Go IN for a closer look with “IN details”

This is the first year that the FOFA gallery has taken part in Concordia’s Art Matters festival, but the privilege of hosting the space could only go to one event. Fortunately, “IN details” has two curators, Cathy Wakim and Catherine Cournoyer, who admitted that two heads are better than one. “The good thing about having the vitrines,” said Catherine Wakim, “is that you can get people to stop and think, whether it be the cleaner, or someone heading in to take the metro.” People who may be too intimidated to go in and check out the gallery will still get a slice of Art Matters, said Wakim.

Catherine Turcot turned her apartment inside out to produce Inside (Out) Reflexion. Shot from below a glass table, the participants were allowed to draw and doodle to their hearts’ content, letting the clear surface of the table to instead become a reflecting pool for their thoughts and inhibitions. Only after several minutes of playful scribbling did Turcot intervene to take her photos, not wanting to interrupt, or worse, prohibit their free expression.

(I posed for Catherine Turcot’s Inside (Out) Reflexion, but my photo was among an early batch that didn’t make the cut, she later informed me).

Shannon Harris used video, and her own bathtub, to create Navel Gazing. “When you zoom in close, you can’t see the forest from the trees,” says Wakim, which is probably why footage of Harris’ fuzzy navel, hair and the ripples in her bathtub appear to be “moonlight, sand, wave and seaweed,” according to Harris herself.

Caroline Vallières traveled beyond her own borders, and her bathtub, visiting Ecuador, the Balkans and Kenya and overlaying photos of wrecked and ravaged buildings with the people that may have once inhabited them. With the power of Photoshop, they appear like ghostly vistas into those souls dispossessed of their normal lives by the ravages of war.

Anthony Vrakotas goes into detail into what might have damaged those buildings. In his Grenade Project, he reproduces one of the most frightening images in western culture, the grenade, representing it as a series of pixellated dots like shrapnel that’s been meticulously recombined to discover the source of the deadly blast. “As an artist I spend my time asking questions and avoiding answers,” says Vrakotas. The results are a kind of metaphorical grenade, stirring up questions and controversy rather than finding actual solutions to these problematic questions.

The vernissage, which will take place on March 11th in the EV building, will feature the musical stylings of Jackson Darby.