Special projects

Kelly Andres, Mathieu Ball, Manuel Chantre, Vincent Chevalier, Kandis Friesen, BLAKE HARGREAVES, Jonathan Lemieux, thomas ouellet fredericks, Nick Rudzicz, JOSÉE SCHRYER, ALEXANDER WESTCOTT, with Amber Berson, Eliane Ellbogen, Emma Geldart and Danny Perreault

Eastern Bloc is celebrating its four-year anniversary by moving in. HOUSEWARMING PARTY is a one week site-specific installation in which Eastern Bloc staff, volunteers, members and past collaborators are invited to exhibit works around the theme of domesticity. The artwork, ideas and furniture of Eliane Elbogen, Amber Berson, Emma Geldart, Kelly Andres Jonathan Lemieux, Vincent Chevalier, Kandis Friesen, Mathieu Ball, Nick Rudzicz and Danny Perreault will take up residence at Eastern Bloc for one week. On Sunday, September 11th, Eastern Bloc will host a series of intimate concerts in its ersatz domestic space by fellow collaborators Blake Hargreaves, Thomas Ouellet Fredericks, Alexander Westcott and more.

PLANT PARLOUR (2011)

KELLY ANDRES

A growing archive and library for plants (and people). This temporary installation in the Eastern Bloc gallery features the plant incubator and tissue culture process. Plant tissue culture will be performed daily during regular gallery hours. The Plant Parlour project aims to host a collection of over 300 plant varieties by next summer. The parlour, and the plant collection will be accessible to PP members. Plants tissue samples will be collected through a number of means; samples from members, gathered from anywhere plants are grown or sold, and samples sent through the post. The Plant Parlour's other activities include mapping the migratory cartography's of the plants and people that are included in the collection through short interviews, home visits and portraiture (people with their houseplants). Other projects and workshops include 3D printing and prototyping in a makeshift wetlab, a library of fictional hybrid specimens, and working with chlorophyll as a medium. The Plant Parlour will be located in the Dimitri building on Parc and Van Horne.



BEHIND GLASS (2011)

MATHIEU BALL

Part sound installation, part wall art, "Behind Glass" creates an affective relationship between a speaker and the shadow box frame in which it is placed and hung on the wall. "Behind Glass" is a comment on the institution of two-dimensional art and how audio art might eventually encroach on the canon of contemporary wall-mounted art.



PWIFd (Places Where I've Fuck'd)

VINCENT CHEVALIER

"PWIFd" is a web blog (pwifd.tumblr.com) that consists of images of places where Chevalier has had sex. The photos were acquired by screen capturing the images of the sites located using Google Street View. Some were taken immediately after the sexual encounter took place, while others were drawn from the artist's memory months or years after the act. The resulting set of images provides a photo-indexical account of Chevalier's sexual history that consists of a variety of sites, including apartment buildings, hotels, and houses, or public places such as saunas, parks, and commercial buildings.



MAINTENANCE / D’ENTRETIEN

KANDIS FRIESEN

As part HOUSEWARMING PARTY, Friesen will be performing small-scale drawing interventions in Eastern Bloc's gallery, storage, and workspaces. These interventions will be intentional compositions made by cleaning (erasing) small surface areas, and both the cleaning process and the space once it has been cleaned, will be documented through sound, video, and photography. Friesen is interested in relationships to both cleanliness and the act of cleaning - social, economic, gendered, racialized, and personal relationships to who cleans what, how, and why. Her mother's neurotic cleaning rituals, the largely ignored immigrant janitor staff at the university she attends and works at, the infrastructures of industrial cleaning machines and toxic products, fetishizing the immaculately clean or the horrifically dirty, and the mundaneness of unending dirty dishes at her day job; these all reflect different relationships to the act of cleaning. This small series of performative drawings brings attention to a specific kind of work, and how it may play out in a workplace, here an artist-run-centre-turned-residence, in a blurring of domestic, workplace, and artistic spaces.



JIM SLAY (2011)

BLAKE HARGREAVES

A horror film in person that tests the limits of self control in the face of anxiety, the limits of pulmonary endurance, the limits of the club's subwoofers. Analog electronic physics as a crying pool for collective viscera subjected to the most cavalier of treatment. An intuitive sensory education in the science of twentieth century sound synthesis engineering, presented in tandem with a virtual reality simulation of the worst imaginable first date.



