Raymonde April : Tout embrasser
September 11 - October 20, 2001

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Montreal-based artist Raymonde April. The exhibition assembles nearly six hundred black and white photographic images culled from the artist's production over the last three decades, offering up a rich visual archive at once documentary and evocative. Also the source for the film "Tout embrasser" completed by April in 2000, the re-presented black and white stills create an expanded space within which time and place blend and blur to inspire the flow of memory and imagination.

The exhibition is curated by Régis Durand, Director, Centre National de la Photographie in Paris. As he articulates "Tout embrasser means to recapture a whole life (a history, a body of work): with this intention, there is both photography's celebration (everything is there) and its denial (only fragments are produced)."
Raymonde April has exhibited extensively in Canada and France as well as in Italy and Spain. Her work is featured in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, the Musée du Québec, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. April is a Professor in the Photography Department at Concordia University.

The exhibition is presented in conjunction with Le Mois de La Photo à Montréal and is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue. It is presented with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts, Assistance to Art Museums and Public Galleries for Operations and Programming in Contemporary Art.