THE 1ST PART OF THE 2ND HALF

Opening on Thursday, October 10, at 6 p.m.
The exhibition runs from October 10 to November 9, 2002.

The discourse around AIDS and its representation has propelled Stephen Andrews' work for over a decade, yielding important bodies of work that examine love, death, mourning and survival. The 1st part of the 2nd half is an exhibition of recent work that imagines a future, a natural thing to do, but something that for those grappling with the AIDS virus, was impossible to consider a few years ago.

Stephen Andrews' constructed, oversized filmstrips hang suspended along the length of the gallery, their physicality underscoring a repetition, transience and fragility inherent in the imagery itself. Using the motif of film as a formal device, the artist presents a picture of time stopped, where a minute can be seen teased apart into hundreds of component pictures. The work in The 1st part of the 2nd half is a composite of images and various media, combining photocopied photographs, drawings and video frame grabs. As a whole they weave together personal and cultural cycles creating a dialogue between the individual and the collective and marking a shift in the artist's concerns from the self to the social. In a fragmented narrative, he plays with the point of view and disrupts the procession of time. He begins with an ending and concludes with, as the title suggests, a new chapter. In the words of artist/writer Cheryl Sourkes, "Andrews' pictures are a reminder that life thrives on the edge of chaos."

Luce Des Aulniers: A presentation touching upon the work of Stephen Andrews
6 p.m., Thursday, October 10.

Luce Des Aulniers will reference Stephen Andrew's work to draw motifs for a dialogue between two themes: saturation and freshness. What are we saturated with? What messages and risks does repetition involve? And then, is freshness a guarantee of renewal?

These and other mischievous or serious questions will offer a glimpse of radical life and death issues, and the contemporary complexity of their relationships.

Stephen Andrews was born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1956. Of his nine lives he has used three to date. A near drowning, a drug overdose and a presumed terminal diagnosis of AIDS. These three brushes with death have influenced his development in numerous ways. The last of these gave rise to pictorial investigations of memory and grief, and more recently to projects referred to as 'films' including hoi polloi and The 1st part of the 2nd half which shift the artist's interests from the personal to the social. Andrews' work has been exhibited internationally and across Canada including recent solo shows at Paul Petro (Toronto), Art Gallery of Windsor, Justina Barnicke Gallery (Toronto), Lombard Freid Fine Art (New York), Mount St. Vincent (Halifax), Arcus Project (Moriya, Japan) and group exhibitions at CAM (Houston Texas), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), The Power Plant (Toronto), Saidye Bronfman Centre (Montreal), Fotofeis (Glasgow, Scotland) and Museu De L'Arte Moderne (Sao Paulo, Brazil).

Luce Des Aulniers is a social worker in mental health and a sociologist. Also trained in art history and animation, she holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (Sorbonne, Paris, 1989). She is a professor with tenure in the Communications Department at UQÀM where she founded a new interdisciplinary program in Death Studies. She mainly explores this field of training and research from the perspective of day-to-day life and death relationships: fear and identity; women and men facing death; images and death, including artistic production; changes in rites of death; serious disease and its ensuing issues - suicide, request for euthanasia, etc.

Her work is well known in French-speaking communities as well as the United States and South America for its interdisciplinary scope and free association. She guides the work of students in six universities and has published some twenty scientific books and more than three hundred essays. In 1997, she published Itinérance de la maladie grave, le temps des nomades, with L'Harmattan press, Paris.

Dazibao thanks Stephen Andrews and Luce Des Aulniers for their generous contribution and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.