SEMIOTICS OF MY FRIDGE (2010)

JONATHAN LEMIEUX

"Semiotics of my Fridge," based on Martha Rosler's seminal work "Semiotics of the Kitchen," is a performance-based video work that exposes the precarious state of an art student's fridge (or wallet), where Lemieux eats all the food in his fridge, one item at a time. His poor state obliges him to consume a sad combination of eclectic and disparate food items. The video is as much a moment of endurance for the performer as the viewer because the work is one unedited single shot.



TVDESTROY (2011)

THOMAS OUELLET FREDERICKS

"TVDESTROY" is an audiovisual, collective, and interactive installation. Its creation occurs at a suitable time: Canada's transition from analog to digital television. The project consists of a pile of televisions, lent by the community, that generate abstract audiovisual animations through a TVDESTROY module. Theses animations can be controlled by the audience with a typical household remote. The installation then becomes an audiovisual orchestra directed by one or more conductors. In exchange for lending their televisions, every individual will receive the TVDESTROY module that was attached to their television, allowing them to continue to "destroy" their TV at home. Ouellet Fredericks will present "TVDESTROY" as a prototype interactive performance during the 4-year anniversary event on 11 September 2011.



The American Dream (2010)

NICK RUDZICZ

"The American Dream" is a short, experimental game created for the GAMMA IV curated game design expo. Working within the event's constraints - submitted games were restricted to using only one button as input - "The American Dream" aims to explore the range of emotion possible within a system of limited interactivity. It is deeply inspired by the graphical abstraction and ludic inscrutability of the Atari 2600 era, a period of exploratory game design that works best without a manual. "The American Dream" is the condensation of a good, proper, consumer's life. It has been played in several countries; presumably, it has been banned in the rest.



A FAMILY STORY (2011)

JOSÉE SCHRYER

Shortly after Schryer’s parents were separated, her and her father stopped speaking to one other. Aside from early childhood memories, she is left with little knowledge of her father. Through “A Family Story,” she has come to re-discover this man, someone who lives by himself in a small cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water, finding company in the dears he nurtures. “A Family Story” is not a photo documentary; the results of this engagement are meant as a story. Schryer’s aim is to gather single moments, sometimes uncanny depictions of the unconditional bonds of a family. The photographs in this series were taken with an old medium format Hasselblad 500c camera between December 2010 and April 2011.



24 Hrs (2011)

AMBER BERSON, ELIANE ELLBOGEN, EMMA GELDART, DANNY PERREAULT

“24 Hrs” is a video installation turned in on itself, allowing the gallery visitor to sneak a look into the inner workings of an art centre. Following many conversations about the hilariousness of the office dynamics at Eastern Bloc, often joking that the daily antics, quibbles and appointments were the makings of a reality show, Ellbogen, Berson, Geldart and Perreault, the centre’s four main employees, decided to videotape themselves at work for an entire week. These recordings, partly edited, partly streamed live, are visible on a closed-circuit TV in the Eastern Bloc “living room.” Conceived specifically for HOUSEWARMING PARTY, “24 Hrs” is meant to shed light on the obscured, and sometimes arbitrary, boundaries that we create for ourselves between our personal and professional lives – how our workspaces so easily become living spaces and our living spaces workspaces.



REFERENCE (LIBRARY) (2011)

AMBER BERSON

"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career."
Gloria Steinem

Inspired by the above quote by eminent feminist thinker Gloria Steinem, Reference (Library) is a tongue-in-cheek representation of my imaginary home library. Nestled somewhere between digital art theory and misdirected self-help manuals geared at working wives, I've created for myself a safe environment in the liminal space between work and home, family and coworkers, life and career.




KELLY ANDRES
Andres’ work has been exhibited at Eastern Bloc, Montreal, Latitude 53, Edmonton, the Science Gallery, Dublin (with the Grafting Parlour), M:ST Performance Art Festival, Calgary, Free Radio Banff, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Babel Art Gallery, Norway, ISEA 2008, Singapore, Signal and Noise, Vancouver, CONFLUX 2007, New York, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Trianon Gallery, Lethbridge. Andres has had residences at Media Lab Prado, Madrid, e-MobiLArt (Greece, Finland, Austria), ISEA 2008, Singapore, Studio XX, Montreal, The Banff Centre and the Banff New Media Institute, Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Trondheim Norway and Foundation Kuenstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany. Her work has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Alberta Ecotrust.


MATHIEU BALL
Mathieu Ball is a multidisciplinary artist and musician born in Montreal, Canada where received his BFA from Concordia University in 2011. Working with photography, sculpture, sound or a marriage of different mediums, Ball creates site-specific and gallery intended work that dwells on the relationships he has with the everyday, artistic establishments and what happens when both collide.


