Sunday, September 2, 2007

Shannon Collis, Temporary Geography, Harcourt House, August 31 - September 29, 2007



Image: Shannon Collis, 2007

Former Edmonton-based artist Shannon Collis returns with an intricate network of digital and wax-based prints from her current position at the Sam Fox School of Art & Design in St. Louis, Missouri. Taking off on Tony Bennett’s visualization of memory fragments as a palimpsest, the works in question draw the viewers into the brink of losing ourselves into decoding the scatter of multicoloured fragments--confetti-like explosions that recall the the real and the remembered. The row of prints on the south wall of the Front Room carry titles like “Accumulation” and “Strata,” suggesting both the atmospheric layers at work and the cloudy residues of thought.
The one question that comes to mind is whether Collis intends on examining memory as a personal or collective endeavor. Regardless, the prints--some of which are rendered on wax--take on the reconstruction of memory and thoughts quite imaginatively.

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