Atelier LePrince

Jocelyne Prince

Mixed-media artist Jocelyne Prince is in residence in the Glass program at ACAD throughout the month of January 2014. In association with the residency, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery presents an exhibition of Prince’s work in the IKG Modular Gallery, Main Mall.

The Live Event series is about a desire to infuse the act of making with a new iconography and romanticism. There is a palpable energy to fabrication studios. Both makers and visitors are immersed in the primeval connections elicited through the action of making. I am looking to frame making in a fantastical and glorified light. Hot glass studios are especially conducive scenarios where forces such as heat, gravity, and timing are elements in an overall plot. Performative and photogenic, molten glass has infinite variation and the hand/body that forms it has humanistic vigour and a history of tradition and skill. To my mind this pre-industrial setting of workers / maker wrangling material suggests a space of transformation, a theatrical space. 

Atelier LePrince Live Event is based on a 16th century stained glass titled the Tree of Jesse made by the Atelier LePrince (a family of glass painters identified as my ancestors). This particular window is of interest to me certainly for its family ties and connections to glass, but most importantly for its uncanny entry into the personal since the master glass painter, Engrand LePrince, included his self-portrait within the window. It is not clear if this self-representation was an act of hubris or one of equity (thinking perhaps that we are all from the family of Christ). Either way it is eerie and spectacular to confront the image of an ancestor and to rethink how iconography, culture, and our professions define identity.

-- Jocelyne Prince
 

Jocelyne Prince grew up in St. Boniface, a Francophone community in Winnipeg. Following a distinctly aleatory path she received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and then hung out in punk clubs in Montreal looking to avoid most everything. She did go on to pursue an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She exhibits her work in museums and alternative galleries and venues across North America, Europe and Asia. Upcoming and recent exhibitions and events include: Fiasco Toyama, Japan, El Greco ReVisited, Tacoma, WA, Oluf Høst Sunrise ReVisited, Bornholm, Denmark, Roda Blommor, Reyjmyre, Sweden (Art Lab), and Enacting the Screen, Brick + Mortar Video Festival, Greenfield, MA. She has received several grants and most recently was awarded a Howard Fellowship. Prince lives and works in Providence, where she is an Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design in the Glass and Digital + Media Departments. 

Jocelyne Prince: Atelier LePrince is the inaugural iteration of the IKG Modular Gallery, which aims to offer visiting faculty and artists a flexible, professionally appointed exhibition or event space, animate ACAD’s Main Mall, and engage students, faculty, staff and the public through alternative contemporary programming in visual arts, craft, emerging media and design.

The Illingworth Kerr Gallery (IKG) would like to acknowledge the important support of the Alberta College of Art + Design, the Rawlinson Fund Visiting Artist/Designer Initiative, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, CADA and an anonymous donor. Gratitude is extended to Lucky Leone, Natali Rodrigues, Tyler Rock, Stephen Lamb, Dale Vanden Berg, Joe Kelly, Kyle Whitehead, Alex Moon, and students in the Glass program. 

List of Works

1. Cherry Blossom Live Event (2011). Photo work and video. K-Arts, Seoul, Korea.
   
   Teams of Korean all-women glass blowers work production style to generate mold-formed cloud/blossom shapes. These are placed, hot, onto a makeshift tree made of scrap wood. The hot glass burns the wood and eventually breaks; glass shards fall to the ground re-enacting the fragile nature of the cherry blossom.

2. Oluf Høst Sunrise ReVisited Live Event (2012). Photo work and video. European Context, Bornholm, Denmark.
   
   This 10-minute live event attempted to revisit the ideas of the Danish painter Oluf Høst who lived on the island of Bornholm and dealt with the ever variable light phenomena of sunrise and sunset. Laura Potter accompanied the event by invoking a “Nordic style” of vibrato tuba playing.

3. El Greco ReVisited Live Event (2013). Photo work and video. Tacoma Museum, Washington, USA.
   
   A live re-creation of El Greco's painting Coronation of the Virgin begins with a fireball emerging from the glass furnace and a team of master glass blowers working to produce large-scale cloud bubble parts. A live model is suspended within the 100’ cone of the glass shop over the large crackling cloud formation.

      4.   Live feed from ACAD’s Glass hot shop.

      5.   Atelier LePrince Live Event (2014). Scaffolding and glass panels.