archives 2005
JAN 15 - FEB 12
Rounding Error 3 years of C0C0S0L1DC1T1 projects
C0C0S0L1DC1T1 working out of the UK, Canada and France, curate sound, Internet, video and film based artists from around the world into galleries, museums, festivals and CD/DVD projects. The artists chosen often have developped interests in urban issue based art works that have strong socio-political themes and cross pollinations with architecture, dissonant electronic media and collaborative cultural production. Rounding Error is 3 series of works:
Tensile Selected works from the previous 3 years of commissioned and curated media pieces, these worksreflect upon the theme of transient architectures, including narratives of escape technologies, urban paranoia and mobile structures which often reference theoretical architects such as Archigram, Soleri, The Metabolists and others.
Broken Channel A range of leading international artists working in sound and video present artistic interpretations of the contemporary experience of surveillance. We live in a time in which surveillance is running out of control, entering all aspects of people's day to day lives, encountered not only in the spectacular cases of terrorist scares, but also in the mundane realities of supermarkets and motorways, store cards and credit ratings, product tags and mobile phones. Broken Channel does not pretend to check the spread of surveillance. Rather, it seeks to simply open up alternative spaces in which discordant voices can be heard, by presenting diverse visions of a world beset by surveillance technologies, of a control society running out of control.
-40 The National Film Board and Terminus 1525 Festival approached C0C0S0L1DC1T1 to curate a project that looked at propaganda footage from the decade of the 1940's in Canada. Focus is drawn on the role of propaganda films in contributing to the Canadian national identity which emerged during WWII and the following years, and to the re-evaluations of these nationalist ideals made possible through the contemporary deconstructive techniques of re-mixing, re-scoring and re-editing. 20 Canadian artists were selected to participate in this project.
FEB 26 - APR 9
Mara Verna (Qc) Multiple Whites
Victoria Stanton (Qc) (Being) One Thing at a Time
Mara Verna's Multiple Whites tests the hypothesis that otherness may be reconceived as Whiteness, albeit prosthetically enhanced so as to problematize its status as an embodied construct. It locates thematic elements within a global field of forces that are inherently complicit to the ways in which Whiteness navigates within and around our contemporary world. In accompaniment to a performance installation Mara Verna's live performance with the realm of selves entering a more embedded use to stage a set of multiples, that of the White woman. Eerie, confusing, and in a sense almost hyper-real, it portrays a fantasy for desire as a composite intersection of the self, both real and imagined. As Virginia Woolf once proclaimed, 'A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have a thousand'. Where the challenge lies perhaps, is to make real, however temporarily, even just a few.
Victoria Stanton's (Being) One Thing at a Time is an ongoing series of public live art actions with an interest in disrupting quotidian expectations and blurring the boundaries between art and life. These timebased group performances intend to be active reflections on human dynamics and individual agency within the realm of public space. This project began with photographing her dish-rack and portraits of herself reflected in her bedroom mirror between November 2001 and November 2003. Between August 2003 and November 2003, she carried out six documented performance interventions in public places around the city of Montreal. The resulting collection of images is at once an attempt to mark passages of time through these self-contained document-capsules as well as an in-depth visual study of the captured performance action/transgression of the private/public dichotomy. And it is through repeated interpretations of the (Being) performance series that Stanton aims to develop a continuing cycle of live-art-life action and documentation.
APR 16 - MAY 21
Brian Flynn (AB/Ireland) I will be alright, you will be ok
Sarah Joy Stoker (NL) Rocks On
Brian Flynn uses carpet underlay and his fingers to produce large format portraits of cover images of paramilitaries from murals photographed in Belfast's hot spots, newspapers, books and the Internet. These works were recently completed while Flynn was living in Belfast representing a culmination of two years of experiences. Informing his voice that aims at revealing the ambivalence of historical truths are his visits to Northern Ireland throughout his youth and his continuing visits to the family home there.
Putting emphasis on the human condition, how we affect others, our environments, and ourselves, Sarah Joy Stoker believes that genuine appeal; love and connectivity with all things that make up the world directly affect ones health and well-being. It is her wish to collectively experience reverence towards that which gives us life, through art. To her, art is an active force in life and therefore a vehicle for action in our communities.
MAY 28 - JUL 9
David Yonge/Jean Klimack/Tania Lewis 123 Sense
Through humour laced with unease, David Yonge, Jean Klimack and Tania Lewis present geographic landscape visions of how sense is created from or imagined in relation to daily occurences, myths and situations.
David Yonge is a British Columbia artist known for his extreme performances portraying various masculine characters who inevitably engage in violence -- the mutilation of objects, as well as his own self. Yonge's performances, including, I like Canada and Canada likes me, hHead, and Yellow Diablo vs. 1980 Camaro, are intense, physical, sexual and violent investigations of masculinity and bravado that aim for victory and inevitably end with failure. Throughout these performances Yonge deconstructs the performance of masculinity as rooted in sexual and violent impulses that become motivating forces for every simple or profound gesture that he makes. Yonge's work often examines confrontations within the interior self and the effects of contemporary culture from multiple perspectives. In his video Redneck/Redneck, Yonge presents an urban myth whereby everyone in life has a double and if you ever have the misfortune tio encounter your double, only one of you can survive. Frought with dark humour, an unsettling intrigue and suspense, the social morals, banalisation and justification of aggressive beghaviour take precedence over the mythical aspect of the story.
