exhibition: what brings you here?

What Brings You Here? I-Fu Chen, Ricardo Conte-Oro, Michelle Johnson, Andrew Nguyen, Conrad Tang, and Eva Tsang March 7 – 27, 2009 VMAC Gallery 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 452 Toronto, ON Opening Reception March 7, 2009 2 - 5 PM VMAC gallery is proud to present: What Brings You Here? Featuring six young artists working with digital and film based media. Dusty corners, the communities of the information highway, intrinsic fictions of the cinematic, this exhibition is this emerging artists collective’s attempt to navigate the murky waters of a society created within a community of fantasy. Ricardo Conte- Oro, through websites such as Craig’s List and Kijiji, is invited to strangers homes in which he dons the persona of stage director in an improvised space. Conrad Tang embraces the banal, and, like a magician, draws out the dreamlike of waking life. In contrast to the mundane, Andrew Nguyen archives the forgotten and overlooked with a sensitivity and empathy to the inanimate. Investigating our connectivity through the corporeal, Eva Tsang materializes massive communication through a tactile web of photo-sculptural substances. Michelle Johnson, too, embraces the cinematic and its fictitious violences, mediating these constructions through her own body on film. I-Fu Chen creates atmospheric narratives through the use of a digital film noir aesthetic investigating generational alienation with an ironic perspective. This collective of emerging artists are embracing and rejecting the inherent ambivalences of a digital age mitigated through ourselves, our communities and our imaginations. For more information please contact: shell.johnson@utoronto.ca