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Description:

Nesreen Galal is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal. Her work mostly centers on notions of identity, memory, the surreal, the uncanny. Additionally, she uses art as a vessel to critique colonial discourse, orientalism, capitalism and the cisgender male gaze. She presents these themes through a diverse variety of mediums, from cyanotype, to salt printing, to lumen print, anthotype, collage, to experimental photography and to filmmaking. Her short film, “Loss of Identity”, was screened in Montreal’s first BIPOC Film Festival in the summer of 2021. Her work has been internationally featured in magazines such as Luna Collective Magazine and Sunstroke Magazine, and she has had the opportunity to showcase her work locally at the likes of VAV Gallery, Eastern Bloc, Livart, Atelier Galerie 2112 and Somewhere Gallery. Recently, she has been focused on photography and printmaking with chemical ingredients. Nesreen is currently in her final fourth year, double majoring in Computation & Studio Arts, as she has a passion for blending both analogue and digital mediums.

Loss of identity 3.0 stems from my personal journey as I grappled with identity confusion. This installation delves into the interplay of various emotional layers, facial expressions, and the act of masking to conform to societal norms. The concept of masking involves concealing or omitting parts of oneself to present a socially acceptable image. My struggles with ADHD (ADHD masking), imposter syndrome and general challenges with fitting in, coupled with my mixed background as a marginalized queer Arab, led me to explore art as a therapeutic process. I crafted masks, one of which symbolizes my  younger self, complete with the hair highlights I recall to have once favored. Another mask, adorned with fragmented mirrors, represents the idea of a fractured self-image. Additionally, I produced four 3D-printed masks of myself showcasing different expressions. The intention was to establish a disconnect between the audience and the performer, fostering a voyeuristic experience. To achieve this, I incorporated CCTV cameras, evoking a sense of surveillance akin to a security guard monitoring screens for potential intruders or threats. By deliberately concealing my face, I aimed to question the concept of true self, highlighting the inherent challenge of understanding one’s feelings and thoughts. After all, my internal mental processes remain inaccessible to others. The theatrical appeal and use of masks and performance addresses a heavy topic while exploring notions of play in my work.

Description:

‘Seventeen’ explores what it means to grow up and live in an ever-changing landscape. It dives into the abrupt personal discovery that life is going to be constantly filled with change, and adapting, and growing. Change has never come easy to me, and big transition periods can take even bigger tolls on me. With this short film I have finally allowed myself to understand that it is these changes that, although scary, are also beautiful and play a necessary role in forging forward on my own perfectly imperfect path. 

A red line runs through various clips and images forming a connecting pathway. The line twists and turns, never being still or stagnant, representing the difficult and necessary ever-changing pathways we all follow. Places, people, and things, these are the changing elements in our life that make us who we are. Where are we going? Who knows. All I know is we have to keep moving and changing to get there.

Description:

This work presents two faces of the same person–the One and the Other. The One fell into a cliff, trapped and tied into a sordid dark space of mindless copy-pasting, of fading thoughts. The Other is still running free in an infinite space of childlike wonder, producing the original material of sincerity that feeds the manufacturer. Yet as the Other nears the edge of the cliff, the hope they carry is enough to wake the One from its stagnation. The One can warn the past, but will it come in time to break the circle?

Description:

As an artist, my drive, or rather, my impetus to create is directly related to my mental health.  In many ways art is a form of relief from the stresses of our world, especially one still reeling from the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Infinite, as the piece is known, is a small part of a larger series I’ve been doing. The series focuses on surreal collages depicting vivid motions, with themes of euphoria, vulnerability, and passion. This piece depicts a statue of Galileo in the midst of a sea of surreal colors and images, depicting both our world and his own. With the line, “you are loved, you are infinite” I want to convey reassurance for when we feel unwanted or lonely in the midst of our own personal struggles to regain our energy, our drive, our impetus.

Artist Statement:

The Inbetween is an animated short illustrating the point in a young adult’s life where they accept that they have outgrown their childhood home. Not that they can never return, only that it will never be the same as when they were small. In the film, a girl outgrows her home and leaves for a new one where she might fit. Upon arriving, she realizes she may have some more growing to do before this new home suits her.

The idea for this film arose at a time when I was feeling an inexplicable sense of loneliness and confusion about my future and a homesick nostalgia for my childhood. I didn’t want to move back to my hometown; it felt so different now, from when I was a teenager. And I didn’t want to be in Montréal in my apartment because I didn’t feel like I was old enough or “ready” to be taking care of myself completely. I wanted to either go back in time, or fast forward to a future where I would be and feel more secure.

