EXHIBITION SCHEDULE 2016
Nicole Liao Against the Day (Toronto, ON)
Andrew John Milne & Chantal Dupas OMMATIDIA MURALIS (Winnipeg, MB)
Yukon School of Visual Arts Year End Student Exhibition
Sarah Pupo What Is Called Spirit (Montreal, QC)
Joi Arcand | Through That Which Is Scene (Ottawa, ON)
The Natural & The Manufactured 2016
Kevin Yates & Robert Yates | migratory (patterns) (Grafton, ON & Ste. Julienne, QC)
The Volcano Collective | Northern Howl (Vancouver, BC)
Kathleen Ritter | Lecture and Commissioned Text
Shelley Hakonson Perpetual Curiosities: A 30-Year Retrospective (Dawson City, YT)
Jacinthe Loranger (Montreal, QC) | Bananapocalypse Now! See You in the Oblivion
_________________________
NICOLE LIAO AGAINST THE DAY
January 21 – February 27, 2016
Opening Night: Thursday, January 21st
Artist talk at 7:30PM in the KIAC Ballroom | Reception to follow
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Daily skirmishes were now being fought, no longer for territory or commodities but for electro-magnetic information, in an international race to measure and map most accurately the field-coefficients at each point of that mysterious mathematical lattice-work which was by then known to surround the Earth. As the Era of Sail had depended upon the mapping of seas and seacoasts of the globe and winds of the wind-rose, so upon the measurements of new variable would depend the history that was to pass up here, among reefs of magnetic anomaly, channels of least impedance, storms of rays yet unnamed lashing out of the sun.
– Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
Against the Day is a photo and video installation composed of found scientific drawings, photographs, models, and footage based on early records of Auroral research and documented nuclear bomb tests in outer space. In 1962, the detonation of high altitude nuclear bombs known as “Starfish Prime” resulted in an artificial extension of earth’s magnetosphere, creating stunning atmospheric lights over Honolulu in its wake. The light show that resulted from these tests reproduced the Aurora Borealis – something that has long occurred on its own over the Arctic Circle. In this doubling of the Aurora, the catastrophic is no longer simply an “Act of God”, but integrally tied to human activity.
Video footage was sourced from declassified films from the U.S. Nuclear Testing Archives and juxtaposed against records of the Aurora Borealis from the NFB documentary, “The Northern Lights”. Placed side by side, the line between cosmic phenomena and manufactured acts begins to collapse. It’s no coincidence that early research into the electrical mysteries of the Aurora Borealis is directly tied to the Space Race during the Cold War.
The exhibition addresses the nature of Doubling; the complex physical and chemical relationship of particles, radiation and light makes the Aurora Borealis and its sinister twin ideal subjects with which to explore the technology of the photograph and the moving image. Like a Science Fiction film, the Double begins to take on an apocalyptic life of its own, independent of time and space, returning again and again to haunt the present.
The exhibit seeks to understand the Aurora Borealis in terms of its relation to the science of optics and electromagnetic forces; incidentally, this complex physical and chemical relationship between particles, radiation and light in the Aurora is also the nature of the photograph, film stock, and the bomb. Like Doubles in a Science Fiction Film, recordings, simulations and images of the Northern Lights begin to take on an apocalyptic life of their own, moving independent of time and space, returning again and again to haunt the present.
– Nicole Liao, 2016
NICOLE LIAO was born in Calgary and currently lives and works in Toronto. She has a background in Print Media and Architecture. Her work explores representations attempting to map, record and break down real world phenomena; she is interested in exposing the rifts between data and their sources, as well as finding moments of connection between disparate events. This is her first show in Northern Canada.
Exhibition Brochure with text by Padma D. Maitland (PDF)
_______________________
ANDREW JOHN MILNE & CHANTAL DUPAS
OMMATIDIA MURALIS
March 10 – April 16, 2016
Opening Night: Thursday, March 10
Artist talk at 7:30PM | Reception to follow
The ODD Gallery is pleased to present Ommatidia Muralis, a new collaborative interactive installation by Winnipeg artists Chantal Dupas and Andrew John Milne.
