folio
Issue 7 — Winter 2012 McGill Art + Design
Folio Staff Editors Paula Alaszkiewicz Michæl Beauvais Aimée Bell-Pasht Claire Bourgeois Erin Carrieres Laura Chapnick Jordan Deutsch Jürg Haller Maya Inglis Jeremy Keyzer John Levesque Galen Macdonald Sara Hashemi Nasab Alexa Roach Pooja Sen Louis Soulard Erin Spangler Contact foliomag@gmail.com foliomagazine.ca
About Folio is a student-run visual art and design magazine that acts as an ongoing archive of McGill’s artistic community by providing a venue for student artists to showcase their work. It is published biannually. Cover: Cheresa Lemaire Facing page: Pooja Sen Back Cover: Susannah Feinstein All contents © the respective artists. Opinions expressed in Folio are not necessarily those of McGill University.
folio magazine : Issue 7 — Winter 2012  Contents Wild Beasts Pooja Sen
Untitled Talvi Faustmann
Luna Charles Kenneth Koo
Untitled (Ode to The Blue Hands) Maya Inglis
Dark Simulacrum High Tide Sofia Ajram
Me and my Friends Lukas Thienhaus
au noir Molly Teitelbaum
POOJA SEN wild beasts roam these pages
KENNETH KOO Luna
Charles
SOFIA AJRAM Dark Simulacrum and High Tide
TALVI FAUSTMANN Untitled
MAYA INGLIS Untitled (Ode to The Blue Hands)
LUKAS THIENHAUS Me and my Friends
MOLLY TEITELBAUM au noir
folio contributors CHERESA LEMAIRE studies economics and describes her art as an attempt at perfection. Her emotions serve as the fundamental element of her creative practice. She consistently demands more of herself; more perfection, more emotion. In her words, “it’s as if you’re trying to explain why you exist.” POOJA SEN is studying art history and history, which she hopes gives these works some sort of unsubstantiated intellectual authority. She once received an award at her pretentious high school that deemed her artwork as “exquisitely crafted and deeply personal.” She likes the sound of this but feels it suggests that making art is a solitary act of genius and Pooja does not think she is lonely nor a genius. She does her art making at unnatural hours of the night and is always cranky in the morning. She is inspired by free magazines, old textbooks, annoying text messages, junk food, and the Internet. KENNETH KOO believes that his spirit animal is a Persian cat. He draws inspiration from his studies in art history, particularly in the æsthetics of the Rococo, French Neoclassicism, as well as fifteenth-century Flemish painting. Kenneth works in graphite on tracing paper and acrylic on Masonite, creating works which stem from his intrigue in the animal world and Persian culture. SOFIA AJRAM comes from the Third Planet. “I am fastened to the sensuous of the inner universe. I want to share with you the galaxies projected within and without: absolute space and absolute time. I want to share with you the stars contained by the new souls of my race, humanity, in its infancy. Let me show you something electromagnetic. Let me take you to the place where Their dreamscapes and Our reality exchange glances. Let me help you remember.” TALVI FAUSTMANN turns to drawing when she is angry, sad, overly caffeinated or most commonly, a mélange of all three. Talvi studies English literature and sees academia and art production as in opposition to each other due to the unnecessarily competitive nature of the latter. She is inspired by strange countercultural things and “typical” things like beauty and colour. Her Untitled series of faces expresses internal emotions interwoven with the physical landscape of the body.
MAYA INGLIS exclusively uses analog photographic devices because she enjoys the wait between composition and result. She struggles with defining her practice, but is confident in her intrigue with black and white photography and cinema of the early twentieth century. Maya’s photographs echo the æsthetics of that era in their soft, dreamlike ephemerality. Most recently, arcade cards of the 1930s with movie stars printed on them have captivated her. LUKAS THIENHAUS is a chemistry major in his last year of study. Inspired by music, popular culture, his schoolwork, and advertising, Lukas enjoys sampling from all of the above to generate an artful synthesis of disparate parts. The making of Me and my Friends, created by layering acrylic paint and marker on a magazine advertisement, corresponds visually to Lukas’ meshing of inspirational sources. Lukas cites his ultimate artistic aim as somehow documenting the particular time and place in which he is living. MOLLY TEITELBAUM studies art history and political science and finds university the most uninspiring artistic environment. In creating her abstract finger smudges, Molly prefers to use plastic wrap to distribute paint instead of brushes. au noir is an amalgamation of acrylic, pastel, and pencil. Molly views art-making as an orgasmic release; she is frustrated and irritated before and during the creative process, but once she has finished the work, she feels at ease and content. SUSANNAH FEINSTEIN describes her work MY EX IS ‘SEEING’ A NEW CHICK :( :x as “sad city USA”. She is inspired by that episode of Curb where Leon tells Larry how to stand up to skinheads: “You get in that ass, Larry. Know what I mean? You get in that ASS Larry. That’s what the fuck you do. You let that man SLIDE today. You gotta immediately get in somebody’s ass when they do that to you. You pull they asshole open, step into they asshole CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND YOU. Get a spray paint can, right? ‘LARRY WAS HERE’, you spray paint ‘LARRY WAS HERE’, ‘WASH ME’, ALL THAT KINDA SHIT. Fuck his whole asshole up, eat some Snicker bars, throw the paper on the floor...throw some newspaper on the floor. Fuck his asshole up, know what I’m sayin’? Then you open that asshole one more time, OPEN IT, OPEN IT UP AGAIN...UUUUUUHHH!!! Step outta there, then leave that motherfucker wide open so he know you been there.”
T C M o t
Thanks to the AUS Fine Arts Council, the Students’ Society of McGill University, and the Dean of Arts Development Fund for their generous support.