{"id":13792,"date":"2012-08-20T19:16:23","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T23:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/?p=13792"},"modified":"2012-10-23T19:08:26","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T23:08:26","slug":"jamelie-hassan-at-the-far-edge-of-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/?p=13792","title":{"rendered":"Jamelie Hassan: At the Far Edge of Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jamelie Hassan, Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>(detail),1990. Collection of Museum London.<\/p>\n

August 24 – October 14, 2012<\/strong>
\nOpening Reception: Friday, September 7, 8 – 10 p.m.
\nMUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART<\/strong>
\nMain Space
\n952 Queen Street West
\nToronto, ON, M6J 1G8
\nT: 416.395.0067
\nE: info@mocca.ca
\nwww.mocca.ca\/
\nHours: Tues\u2013Sun 11:00\u20136:00 p.m<\/p>\n

Curated by Melanie Townsend<\/strong><\/p>\n

Organized by Museum London, generously supported by Salah Bachir and Jacob Yerex<\/p>\n

“This survey exhibition traces four decades of art-making by London, Ontario artist Jamelie Hassan and presents a body of work that intertwines her enduring interests in text, language, memory, personal history, and identity.<\/p>\n

Her pioneering practice steadfastly asserts that artists have a responsibility to address the critical issues of our time, while her geographical location in the \u2018regions\u2019 of Southwestern Ontario grounds her practice. Yet despite the influence of here, Hassan\u2019s work is equally influenced by there\u2014as experienced through her research and travels in Asia, the Americas and the Middle East, and Lebanon, the homeland of her parents.<\/p>\n

At the Far Edge of Words features important works from throughout the artist\u2019s career. Common Knowledge, 1980-81, a mixed media installation comprised of ceramic objects and watercolour paintings, documents and replicates items of significance from Hassan\u2019s domestic environment: the jawbone of a caribou, a sardine can, curls of Birch bark, books, letters, a flower\u2014all personal momentos of her life. The work is among the earliest pieces inspired by her heightened focus on the everyday. Among the watercolour paintings are facsimiles of rejection letters from the Department of Immigration, denying her grandmother and uncles entry into Canada, marking the introduction of family history into her work.<\/p>\n

Hassan\u2019s first film project, The Oblivion Seekers, 1985, began with a childhood memory and a search through private and public archives. The film juxtaposes archival and family film footage of celebratory dancing and singing, seamlessly moving between sites in Canada, the United States, Lebanon and Egypt, and is a powerful record of individual identity situated against the backdrop of political tension in the world.<\/p>\n

The exhibition also includes photographic documentation of Hassan\u2019s watershed installation, at London, Ontario\u2019s Forest City Gallery, Beyrouth\u2026 is war art?, 1980. Here black and white images that document a destroyed wall at the artist-run centre are juxtaposed with images from Beirut, Lebanon, photographed by Hassan during the country\u2019s civil war in 1979. Neon has also featured prominently in Hassan\u2019s more recent works. The exhibition includes several new neon works\u2014 (Manuscript Page) 2005, \u0646 2009 and dar\u2019a, 2010\u2014created in response to an Arabic\/Persian manuscript.<\/p>\n

Over the course of her career, Hassan\u2019s approach to artmaking has been distinguished by her use of a wide range of media (ceramics, watercolours, bookworks, photographs, video, and installations) from which she selects an approach best suited to the task at hand. Watercolours, for example\u2014swift and portable and comprising much of the work she makes when travelling\u2014capture the immediacy of personal engagement. At the Far Edge of Words includes early paintings from travels in the late 1970s; Qana, Lebanon, 2006, a series of newer ink drawings created in response to the Israeli bombings of the Lebanese town; and a series of watercolour paintings, entitled Curfew, 2007, created in response to the curfews imposed in Rangoon by Burma\u2019s military dictatorship.<\/p>\n

The title of the exhibition, At the Far Edge of Words, pays homage to Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish, evoking a line from his poem, “I am from there”. The poem begins “I am from there. I have memories,\u201d concluding: \u201cI learned all the talk and dismantled it to construct one word: country.\u201d Melanie Townsend<\/p>\n

Hassan<\/strong>\u2019s work is represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver); the Art Gallery of Windsor (Windsor); The McIntosh Gallery (London); and Museum London among many others. In 2001, she was a recipient of the prestigious Governor General\u2019s Award in Media and Visual Arts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August 24 – October 14, 2012<\/strong>
\nOpening: Fiday, September 7, 8-10 p.m.<\/p>\n

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART<\/strong><\/p>\n

focused on issues of cultural and personal identity, exclusion, displacement, language<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-listings_archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13792"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15766,"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13792\/revisions\/15766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}