Jamelie Hassan: At the Far Edge of Words

ARTIST’S PRESENTATION Thursday 22 September at 8 PM This survey exhibition traces four decades of art-making by London, Ontario artist Jamelie Hassan and presents a body of work that intertwines her enduring interests in text, language, memory, personal history, and identity. Her pioneering practice steadfastly asserts that artists have a responsibility to address the critical issues of our time, while her geographical location in the ‘regions’ of Southwestern Ontario grounds her practice. Yet despite the influence of here, Hassan’s work is equally influenced by there – as experienced through her research and travels in Asia, the Americas and the Middle East, and Lebanon, the homeland of her parents. Hassan’s approach to artmaking is distinguished by her use of a wide range of media (ceramics, watercolours, bookworks, photographs, video, and installations) from which she selects an approach best suited to the task at hand. Watercolours, for example – swift and portable and comprising much of the work she makes when travelling – capture the immediacy of personal engagement, while robust mixed-media installations – part of her studio-based work – confront the complexity of cultural politics and personal history. Hassan’s first film project, The Oblivion Seekers (1985), began with a childhood memory and a search through private and public archives. The film juxtaposes archival and family film footage of celebratory dancing and singing, seamlessly moving between sites in Canada, the United States, Lebanon and Egypt, and is a powerful record of individual identity situated against the backdrop of political tension in the world. Further investigating these tensions, the exhibition includes early paintings from travels in Iraq in the late 1970s, as well as Qana, Lebanon (2006), a series of newer ink drawings created in response to the Israeli bombings of the Lebanese town in 2006, and Curfew (2007), a series of watercolour paintings prompted by the curfews imposed in Rangoon by Burma’s military dictatorship. The title of the exhibition, At the Far Edge of Words, pays homage to Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish, evoking a line from his poem “I am from there”. The poem begins “I am from there. I have memories” but concludes “I learned all the talk and dismantled it to construct one word: country.” Hassan’s work is represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver); the Art Gallery of Windsor (Windsor); Museum London; and the Dalhousie Art Gallery, among many others. In 2001, she was a recipient of the prestigious Governor General’s Award in Media and Visual Arts.