Jean Klimack has a BFA from the University of Manitoba, and has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and University of Manitoba. Her work has been included in many group exhibitions at the Othergallery (Winnipeg), MCAD Gallery (Minneapolis), The Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg), the Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax), Frances Wolfson Gallery (Miami), Godfrey Dean Art Gallery (Yorkton) to name a few. She recently had a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (Brandon). Klimack was involved with M.A.W.A. on various committees and the Board for several years also held the position of administrative coordinator at Ace Art Inc. She is currently working towards a MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. Klimack's large format photography work chew-by-numbers explore the physical and metaphorical attributes of chewing gum. The relationship between gum, time, and pastimes explored, by substituting gum for paint in a paint-by-number set she renders the landscapes more vibrant through the eclectic colours of the gum. An attraction, repulsion tension emerges through the technique referencing so simplistically body fluids, functions and the passing of time.
Tania Lewis originally from Newfoundland, lives and works in New York. A graduate of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, her drawing series The Snowbird Series comment on urban pioneering and the transitional relationships created through the experience of gentrification in New York City.
JUL 16 - AUG 20
Robyn Moody Still
Susie Major All the rivers I've crossed (Sweet Water)
Robyn Moody plays out his "mad scientist" role in his installation Still. Based on a survival tool for obtaining water, Moody's work includes tall plastic cylinders that capture the evaporated water from boiling kettles, which then allows the water to drip into buckets. In the center of the piece is a bulky device a control panel; the central Brain. Completely enshrouded in a perimeter of plastic wrap, insinuating "authorized personnel" only, this electronically controlled, automated reproduction of the water cycle explores the disturbing possibility of life support networks becoming necessary while creating an unsettling and beautiful experience.
All the rivers I've crossed (Sweet Water) is a performative drawing, an intervention in various sidewalk cracks throughout the city that chronicles the course of Susie Major's life through the Rivers I've crossed. This work stems from daydreaming during walks around my neighborhood in Montreal. As she walks she notices the stress cracks in the sidewalks; they remind her of rivers on a map. plays out his "mad scientist" role in his installation Still. Based on a survival tool for obtaining water, Moody's work includes tall plastic cylinders that capture the evaporated water from boiling kettles, which then allows the water to drip into buckets. In the center of the piece is a bulky device a control panel; the central Brain. Completely enshrouded in a perimeter of plastic wrap, insinuating "authorized personnel" only, this electronically controlled, automated reproduction of the water cycle explores the disturbing possibility of life support networks becoming necessary while creating an unsettling and beautiful experience.
AUG 27 - SEP 3
Les Fermieres Obsedees Rodeo Drive
"Rodeo Drive" is a performance in downtown St. John's, starting at 1pm, in front of the Scotia Centre on Water Street. Les Fermieres Obsedees composed of four artists from Québec City stemming from the visual arts: Catherine Plaisance, Eugénie Cliche, Mélissa Charest, Annie Baillargeon work in the world of performance by offering actions that state a reflection and experimentation on the human being and its interactions with other individuals, and on the diverse codes and standards which govern our existence. Wearing their uniform makes them melt one into another and, at the same time pushes them to endorse and somehow participate in the gestures and attitudes produced by others.They have developed a visual language linking the tragic and the burlesque, proposing perfromances which are at the crossroads of multiple disciplines. They have presented their work at La Centrale\Powerhouse in Montréal, at the second performance festival in Rouyn-Noranda (L'écart), atthe Festival de Théâtre de rue de Shawinigan, at Cohabitation: commune mesure (AXE NÉO 7) in Hull, at eyelevel Gallery in Halifax and at The Chapter Theatre in Cardiff, Wales, for the Québec-Cardiff exchange organized by Le Lieu in Québec city.
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SEP 17 - OCT 22
David Hoffos Scenes from the House Dream
his installation work David Hoffos seeks to to reveal and examine the sources of illusion found within genre movies, theme park attractions, 19th century parlours, and museum displays. The evolution of his work has been a steady process of accumulating and inventing techniques and devices and then applying and refining them. Over the course of more than 20 installations his work has developed step-by-step from simple, stand-alone film/sculpture pieces into complex, immersive, multi-channel environments. A few of the techniques and devices that characterize this include: film and video projection onto cut-outs, large miniature scenes, mirrored boxes, phantom figure illusions, ghost video glass effects, cineramas, homemade video projectors, and curtained entrances. You Will Remember When You Need to Know, the first of the works to incorporate a miniature scene, used genre cues - the abandoned house, the dark forest, searchlights - to situate the viewer within a 1950s sci-fi/horror UFO visitation scenario. As a way of choosing subject matter, David Hoffos started working through the movie genres. His large works Catastrophe (disaster movie) and Another City (sci-fi/romance) employed genre cues and went further towards placing the viewer at the centre of both the skeletal narrative and the illusion apparatus. For example, in Another City the viewer stands at a window overlooking a vast miniature metropolis; their eyes adjust to a giant, dim cyclorama projection - the big movie-ending kiss fills the screen; life sized lovers appear to materialize in the space as the mechanisms of deception (TVs, vcrs, glass, cut-outs) are finally revealed in the pulse of their own light.
OCT 29 - NOV 12
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay I am a Boy Band / Live to tell
Geoff Younghusband The Loose Confederacy Animations
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born artist working predominantly in video, text and sound. Since 2000 his work has brought together song, self-reflexive performance and lyrics from pop music as vehicles for examining the singing voice, the untranslatability of emotions into language and the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture.
Geoff Younghusband is a photographer, musician, Props Master and Art Director for Film and Television. He has been a stage manager and technician for many productions at RCA and the St. John's Arts and Culture Centre over the past decade and has played bass with many bands, including the award-winning FUR PACKED ACTION and currently with JIGGER. He balances his technical work and multimedia programming with running off the grid and into remote areas to shoot landscapes speckled with characters, like those of the performance collective, Loose Confederacy. This work follows directly from Geoff's earlier photo collage work combining fictional scenes and characters.