Transparent Endings

Art Matters Exhibit PUSH-PULL Explores the Creation Process as Art

Fringe ArtsCaitlin Leroux — Published March 8, 2011

The process behind a fascinating piece of work is something that often goes unnoticed and unobserved. In most gallery settings, viewers are limited to the final product. In response, viewers are not provided with the tools to deconstruct the work that goes into the creative process. This is what PUSH-PULL attempts to explore.

The show features the finished works and coinciding creative processes of 10 Concordia-based artists at La Galerie ESPACE. The works are varied in medium ranging from fashion, jewelry, industrial and graphic design, furniture, photography and painting.

PUSH-PULL asks viewers to pay attention to the process behind the work and the balance that is attained through the final product. Viewers are introduced to the scrap sketches, leftover materials, example prototypes and the original ideas that the artists’ inspiration stemmed from.

Artist Thea Govorchin is one of the featured painters whose work, entitled “Pouteenage Lust,” illustrates an image of nude “babes,” as she described them, floating over poutine. Her creative process includes images that lent inspiration to her creative process, including a particular print featured in one of the pieces in the Miu Miu spring 2010 collection

The industrial design and furniture pieces that were housed in corners, in the open space and on the stages of window displays also included visual explanation behind their production.

Designer Eli Kerr created a chair made of metal and leather, explaining how a balance between the materials was found in a similar fashion to the way that the balance between a zipper and a leather boot is found.

Comparisons such as the latter help explain the thought process that artists experience asking themselves. “How do I find balance between the materials I am working with?” Or, perhaps as seen with Andrew Evan Taurins spatial exploration using cardboard tubes or Pablo Aracenas, graphic design piece, “How do I find the balance between the negative and positive space?”

La Galerie ESPACE was the perfect venue for such an array of works. The gallery’s “in” and “out” door adds to the overall push-pull theme of the exhibition.

Govorchin described the show as “achieving balance, in the way that Vivien displayed the theme in regards to the layout that the space provides.”
PUSH-PULL reminds us that the process of creation is just as worthy of display as the final works are—that we should be art literate as we peruse some of the great works of art that are out there.

They have probably taken months of preparation striving to reach a push-pull balance.

This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 25, published March 8, 2011.