As artist-in-residence at the University of Manitoba’s Belamonte Laboratory, Dupas creates “microscopic paintings” from tinted cross-sections of houseplants. Rather than presenting these through a typical microscope, Milne builds extravagantly designed wooden viewing machines. His machines offer analog augmented views of reality, fracturing and multiplying Dupas’ personalized scientific images.
Ommatidia Muralis is a hybridization of two distinctly different artistic practices. The playfulness of combining defunct analog apparatus and cutting edge digital technologies opens thoughtful questions about the ways various viewing techniques shape our knowledge.
CHANTAL DUPAS is visual artist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba and has studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Yale University and the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Although primarily a painter, her work is never limited to one medium. In the past she has worked with various sculptural materials, ranging from bronze to ceramics, and has recently ventured into video and lab-based new media techniques. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, and is in private and corporate collections including TD Bank, and the Province of Manitoba.
Artist Statement
My work is rooted in a reflective interest in the cyclical and fragile nature of life. Through my studio practice and research, I have gravitated towards themes such as consumption, death and transformation in various capacities. Often, inspiration for bodies of work begins with analyses of certain experiences within natural environments, whether intentional or coincidental. I am motivated by the discovery of natural occurrences new to me and bring this sense of wonder and awe into the studio, where I inevitably begin to question my affinities with and aversions to the world around us.
My work has responded to phenomena in places ranging from the Arctic Ocean, the foothills of Connecticut and to my own back yard. My most recent ventures have been delving into the world of botany, which stemmed from a residency at Riding Mountain National Park. In recognition of the important role research plays within my practice, I have began my own version of “field research,” enrolled in botany and microscopy courses, began volunteering at the University of Manitoba’s Herbarium and am currently Artist-In-Residence at the Belmonte Laboratory.
Embracing my compulsion towards fact-based research and organization/categorization, my work enables me to question whether these systems confront fears of mortality and perhaps are ways we deal with and control time. At the core of my practice, I search for experiences that remind me that I am within the natural systems I gather information from.
ANDREW JOHN MILNE is a self-taught Winnipeg based Interdisciplinary Artist that interweaves New Media, Film, Photography and Performance. He has a background in mechanical, electrical and software design, contemporary dance, photography and film. In his work Milne approaches cutting edge media with obsolesced technologies and materials, constructing anachronistic yet functional devices that draw ‘mechanism’ into a post-cinematic dream space that realizes the future of seeing and knowing.
Andrew is the founder of the Museum of New Ideas, a mobile new media exhibition and studio space, and is a founding member of Bent Light, a post-cinema film collective. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Artist Statement
I feel that invention can be described as the arranging of various components, supports, and materials around an invisible form: the function of an apparatus. I am deeply interested in the nature of these invisible structures; What is the source of these unseen operations? Are they expressions, desires, needs, ideas? The apparatus is an embodiment that allows the nature of function to leak into the experience of the viewer; shape, rhythm, limits, outcomes.
Creating a device to both contain and facilitate the work of another has been a learning experience as every decision carries different weight when the loss that is risked is not your own. It has also served to emphasize how much the physicality of an optical mechanism is at odds with its functioning. Is it that optical devices strive for a functional invisibility? or how is it that we, in order to realize the transcendence that they promise, require them to be so?
Exhibition text by Dagmara Genda (PDF)
_______________________
April 28 – May 10, 2016
Yukon School of Visual Arts | YEAR END STUDENT EXHIBITIONS
Location: ODD Gallery & SOVA Gallery
Jun Chen | Sierra Megas | Isaac Roberts | Tyler Anderson | Heeyoung Chung
James Lewis-Healey | Alexandru Stratulat | Jules Bussey | Megan Wright
Instructors: Bill Burns, Paul Griffin, Jeffrey Langille
_______________________
Sarah Pupo What is Called Spirit (Montreal, QC)
May 19 – June 18
Artist talk and Reception Thursday, May 19 7:30pm
What Is Called Spirit presents works in several media by Montreal artist Sarah Pupo: paintings on silk, watercolours and drawings on paper, and animation. Equal parts opaque and transparent, Pupo’s works explore the edges of consciousness where sleep and wakefulness seep into each other. Revelling in that dreamlike state, her animations morph materiality from light to dark and back again. The results are immersive & mesmerizing.
