By Lauren Krugel
Farouk Kaspaules says he is utterly preoccupied with the homeland he left behind nearly 30 years ago.
The Iraqi-Canadian artist says he makes sense of his memories though his artwork, which uses layers of photography, silk-screening, and crude hand drawings to create a distorted version of the original image.
A collection of Kaspaules’s work called “Traces” is currently on display at Gallery 101 on Nepean Street.
The artist’s memories of his war-torn country have gripped him so tightly throughout the years that it has been impossible for him to move on to any other art projects, he says.
“You remember the smell of the neighbourhood, the street, the soil, the everything. And yet you are so far,” he says.
“It’s not a fiction for me. It’s very real. What became so difficult was that my memory of the place was so important to me that I had to cling to it, I had to not let go.”
Two of Kaspaules’s pieces feature the central Baghdad square where he remembers playing as a child, and the Tigris River where he remembers swimming. Scribbled bombs, warplanes, and arrows mar the photographs.
Kaspaules says his work is political as well as personal. Many of his pieces explore the plight of the Ma’dan, or Marsh Arabs, who were brutally repressed under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Another Gallery 101 exhibit currently on display also deals with how people remember places, but in a much different way.
The exhibit’s title, “Gagner des Vertiges tout à son Aise” was inspired by Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who came up with most of his thoughts while wandering throughout Geneva, says Montreal artist Josée Pellerin. Roughly translated, it means, “getting dizzy in a carefree manner.”
She explores urban and suburban landscapes through two works, “A nice Place to Live Leave” and “Un Histoire de Soi,” or “a story of self.”
Pellerin came up with “A Nice Place to Live Leave” while she was at a conference in Baie-Saint-Paul, Que., a town she says she found inspirational because “everyone is a painter.”
The work is a wall-sized patchwork of different-coloured wooden squares with the silhouettes of houses painted on them.
Each day she painted a different house she saw on her trip – like keeping a diary, she says.
On some squares are folded flaps of paper with the names of different cities written on the surface.
Underneath the flaps are short stories and snippets of description about the place, offered by hundreds of people Pellerin interviewed.
She says lifting the flap is like lifting up a lifting up a layer of memory – bringing the viewer closer to a place they may have been in the past.
“A Nice Place to Live Leave” is meant to draw a parallel between the city where we spend our everyday lives, and the cities that we dream about or remember visiting.
“Un Histoire de Soi” is a collection of photos of suburban homes cast in various shades of black and gray, except for isolated windows and streetlamps, which are lit from behind in bright, surreal colours.
Superimposed on the images are collages of disjointed words and phrases that Pellerin overheard in various public places.
Pellerin took the photographs during the day and then used a computer graphics program to darken them.
“In that way, I could choose where I could put the lights. I chose where I could make a fiction,” she says.
For instance in one piece, everything is completely gray and black, but for a car window which is backlit in blue turquoise.
Gallery 101 curator Jessie Lacayo says she ran the two exhibits at the same time for a reason.
“It was very much about how the two of them talked about place. It was interesting how both used memory,” she says.
Since the gallery has spaces on two levels, Lacayo says the exhibits could be viewed both on their own, and in relation to one another.
“The viewer makes the connections or they could choose not to. That’s what we do. We want people to not be too obvious. We want people to work a little.”
“Traces” and “Gagner des Vertiges tout à son Aise” are on display at Gallery 101 until April 9.