GEMST art supplies

Studio Lux

Productions Jeux d'Ombres

Concordia GSA

Paul Litherland

1. the act, skill, or manner of flying
2. rapid movement or progress
3. the act of fleeing
4. a soaring journey above
or beyond the normal everyday world

Project title:

"Flight"
Maison de la Culture, Notre-Dame-de-Grace
3755 Botrel (metro Villa-Maria)

2173 Oxford
Montreal, Quebec
H4A 2X7

"Flight" is a collaborative project between two professional artists and a community of Montreal women. "Flight" is an exhibition of painting and sculpture held at La Maison de la Culture in Notre Dame de Grace (Montreal). The exhibition displays the results of a series of workshops organized and facilitated by Katja MacLeod Kessin and Cynthia Hammond. The workshops were offered from March to May, 1999, to a group of women who had been residents of a women's shelter, L'Auberge Transition.

MacLeod Kessin and Hammond are both working towards doctoral degrees in Concordia University's Doctoral Programme in Humanities, and have experience in academic and community-based art projects: our immediate goal was to introduce this particular group of women to the language of visual expression, thus providing them with a means of self-therapy. We used the methods of "banishing" and "visualization" developed in the "Awareness Through Art" programme which MacLeod Kessin directed at L'Auberge in previous years. For the project "Flight" we have chosen a scenario in which a professional display of the art created is an added goal, so that the work of negotiating past experiences will be a publicly affirming endeavour. The resulting works of art, including a collective piece and works by MacLeod Kessin and Hammond, draw from the themes and history of painting on canvas, and, through a variety of materials, the symbolism of wings. The stretched canvasses served as a "safe room" in which to explore issues of violence while the wings symbolize both escape from violence and strength to work towards a better future. Our project's title represents the overlapping issues which mark these women's experiences and art production.

The women, in agreeing to participate in "Flight," have collaborated with us to help attain our larger goal: to demonstrate to the intellectual, artistic and student communities in question about the possibilities of art for acknowledging and empowering oneself in the aftermath of traumatic experience. We thank them for their enthusiasm, courage and creativity.
We also thank our many volunteers and sponsors, who made our project a reality, specifically: Nicole Bangum, Aimuna Boicel-Mattheij, Marian Dufour, Julie Gentile, Audrey MacLeod, Darcy MacLeod; Gemst Art Supplies, Studio Lux, Productions Jeux d'Ombres, the Wesley United Church and Concordia University's Graduate Students' Association.

Cynthia Hammond Katja MacLeod Kessin

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IMAGES

CYNTHIA HAMMOND

I am interested in the symbolic potential of wings for human bodies. Over the past three years I have focused on the meaning of wings attached to human form as a narrative involving transcendence and loss. Humans are not built for flight, but narrative and metaphorical attempts to fly are crucial for mythologies which seek to locate humanity's terrestrial boundaries. As the physical impediments to flight are overcome (Daedalus and Icarus, for example), the wish to fly is accompanied by some sort of loss, or sacrifice. In these mythologies, humans do not have the means to fly, thus other means are creatively achieved, but at a cost. I am interested in these other ways, in appropriating the metaphor of flight-as-creativity for those bodies that would appear to be the most earth bound: bodies in pain, or bodies that struggle. Wings cannot simply make light of such struggle - wings cannot erase pain. But wings can tell of other strengths, hopes and resources. I wish to appropriate the narratives of transcendence and loss that accompany human flight in order to reverse the causal paradigm, in order to reserve creative agency for the bearer.

Cynthia Hammond has mounted exhibitions of painting, sculpture
and installation in Ontario and Québec, and temporary installations/interventions/performances in Nova Scotia, Montréal, England and Mexico. Currently she is completing interdisciplinary studies at Concordia University in Art History, Studio Art and the Department of Religion towards a doctoral degree. The focus of the dissertation falls on the history and representation of winged human figures as they relate to architecture, in religious, visual and mythical texts.

Hammond has taught contemporary, community-based and activist art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Concordia University, courses in which the students are encouraged to reconsider the boundary between theory/history and practice. Forthcoming publications include pieces for La Revue d'art canadien/Canadian Art Review, the Journal of Religion and Culture (Concordia University), and Analecta Husserliana, an American phenomenological studies journal. Hammond is a regular contributor to La petite enveloppe urbaine, a quarterly, collaborative artists' book published in Montréal.