As artist and writer Sherry Walchuk notes, “Pupo’s material choices and processes conflate time. In her drawings, ink and gouache flood areas quickly, then seep and pool as they slowly absorb into the paper and dry. In her paintings, she applies inks and dyes that instantly enmesh in the silk and cotton surfaces. She swiftly adds warm wax, which hardens atop the washes, suspending the previous layers beneath. The application of flowing materials is fast, followed by a slow drying time. A pause occurs between each gesture and accumulating layer. Pupo’s process is slow, using fast materials.”
Walchuk’s complete text is available here.
Sarah Pupo Bio:
Sarah Pupo lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. Her work integrates aspects of painting and drawing, installation, and self-taught, provisional animation techniques. Her approach to making things prioritizes intuition, ritual, associative thinking; the flux of chance and control.
Pupo has exhibited at galleries and artist run centres locally and internationally. Recent projects include a solo exhibition at articule (Montreal), participation in the Symposium of Contemporary Art in Baie-Saint-Paul and residencies in Iceland, Finland and the Yukon (KIAC Artist Residency in 2013!).
_______________________
Joi Arcand | Through That Which Is Scene (Ottawa, ON)
June 30 – July 30
Artist talk June 30, 7:30pm
Through That Which Is Scene is a mixed-media installation that centres around miniature cardboard cutouts created from several decades of Arcand’s family’s photos. The First Nations artist uses the cutouts to reconstruct memories and present family history as a tongue-in-cheek display of supposed curiosities. Colonized assumptions about “The Indian” fall into disarray through her blend of nostalgia and pop culture.
The dioramas are accompanied by Viewmasters, vintage toys typically used to observe postcard-perfect landscapes and cultural icons. Clicking through these colour-drenched “tourist reels” will give visitors a glimpse of how new identities can be imagined.
An exhibition text by visual artist and Associate Professor of Art & Art History Mary Longman is available here
Bio:
Joi T. Arcand is a photo-based artist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and based in Ottawa, Ontario. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Saskatchewan in 2005.
Arcand was the co-founder of the Red Shift Gallery, a contemporary Aboriginal art gallery in Saskatoon and most recently the founder and editor of kimiwan ‘zine, a quarterly Indigenous arts publication. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, York Quay Gallery in Toronto, PAVED Arts in Saskatoon, grunt gallery in Vancouver, and published in Black Flash Magazine.
_______________________
The Natural & The Manufactured: double exhibition opening
Opening receptions: Thurs. Aug 11, 7:00pm (part of Yukon Riverside Arts Festival’s Gallery Hop!)
Artist talks: Fri. Aug 12, 7:30pm
Guest lecure: Sat. Aug 13, 7:30pm
1. Gallery exhibition:
Volcano Collective (Karen Kazmer & Deborah Koenker, Vancouver, BC) |
Northern Howl: An Installation for Dogs and People
Karen Kazmer and Deborah Koenker will research Yukon life and attitudes through face-to-face research, diving into interviews and gathering stories and then reflecting their perceptions back to the community for enjoyment and discussion/dispute.
Their in-gallery installation will start at the ceiling with recreations of Ursa Major and Minor (the bears) and Canis Major and Minor (the dogs). They will populate the gallery below with abstracted sculptures of wolves, dogs, and grizzly bears (a Yukon “species of concern”).
Anecdotal stories, myths and tall tales (manufactured) of dogs, wolves and bears gathered from community participants will be included in Northern Howl as audio recordings.
