Sandra Haar: Selections from Permitted


Project Space
Sandra Haar: Selections from Permitted
Sandra Haar
September 11, 2015 – October 10, 2015

The Permitted series takes as its subject a scene from a first-run feature film ( הסיפור של יוסי / Yossi, dir. Eytan Fox) viewed in a Tel Aviv cinema. It depicts, from memory and from re-viewing, the climactic scene of a filmic love story between two men. The scene’s portrayal of longing realized is thematically mirrored in the artist’s process. While waiting for the DVD release (and thus, the opportunity to make images from the film), she re-created the scene from memory, re-enacted with two models. The representation of this remembered version of the scene is overlaid with representations from the original, evoking the processes of remembering and re-enacting. Permitted is one of two recent print-based projects that are visual meditations on the act of viewing or witnessing. In these projects, Haar is interested in how spectatorship and witnessing intersect with social and historical location, and how these locations facilitate or impede the acts of identification and compassionate witnessing. Feminist discourses and queer approaches to the production and reception of erotic images are important influences and provide the context for this project.

Sandra Haar is a Toronto-based artist and printmaker, who works in installation, bookwork and flat formats. Her artistic practice focuses on subjectivity and representation, investigating a range of personal and cultural concerns. Sandra Haar’s art has been exhibited locally and nationally, including Gallery 44 (Toronto), Forest City Gallery (London) and La Centrale (Montréal), published in several periodicals and anthologies, including The Girl Wants to: Women’s Representations of Sex and the Body (Coach House Press), and sold through Librairie Formats (Montréal), Printed Matter (New York), and Art Metropole (Toronto), among other venues. Reviews and articles on her art have appeared in a variety of publications, including the collection Textura : l’artiste écrivant / the artist writingHer screenprinted work is held in a number of private collections in Toronto and Berlin. Sandra Haar is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art. Her work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.