Anne-Marie Emond
Working as a museum art educator while completing my MFA and Ph.D, I was, at the time, immersed in a rich environment that combined art production and research on museum's visitors responses to art objects. In the practice of museum education I had to study exhibits several months before I could actually enter the galleries. This meant that I had to build a certain understanding of the exhibit by reading catalogues, looking at reproductions, studying the projected floor plans and wall panels in order to make myself familiar with the upcoming show. This process, as it were, became entwined to my studio work and influence began to move between both environments. Over time, proximity between museum practice and art production would become a catalyst which informs my investigations.

In a previous study, I identified a set of 4 phases (remembering, reflecting, revealing and re-creating) related to a museum experience that is carried through to the art studio. This model is based on the approach developed by Stan Horner (1988), professor at Concordia University in Montreal. Lately, I have been studying the remembering phase which deals with the impact of knowing of the exhibit prior to seeing it and to make something in the presence of the works of art. So far, it reveals a cognitive time-space conjuncture in the shaping of aesthetic response. The beginning of the response in the expectation time span is perhaps more important than suspected. It's seems that at that moment the exhibit as an idea is autonomous vis-à-vis the latter phases because it is wholly constituted on projected or passed experiences.

Through the making of the exhibit as viewer we enter a realm of alternating poles, confronting our identity to a time-space conjuncture that both stabilizes and destabilizes the shaping of our museum journey. This is where I research how the museum and its visitors reconstruct meaning of art objects. Meaning-Making, is a place where art objects are re-generated, re-interpreted, re-purposed, re-experience and re-incorporated by museum visitors' phases of remembering, reflecting, revealing and re-creating.

The small-format works were constructed from larger scaled paintings. This layering process begins by photographing paintings and drawings of self-portraits covered with bees wax, establishing a first degree of transparency. The photos are scanned, and using a computer, I construct new images combined with text. Those images are then painted over with acrylics, oils or watercolour and coloured with pencil. In some instances, wax covers certain areas of the image.

This studio production essentially describes the meaning-making process of visitors, through layering and echoing a suggestive meaning. One resonating meaning is frfrfrfrf

amplified or modified or intensified by means of the application of another resonating meaning adjacent to the first. The images I employ in my work have already been transformed from what they were originally by the process of looking and seeing.

One of the things I refer to is the conceptual nature of the work 'Traces of Meaning'. The art works signify something quite different depending upon where they are shown and who is looking at them. While the action of looking and seeing creates new meanings, it would seem that the articulation of a new context could be only partly a function of the paintings themselves. It is here that the viewer's role as a spectator in a specific time and place becomes crucial. You can look at an art work in the contemporary context it is placed within, or you can see a totally different picture.

Contact Information
Anne-Marie Emond, Ph.D
Universite de Montreal
Faculte des sciences de l'education
Departement de didactique
C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville
Montreal, Quebec
Canada
H3C 3J7

Email : anne-marie.emond@umontreal.ca
Fax : 514-343-7286
Tel : 514-343-6067
Universite de Montreal web site : http://www.umontreal.ca/