Faculty & Instructors

  • Brock Talks: “Finding Photographs” by VISA Professor Amy Friend

    Tuesday, February 07, 2017 | By

    Brock Talks Logo“Finding Photographs” by Brock Visual Arts Professor Amy Friend
    The process artists undertake in their studio practice involve various amounts of experimentation and discovery. Professor Amy Friend, Department of Visual Arts, will present behind-the-scenes aspects of studio practices by several photographic artists working with found photographs and highlight the complex navigation and issues related to the specific act of ‘finding photographs.’

    Wednesday, February 15, 7 – 10 pm
    St. Catharines Public Library
    54 Church Street, St. Catharines

    For more information, connect with us on our Facebook event page.

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  • VISA instructor Amy Friend featured on MoMA Instagram!

    Tuesday, January 24, 2017 | By

    VISA instructor Amy Friend’s piece, “Hands on Water”, is featured today on the Instagram page of the Museum of Modern Art as part of their MoMA R&D Salon 19: Modern Death. Have a look! Congratulations, Amy!

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  • Visual Arts professor releases new book on photography

    Friday, December 09, 2016 | By

    Appropriated photographs book cover(Source: The Brock News, Friday, December 9, 2016 | by Alison Innes)

    Professor Linda Steer has been fascinated with photography since she was a little girl looking at her grandmother’s photo albums. Her interest in photography and surrealism has now led to the recent publication of her book, Appropriated Photographs in French Surrealist Periodicals, 1924-1939.

    Steer says understanding the appropriation and recirculation of images is an important part of our media-rich culture.

    “Research on photography is becoming increasingly important as we live more and more of our lives through visual images,” she says.

    Memes are one modern example of how the meaning of an image changes.

    “They are typically photographic images that have been appropriated and altered through the addition of text or juxtaposition with other images. They circulate on social media. That process of adding text and re-circulating changes their meanings,” Steer says.

    The surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s were doing a similar thing in their magazines: taking existing images and juxtaposing them with other images or text. In this process, surrealists turned established images, such as medical images or crime-scene photographs, into works of art with very different meanings from the original photographs.

    It’s important to our image-laden lives to understand this process and what it means, says Steer.

    Her book is structured around four case studies and is the first of its kind on this topic.

    Since art history is an interdisciplinary field, Steer’s analysis engages with histories of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, ethnography, anthropology, literature and poetry, criminology, forensics, politics, religion, and popular culture in late 19th and early 20th century France and beyond.

    While the book is for an academic audience, Steer hopes those interested in photography and art will also find it appealing.

    “I hope that my book gives readers a new way of thinking about the complex relationships between surrealism and photography, and that it allows readers to understand, in a more general way, how photographs work and how they come to have meaning,” Steer concludes.

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  • Visa Photography Instructor Amy Friend mounts exhibition.

    Tuesday, November 01, 2016 | By

    image_559Photography Professor Amy Friend presents Eternal Light at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in Toronto.

    November 2 – 30, 2016
    The Gallery at the J
    Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre
    750 Spadina Ave. (at Bloor), Toronto Ontario

    In Jewish tradition the death of a loved one is commemorated by lighting a yahrzeit candle, often with a prayer beginning with a passage from Proverbs, “. . . the lamp of the Eternal is the soul of humanity . . .” For most Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and so many who died before, there is no surviving family to observe this ritual. It therefore falls to future generations. For a visual interpretation of the theme Future of Memory, Neuberger HEW commissioned artist Amy Friend. Exploring the notion of light, Friend used archival photographs of European Jewry before the Shoah from UJA Federation’s Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre. She carefully perforated each reproduced photo and shined light though the small openings, bringing new light into the image and recreating it as a unique work of art; a poignant and eternal tribute to life, love, and loss.

    Amy Friend is a Canadian Artist and Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Brock University. Friend has exhibited nationally and internationally, exploring issues related to history, memory, personal archives and phenomenology. She works with the medium of photography pushing its anticipated boundaries through installation and material experimentation. Recent exhibitions include Assorted Boxes of Ordinary Life (Rodman Hall, Canada), Heaven on Earth at the DongGang Museum of Photography (South Korea) and at the GetxoPhoto Festival (Spain). She has been selected as a top 50 photographer by Critical Mass International Photography Competition for three years running. Amy Friend is represented by C3 Arts.

    Exhibit Curated by Mira Goldfarb. Generously co-sponsored by Sally & Mark Zigler in honour of their parents, Fanny & Bernard Dov Laufer and Etty & Salo Zigler.

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  • Presence: Large Drawings by Lorène Bourgeois

    Wednesday, October 26, 2016 | By

    (Source: The Brock Press, October 25, 2016 | by Shannon Parr)

    Lorène Bourgeois’ “Forteresse painting by Peter Legris

    Lorène Bourgeois’ “Forteresse” (2012) / Peter Legris

    Brock’s own Visual Arts Instructor, Lorène Bourgeois, is exhibiting a collection of her work with large drawings at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts. Some of her most recent highly detailed drawings are mounted directly on the wall and are described by MIWSFPA as “large-scale representations of humans, animals, clothing and nakedness”.

