Blog

18 May 2012
Alex Borkowski

Throughout her multidisciplinary and eclectic artistic practice, Pavitra Wickramsinghe is consistently “guided by the need to know how things work – to break down motion, videos and screens to their most elementary steps and build them up again.” She is not concerned with photographic clarity of the filmic medium, but rather with the ways in which this clarity is constructed and illusory. Her “Screen Tests,” for example, unsettle the fundamental element of the screen that structures the perception of video art. By building layered screens of wavy nylon and steel fibres, she creates the possibility of new distortions and refractions of the light beam of the projection. She unpacks the way in which images are presented to us in order to open up the video medium to new optical and imaginative possibilities.

This deconstructivist impulse is also evident in her installation “51L3NC3 4ND L1GH7,” which she will be presenting at Sight & Sound. In this video installation, she employs techniques of stop-motion animation by photographing and combining a series of still images derived from found footage of two men slow dancing accompanied by a violin player and of two women boxing. The painstaking process of stop-motion animation allows the artist to break down and recompose the basic elements of human motion. While such movement could be generated with relative ease using digital media, Wickramsinghe choosing to stick to the more artisanal, if antiquated, mode of animation as she feels it “ allows for the hand to appear more. I feel like it gives a materiality to the work that sometimes gets lost in videos.”

Wickramsinghe’s process also appears in what she describes as the “temporal disharmony created by the time-lapse of the passing day of the background and the regular time of the foreground animation.” The changing light becomes an indication of the two separate temporalities that are brought together to form a unified image on a new artistic plane. Indeed, she describes the title “51L3NC3 4ND L1GH7” as a play on words from modern architect Louis Kahn’s famous dictum of “silence to light.” Kahn employed light to great effect in his buildings, working with windows to carefully craft the presence of light in an interior space. Wickramsinghe considers the window to be “at once an entrance into and a barrier of another place.” In “51L3NC3 4ND L1GH7,” the window acts as a site upon which human figures dance and fight, upon which narratives unfold. Just as she seeks to make the viewer aware of the screen, we are made to look at the window as well as through it, bringing to the fore the imaginative possibilities of our everyday gaze.

3 May 2012
Ming Lin



Ralitsa Doncheva's film works occupy an ambient space which traverses definitions of fine art, performance and cinema. At Eastern Bloc's most recent Data : Salon, which invites emerging artists to exhibit their works-in-progress, she showed her latest film Still Moving on parallel screens, the tripartite imagery on each reflected on the surface opposite to it.

Culled from reels of archival footage from the seventies, which documents the flight of Ukrainians from Communist Eastern Europe to the United States, Still moving is a meditation on the everyday: the banal movements through which an ideology is made manifest. Slowed down and sped up at alternate paces, transposed shots of the vicissitudes of the quotidian - business people walking to work or children in a dance class - are simultaneously nostalgic and melancholy. Often zooming in to the point of abstraction, the film is vaguely disorienting and as a result resists defaulting to any one narrative.

Displayed in one of Eastern Bloc's more enclosed exhibition spaces, Still Moving created an intimate and inviting atmosphere. Although it was not part of the Data : Salon screening, Doncheva intends for this work to be accompanied by a soundscape she recorded, featuring the voices of personal acquaintances of Eastern European origin singing and conversing in their mother tongue. She hopes that the work will have a performative feeling to it. In this way her work belongs to the genre of "expanded cinema" which seeks to unite art and life by using technology to enlarge the scope of human experience. As the theorist Gene Youngblood, who coined the term claimed, our reality is already constituted by virtual augmentation and therefore it is pertinent to use these capabilities to their full potential. Artistic cinema is one means to expound upon this version of reality. Doncheva's film, using moving image, sound and space, creates a synaesthetic experience which can invoke this pronounced reality.

