archives 2011
JAN 10 - FEB 21
Andy Jones (NL) Artist Residency
The Abbie Table Project
Andy Jones, one of Newfoundland's most well-known actors and writers, will have a month long residency at Eastern Edge during which he will continue to develop the Abbie Table Project with visual artist Peter Breckon and members of the "Growing Up, Up In Cove" Collective. The centerpiece of the project is a 10' X 4' table inscribed with the personal story of Abbie Ellis Whiffen, Growing Up, Up in Cove. Narrating the life of a Newfoundland family engaged in the salt fishery from the 1920's to the 1950's, the story has been "illuminated" by several dozen contributors. His residency at Eastern Edge will include "performances" of the table in the form of public readings and interpretive theatre pieces.
MAR 07 - APR 18
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY EXHIBITION
Goody-B Wiseman (ME) Superlovestarpower 2: The Album Project
Jo-Anne Balcaen (QC) The Longer I Wait, the Better it Feels
Superlovestarpower 2: The Album Project recasts iconic album cover photographs from the 1960s and 1970s as short films. Recreating these now well-known snapshots and inserting them into speculative narratives, Goody-B Wiseman re-imagines the possibilities of these still images when they are re-inserted into linear time. Goody-B Wiseman lives and works in both the wilds of Downeast Maine and Los Angeles. She works in a variety of media including sculpture, film and printed matter and is primarily engaged with the use and structure of narrative.
The Longer I Wait, the Better it Feels presents a series of audio and visual installations that deal in one way or another with the trappings of popular music, obsessive and delusional fandom, and innocent fantasy. Jo-Anne Balcaen's work examines the elusive nature of happiness, and how the commercialization of desire can create an inflated sense of expectation and a distorted sense of self. Jo-Anne Balcaen is a Montreal-based artist who has exhibited her work in venues throughout Quebec, Canada, Europe, and the US.
April 30 – June 11
Jonathan Villeneuve (QC) Wavelength
Kip Jones (ON) Linear Gesture
Jonathan Villeneuve’s installation project Wavelength is a series of large-scale structures built out of common building materials that evoke the movement of a slow and steady wave. His recent work focuses on the perpetual flow that drives the evolution of the constructed en-vironment in response to human activity.
Kip Jones’ Linear Gesture is a site-specific sculptural response, delineating new spaces through the use of sweeping linear modules that intersect and arc through the gallery. This exploration of the parameters of space and place is driven by an ongoing interest in the subjective construction of imperceptible boundaries.
JUN 25 - JUL 30
Liz Solo + Jesse Walker (NL) Phytophilous Initiative
Sandee Moore (MB) Imaginary Gift
Does your begonia love you? Can your cactus transmit messages into your dreams? Newfoundland artists Liz Solo and Jesse H. Walker investigate these and many other questions with the Phytophilous Initiative, a gallery exhibit featuring interactive laboratory experiments, installations, screenings and scheduled performances around the City. The Phytophilous Initiative is an inter-disciplinary art project by Jesse Walker and Liz Solo that explores methods for communicating with plants. Liz Solo is a theatre artist, musician, filmmaker and uber-nerd who also works with New Media and synthetic environments, merging online virtual spaces with the live performance space. Liz has a studio in St. John's and tours regularly with her performance work and with her band, The Black Bags. Jesse Walker is the son of artists Peter Walker and Peggy Hogan, and was born in 1980 in St. John's, where he currently works. Jesse has played in heavy metal bands in St John's and Halifax, and attended NSCADU 2005-2009.
Inspired by her own unwillingness to take off her backpack to find money to give to homeless people, Sandee Moore's Imaginary Gift began when she started anonymously dispensing gifts, both useful (coffee) and wonderful (bubbles), to people on the street below her fourth floor studio window in a gesture of non-capitalist public exchange. Through her participatory works Moore seeks to create opportunities for audiences to engage in new and pleasurable relationships, redefining the parameters and permissions for social interaction.
Sept 24 - Nov 05
Eleanor King (NS) No Signal
Dustin Wilson (QC) Reversion to the Original Point
Eleanor King's sculptural installation No Signal explores disconnection through collections of obsolete technologies carefully arranged to mimic the cluttered structure of a boutique-style junk shop. Interspersed with components of audio and video, it is a vista of consumption indexing the media traces of an unsustainable culture.
Eleanor King is a Halifax-based, interdisciplinary artist who exhibits and participates in residency programs nationally and internationally, most notably with shows at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Nuit Blanche (TO), and Galleri F-15 (Norway) and residencies at The Banff Centre and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (FL). Eleanor's site-specific installations and performances are inspired by everyday life and are realized using provisional materials and improvisational methods. Her musical projects include bands House of Lancaster, The Got to Get Got and The Just Barelys. She teaches media arts at NSCAD University and is Exhibitions Coordinator of Archives, Collections and Public Art at Anna Leonowens Gallery.
Through multimedia installations and performances in the character of an expert "futurologist," in Reversion to the Original Point Dustin Wilson depicts a vision of the future marked by mundane mismanagement, deliberately using "future anachronisms" in depicting landscapes covered in snow and populated by people subsisting by traditional means in a world of antigravity and advanced genetic engineering. It is a speculative exhibition that explores issues of cultural isolation, atavism, and displacement.Eleanor King's sculptural installation No Signal explores disconnection through collections of obsolete technologies carefully arranged to mimic the cluttered structure of a boutique-style junk shop. Interspersed with components of audio and video, it is a vista of consumption indexing the media traces of an unsustainable culture.
Dustin Wilson was born and raised in New Brunswick, and enjoyed drawing Dungeons and Dragons characters until earning a BFA at Mount Allison University. Dustin began working on the multifarious project Reversion to the Original Point in 2008 when he realized his innate talent for prescience. Drawing is essential for Dustin in producing speculative images which are filtered through physical, biological and geographic constraints; combining elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Dustin has received funding from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and the Canada Council for the Arts, he is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph.
NOV 19 - DEC 17
CAMP, KITSCH + CHEESE
Annual Members' Exhibition
Kitsch is a manner of referring to the problem of 'taste' in the contemporary world. It can be considered as a sort of optimistic gloss that locates pleasurable sensations in everything, from works of art to the pattern of a tablecloth. Everything is reduced to an accessible aesthetics: the 'classics' translated into cinema and comics, symphonic music into film scores, novels into the Reader's Digest. Camp is more complex. It is more removed, more ironic, more refined, than kitsch. Unlike kitsch, it is not sentimental but detached. It involves the self-knowledge of artifice and stylization; it is the 'lie that tells the truth' (Jean Cocteau). If kitsch is 'bad taste,' then camp, as Susan Sontag put it, is 'the good taste of bad taste.'
- Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (p. 106)