Post Neo: Julia Campisi & Manon Labrosse

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858 Bank St., Suite 101, Friday, May 18, 6 to 9 pm!

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cover art work: Julia Campisi, Manon Labrosse

A wild new world is created in Post Neo, Studio Sixty Six’s May 2018 exhibition. Photo-based artist Julia Campisi and neo-landscape artist Manon Labrosse are paired in this avant-garde exhibition of ostensibly traditional genres: figurative and landscape; and together they create a contrasting as well as forward-looking blend of the abstract and the real. Both artists approach their subjects and use of materials in innovative ways, bringing new, fresh and modern perspectives to classic subjects.

Manon Labrosse is a Franco-Ontarian artist from Northern Ontario. She currently lives in the Outaouais region in the province of Quebec. She studied painting at the University of Ottawa. Labrosse’s practice is based on experiences in nature: her painting style plays on memory, using her experiences as an adult, documentation of the landscape and an unavoidable connection to growing up in Northern Ontario to create conflicting landscapes of bright colours and dark neutral tones.

Inspired by a short story by Margaret Atwood titled Death by Landscape, the landscapes in this series, titled “How to Paint Death According to Lucy” are meant to have a polarizing effect of restlessness and subdued acceptance. In addition, it considers the idea of metempsychosis, transition, and the possibility of an “in-between” world where The Wilderness rules and we have to assimilate by becoming rooted in nature.

Julia Campisi is an artist living in Toronto. She draws her inspiration from photo collections, history and analogue techniques. Her hand-made collages are derivative in nature and they challenge our notions of visual culture. By using found images she creates a new expression onto the original. The gesture of extrapolation highlights the inconsequentiality of the original image. The work is meant to accomplish a transformative effect with the use of minimal interference of added material to the original.

My most recent work investigates the language of photography by using historical photographs as a starting point to discuss the relevance of the medium as a whole. By creating a new original work through the process of painting we can begin to question the mechanical way in which we now consume images.