burning through the body
Sarah Pupo
Curated by Nasrin Himada
05 – 27 April 2019
Opening Reception: 05 April 6-8PM

Co-presented with the 2019 Images Festival

The drawing of the body burns into the body//and so//it burns through the body//then the wildfire//reaches from chin to collarbone//some draw burn marks//and some enter burn marks//and then burn marks become drawings//and so//drawings burn
— Kristin Eiriksdottir

Kristin Eiriksdottir’s poem, “KOK,” inspires the exhibition’s thematic of opposing forces and tensions of layering and unraveling, concealing and revealing, openness and containment. Both Sarah Pupo’s watercolour paintings and animation work are relational and dynamic configurations that create movement between these diametric paths. The exhibition highlights the physical and intuitive labour that goes into the making of an image. The gestures, colours, shapes, and forms that appear on canvas and on screen bring something to life that spills over and through the frame. What has been generated, animated, and projected, compels us toward these works as they delight in the poetic intention of intuition, in movement and colour.

10’53, stereo, colour, stop motion animation, 2020.

A suite of four looping animations created by Sarah Pupo in dialogue with the poem KOK, by Kristín Eiríksdóttir. Eiríksdóttir voices the soundtrack in its original Icelandic and in English.

Following the 2019 exhibition burning through the body, the project was adapted to a single channel video with the support of a Digital Originals grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

BIOGRAPHIES

Sarah Pupo’s practice bridges watercolour, drawing, provisional installation, and lo-fi animation. She works with materials and processes that foreground intuition, associative thinking and ritual as means of accessing subtle logics and cyclical time. She lives and works in Montreal, QC.

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer, editor, and curator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal), in Kanien’kehá:ka territory. Their writing on contemporary art has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Critical Signals, The Funambulist, Fuse Magazine, Contemptorary and MICE Magazine.

+ Image: Sarah Pupo, Untitled, watercolour and wax on silk, 36” x 40”, 2018.