an entire day an entire month

Julie Favreau, MFA 12, has spent weeks in a serious rush.

From April 7 to May 16, the FOFA Gallery is displaying her film at an exhibition entitled an entire day an entire month. In the time leading up to its opening, the Concordia grad worked tirelessly to ensure that everything about it was just so.

“I kept trying new materials and rearranging the space,” Favreau says. “It’s natural for an exhibition to evolve with an artist’s ideas.”

an entire day an entire month explores how one story can generate another. The exhibition features a short film that Favreau produced; it was inspired by the novel Entre Ciel et Terre (Gallimard, 2010), the French translation of Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Himnaríki og helvíti (Bjartur, 2007).

“It’s the story of a boy who loses a friend during a fishing expedition,” Favreau says. “The novel focuses on the stories within a community, along with a silent but poignant communication with nature.”

The video — which was informed by the book’s sparse yet powerful language and universally resonant tale — depicts a man and woman interacting with a lifelike glass finger that Favreau herself sculpted.

With the help of minimalist, all-white materials, the artist was able to reinterpret the relationship between the couple and their surroundings.

“I place them and the object within a modernist home and natural settings,” she says. “By using completely different elements to retell one story, you create a new one,” she says.

Favreau’s reinvention doesn’t end there. When the FOFA is closed to visitors, she will invite dancers to join her within her installation, the materials from which, she hopes, will inspire her to choreograph another retelling that will become its own story.

“It’s another way to express the relationship between object and movement, which is my primary focus,” she says.