The Inbetween is for those who leave their childhood home feeling larger than life, to pursue an ambition, or simply for a change of scenery. I expect the audience to reflect on their personal intermediary stages, as well as their experience of leaving home and returning back for the first time after being out on their own. This is all to say, I think we’re all a bunch of little giants just trying our best to grow and figure it out.

Keeping it Together

The video performance, Keeping it Together, explores the body’s surface as a container, a barrier and a mediator of experience. This artwork sprung from an inquiry about the body’s ability to produce and interact. The vinyl embodies the invisible border that our skin imposes on our experiences. In this performance, the body reaches out, grows, evolves by moving from outside its boundaries to inside its container. The containment by the body is rendered by the use of a diaphanous red fibre material being place under and through the vinyl skin.

Weighted

The video, Weighted, explores the body’s weight and its capacity to fill and occupy a space. I created this project as an experimentation to understand the potential of video montage and sound sampling. Transparency occupies an important place in layering multiple bodies to break down movement and fill the screen. The colours create a visual rhythm, but also boundaries, highlighting various lines present both in the space and in the body. The entire video was shot in a bedroom, and some of the upside down image alterations are used to suggest ideas of personal inner space and weightlessness for the body movement.

Please visit the link to view both performances: http://www.elisabethcharland.com/video-performance.

In June of 2014, Concordia University’s Art Education Department hosted Brooklyn-based experimental artist Oliver Herring to create TASKmtl, a series of TASK parties which invited people of all ages to participate in improvised expression through art, messy play and interactive performance. In this two week intensive workshop our group collaboratively designed, engaged-in, documented, and compiled materials to include coordinated spontaneous networked communications for each TASK event through popular mass media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.

To promote our Teen edition of TASKmtl, creating a targeted message directed at youth in the medium and visual form through which they communicate became an amazing task for reflecting on teaching practice. As a visual artist engaged in digital storytelling, establishing “a connection between the creator and the viewer,” and knowing your audience gives voice to engaging communication (Howland, Jonassen and Marra, 2012, p.227). As an art educator “making content and connections relevant to students’ lives helps bring meaning and purpose to instruction in all content areas” (Dreon, Kerper and Landis, 2011, p.7). Drawing on these essential principles I looked to my students as teachers and chose one of their favourite platforms: the Hollywood-style iMovie Trailer as the vehicle for inviting them to join us.

Conceptualizing celebrating the end of a school year with art-making, my video School’s Out and Task Is In! was easily supported by the Hollywood-style movie trope my students introduced me to during our issues-based L.E.S on stop-motion animated films. The Trailers allowed them to quickly edit clips into quirky themed templates during the postproduction phase of editing on their iPad in class, when Media Lab time was unavailable. The immediacy of its platform proved it to be a great tool for unpacking the more sophisticated desktop movie-making software platforms to come and allowed for practice working out timing of music, titles, transitions and credits for their films. At TASKmtl, personal stories influenced the tasks we wrote, performed, shared and collected.

My short trailer serves to build a greater story around Oliver Herring’s Socially Engaged Art and the inclusive vision and nature of collaborative art practices and TASK. My students’ way of knowing and storytelling “as actors who view, read, watch, play and often instruct their teachers about popular culture and media” has also helped me to reflect upon, evaluate and expand thinking about my own knowledge production and the dialogical relationship I have with students as cultural producers (Marshall and Sensoy, 2011, p.2). Created for: ARTE 398U TASKmtl.

References: Dreon, O., Kerper, R. M., & Landis, J. (2011). Digital Storytelling: A Tool for Teaching and Learning in the YouTube Generation. Middle School Journal (J1), 42(5), 4-9. Howland, J. L., Jonassen, D., & Marra, R. M. (2012). Meaningful learning with technology (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc. Marshall, E., & Sensoy, O. (2011). Rethinking popular culture and media. (1st ed.). Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools Ltd.

My art practice focuses mainly on storytelling and includes creating paper and wood puppets because of their inherent ability to evoke narratives with viewers. With this project, I wanted to adapt my puppets to animation. The paper cutout stop motion animation technique I used was inspired by the work of filmmaker and director Terry Gilliam and by shadow puppetry. I wanted to use animation to tell a simple and humorous story, to make the piece accessible to students and various audiences.

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