IMAGES

KATJA MacLeod KESSIN

I was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1959 and emigrated to Montreal, Canada in 1981. Between 1985 and 1993 I received a Bachelor's degree in Studio Arts and a Master's degree in Painting from Concordia University. I am presently enrolled in Concordia's. Humanities Ph.D Program, combining studies in Art History, Studio Arts and German Studies in the research project To Lend the Dead a Voice, which focuses on "second generation German artists", the descendants of Jewish and gentile Germans of the "Third Reich". The thesis consists of both theoretical and Studio Art components and involves an exhibition aimed at communal healing.

My personal art practice includes painting installation, performance, video and writing. It often draws on childhood experience and explores socially accepted forms of violence, the hidden dangers and often false comforts of traditional family life. I am specifically looking at connections between the home environment and large-scale acts of violence, as it is exemplified in Hitler's Third Reich and the resulting Holocaust. My most elaborate project to date has been the curating of the exhibit Leo Haas - survival and rebirth, a 1995 exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the closing of Nazi concentration camps in Europe. This project was sponsored by the Montreal Memorial Holocaust Center and toured North America for one year (City Hall in Montreal, the National Arts Center in Ottawa, the Holocaust Center in Washington, D.C.).

During the last decade I have established myself as a professional artist and art instructor through a variety of venues. To date I have produced 7 solo exhibitions, participated in numerous group exhibitions, publicly presented a series of performances and been involved in the curating of various exhibitions. I have taught painting and drawing in a variety of settings and I am teaching Art History at Concordia. In 1995 I introduced an Art program for women and children at a local women's shelter, which resulted in a series of workshops, Awareness through Art, derived from my own art practice and aimed at activating the residents' creative healing capacities.

As a professional artist I have been the recipient of various project and travel grants. As a graduate and doctoral student I have held several assistantships, including the research of "genocide art", and I am the recipient of several scholarships. My work has been exhibited in Canada as well as in Germany: in 1996 the painting installation Still Alives was exhibited in the city hall of my former German home-town; 1998 brought me to Luebeck, Germany as artist in residence in the GEDOK studio (German and Austrian organization of women artists), where I performed and exhibited my recent painting installation Aryan Household - an exploration of racial stereotypes in the Germany of my early childhood - and introduced Awareness through Art workshops to women in the city of Hamburg. I am presently preparing the exhibition of my most recent body of work, the painting installation Grim Reaper, which focuses on the issue of childhood trauma.

Throughout my formal art education my teachers asked me to dedicate my life to art. This unreasonable demand on a mother of three resulted in my decision to dedicate my art to life instead: the production of art that is purely aesthetic holds no interest for me. Instead, I see my art as a means to explore, to communicate with and to impact the society I both live in and am part of.

 

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KATJA MacLeod KESSIN
2173 Oxford, Montreal, QC H4A 2X7 Canada

katja@vax2concordia.ca

languages: English, German & French

picture from the documentary 'Oh Mother!'
director of photography:
Salvatore V Barrera

painting & mixed media installations

Concordia University, Montreal, QC - 1999

Visual Arts Centre, Westmount, QC - 1997-98
Auberge Transition (women‘s shelter), Montreal - 1995-99
Hamburg, Germany - 1998
specialized painting workshops (Awareness through Art)
Oxford Street Studio, Montreal - 1996-97
painting workshops for women

EDUCATION

Concordia University, Montreal - 1998 - date

Concordia University, Montreal - 1993

Women's Studies & Art Therapy
Concordia University, Montreal - 1988, 1995

Lerchenfeld, Hamburg, Germany - 1992

Concordia University, Montreal - 1988

Institute of Foreign Languages, Hamburg, Germany - 1982

Aufbaugymnasium (College), Hamburg, Germany - 1979

GRANTS

SSHRC - 1999-2002
FCAR - 1999
Concordia University, McConnell Fellowship - 1999-2000
Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies - 1999-2000
University External Grant Holder Doctoral Scholarship - 1999-2001

Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (long term) - 1998
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (short term) - 1997
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (long term) - 1994

Canada Council – Germany - 1998
Canada Council – Germany - 1992

RESEARCH & TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIPS

Dept. of Art History, Concordia University; Genocide & Holocaust Art - 1998-00

Model Drawing Studio, Concordia University - 1991-92

Visiting Artists Programme, Concordia University - 1990-91

SOLO EXHIBITIONS - painting installation

GEDOK Studio, Lübeck, Germany - 1998

Oxford Street Studio, Montreal - 1997

Gallery 89, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec - 1997
Marianopolis College, Montreal - 1997
City Hall Gallery, Ammersbek, Germany - 1996

Gallery Dare Dare, Montreal - 1995
Bourget Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal (thesis exhibition) - 1993

Gallery 89, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec - 1992
Bourget Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal - 1991

