FOFA Gallery opens in the EV

Barbara Black

At last the Faculty of Fine Arts has its own art gallery. It’s in a splendid location, facing Ste. Catherine St. in the new EV building. At the festive opening on Sept. 21, Dean Catherine Wild congratulated former dean Christopher Jackson for his work in realizing this long-awaited facility.

It includes the gallery proper plus a small dark space for video installations and other specific artworks, the vitrines or windows facing the interior corridor, and a sculpture court on the street, where Randall Anderson’s dashing figure, Zoom!, evokes a student — or perhaps a professor, or even a business executive — covered in Post-it notes.

The show inside the gallery, called Body Notes, includes work by five artists who deal with the human body. Marc Séguin shows a big work called Road Kill, in which a bas-relief crow (a real, dead bird) takes aim at a recumbent woman. Also represented are Caroline George, Sophie Jodoin, Theresa Sapergia and Marion Wagschal.

As director Lynn Beavis explained, the gallery’s mandate is to showcase the work of faculty, students, staff and alumni of Fine Arts in many forms.

From Oct. 20 - Nov. 12, the FOFA will show an exhibition called Auktion 392: Reclaiming the Galerie Stern, Düsseldorf. Art History professor Catherine MacKenzie and her fourth-year class have assembled material from the estate of well-known Montreal dealer Max Stern, who was forced to liquidate his art collection in Nazi Germany. As efforts to reconstitute the Stern collection continue with the active participation of Concordia, this is bound to be an important show.

The FOFA Gallery, as it is being called for now, shares the non-academic space in the EV building with several other enterprises. This summer the jean giant Parasuco rented space while its store at Crescent and Ste. Catherine was being renovated.

November will see the opening of the Montreal flagship store of Arc’teryx, a Vancouver-based outerwear chain that wants to break into the eastern Canadian market. Another 1,500 square feet of space is ready to be leased along Ste. Catherine St.

At the north end of the building, on the metro level, a branch of Omer DeSerres art and crafts supplies is already in place, and a branch of Jugo Juice will provide fresh fruit juice to thirsty patrons of the new recreation facilities.

Back at ground level, on the Mackay St. side of the EV building, an alumna is setting up shop. Michaelee Lazore, a graduate in mechanical engineering, is the proprietor of Sequoia, which sells beauty products and candles in Kahnawake. She plans to open her second store at Concordia in November.