Amy Elkins Blog

Seems things are sometimes brought about by such a humorous and crazy chain of events. Through showing at Yancey Richardson gallery my work was seen, bought and curated into a museum exhibition last summer at Kunsthalle wien in Vienna. The work was in turn seen by a gallery owner from Frankfurt who was at the press preview of the museum show. We talked for several months. She then took my work to Miami for Pulse and sold it to a gallery owner in Montreal where it went into his private collection. So my work literally went half way around the world and landed in this show in Canada. Pretty sweet how these things happen.

In said show, I have several pieces. It just opened this weekend. Unfortunately I couldn't make it up there for that. Perhaps I'll make a trip later in the summer. If you are in Montreal this summer make sure to check it out. It's up until September.

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (PFOAC)
FACE À FACE / LOOKING BACK
Marc AUDETTE, Alexandre CASTONGUAY, Luc COURCHESNE, Amy ELKINS, Jérôme FORTIN, Adad HANNAH, John LATOUR, Marie-Jeanne MUSIOL, Roberto PELLEGRINUZZI, Chih-Chien WANG
19 June - 4 September 2010

Several installation shots can be found: here
If you are interested in reading more about the nature of the show:

FACE À FACE / LOOKING BACK

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present FACE À FACE / LOOKING BACK, a selection of recent and early works by ten artists using photography, video, multimedia, or installation art to explore contemporary issues of representation through the tradition of portraiture. This group exhibition is also an occasion to mark the fact that the gallery is entering its 10th year of existence!

As a complex register of emotions, expressions, and personal identity; the human face has been an enduring source of inspiration for artists throughout history. The representation of subjects in the visual arts, however, is a site of critical enquiry and debate. What do portraits say about the individuals depicted, the public who views them, and the artists who mediate this experience?

FACE À FACE / LOOKING BACK questions the role of the portrayed subject as a passive agent. In some of the works on display, the sitters are actively involved in their own representation. They interact with each other and engage with viewers directly. Though some of the sitters return our gaze, others avoid doing so as if to resist our facile attempts to classify them. The faces of some of those portrayed remain concealed or are obscured, as though to protect their anonymity while looking at us.

In conventional portraiture, the role of the artist is often understated in order to create the semblance of a one-to-one relationship between sitter and viewer. For some of the works presented, this illusion has been abandoned in favour of emphasizing the constructed nature of the portrait. Faces are dissected into grid-like compositions, presented in a temporal sequence, or are created through composites taken from numerous sources. Elsewhere in the exhibition, artists engage in self-representation, although the act of self-portraiture is deferred as their features are substituted by other forms.

In as much as FACE À FACE / LOOKING BACK challenges conventions of portraiture while exploring the relationships between sitters, viewers and artists; it also draws our attention to the very act of looking.