Gallery 89, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec - 1990

Art Space/Coin des arts, Concordia Women‘s Centre, Montreal - 1989

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

VAV Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal - 1998

Visual Arts Centre, Westmount, QC - 1997
mixed media

Maison de la Culture Côte des Neiges, Montreal - 1996
painting installation

Bourget Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal - 1991
graduate student painting exhibition

Concordia University, Montreal - 1991
multimedia exhibition

Artspace - Main Gallery, Peterborough, Ontario - 1990
collective exhibition with Sara Morley & Floyd Sandiford

Canal Complexe - Blue Gallery, Montreal - 1990
collective exhibition with Sara Morley & Floyd Sandiford

VAV Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal - 1990
multimedia exhibition

VAV Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal - 1990
multimedia exhibition

City Hall, Toronto - 1989
paintings

Dan Delaney‘s Artlenders Gallery, Westmount - 1989
paintings

Foufounes Electriques, Montreal - 1989
AIDS Hospice Fundraiser

VAV Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal - 1989
paintings, collective exhibition with Nicole Lebel

CURATORIAL WORK

Maison de la Culture NDG, Montreal - 1999
with Cynthia Hammond
an interdisciplinary art exhibition produced by ex-residents of Auberge Transition
in conjunction with the Concordia University conference But now I have to speak

VAV Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal - 1998
with Meredith Browne
an interdisciplinary art exhibition
in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the PhD in Humanities Programme

An exhibition in memory of the closing of Nazi Concentration Camps
Sponsored by the Montreal Holocaust Centre - 1995
Maison de la Culture NDG, Montreal
National Arts Centre, Ottawa
City Hall, Montreal
Holocaust Centre, Washington DC

LECTURES & CONFERENCES

German Studies Dept., McGill University, Montreal - 1999
lecture & slide presentation

Goethe Institute, Montreal - 1999
lecture, with Dr. Trudis Goldsmith-Reber

Inter-University Conference on the Study of Religion and Culture
Concordia University, Montreal - 1999
Aryan Household, performance

International Conference on Art and the Idea
Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario - 1999
A is for Auschwitz, lecture & slide presentation

Concordia University, Montreal - 1997, 1999
lecture & slide presentation

Inter-University Conference on the Study of Religion and Culture
Concordia University, Montreal - 1998
Who owns the Holocaust?, lecture & slide presentation

Concordia University, Montreal - 1997
slide presentation

Peter Kleinmann Foundation, Montreal - 1997
Women, Art & Society, lecture & slide presentation
panelist

Oboro Gallery, Montreal - 1995
slide presentation

SOLO PERFORMANCES

Department of Religion, Concordia University, Montreal - 1999
GEDOK Studio, Lübeck, Germany - 1998

Espace Go, Montreal - 1990
Porte Parole, presented by Tangente

Artspace - Main Gallery, Peterborough, Ontario - 1990

Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal - 1990
presented by Concordia University

Concordia University, Montreal - 1990

Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal - 1989
presented by Concordia University

Concordia University, Montreal - 1988
a series of six performances

OTHER VENUES

PhD in Humanities, Concordia University, Montreal - 1999-2001

GEDOK Studio, Lübeck, Germany - 1998

documentary, Productions Jeux d’Ombres inc.
subject & consultant - 1998

fundraising exhibition – McKinsey & Co., Montreal - 1996
visiting artist

public studio tours, presented by Cobalt Art Actuel - 1995
invited artist

video satire - 1994
co-directed with Sara Morley

DOCUMENTATION

documentary by Sara Morley & Sandra Dametto
featuring Katja MacLeod Kessin, Deborah VanSlet & Helen Workman
Productions Jeux d’Ombres inc. - 1998

catalogue, produced by Catherine Gagné
published by Ville de Montreal - 1996

catalogue, published by Cobalt Art Actuel - 1995

catalogue, published by Concordia Women‘s Centre - 1990

COLLECTIONS

Musée de Québec, Quebec City

private collections in Canada, Germany, Netherlands

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CYNTHIA HAMMOND & KATJA MacLeod KESSIN

Davidson, Gustav. "Introduction" to A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Ones.
Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada: [1967] 1994.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
New York: Continuum, 1997.

Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 1984.

The Reenchantment of Art. Great Britain: Thames & Hudson, 1991.

Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality.
London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Lanscapes as Public History.
Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: MIT Press, 1995.

Heller, Agnes. A Philosophy of HIstory in Fragments.
Oxford, England and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993.

Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art.
USA: Bay Press, 1995.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine de. The Little Prince, trans., Katherine Woods.
New York: Harvest, [1943]. 1971.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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