March 2009
La Petite Mort Gallery presents…
OSHEEN HARRUTHOONYAN
ELEPHANTS / Photographs
One Month Exhibit: March 6 – 29, 2009
Vernissage: March 6 / 7 – 10pm
Proudly sponsored by CKCU 93.1 FM
Tunes by BOYSCOUT KILLERS !!
Osheen Harruthoonyan – Elephants
“Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: it wants meaning, but at the same time, it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise which will make it less acute…”
-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Osheen Harruthoonyan’s Elephants series addresses the purity of meaning embroiled in the faultiness of human memory. Combining the hand-manipulation of medium format negatives with traditional wet-darkroom printing; Harruthoonyan’s works achieve a representational lucidity akin to the smack of virtual light on the retina at the zenith of a nightmare. His ethereally manufactured locales describe the inevitable struggle that occurs in the surreal reconciliation of personal histories made vague with time. The missing faces of his subjects – situated in proportionately abstract scenarios – cleverly express the muddiness incurred in the recollection process.
Harruthoonyan’s photographic experiments rigourously depend on the incomplete and improbable potential of chemistry and light. This refreshing change from the often fast-and-dirty digital 21st century is, in and of itself, symbolic of a history that photographers everywhere are struggling to recall. His darkroom creations evoke our collective understanding of memory in its most raw and in-between state; as a noisy and less acute summoning that correctively interprets a moment in time.”
-Christine Lucy Latimer
Performing Live:
BOY SCOUT KILLERS
Boyscout Killers is : Mike Plante, Mathieu Coates, Mark Audet, Philippe Lepage “We have been stuck in this hellish place of forced believed comfort, surrounded by the monotony it’s inhabitants ultimately wear. Government workers are seen flocking every street corner. Conversations about elastic fights that broke out in the Data Entry cubicles can be felt floating over the city, something like a bad omen. We live in a place which is brimming with people who smoke large quantities of weed and waste it on couch conversation. Derelict roads leading to no place of interest. One of us managed to get to the other side of the world, only to find out the situation was worse there. We are forever trying to keep our sanity the only way we know how. We are the Boyscout Killers and we create”.
Thank you,
Guy Berube, director
La Petite Mort Gallery