Artist Rosalie Favell will conduct an Artist’s Talk on Thursday, Nov. 14 in The Gallery of the College of Staten Island in the Center for the Arts (Building 1P) from 2:30pm to 4:00pm, prior to the opening of her exhibit, Memory as Muse: The Art of Rosalie Favell at 5:00pm.
The Gallery of the College of Staten Island/CUNY is honored to present the work of the acclaimed Canadian photographer Rosalie Favell. Her work is deeply inspired by her heritage as a member of the Métis people, a distinct group of aboriginal people in Canada, who trace their descent to the mixed union of First Nation and European populations. They are today a distinct aboriginal people recognized in the Canadian Constitution along with the Inuit and Indian peoples.
Our exhibition brings together two suites of Favell’s works, “Wish You Were Here” and “Closer to Heaven,” which share the emotion-charged memories of her lost family members. Both groups incorporate old, almost archival, photographs imbedded in larger photographs made by Favell to envelope and inform the treasured caught memories of, in the first series, her beloved grandmother (her Nanny) and in the second, her father, Gerry, and his brother, Doug. Although they are gone, she keeps them ever fresh, relevant to her life, and present through her art. Moreover, Favell’s aesthetically crafted photographs speak to the combined potential of works of art to exercise personal and political issues, an imperative all inherent in works of art but brought to the fore in her vision. Her strong empathy with her grandmother, who loved to photograph and be photographed, is as an essential key to the exploration of her identity as a woman as it is to the place of women in her community at large. Again, “family,” writ large and small, is at the heart of “Closer to Heaven.” Throughout, Favell works to unfix photography’s elusive boundaries between art and document, personal and political, past and present.
