Dawson College’s Fine Arts Department has long-prided itself in the ‘studio’-practice of its faculty members. Outgoing retirees and Chairpersons have come to be (traditionally) offered an exhibition venue and a catalogue-publication as tokens of appreciation for years of service. A fleeting glance at such recent ‘salvo’-projects might suggest [subtle] degrees of career-associated wear and tear -- [dark-playfully] / euphemistically now: Myles Tyrrell departed the College questioning “Two or More Dimensions” ; Catherine Young Bates retired [seeing through] “Eyes of Icarus” ; Andres Manniste began his “Babel” series; Loren D. May sought “A Place to Lie Down”; Marcia Massa dealt with [....]”Shards” ; ** ... Giuseppe Di Leo began drawing persons, hands funneled to mouth, calling out into the emptiness of the abyss.
Is Julianna Joos’ exhibition entitled “Noeud” [a project organized in modest tribute for three years as Fine Arts Department Chair] anymore hapful in essence ? Catalogue essayist, Françoise Belu, introduced an overview of Joos’ work with a reference to [Freudian] ‘sublimation’, followed by a [loose] Lacanian analysis (most of all) regarding the ‘primacy of the symbolic’, and, then, exited with a declaration of the presence of a “cathartic example” ...
[Simply observing now] “Noeud” -- is an exhibition best viewed in five distinct parts -- five, varied, process-based demonstrations ‘stitched’ together by the one notion / ‘metaphor’ of weaving / unweaving (a ‘knot’ ). ...
Can a visual inventory which includes:
1) four, somber-gray, prayer-mat-scaled, Jacquard tapestries,
2) twelve, likewise woven, now multi-coloured, mini-compositions referencing ‘vanitas’,
3) several, repetitious [read: the tedious process of weaving ?], ‘sanguine’-tinted collagraphs,
4) four, eye-candy-explosions of colour --(predominantly) ‘red’, ‘yellow’, ‘blue’ (more ‘violet’), and ‘green’ digitally enhanced computer prints,
5) and one transient, exhibition-space-wandering [almost ghostlike], mannequin donned in an artist-woven ‘gossamer’ dress,
possibly hold true to a singular primacy of symbolic ‘order’ (defn: ‘order’ referring to a ‘logical’, sequential occurrence in space and time and medium) ??
... Joos is an abundantly-established, much-respected, and prolific Quebecois printmaker. Her recent foray into the realm of Jacquard weaving is experimental. To ‘hang’ the thematic raison d’etre for an exhibition project around or about a noose, knot, or weave -- and by symbolic extrapolation into acephalous expression -- is somewhat problematic, ... after all, it might be philosophically argued that any (artistic) thematization of this world is necessarily an inadequate response to this world.
Hidden beneath pretentious words [in both catalogue essay and ‘blog’], Julianna Joos’ “Noeud” exhibition project might be revealed more honestly as a thoughtful mediation on this life’s experience caught somewhere in-between a sense of satisfaction and disturbance. ... With “Noeud”, the artist maintains -- in the foreground of her explorations -- a fundamental relation to human proportion.
T.L. Mtl. April 2007
** “quotes” referencing Faculty exhibition catalogue titles, published Dawson College (Special Events Committee, Fine Arts Department, 1995 - 2004)