- Off-site exhibition:
Kevin Yates & Robert Yates|migratory (patterns)
(Grafton, ON & Ste. Julienne, QC)
For their off-site exhibition, Robert Yates and Kevin Yates will video-record migratory bird species in Dawson City, and then create video wallpapers from which birds come and go.
The wallpaper patterns will be informed by decorative motifs once popular in the Klondike. The videos will be installed on two separate floors in Ruby’s Place, a historical Parks Canada building. The footage will be edited so that a bird leaving one projection will arrive moments later in the second projection, and vice versa.
Birds migrate across cultural boundaries as if all geographies are home. Through its bird-oriented contemplation of travel, migratory (patterns) presents a new contemplation of global connectivity and human migration.
- Lecture: Kathleen Ritter | The Sound of North
(Toronto, ON / Paris, FR)
As a starting point for a first trip north, Ritter will use the words of Glenn Gould, spoken 50 years ago, and imagine what they would sound like if spoken today:
“I’ve long been intrigued by that incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga which constitutes the Arctic and sub-Arctic of our country. I’ve read about it, written about it, and even pulled up my parka once and gone there. Yet like all but a very few Canadians I’ve had no real experience of the North. I’ve remained, of necessity, an outsider. And the North has remained for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.” — Glenn Gould, Introduction to The Idea of North, 1967
- Documentation: Kathleen Ritter | Post-exhibition essay Fall 2016, “The Tour”
Kathleen Ritter, a curator, artist and critic who works internationally, will evolve her post-exhibition essay from conversations with the exhibiting artists and from her research into perceptions of the North from afar. Ritter’s professional work in Scotland, France, and Canada will give her a unique perspective on the context and environment of the art created and shown through The Natural & The Manufactured.
Biographies:
The Volcano Collective: Deborah Koenker and Karen Kazmer
As an immigrant to Canada, Deborah Koenker is interested in borders, globalization, migration/immigration, the difficulties of cultural integration, building community and social justice. She has produced three installations on “disappeared” and murdered girls and women, one of which involved collaboration with 80-some residents in the village of Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico. Personal narratives are increasingly important to her practice; her 2016 Kelowna Art Gallery exhibition Grapes and Tortillas, for example, includes texts written by temporary seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico who come to work on farms, and in vineyards and green houses in the Okanagan Valley, BC and across Canada.
Karen Kazmer’s installations and public artworks are ongoing investigations of architectural space, human and animal interaction, originating from an interest in the body as messenger. She has worked with light, mixed media and technology in producing exhibitions for galleries in Canada and the U.S. Her community based public art projects seek imagery from public workshops, collaborations and on-site activities of people and animals. Recent gallery installations involve the use of sensor-driven pneumatic elements.
Kevin Yates and Robert Yates
Kevin Yates is known for his sculptural works, often highly realized miniatures, doubled to resemble a reflection in water. He likens his work to film stills: objects that hold a “pause” in space, offering the viewer time to examine and inspect.
Robert Yates employs his experience in film production and cinematography to create video works that first conjure stillness, then morph into multiplying, fractured or mirrored images. The slippage between interior and exterior seems constant yet is impossible, since the images are willing to reflect layers but not break open to another one below.
Kevin Yates and Robert Yates began collaborating in 2011. They blend video, photography and mixed media to construct sculptural/video installations and site-specific projects. They create unnatural dream-like viewing experiences, with uncanny open-ended narratives. The works depict subtle intersections between natural and cultural worlds, leading the viewer to question perspectives and germinate new understandings.
Kathleen Ritter
Ritter is an artist and a curator. She was an artist in residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, as a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts International Residencies Program in Visual Arts, in 2013. Working with sound, photography, video, and text, often in collaboration, Ritter has exhibited her work across Canada. She was recently commissioned, along with composer James B. Maxwell, to develop a soundtrack for the international conference Institutions By Artists based on the minutes from the organizers’ board meetings.
