Janet Werner Earthling
Haig Aivazian Collapsing Foundations
29 March–28 April 2012
Opening:
29 March 2012, 18–20h
Performance:
The Wolf at Your Doorstep, 4 April 2012, 18h
PARISIAN LAUNDRY
3550 St-Antoine West (between Greene & Bel-Air)
Montreal QC H4C 1A9
514.989.1056
Janet Werner‘s work focuses on the invention of fictional characters based on found images from popular culture including models, celebrities, dolls, and figurines. The paintings operate within and against the genre of portraiture, taking anonymous female figures and imbuing them with fictional personalities. For Werner, the process of painting is a way of investigating the iconic power of the image, invoking imagination, memory, and projection to invest the anonymous figures with human subjectivity and emotion. The final paintings are composite portraits that retain aspects of the original while also representing notions of transformation, innocence, and loss. In Werner’s current practice, the proportions of the figures shift; an argument erupts between beauty and the grotesque and the figure itself becomes the site of contest. Folded, cut, occluded, or altered, with colors ranging from luminous to ashen, and scale shifting from pixie to giant, these figures possess an otherworldly aspect. There is a subtle suggestion of witchcraft in these portraits, though it is not clear if these beings are the ones casting spells or the ones upon whom the spell is cast. Mute and expectant, leaning into the frame, at once imposing and powerless, the characters embody conflict and contradiction. Wearing their complications like a crown, they confront the viewer with their big loneliness, beckoning like absurd clowns or sorcerers practicing a kind of rough magic.
Janet Werner was born in Winnipeg and lives and works in Montreal. Werner holds an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. She has shown widely in Canada and internationally, her work will be featured in the upcoming survey exhibition Oh, Canada at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA curated by Denise Markonish.
Haig Aivazian‘s Collapsing Foundations is a multi-part series comprised of written text, sculpture, drawing, video and a lecture performance, all of which seek to answer the following question: Can one erect a monument to an individual who has already erased the traces left from his life’s work? In December 2004, Aivazian’s father, an architect, was undergoing cancer treatment in Al-Ain’s Tawam hospital in the UAE; he made pencil corrections to CAD drawings of a house that he had been working on. His ordinarily sharp lines were now muddled due to his weakened hands: his pencil marks looked more like a destructive effacement rather than a series of corrections. The Collapsing Foundations project is based on these three CAD drawings, and is an attempt to decode the instructions left on them by the architect. The mission of the wider body of research is to evaluate the possibility of a vocabulary or index of materials and marks in order to determine an approach to building the artist’s father’s tombstone in Dekwané, Lebanon.
The Wolf At Your Doorstep is a multimedia lecture about an architectural model of a house destroyed by its architect (the artist’s father). Using archival material, conversation transcripts, and artwork documentation this performance attempts to reconstitute the architect’s biography. The Wolf at Your Doorstep unfolds as a structural collapse that layers the decomposition of the house in question, with that of the architect’s body and subjectivity, as well as that of language itself. This performance is part of a larger ongoing project entitled Collapsing Foundations.
Haig Aivazian is an artist, curator and writer born in Lebanon and currently based in New York City. Using performance, video, installation and sculpture, his work weaves together personal and geopolitical, micro and macro narratives as it searches for ideological loopholes and short circuits. Aivazian has a BFA from Concordia University in Montréal Canada and an MFA from Northwestern University in Chicago, USA. He also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. He was Associate Curator of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 entitled Plot for a Biennial and has written for a number of websites, publications and catalogues. He is currently represented by Lombard Freid Projects in New York.