VINCENT CHEVALIER
Vincent Chevalier is a Montreal-based artist employing the performative qualities of disclosure as his primary medium. His projects often consist of repetitive and endurance-based tasks that attempt to bring the private into the public, the latent into view. These actions range from the quotidian to the theatrical, and take place in a variety of public settings including on the street, within the gallery, or on the web. He has exhibited locally and internationally at various festivals and galleries including Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse, the FOFA and CIRCA galleries in Montreal; the ANTI-Contemporary Art Fesitval in Kuopio, Finland; and the XVI Annual International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006, and his work has been written about in No More Potlucks. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Intermedia/Cyberarts at Concordia University in 2011.


KANDIS FRIESEN
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Kandis Friesen is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal, Quebec. Working with sound, video, drawing, and installation, her practice examines notions of language and translation, sites of national and cultural identity, and memory and the collective archive. Her work has been exhibited and screened across Canada and internationally, and her video works are distributed by Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), an artist-run centre in Montreal. Among many projects, she is currently working on the Mennonite Video Archive Project, a collaborative collection of work responding to unedited and untranslated footage of a documentary that was never made, found on the dark shelves of a Mennonite archive in the summer of 2010.


JONATHAN LEMIEUX
Masochist video performer, obsessive curator and geometrical painter, Jonathan Lemieux creates work about physical and/or psychological endurance, for him and for the viewer. Lemieux’s passion for architecture has pushed his art to explore the influence of the public space on the private, and how their points of intersection affect people’s relationships to their own identity.


THOMAS OUELLET FREDERICKS
Thomas Ouellet Fredericks is an independent artist, a part-time university teacher and a consultant. After completing a Master's degree in communications at Université du Québec à Montréal in 2003, he specialized in the creation of interactive installations, whose user interfaces are modeled on behavioural and psychological contemporary research. Fredericks' work often uses biological elements, or their simulation, and poses a definite emphasis on the sense of touch. He is a proud member and active participant of the open source and Creative Commons movements. Fredericks' work has been shown nationally and internationally. He lives and works in Montreal.


NICK RUDZICZ
Nick Rudzicz has been playing video games for over a year now, and has concluded that this entitles him to make his own. Combining his degrees in Computer Science at Concordia and McGill universities along with his love of science and enthusiastic cynicism in all things Human, he seeks to leave behind his traditional office job for the wild and potentially unhygienic world of independent game design. In his spare time, he co-organises the Mount Royal Game Society – an association of other like-minded individuals – while occasionally cooking and photographing food, or tweeting.


JOSÉE SCHRYER
Josee Schryer lives in Montreal and studies Photography and Art History at Concordia University. Her primary interests revolve around the narrative portrait and the emotional charge carried in series of images. Her main focus is the relationships that exist between individuals of an immediate family, including her own, and the factors which influence their identities.


AMBER BERSON
Amber Berson is passionate about art and its potential for social change. Her current research focuses on art and mourning, museum practices, narrative theory, and vernacular collections. Her Master's thesis at Concordia University considered how missing and murdered Aboriginal women have been depicted in Canadian art. She works at Eastern Bloc and most recently co-curated SIGHTandSOUND 3 and Espèces vulnérables at Eastern Bloc, In Your Footsteps at the VAV gallery, Rearranging Desires: Curating the Other Within at the FOFA and "We lived on a map..." at the CEREV (Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence) exhibition space.


ELIANE ELLBOGEN
Eliane Ellbogen is a Montreal-based curator and Artistic Director of Eastern Bloc, a New Media production and exhibition centre, which she co-founded in 2007. After completing a BA in Art History at McGill University, she has involved herself in the local art scene, as writer/director of multimedia theatre works, graphic designer and zine maker, and more recently, as independent curator, festival organizer and femme à tout faire. She has collaborated internationally and locally in the organization of Eastern Bloc’s annual audio/visual festival, Sight & Sound, and in recent years has co-curated the monthly Data : Salon series and other exhibits including Département des Nuisances Publiques, Clash, and Espèces Vulnérables.


DANNY PERREAULT
Danny Perreault is finishing his Master’s in Research-Creation in Experimental Media at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is fascinated by the fragmentation of the projected image, both in performative contexts and in public spaces. Perreault explores the correlation between urbanism, architecture, scenography, video art, sound art and light. His works “Vetroy” (2005) and “Tvestroy” (2007) have been presented in Montreal, Ottawa, Paris, Marseille, nantes, Brussels and Eindhoven. More recently he presented “Coup d’éclats” (2011) at Sight & Sound Festival, organized by Eastern Bloc.