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Visual arts

CO-RESPOND-DANCE-VERSION II

CO-RESPOND-DANCE-VERSION II

Information on the activity

Dates to come

November 5th – December 12th, 2020

Through a range of media that extends from drawing and writing to performance and installation, Francisco-Fernando Granados uses abstraction as a conceptual strategy to challenge perceptions regarding the stability of identity categories. Born in the midst of the Guatemalan Civil War, his experience of coming to Canada as a refugee informs the aesthetics and politics of his practice. His work develops from the intersection of traditional formal training in painting and printmaking, studies in cultural theory, early activism with newcomer youth communities, and working through artist-run culture.

Granados has maintained a near-daily drawing practice since 2016. From this non-figurative body of work, he has crafted the idea of minor abstraction (abstraction minoritaire) as a way to guide untranslatable compositional impulses away from Modernist claims of autonomy. Forms of minor abstraction emphasize ephemeral materials, site-specific approaches, and non-art contexts. They seek to infuse non-objective visual vocabularies within open-ended politics informed by the artist’s queer and refugee experiences.

In response to the security measures imposed by COVID-19, Granados’s initial plan for installation project has shifted to become mobile and accessible; it is now comprised of an artist book (distributed through the gallery and by mail), and poetic and movement-based performances by guest collaborators k.g. Guttman and Kama La Mackerel. The book will include compositions from the ‘letters’ series. Oscillating between the alphabetic and the epistolary, each ‘letter’ is part of an ongoing body of work currently consisting of more than 300 drawings that aim to synthesize a broad range of abstract compositional strategies.

2020-11-05
Quartier des spectacles Montreal, Quebec