NAVA MESSAS WAXMAN: VARIATIONS ON BROKEN LINES
JAN 20 - FEB 10, 2023 | MONDAY - SUNDAY | 4PM - 9PM
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Variations on Broken Lines is a multimedia installation that explores how our understanding of “real” space-time is challenged by our current digital culture. The installation comprises dance archives of bodily diasporic gestures that dwell beyond borders, time and space. It encourages reflection on liminal concepts and their emergence at a time when our bodies, identities, and environments become displaced and impalpable. The multiple temporalities in space generate an imaginary rite of passage, provoking disruption of borders, and enhanced potential for cultural, social, and personal pattern shifting.
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The installation utilizes various conceptual choreographic methods and techniques of layering, weaving, and blurring/blending forms and gestures, to reflect the view that there are knowledge and points of connection in the spaces between past and present. The complexity of virtual mediations and the feeling of in-between-ness, illuminate experiences inscribed upon our bodies.
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Nava Messas-Waxman is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working with performance, choreography, moving-image and multimedia installation. Her practice engages identity, memory, and the body. Growing up in a Moroccan Judeo-Amazigh immigrant family shaped her interest in themes of movement, migration, diaspora, archive, time, and space, delving into the transitory nature of gestures, often embedded within complex artistic, cultural, and personal registers.
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She is a doctoral candidate in Visual Arts at Toronto's York University. Messas-Waxman holds an MFA from York University in Visual Arts and a BA from The Open University in Social Science and Communication. Recent projects include Nuit Blanche Toronto (Variations on Broken Lines) 2022, Shared-View (2022), Variations on Broken Lines ( 2020), and Choreographed Marks ( 2019). Messas-Waxman was the 2019 recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship (SSHRC). In addition, she received an Exhibition Assistance Grant from the Ontario Arts Council (2018) and a Travel Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for her collaborative project "Elements of Chance" (2016). Nava Lives and works in Toronto.
PAST EXHIBITION
'untold stories'
A solo show by Elham Fatapour
NOV 26 - DEC 11, 2022
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Elham Fatapour is a Toronto-based artist who received her MFA at York University in Visual Art. Her recent works include painting, performance, and mixed media installation. They address diverse but interconnected subjects, including satellite usage, surveillance, vernacular architecture, modes of communication, and empathy.
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"I think of my practice as a vessel for memories of past traumas. I use imagery, colour and technique to charge my paintings with empathy and present them in mixed media installations that encompass the viewer. In order to convey both personal narratives and connect with a larger context, I depict my body in foreign spaces. The installation of this work immerses the viewer and in doing so, opens a dialogue about the survivorship of displaced peoples and the power of the state over its people.
I have started a series of hybrid works, somewhere between flat paintings and multimedia collage to extend my painterly skills, both in expressiveness and naturalism. My imagery incorporates culturally symbolic materials, such as carpet fragments, to express my social and political investigations. I paint on and collage with traditional carpets to make reference to the historical and cultural importance of them. Both the patterns and colours of these carpets include symbols that propose non-normative ways of understanding history. Through the integration of domestic textiles, historic patterns and figures in my work I aim to conceptually implicate all people."
homemade satellite dishes
My practice focuses on exploring media, censorship, and communication through the mediums of painting and installation. Satellite dishes are one of the primary communication devices used to access mass media in much of the world. As a result, they have become part of urban design. Satellite dishes have always been interesting objects for me. They carry many different meanings, and, depending on how they are installed, almost develop personalities.
‘homemade satellite dishes’ is an ever-growing mixed media installation using satellite dishes. By painting them I strive to camouflage them within domestic environments. Through this work I attempt to understand how camouflage functions in society and throughout culture. The concept of camouflage goes beyond simple strategies of mimicry, beyond the politics of appearance or the art of disappearance.
Drawing together medium and message, my work explores the materiality of place and person, to demonstrate the complicated relationship that exists between technology and our socio-political climate.
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The new addition of these series is an interactive installation. Mounted at varying human heights, they look like a group of people gathered in private conversation with one another. They are also painted with the same colors and patterns of the traditional women’s scarves that shroud them, conveying a sense of domesticity within a female-dominated environment. This results in each satellite having its own personality, like a portrait of an individual person.
Satellite dishes are mass communication tools whose sole usage is to transmit and receive information. By recycling locally sourced dishes, and utilizing them within this installation, these devices reinforce our need to stay connected to one another, especially following the hardships of the pandemic. Audiences are encouraged to walk around and in between the dishes, coming face-to-face with these repurposed structures. Their movement will activate pre-recorded audio, creating an interactive experience based in connectivity with one’s immediate environment.
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