Tell me a bit about the process of making the film that you presented at Data : Salon at Eastern Bloc.
It's called "Still Moving" and it is a video installation that shows archival documentary footage taken from Eastern European documentaries, shot in the seventies, about Ukrainians emigrating to the United States, a common phenomenon at that time. Lots of Eastern Europeans left because of Communism and economic problems. So these were really heavy political films, but what interested me was that they were also visually pleasing. I wanted to strip them of their original context and make them more contemplative. So I chose the really banal everyday sequences - a woman walking in the park, or a woman in a crowd, or a woman dancing - and I slowed them down to the point where they appear almost static. I created a triptych as a framing device, but also as a way of creating a space that's almost imaginary, a "mindscape." It happened almost by chance, with these two small actions, I created something that I really liked. I'm not really sure why even, but I continued to work with them and it became my thesis project.

So all of the footage is found footage.
Yes, found footage that I manipulated focusing on the basic formal qualities, such as colour, composition, light, space, and I built this triptych. It's two screens, each with three frames. In this way it can be shown in different ways. Ideally, if I can find a gallery that would be willing to provide me the equipment, I want to project each frame separately on a screen. These images are really impressive when they're big.That's the beauty of working in film, the images are so beautiful. I want them huge, to take up the entire room and play the soundscape simultaneously. At Eastern Bloc, I showed the film silent, just because I knew there would be other works around, I didn't want to take up too much space. I was also testing the work, to see how people respond to it. It's still not finished. The soundscape contains voices that I recorded of Eastern Europeans I know. I asked to tell me stories from their childhood. One voice is singing a beautiful song. I did some experimentation with the sound.

The enclosed room at Eastern Bloc really worked for my piece because it's really not a narrative piece - even though it's not abstraction, it's quite figurative - it's really busy and also really slow, and this way the viewer could shut off the outside.

I worked with four different documentaries and I chose them because of my background. They reminded me of home - even though they're from the seventies - they projected the exact images I remember from my childhood - the colours, the dresses people wore, the landscape - it was kind of like going back home.

Do you consider your work New Media Art? Would you consider yourself a fine artist? What is your ideal mode of presentation?
I think I'm really in between because I've been educated in traditional cinema. Recently I've started working more in video - I'm still incorporating film - but, for my show in Art Matters, I used archival documentary footage that was 35 mm which I transferred to video and manipulated. I don't know if it would be considered New Media; it's interactive. I had two separate panels with one being a mirror-reflection of the other. They were parallel facing one another, in dialogue, so that the viewer could immerse themselves. So in that sense, the work would be considered New Media - because it incorporates old media in a new context.

What first drew you to film?
It was really by chance. My background is in theatre and performance art. I did contemporary dance and acting. When I arrived in Canada I started doing philosophy and studied communications. I took a random film studies class with an amazing professor, and I started doing still photography and film shoots. I made a film that was completely spur-of-the-moment that was about a yellow house in Ottawa. A huge garish yellow house. I filmed it with a bunch of friends over a weekend and then I left for Bulgaria. When I came back, I showed the footage to some people and they really encouraged me to make something out of it. So I made a short documentary film and I showed it in Ottawa at the Mayfair Theatre, it's called "This house will not be here tomorrow" and people really liked it. I applied to Concordia with this film. My original idea was to make fictional work, to be a director and work with a group of people, crew members, and be famous and make money, you know, but then when I started studying, I realized that I'm really not suited for that. I prefer working on a smaller scale and making work that's personal in the sense that I have control over every aspect of it. Naturally, I became drawn to more experimental work.

I had a really good professor, his name is Richard Kerr, who really inspired me. He told me how to look at images, what the image means outside of the fictional world, how to make images. Richard Kerr is also the one who gave me the documentary footage that I worked with.

How does identity figure in your work? Are you interested in doing further explorations of your background or heritage?
I think everyone that does art comes to that. You are working with your own memories and I think I do it unintentionally. Sometimes I really don't want to. Actually my original idea was to make something really light - pretty and full of colour - but then came this melancholic piece that I like and am really proud of. I guess I'm nostalgic sometimes and my work reflects that. In fact, everything I've done so far is similar in that sense. Last year I did a piece, working with a small camera - like a cell phone but HD - and I did a documentary about a girl that I happened to see on the bus, I recorded her for several minutes focusing on her face. I pointed the camera at her to see how she would respond. It was funny because she never looked at me, never looked at the camera, never said anything, she just gave me this one glance. So I made a piece about that which was also very contemplative.

