folio
Issue 5 — Winter 2011 McGill Art + Design
Folio Staff Paula Alaszkiewicz Michæl Beauvais Claire Bourgeois Elle Bourgeois Emma Bonnier Tyler Chau Jordan Deutsch Gabriela Gilmour Bianca Giulione Jürg Haller Maggie Horikawa
Marissa Lee John Levesque Chloe Lord Milena Lorsignol Melanie Massey Devon McCormack Milena Papřok Alexa Roach Pooja Sen Erin Spangler
Contact
foliomag@gmail.com foliomagazine.ca
About Folio is a student-run 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: Daeun Janet Kim Facing page: Clara Syme All contents © the respective artists. Opinions expressed in Folio are not necessarily those of McGill University.
folio magazine : Issue 5 — Winter 2011 Contents Thises Michael Marotti
Gun Study Clara Syme
Serengeti Abby Howard
Photo Studio Camera Obscura Red River James Moore
Zola Paula Alaszkiewicz Ain’t Just a Thing Whitney Mallett
The Scale of Things Julia Chang
Hankerchief Hat Marie McCulloch Untitled Sarah Cook Taste the Rambo Stuart Mcleod
Thises: Tan Series (Cockpit, Captain, Crime)
Thises: Red Series (b o o k, II, Sí)
MICHAEL MAROTTI
PAULA ALASZKIEWICZ Zola
ABBY HOWARD Serengeti
WHITNEY MALLETT Ain’t Just a Thing
CLARA SYME Gun Study
JAMES MOORE Photo Studio
JAMES MOORE Camera Obscura and Red River
JULIA CHANG The Scale of Things
MARIE MCCULLOCH Hankerchief Hat
SARAH COOK Untitled
STUART MCLEOD Taste the Rambo
folio contributors DAEUN JANET KIM studies Cultural Studies and Communications. Her photograph, Nabi on Shore, was taken on 35 mm colour negative film with a half-frame camera on Jeju Island in South Korea. She particularly enjoys the challenge of this camera, as there could be disjuncture with the following half-frame, and it takes particular attention to create visual continuity. She likens art making to academia, as they are both about communicating knowledge forms and ideas, only with different processes. MICHAEL MAROTTI is in his final year of learning what not to do, but finds creative stimulation in dance. He collects found flat objects and constructs collages in several notebooks that supplement and illustrate the written work on its pages, in a way that “imbues it with a sense of ‘being there’”. These notebooks also act as physical repositories for other found flat things. The two works published, though divorced from their context, are self-evident in their construction. ABBY HOWARD is an Anatomy student, and she works with pen and ink. Serengeti is an amalgamation of her interests in animals, and photographs from the American Civil War era. It depicts Commander McClellan of the Union Army, flanked by lions, and General Lee of the Confederate Army, surrounded by hyenas, as binary opposites. She draws her inspiration from crafts by children locked in her basement, whom she remunerates with M&Ms and Justin Bieber paraphernalia. PAULA ALASZKIEWICZ is a student in Art History and History. Her Zola series consists of photographs mediated through a kaleidoscope, creating new sensory approaches to non-celebrated objects and spaces. Her studies in art have encouraged her to approach the world aesthetically, where she prefers soft, misty, and dream-like ideas that aestheticize everyday life. She tries to translate this perspective through photography and pencil drawings. WHITNEY MALLETT is in her final year, studying English Literature, which she finds to encourage her creative explorations. Her work is a series of stills from a music video for the rock group Dirty Wedding shot on super 8 film. She juxtaposes ideas of the collective and the individual, while examining various patterns of human movement, such as cyclists and a lone man walking. For the band, Ain’t Just a Thing captures the tension between individualistic dispositions and the musical group as a whole.
CLARA SYME is an Arts and Science student, making art out of casual habit, until she develops a larger idea that she wishes to pursue. She prefers systematic art production, where she can work out problems through trial and error. In Gun Study, she uses acrylic and pencil to manipulate context, style and scale, achieving an abstraction of the object. She cites Calder and David Foster Wallace as influences. JAMES MOORE is in his final year of an MA in Architecture. His work focuses on reorienting the ways we perceive the world around us by disrupting the seemingly static or mundane. In Photo Studio, he creates photomontages of his familiar and intimate environments and approaches a space in unusual ways. Camera Obscura operates within the physical limits of functionality and the Red River, while encouraging a refreshing awareness of our surroundings. JULIA CHANG is an Architecture student whose photography is a departure from her preferred use of paint, pencil and charcoal. The Scale of Things are photos from Taiwan and Quebec City, manipulated in ways that confuses our regular perceptions of scale. This ruptures the stability of reality and our relationship with the visual world. MARIE MCCULLOCH studies English Literature and Women’s Studies. She mostly works with pencil, marker and charcoal. Hat and Hankerchief are linear interpretations of contemporary German street fashion, though she gravitates toward older subjects, whom she finds more visually interesting. Her art is inspired by a quote from The Line King: “If a line is sometimes said to be a dot going for a walk, then [Al] Hirschfeld made it skip, dance, and jump!” SARAH COOK is in International Development Studies, Philosophy and English. She self-consciously calls her own drawings “glorified doodles”, as she draws mindlessly while her attention is centred elsewhere. She acknowledges her lack of art education, and thus refuses to offer a contrived or affected narrative of her own art making. STUART MCLEOD studies French and has always been drawn to photography. He attempts to find inspiration in quotidian experiences, which he actualized by capturing an idea, scene, or moment of contrast through a series of photographs taken each day for an entire year. The struggle is to translate the ordinary into visually pleasing forms. Taste the Rambo exemplifies this playful intervention in everyday aesthetics.
Thanks to the AUS Fine Arts Council and the Students’ Society of McGill University for their generous support.