Contaminations
Chrissy Poitras, Klaudio Shita
March 11 - April 1, 2008
Artist talk: March 13th 3p | Reception: March 27 6-8p

Chrissy Poitras, Untitled, 2008

Chrissy Poitras
My work is an investigation of accidental marks I encounter in my surroundings. I use these found marks with their different qualities to inform my paintings and create challenging juxtapositions. Through a process of interpretation and layering, I bring these marks together to create my own new accidents. I work on impulse, playing with shape and colour, allowing the painting to come together on its own, while also exposing the different methods and techniques used.

Chrissy Poitras was born in Picton, Ontario in 1984. She was
surrounded by art her whole life as her father was a painter and marble sculptor. After two years at Trent she transferred into the Queen's University BFA program. In her fourth year at Queen's Chrissy is focusing on painting and printmaking. She has exhibited in Prince Edward County, Kingston, Peterborough and Toronto throughout her time at Trent and Queen's and continues to enter into new exhibitions. At the end of her third year at Queen's she was awarded the Margaret Craig Fine Art scholarship for the highest standings in painting for her year. Chrissy plans to graduate Queen's in June of 2008.


Klaudio Shita, Untitled, 2008

Klaudio Shita
For the past two years my intent has been to find ways ofapproaching narratives visually as a means of cultural criticism: namely, ecocide and the wretchedly persistent social meme fuelling it: the unsupportable belief that humanity and the human-made are somehow outside of nature. I think this is the premise to grand narratives that will not allow us to think up ways of living sustainably until we learn not merely to deconstruct them, but to construct alternatives. It is largely a linguistic problem; that is, by grand narrative, I mean that we are dealing with a semantic environment, the operational software of a culture if you will. Discrediting it does not get rid of it. A culture needs a premise to align meaning within its parameters. My approach to these issues in visual media is influenced by the methods of science fiction, speculative fiction and alternate history genre (notably: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, and The Story of B, Robert J. Sawyer's The Neanderthal Parallax, Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words --all dealing with ecocide in terms if culture
criticism).

This is a long-term project, requiring the cumulative development of a visual language for talking about ecocide in the first place -- a language not immediately influenced by the anti-colonialist discourse that has been readily adopted for these issues so far. As a result, my works are visual versions of writing exercises aimed at articulating environmental issues through narrative. I use narratives that don't make sense, and allow them to continue and back up on themselves, throughout each work. I use this approach to play with the structure of a semantic environment and piece together specificities over and around borders that give structural support to imagined differences.

Klaudio Shita was born in Albania in 1983. He currently studies Fine Art at Queen's university, periodically participating in Works Cited events in collaboration with other artists. After graduation he plans to continue a fine art career on a collaborative, grass roots level, and enroll in an apprenticeship to become a tattoo artist.