Makeshift ventures inside the studio and sites of production, turning outward these layered spaces of making. Brea Souders and Maegan Hill-Carroll call upon studio vestiges and the remnants of personal archives in much of their ongoing photographic experiments. In her series Unexpected Light, Hill-Carroll constructs the byproducts of her practice into compositions that at times reference traditional studio photography and at others seem to evoke the sci-fi. Reflective foil and rags used to clean out a clogged inkjet printer, trinkets collected from various travels, and a once forgotten series of images, are intuitively combined into curious assemblages. Souder’s series Film Electric similarly makes use of a decade’s worth of mechanical errors and failed experiments. Exploiting a process she discovered while cleaning up her studio, Souder’s uses static to momentarily produce gravity defying sculptures of her cut-up filmstrips. Her chance-based arrangements of disposable debris are paired with a series of images produced while working out of a temporary studio in her childhood home. The familial is also central in Ève K. Tremblay’s series Clair Obscur dans l'atelier de mon père, which recreates the objects of her father Alain-Marie Tremblay's studio in Val-David, Québec. The chiaruscuro style images focus in on the markings of the worn space and a series of ceramic-sculptures made in clay and betonique – clay concrete invented by Alain-Marie in the 1980s. Revealing her continued interest in process, the images are combined with hand-molded clay sculptures into which Tremblay impresses photographs of her father’s workplace. Together, the works in this exhibition turn photography in on itself, implicating the medium as both a memory aid and raw material.
Co-presented with the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
Essay by Noa Bronstein
Born in 1978 in Baltimore, Maryland, Brea Souders studied art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Souders lives and works in New York City. Brea Souders has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, including Abrons Arts Center, the Camera Club of New York and the Center for Photography at Woodstock in New York, as well as the Singapore International Photography Festival and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives. She has received a Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation fellowship at the Millay Colony of the Arts and a Women in Photography/LTI-Lightside Kodak materials grant.
Eve K Tremblay grew up between Val-David and Montreal. After studies in French Literature at the University of Montreal she attended the The Neighborhood Playhouse School of The Theater in New York from 1994 to 1995. She holds a BFA with a major in photography from Concordia University in Montreal (2000). She also lived in Berlin and New York and attended long term artist residencies in Basel (iaab), Strasbourg (CEAAC) et New York (RU). In her work, the thematic of awareness is approached from a poetic point of view, inspired by literature, cinema, science, serendipity and a love for small things. The majority of her works are photographic but other ones are processed based exploring videos, performances, texts, books, mixed medias and recently ceramics (her "clayplays") as she is taking classes at the Greenwich House Pottery in NY. Her works have been exhibited and published internationally. Among others, she has exhibited at Le Musée d'art Contemporain de Montreal, Le Musée National des Beaux-Arts de Québec, MACVAL, Bergen Kunsthall, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, in Momentum 7, the Nordic Biennale, and was awarded with many grants from the Grand Conseil des Arts du Canada and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec. She recently completed an artist residency at the Eileen S. Kaminsky Familly Foundation, at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ (15.2-20.6). She aslo attended a residency with (Re)-Create at Hayden Lake Idaho (26.07-06.07).
Ongoing solo Entre les feuilles (Ève K. Tremblay/Photographies 2000-2014) at Centre de diffusion Parc-extension Montreal runs until January 19th 2015. She just completed asolo entitled EKTBF451/EKTFF451: Notes & confessions at Gallery MK Galerija Miroslav Kraljević curated by Zeljka Himbele in Zagreb Croatia (December 4th-23th 2014). Amongst other projects she is preparing a duo show with her father ceramist-sculptor Alain-Marie Tremblay at Le Musée d'art contemporain des laurentides (June 7- Sept 13 2015). She lives and works between New York (Union City, NJ) and Montreal.
Maegan Hill-Carroll is an artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles and a BFA from the University of Manitoba where she grew up in Winnipeg. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and in Los Angeles. Her writing has been published in the contemporary art magazine Fillip.
