Cut & Paste
Carlyn Bezic and Donald Chan
November 10-November 28, 2009
Reception: November 14, 6-8p | Artist Talk: November 11, 3p


Carlyn Bezic, Simulations, ink and graphite on tracing paper, 2009
Donald Chan, The Red Lamentations of an Evil Heart, Gouache, ink on Canvas, 2009

The act of collage is construction from destruction; tearing things apart to build them up again. Donald Chan and Carlyn Bezic explore this method and push it to other mediums, creating bizarre bodies, many-limbed monsters, and unsettling scenes.

Donald Chan starts his work with an idea, but from there he allows it to change. He never knows how it will turn out, and the end result is never what he intend. As for the finished work, it appears Chan is unconsciously attracted to the distortion of human figures, creating beings that belong in another space. As Chan continues down this path, he tries to understand why he is inherently drawn to things that do not exist. The work serves as a journal of this exploration. Donald Chan has included everything: the good ones, the bad ones, the mistakes, and the discoveries, in hopes of being as honest as possible.

Donald Chan was born in Hong Kong, but was raised in Toronto from the age of two. He remembers drawing his first picture at the age of five, when his grandfather handed him a pen and a napkin inside a restaurant. Drawing since then, he found himself working towards his BFA. If you want to know him better, his favourite food is lobster, he has two sisters, and he is learning the ukulele. He hopes to have a family of his own one day.

As one would make a collage, Carlyn Bezic wants to break apart constructions of women, take the pieces, rearrange them, and build them up again to create something that teeters between the plausible and unreal. Bezic believe that at its core, collage is construction through destruction, or a unity between the opposing acts of breaking apart and building up again. She is inspired by this contradictory and aggressive process and interested in pushing it to other mediums.

Carlyn Bezic uses tabloid media and celebrity culture as a primary reference in her work. She is interested in reworking and redefining the bodies, language, visual codes, and narratives she sees in these cultural texts to illuminate their hidden agendas. Bezic wants to make the women represented in these magazines into monsters to highlight what is already monstrous about the ideals they represent. Her aim is to deconstruct the ideologies inherent in them, in order to construct new, unsettling, and frightening ones.

Chris Ofili once said that art is mostly an act of pointing. Carlyn Bezic wants to point to and reflect what she sees in the cultural texts surrounding her, but in a fun-house mirror, where they are distorted and mutated.

Carlyn Bezic is in her fourth year of Queen’s BFA program. After completing her degree she plans to continue making art in Toronto. You can see more of her work in the Project Room at Modern Fuel in February 2010, or on her blog, carlynbezic.blogspot.com.