What's your method for beginning a new project. How do you usually come across your subject-matter?
The best work I've done has always been unplanned. I read something and it sparks something and I just go. However, sometimes I have begun with a concept and these are usually the projects I am not very happy with. They never feel sincere. So I actually gave up this way of working. Instead I walk a lot, and see things and take notes. I try things out, and, if it works in the beginning, I keep going. The yellow house film, for example, I took a chance and found it to be a great metaphor: a garish yellow house in a government city. With the latest project, the documentaries were given to me and I was so excited to work with them. And, for the project I'm working on this summer, it's a place where my dad and I go fishing. So, the films have really just come about by chance.

What are your projects for the Summer?
I have to begin to promote myself. I've built up a portfolio and now I have to put it out there, making a website and such. I'm going to Bulgaria for a month where I'll be making a film. I'm not sure of what quite yet, but it'll basically be about a church in a lake and it's mysterious because apparently there used to be a small town there, but it was destroyed by the way, and all that is left is this church which is claimed to only sometimes be visible. There are a lot of gypsies that live around there and I would like to make a film about that in 60 mm.

10 April 2012
Alex Borkowski

Flicker is not new. Nor is it dependent on complex technology. The most basic instance is caused by looking into a bright light and waving a hand in front of closed eyes. Flicker was also the subject of the Dream Machine, basically a light bulb suspended in a perforated cylinder rotating on a record turntable, which provided a visionary experience to artists and poets such as William S. Burroughs in the 1960s. Yet Matthijs Munnik’s performance/installation Citadels is far removed from this natural phenomenon or dreamy experience. Using contemporary light and sound technology, Munnik has intensified the flicker effect to the utmost extreme.

Munnik has been playing with Citadels as a performance work since 2009. In its original incarnation, spectators would sit with white masks covering their faces as the artist would project bright lights directly onto their masks, immersing their entire visual field in a wash of colour. For Sight & Sound, Munnik has reworked Citadels to function as an installation, in which the lights are projected onto a 3 meter wide screen, giving the spectator more agency as they craft their own experience by opening and closing different sensory channels by moving their bodies and eyes.

Despite the seeming chaos of the flashing lights, Munnik has taken into careful consideration the optical processes through which they are perceived. He has choreographed each possible colour combination considering how they are experienced with eyes open and with eyes closed. He describes the weird effects of colour inversions, patterning and seeming 3D qualities that the viewer can perceive on the inside of their own eyelids. By closing their senses, the viewer opens themselves up to new ones.

This contradiction is made even more explicit in the auditory component of Citadels: “with the sound in the installation, you don’t hear any sound,” Munnik explains. In place of speakers, he intends to situate a block in front of the screen upon which viewers can rest their elbows and cover their ears in order to feels the vibrations of sound within their body. In this regard, Munnik seems to present the spectator with an opportunity to engage with an entirely new alternate mode of perception: “You close your eyes and your ears, your normal senses, and then you get immersed in this virtual reality.”

Using New Media, Munnik manages to capture the primordial phenomenon of flicker to build “a virtual universe [in] which sound and light are synesthetic, they are always merged.” Citadels thus opens the possibility of an amplified mode of perception and offers spectators an entirely unique experience of sound and colour.

21 March 2012
Ming Lin



In 1957, Allan Kaprow initiated the first of what was to be an ongoing series of "happenings" - loosely organized events that took place outside traditional venues for viewing art, and in which the work itself was constituted by the actions and experiences of the participants. In a later articulation, Fluxus member Allison Knowles, gathered 300 concertgoers to participate in "Making a Salad", creating a large scale performance work out of a common domestic activity. With "happenings", artists attempted to traverse the boundaries between life and art, making "life-like art" as Kaprow would later put it. By invoking absurdity through the insertion of the banal into the rubric of artistic presentation and reception, these works de-emphasized the art object, instead illuminating its context - what Pierre Bourdieu described as the "field" - asserting that cultural pre-requisites were inherent to the reception of art. "Happenings" worked both to expose and dismantle these frameworks by appealing to more basic and everyday knowledge.