    Although born in France, Bourgeois has trained in the arts in Paris, Philadelphia and Halifax, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Bourgeois’ work has been exhibited in Canada, France, Korea, Russia and the United States, and her work is currently held in a multitude of centres for art which include: the Canada Council Art Bank, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the National Bank of Canada, the Richmond Hill Public Library, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Ernst and Young, Senvest, Hart House and the Donovan Collection. Currently, she lives and works in Toronto, as well as teaches in Brock’s Department of Visual Arts.

    In a statement made on her website in regards to her recent drawings, Bourgeois says she is developing a series of drawings that focus on the subject of clothing and its relation to human and animal bodies. She goes on to say that she is interested not only in the social and utilitarian functions of garments, but also their qualities as physical objects. In particular, the details of these physical objects, such as their folds and buttons, are some of what she explores in her work.

    “Isolated from their original context, and placed in the presence of similarly ambiguous “faux frères,” such garments seem to oscillate between functionality and theatricality, between absurdity and threat,” said Bourgeois. “It is this tension, the moment when the function of clothing slips into something less recognizable, that I wish to explore.”

    At the opening of her gallery at MIWSFPA, she further elaborated on her more recent drawings, saying that they relate garments to the human body and face:

    “We have five new pieces in this show. They are all from the same series; what’s interesting for me actually is to allow them to connect to one another just like people would in life,” said Bourgeois. “They really reflect my own experience, like looking at people and contouring people in life. Of course, my interest is in a different meaning of clothing – like, people wear clothing for a social reason, it can be protection, it can be both, or it can also be a sign of authority. There are all these different possibilities, and with this collection we see a few.”

    Out of the pieces hung along the walls, one individual drawing stood out, as it was the lone piece to include an animal.

    “I’ve also been interested in animals for some time – even dressed animals. Sheep, for instance, at the winter fair are covered with a kind of hood, which really reminds you of something from the middle ages,” said Bourgeois. “It’s a bit scary, because you only see the eyes.”

    Although her subject matter is diverse, it all connects to and works with images of humanity. Throughout our discussion on her art, she began to speak about what she is trying to accomplish with these pieces.

    “There is a lot of different thought going into this work,” said Bourgeois. “Like bringing back a different period of history but also bringing together individuals which lived in the past. Some of the work’s sources are really both from my life and looking at people and animals, but they’re also looking at artifacts in a museum. Also, looking at sculpture. Some of these faces [in the drawings] were actually roman people.“

    Lorène Bourgeois’ “Swim Cap” by Peter Legris

    Lorène Bourgeois’ “Swim Cap” (2013) / Peter Legris

    On a drawing entitled “Swim Cap” (2013), Bourgeois commented that this was one of the drawings of a sculpture. This sculpture was depicting a nineteenth century noble person in France, but Bourgeois removed the clothing she’d had on and instead focused on the face and shoulders, noting that she wanted to focus on the woman’s strength in these features.

    Referencing a work entitled “Tin Hat” (2014), Bourgeois noted, “this fellow here who was a Roman general has become a soldier or a worker – we really don’t know now because of that tin hat. I know it is an odd thing I’m doing with the human form but for me, what really matters is bringing them back in a way and showing their strengths and sometimes their attitude, but often the dignity that I see.”

    When the subject turned to motivation, Bourgeois elaborated on the two things she thinks of when meditating on her work; first, its presence.

    “One of the things I think of when I think of my work is the idea of presence – bringing back the human presence, whether it’s that of a person living before our time – it could be a contemporary person like my neighbour’s daughter (reference to “Infant”, 2012). The other word I would use is trying to make it as intense as possible through the way of working. It is very intense, with layers and layers of the medium.”

    On her process, she explained that her staple tool in the Large Drawings collection is Conté, a medium often consisting of compressed, powdered graphite. Bourgeois only uses this and an eraser to produce her pieces; there is no white tool, and so instead she works with the original white space of the paper. One piece can take approximately three months

    In the collection now being exhibited in MIWSFPA, it is interesting to note that there are four separate drawings of figures wearing gas masks.
    Although she expressed her horror at the idea of war, Bourgeois also claimed a sense of fascination felt when exploring war museums. She recounted a time a few years back, when she was on a research grant in England. The Imperial War Museum was holding an exhibition on childhood during WWӀӀ.

    “Something I didn’t realize until that show was that everyone in Europe had to have a gas mask ready,” explained Bourgeois. “Because gas had been used in WWӀ, they thought it was going to be used again in WW2; people were terrified. In that display, they were showing gas masks for children which they called ‘Mickey Mouse’. The gas masks were red and had funny colours so kids would not be so scared of them, but it was pretty scary [for me to see]. They showed a video of a toddler learning how to put the mask on their head. In the end, gas was not used at war, but it’s still a current topic because it’s been used recently in Syria.”

    On her earlier work, Bourgeois talked about her fascination with clothing:

    “I drew only the clothing. I’ve always worked with the human theme. As I mentioned before, I used to look at faces from sculpture and I would take a lot of photos in museums of sculpture, but then all of a sudden my camera started looking below and realizing the clothing.”

