Québec

Attente voracement pour petit déjeuner

Denise et Richard

New School

Beyond Chaos No.7 - Homage to Betty Goodwin

Homage to Appearances Workshop

My Land is Winter, Je Me Souviens

L'iris versicolore

Snow Covered Tree on Rue Dorion

Montreal Jazz Festival (detail)

Les Malaisons

Performance Workshop @ articule

Metro St.Mathieu 3

Metro St.Mathieu 2

Metro St.Mathieu 3

Nancy, Anick and Laïla

Whorlscape - Homage to Caroline Lathan-Stiefel

Shawna Marking Papers in the Sun

Natalie, Laïla and Taoufik

The idea for Contouring Quebec began in 2004 during a drawing workshop I held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, at an artist-run centre called Ace Art. While archiving my drawings of 2002-2003, I realized what I had created was a bio-biographical account of my life in Winnipeg. It included the faces and places that fascinated me, and in its entirety I realized that it was the start of an ongoing library of drawings, or personal nostalgia which described my life as a narrative. Contouring Quebec isa focused collection in its subject, and in many ways will is more comprehensive then anything I’ve done in the past. In some regards, Contouring Quebec is a sequel or a continuation of the biographical account of my environment started in Winnipeg. Using the technique of blind contour to document my journey, Contouring Quebec is a visual narrative of experiencing one of Canada’s most culturally diverse provinces.

Artist’s Statement

Since completing my thesis in Drawing at the University of Manitoba in 1997, my interests in drawing has spanned many disciplines, and I find myself using drawings to describe things in painting, sculpture, and design.

I collect these precious objects that I make as a way of recording my existence. My largest collection of drawings uses the discipline of blind contour drawing, a technique which attempts to capture the fast moving modern world in which we live.

Seurat said that drawing is the probity of art. In this regard, it is no wonder that drawing is one of the first activities that children occupy themselves with. In early childhood, drawing is often a mimetic process, where the child mimics an older sibling or adult’s movements, and quite often the drawings are nothing more than scribbles. These scribbles mimetic properties describe the subjectivity that children and adults use see the world. These drawings describe perception and imperception, or what is real and that which is not. Drawing is a process used to describe that amnesis, or that which can be remembered in the moment where an artist sees and an artist draws.

Blind contour drawing eliminates the amnesis, or memory requirement, that regular drawing creates. In a similar discussion, but about painting photographs, Gerhard Richter states he removes conscious thinking by the act of reproducing what he sees in a photograph. It is much the same with blind contour drawing, where conscious thinking is replaced with hand and eye representation. Following the contours of what is seen, but not looking at what is represented, allows the hand to “feel” the environment.

I collect these drawings of my environment and they become my personal nostalgia. Collecting represents the most rudimentary way to exercise control over the outer world: by laying things out, grouping them, handling them.” I relentlessly draw my surroundings, enjoying the knowledge of this self pleasure, this self-knowing. It is “the joy of finding one’s self that exists outside the world around us” (Baudrillard).