Two recent exhibitions in Montreal, Pr0n at Gallery Pangée and While Supplies Last at Galerie B-312, both at the Belgo Building, attempt to make visible new contexts of art consumption, namely the nebulous interfaces of the internet. While Pr0n emphasizes unique viewing structures, engendered by web browsers and HTML codes alike, While Supplies Last, enacts a more literal interpretation.

In Pr0n, presented by Bozeau Ortega Contemporary Art (BOCA) Gallery collective, the works featured are delightfully askew. Rather than being haphazard, this method of installation is emblematic of the new configurations for viewing that the Internet provides. "Glorp" by Jason Harvey, for example, is displayed in multiples enacting a 'copy-paste' effect, while Tyson Park's "Blogroll", which appears as a logo laden roll of toilet paper, mimics the standard scrolling feature used on most websites. On the opposite wall, Jon Rafman's "El Lissitsky Editing Suite" hovers uneasily low by conventional gallery standards, forcing the viewer to readjust their position. Throughout the show, such tropes render physical the ways in which contemplating art on the Internet has changed our perception of these works. The result of this technology appears to be either something more tailored to our daily lifestyles or else vaguely invasive and disorienting.

Proponents of Post-Internet Art profess to have moved beyond the Internet as a novelty to its acceptance as a banality well integrated into the rhythms of everyday practice. As such, they hope to avoid resorting to self-referential gimmick. Re-instigating the mentality of the 'happening' is one means to achieve this. By taking the Internet outside of the confines of the interface and into physical reality, the social and cultural contexts framing these works is brought into relief. Whereas Pr0n materializes digital objects, re-situating them within the traditional gallery space, While Supplies Last enacts an alternative approach. Visitors to Gallery B-312 are greeted by an array of identical USB keys, which they are invited to take home with them. Each serves as a portal into a virtual gallery space, which can be viewed with ease on the individual's own desktop. Works, which are attributed collectively, include directions to a hidden USB key located somewhere in Ontario, containing an original work, as well as a polemic in the form of a pop-up app, which deplores the art institution: "We get the art we deserve!" All in all, by bringing the gallery into the home (or office), the exhibition demonstrates the very central role the Internet plays in mediating our experiences with art.

Pr0n and While Supplies Last present two Intriguing views of where internet based art may be headed, it appears that examining the medium in this manner might further validate and reinforce the institution as a crucial component of understanding art works. As Anna Dezeuze points out in her essay "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace", the crux of the life versus art dilemma remains. But these sorts of works compel us: "Instead of asking 'what is art?' shouldn't we be asking: what is life?"

29 February 2012
Ming Lin



Out of this years' Nuit Blanche attractions, the valiant efforts of six brazen young men to wrangle an oversized papier-mâché narwhal was one you should not have missed. Fetaphysics, presented by MAW collective (Gabriel Baribeau, Jackson Darby, Max Evans, John Gunner, Craig Spence and Simon Zaborski) at AB Gallerie exhibited a humorous take on the citywide, all night art event. MAW, self-described as "a constantly changing acronym"- at the moment "Most Ambiguous Word"- proposed a reflection on the commercial spectacle and the art world at large using exaggerated and absurd Greco-Roman iconography.

A "Donald Judd - style" block of feta cheese stood several feet tall atop a plaster pedestal. Visitors were invited to help themselves to a portion with the rounds of pita provided. From the ceiling cascaded a giant cluster of grapes, which, upon closer inspection, comprised of box-wine bags painted purple and from which flowed the sweet libations. On the back wall, an entertaining video was projected. The artists, wearing togas while swinging from rope, had grapes haphazardly tossed into their mouths. The soundtrack from Zorba the Greek was barely audible above the din, the brusque baritone of Anthony Quinn's voice providing a slow and encouraging narrative. As visitors gorged on the sculptural offerings, the atmosphere was one of collective merriment.