    Lorène Bourgeois’ “Tin Hat” by Peter Legris

    Lorène Bourgeois’ “Tin Hat” (2014) / Peter Legris

    Bourgeois spoke on the eighteenth century, saying there were were beautiful sculptures with beautiful clothing, specifically noting the time of the French revolution. Men wore very frivolous and showy costumes, which drew her interest. Even now, although she focuses on the face, she works with a hat in her drawings.

    In one corner of the room hung a drawing entitled “Forteresse” (2012); in it, a severe looking woman sits, staring out at you amidst the huge, frilly fabric collaring her dress.

    “The source for Forteresse is a tiny sculpture of a woman from the nineteenth century, and she had a much smaller cloth around her shoulders and neck,” said Bourgeois. “I made her much bigger and her dress also bigger. I call it Fortress. She’s very righteous, very dignified, and you don’t know whether the strengths are coming from her or whether the outfit gives her those strengths. On one hand it gives her power, but on the other hand it’s very restrictive, which it was if you think about those times in the Victorian time where women wore corsets and very stiff clothing.”

    When looking at Bourgeois’ Large Drawings, her dedication to depicting the human expression and presence is clear. The detailed shading done only through Conté and eraser allows her to work very closely with the base level paper itself, coming back to it over and over again, and sustaining a relationship with its white space. She did not need to talk about presence, because it was already felt in the room. “Swim Cap” stares, fierce and dignified, into the dead centre of the room. The depictions of children and people in gas masks almost stalk the corners of the gallery, some staring back at its viewers and others looking away. The medium allows for an intense representation of its subject matter and, with it, Bourgeois has brought these people, Romans or World War ӀӀ children, into the room
    with us.

    Lorène Bourgeois’ gallery of Large Drawings will be held at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts from October 18th – November 18th, Tuesday – Saturday from 1:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m.

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  • Lorène Bourgeois exhibition coming to MIWSFPA

    Wednesday, October 12, 2016 | By

    (Source: The Brock News, Wednesday, October 12, 2016)

    Whether Lorène Bourgeois is drawing humans or animals, the use of garments is a recurring part of her striking imagery.

    And starting Oct. 18, the public will have a month-long opportunity to view an exhibition by the Paris-born visual artist and Brock University instructor.

    The show “Large Drawings” will be on display in downtown St. Catharines, in the Art Gallery of Brock’s Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts. Consisting of 10 to 12 highly detailed works, the images are representations of humans, animals, clothing and nakedness.

    Bourgeois herself will be on hand for an opening reception from 5 to 8 pm on Thursday Oct. 20, which is a free community event.

    Throughout her career, Bourgeois has had her artwork exhibited across Canada as well as in France, Korea, Russia and the United States. She now lives and works in Toronto, and has for several years taught drawing in Brock’s Department of Visual Arts.

    To learn more about the upcoming exhibition and see some of the imagery, click here.

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  • Visa LTA Instructor exhibits in Poland.

    Saturday, October 01, 2016 | By

    amy-friend_dare_alla_luce_1-3LTA Photography Instructor Amy Friend will be exhibiting work in Października Poland as part of the Vintage Photography Festival October 7 to 23. For more information, please click HERE.

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  • Visa Instructor Amy Friend – recent exhibitions.

    Thursday, September 15, 2016 | By

    encontros-da-imagem-2016-5_660x371Photography Instructor Amy Friend is part of the following exhibitions:

    Encontros Da Imagem
    Exhibition: Memory Lab of Happiness
    Braga, Portugal
    Sept. 20 to Nov. 5, 2016
    http://encontrosdaimagem.com/en/2016/exhibits/

    Getxo Photo Festival Getxo, Spain
    September 1 to Oct. 2, 2016
    http://getxophoto.com/en/authors/amy-friend/

    DongGang International Photofestiva, l South Korea
    July 9 to September 25, 2016
    http://dgphotofestival.com/en/main-exhibition/
    DongGang Museum of Photography

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  • Mahtay Cafe opens at the MIWSFPA

    Thursday, September 15, 2016 | By

    The brand new Mahtay café is now open on the third floor student lounge area! Hours of operation are:

    Mon – Fri from 8:30 am to 2pm.

    Please note that the permanency of this café will be based on its success here at the Marilyn I. Walker School. So take some time on your breaks to get up there and enjoy reasonable prices and excellent food and drinks!

    The location is 3rd floor at the south end of the building (lobby), take that elevator to the 3rd floor (not connected to the 3rd floor at the other end) or take stairwell “D”.

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  • Brock University Visual Arts Assistant Professor’s work exhibited internationally

    Thursday, June 23, 2016 | By

    web_01-amyfriend_01amyfriend_march-28_42-17-yearsBrock University Visual Arts assistant professor Amy Friend’s work is featured in the Main Exhibition at the Donggang International Photo Festival in South Korea.

    Exhibition Overview:
    A total of 14 photographers around the world are participating in this exhibition, which will revolve around the theme of ‘Heaven on Earth’.

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