MEMBERS
EXHIBITION
2021
ONLINE X WINDOW EXHIBITION
Feminisms evolve constantly. Each evolution incites us to reinvent ourselves. While the incentive for these evolutions may be difficult to confront, their result is adaptation, innovation, and, eventually, a complete metamorphosis. The Members Committee invited La Centrale’s membership to explore their inner revolutions and observe the perpetual movements of the world around them. flux constant flux comprises their responses to this invitation.
Each of the selected artists explore the theme in a particular way, revealing the complex ways in which evolutions take place. From ageism to isolation, and from grief to resistance, despite the diversity of their responses, the artists are unified in their use of artistic creation as a stabilizing and regenerative force.
As an artist-run centre, La Centrale is driven by the commitment and energy of our members. The Members Exhibition, organized by the Members Committee, celebrates our membership and highlights the crucial role that La Centrale’s members have in supporting our mission and defining our next evolutions.
flux constant flux features works by ten of La Centrale’s members: Laurence Beaudoin Morin, Kristin Bjornerud, Sophia Borowska, Cécilia Bracmort, Stéphanie Chabot, Frances Enyedy, Maryam Izadifard, Fany Rodrigue, Tammy Salzl, and Elyse St-Amour.
ELYSE ST-AMOUR
TRIPTYQUE
This triptych of photographic collage transports us into an intimate universe where the passage of time transforms the female body and the way others look at it. Through self-portraits, collages and photographs of significant objects, Elyse St-Amour positions herself in a fight against female ageism. “Ageism confronts the impossibility of matching what is experienced with the image that Others have of us. There is then a fundamental contradiction between the intimate evidence which guarantees our permanence and the objective certainty of our metamorphosis." KIMURA BYOL
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FRANCES ENYEDY
PROVERBIAL POWER
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Frances’ illustrations are emotive, visceral, and at times grotesque. Queering traditional norms of femininity, she is unafraid to take up space with her work. Proverbial Power showcases an emotional transformation first and foremost, capturing a literal moment of charged battle cry from a femme person on a hilltop, surrounded by familiars and flowers. The work is a gut reaction and figurative take on connections between social crises and ecological collapse, and the individual and collective belief systems enabling them. SARAH MOHAMMED
Hi Hongyu! Nice to meet you. Thanks for the interest in my work and the questions. I think I will answer the one about anger.
The work is definitely channeling a recognizable expression of anger in an embodied form. I'm a cartoonist at heart and am attracted to drawing anger and other emotions through the comic medium. I feel it approaches the misogynistic taboos around anger and womxn in a sort of funny way, and relieves some of the discomfort around this emotion specifically, that I sometimes feel in myself and also see present in the larger culture. Anger, as a potent transformative emotion, connects to the theme of metamorphosis. You are witness to this person's wild, erotic, somewhat erratic moment of transformation, held in ritual space by the ever grounded, ever honest presence of animals, flowers and soil. It is also maybe an angry reclamation of lost (but not forgotten) initiation rites that our modern, industrial, colonial culture distanced itself from long ago in a forward facing "march toward progress" - a process that has generally ignored and demeaned nature's cycles, animals and womxn.
STÉPHANIE CHABOT
MON MEILLEUR
Mon meilleur is a playful work made of found objects. While the sculpture’s body, a wooden crutch, suggests an inherent vulnerability, this assumption is challenged by two protruding hands giving a thumbs up. Clad in bright red gloves (reminiscent of a clown’s nose) these comical fixtures distract from the symbol of weakness and pain to which they are attached. Perpetually positioned to insist that “everything is alright,” it is clear that regardless of the question, Mon meilleur will always respond with the same answer. Rather than burden it with a sympathetic or pitiful gaze, Mon meilleur invites us to join the joke and laugh along with it. MATTIA ZYLAK