But aside from all the mirth, there was myth.

In fact, the epic struggle between man and narwhal was not a performance piece at all, but merely an attempt by the group's members to secure the sculpture, which had lost its balance from a top of a loosened coil of rope. But one could easily have read this as an allegory for the modes in which we stubbornly cling to the myths - including those which fuel the art institution- upon which many of our traditions are based. During medieval times, the narwhal tusk was often believed to be a unicorn's horn. These horns, considered to have magic powers such as curing poison and melancholia, were ground up and drank as potent potions. Due to the resemblance of its appendage to the mythic creature's spire, the narwhal was ceaselessly hunted. It's tusk also figured prominently in curiosity cabinets and personal collections in Europe as a sign of prestige. In Fetaphysics, the oversized narwhal tethered to a golden chariot made a mockery of the "monumentality and glory associated with antique statuary" and, consequently, of the tenuous foundations of the art world in which the processes of valuation as well as the figure of the artist are often mythologized. The tusk, re-attached to its original benefactor, dispelled the mythical properties attributed to it.

But the large sculpture refused to stay still, and it demanded that its creators give it utmost attention and care lest it come crashing down upon them and the onlookers. After much maneuvering, order was restored at last. The narwhal (art object), the fetishized pillar of the institution, was once again resurrected. The spectators cheered, the festivities raged on and art prevailed.





26 January 2011
Amber Berson

As artists, Duke and Battersby seem invested in the concept of intimacy. Their collaborations, which began as art students at NASCAD in the early 1990’s, speak to the rawness of human interaction and to the transcendent power of art. I've gone to see their work as part of the Sobey Prize exhibit, at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, twice now and each time have left feeling haunted.

A video installation that alternates between an animated narrative of love, denial and taboo and a haunting song set to what appears to be of found footage of a woman and her cats, is housed in a wonderland of miniature glassed in dioramas. The effect is haunting. You’ve entered a world where nature is a little bit controlled and people are more than slightly out of control.

In one half of the video a woman named Farrah and her ape-lover Meema detail the trials, tribulations and positive aspects of their very public relationship. At one point, the groundsman at the park in which the pair met describes the nature of the relationship, saying Meema is the smarter of the two as she learned Farrah’s mother tongue and adapted to her needs. The video forces the viewer to question our understanding of power and to dissect our concept of love. In the other half, a woman sings to us a lullaby about her failures and successes, while capturing cats and suffering their wrath (made visible by the scratches on her bare arms). We watch helpless as the woman (the artist?) forces a cat into a glass dome far too small, as we become aware of the domed worlds we share our room with. More than just invested in the narrative at this point, the audience has gone from casual viewer to witness as the artists attempt to control, through art and technology, the unnatural.





26 janvier 2011
Simon Benedict

Depuis le 2 décembre dernier, la galerie Les Territoires présente «Héros», la plus récente série de la photographe et vidéaste Marie-Christine Simard. À travers ses oeuvres, Simard met en scène divers personnages, (la plupart interprétés par l'artiste-même), chacun étant «une représentation archétypale du courage dans l'Histoire, l'histoire de l'art, la culture populaire ou dans les biographies mythiques d'artistes.»

Le travail performatif de l'artiste dans ses propres tableaux photographiques se rapproche de celui de modèles que l'on pourrait retrouver dans certaines peintures classiques ou romantiques. Simard avoue d'ailleurs son lien personnel et esthétique avec la peinture. Toutefois, à défaut d'être peintre, l'artiste utilise la photo et la vidéo pour représenter ces héros du quotidien qu'elle met en scène dans des paysages parfois pittoresques, parfois plus intimes.

Du 2 au 18 décembre 2010
Galerie Les Territoires
372 rue Ste-Catherine Ouest (Édifice Belgo)
Espace 527
Montréal

Pour plus d'informations sur l'exposition et la galerie Les Territoires:
http://lesterritoires.org et http://galerielesterritoires.blogspot.com/

Pour plus d'images:
http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=114937048572113&view=all