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Exhibit to Spotlight Emerging Francophone Artists
As the summer starts to come to an end, the WKP Kennedy Gallery would like to reassure you there is plenty to look forward to this fall.
We invite you to join us to our upcoming fall exhibition. Titled fonction et faillite, the show will consist of individually and collaboratively created pieces by two local emerging francophone artists, Alex Rondeau and Anyse Ducharme. Pieces for the exhibit include photographs, soundgraphs, sculptures, recorded sounds and installations.
A graduate of Ryerson’s School of Image and Arts, Rondeau has a BFA in photography studies and is currently based here in North Bay. He uses the fusing of photography and things like sculpture and performance to explore queerness and the experiences that often come with that identity. His resume is quite extensive, having participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions over the past few years. We would like to congratulate Alexander on his future endeavours, as he will be attending OCAD’s criticism curatorial practice graduate program on a full scholarship.
As a queer artist, Rondeau knows the importance of proper representation, especially in more rural areas of the country.
“Queerness, particularly in Northern Ontario, requires ongoing visibility — institutional or otherwise — given the critical lack of QT2S spaces, resources, representation, and even communities available. The queer and trans communities are the only marginalized groups that do not have a vertical transmission of our histories i.e. my parents can’t teach me about being queer or queer history, nor is it institutionally taught in educational settings.
“White cube spaces such as the WKP have maintained hyper-heteronormative histories in which representation is often centred around old straight white dudes. How many queer artists have had exhibitions at the WKP? How many openly queer artists have been paid by the gallery to display work and how many have shown in juried shows and not been paid?”
The WKP Kennedy Gallery acknowledges this gap in its representation and is thrilled to open the doors to our richly dynamic communities.
Ducharme is a media artist with a focus on digital works and the malleability of data. She has a master’s of fine arts in studio arts from the University of British Columbia, as well as a baccalaurént en arts visuels from the University of Ottawa and a college diploma from La Cité collégiale in 3D Animation. Her works have been exhibited throughout the world, including Proof 23 at Gallery 44 (Toronto) and the Flash Forward festival (Boston, Portland, Toronto). She is currently an instructor in the fine and performing arts faculty of Nipissing University.
Speaking on her part of the exhibition, Ducharme describes her works as centring on “the spaces of transfer in computer mediation. The work considers variances of transparency found in wide circulation, slowed down, in an instance of transference; glitched, bent and sliding onto transparent material.”
The exhibition will open on Sept. 17, with a joint reception during Culture Day`s Gallery Crawl on Sept. 27 with our International Postcard Project exhibition. Both shows will close on Nov. 2.
Dana Westerberg is gallery assistant at the WKP Kennedy Gallery