Ritter was the Associate Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery until 2012, where she curated the exhibitions How Soon Is Now; Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (with Tania Willard); WE: Vancouver (with Bruce Grenville); Rebecca Belmore: Rising to the Occasion (with Daina Augaitis); and commissioned public artworks for Offsite by Damian Moppett, Kota Ezawa, Elspeth Pratt, and Heather and Ivan Morison.
_______________________
September 29 – November 3, 2016
Shelley Hakonson Perpetual Curiosities: A 30-Year Retrospective (Dawson City, YT)
Reception Thursday, September 29, 7:30 PM
Hakonson’s paintings blend influences from pop music, textiles, feminist thinking, myths and fairy tales, and linguistic play. She creates canvases that are at times entertaining, at times twisting darkness, and always subtly challenging. Masks and sculptures round out this retrospective of works chosen from 30 years of output.
An exhibition brochure with text by Vancouver-Dawson City writer Elaine Corden is available here
Bio:
Shelley is a mixed-media artist who lives and works in Dawson City, Yukon, working with acrylics, papers, fabric, metal, found objects and many sculptural mediums.
Symbolism and surrealism are the foundation of Shelley’s art and the starting point of her pieces. Research constitutes a significant part of her process; obscure practices and traditions which are no longer part of our knowledge are the catalyst for her work. Women often play a key role in her works and she uses her art to explore women’s topics that concern her.
Shelley’s formal instruction is modest; she studied art throughout her high school years and had a year of training at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, in 2000, but for the most part has learned by her own efforts.
Shelley’s art varies through time, the mediums and topics change, the styles evolve, but what remains constant is her fascination with our obscure human history and the small hidden, sometimes surprising stories to be found.
_______________________
November 17 – December 17
Jacinthe Loranger (Montreal, QC) | Bananapocalypse Now! See You in the Oblivion
Opening reception and artist talk Nov 17, 7:30pm
In opposition to the banality of everyday life, Loranger makes surreal iconographies and narratives of paper, fragmenting mythological symbols.
Equal parts blatant humour and suppressed horror, Bananapocalypse Now! is a theatre stage where the players are activated (and complicated) by a variety of mythological symbols.
Loranger silkscreens drawings and patterns onto paper, then fills the gallery by forming wall-works and sculptures with their bright colour schemes.
The scenes represent the ruins of a place of worship, breaking boundaries between old, new, possible and impossible religions. Like a banana split under the summer sun, characters will melt together and fade into abstraction.
Bananpocalypse Now! See You In The Oblivion is a still frame, frozen in time, between two states of decomposition.
Bio:
Jacinthe Loranger’s fantastical fictions explore different universal emotions and psychological states. She uses them to revisit mythology, cosmogony, and personal relations to the sublime and to nature. In opposition to the everyday, her work offers a luminous, unhinged alternative world where every excess is a blissful celebration.
Loranger’s constructed narratives compose a multi-layered framework of a mystic quest. She seeks to create her own mythology, derived from a patchwork of cultural references. Psychedelic and poetic scenes allow the coming together of unlike universes to explore various charged emotional and psychological states.
Jacinthe Loranger has a B.A. in visual arts from UQÀM in 2001 and has been practicing printing arts for more than 10 years. She has made numerous installations where silkscreening is explored in all its possibilities. Lorannger has participated in several artist residencies in Canada and France, notably at Dernier Cri. She has exhibited in many solo and group shows across Canada, including the heavy metal-infused Neon Knight Is A Digital Bitch at the Eastern Edge Gallery, 2012.
The ODD Gallery is delighted to be able to offer the monograph for this show in both English (here) and in French (here). This critical text is by Emmanuelle Choquette, a Montreal writer and cultural worker. Her research concerns installation practices in relation with production and diffusion context of contemporary art.
Thanks to Montrealer Jean-Michel Laprise for translating the text from French to English. Also gratitude to Dawson City’s’s Marielle Veilleux for proof-reading the French version.