Art and Art History Presents
Vera Frenkel
Thursday 11 March 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan B124
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville
Rooted in an interrogation of the abuses of power and their consequences, projects by multidisciplinary artist Vera Frenkel have been seen at documenta IX, Kassel; the Offenes Kulturhaus Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz; the Setagaya Museum, Tokyo; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Biennale di Venezia (Club Media, 1997; Head Start, 2001) among other important venues.
Frenkel’s videotapes, installations, photographs, writings, audio works and new media projects explore the forces at work in human migration, experiences of displacement and deracination, their effect on the learning and unlearning of cultural memory, and the increasing bureaucratization of everyday life.
Frenkel’s video-photo-web project on art theft as cultural policy, Body Missing, installed most recently at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna, 2008, was the focus of From Theft to Virtuality, an international conference on the artist’s work organized at the ICA, London, by art historian, Griselda Pollock. The conference papers will form the basis for the first published anthology on Vera Frenkel’s work.
The Institute™: Or, What We Do for Love, a touring installation and a website on the theme of a dysfunctional cultural institution, was seen most recently at the National Gallery of Canada as part of the exhibition of work by recipients of the Governor General’s Award in Media and Visual Arts.
Frenkel’s newest video, ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive, received its world première at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam (November, 2008), and its Canadian première at the Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto (April, 2009).
A mid-career survey of Frenkel’s video works, the Spotlight at the Images Festival of Film, Video and New Media, curated by Dot Tuer, provided the core selection to which new material was added for Of Memory and Displacement / Vera Frenkel: Collected Works, a four disk DVD/CD-ROM boxed set available from Vtape Distribution, Toronto.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
artist lecture: swintak & don miller
Art and Art History Presents
Christine Swintak & Don Miller
Thursday 25 February 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, B124
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville, ON L6H 2L1
Christine Swintak is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in a number of media including performance, intervention, installation and multimedia. She has exhibited at galleries, festivals and museums across Canada and internationally, including HMK Mariakapel (Holland), Model Niland (Ireland), DCR Guest Studios (Holland), YYZ Artist's Outlet (Toronto), Toronto Free Gallery (Toronto), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Art City Festival of Art and Architecture (Calgary), Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax) and Rockefeller Centre (New York). Swintak has also presented numerous independent public interventions and relational happenings in places like Shelburne, Amsterdam, Banff, Vancouver, Teslin, New York, Salt Lake City, Death Valley and Los Angeles. Her projects include building a full-scale ship through collective improvisation, running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld, transforming a dumpster into a luxury boutique hotel, promoting urban quickand pits, creating a symmetrical frontispiece out of two mirrored rooms, attempting to give a shed a consciousness, and producing a series of impossible project proposals. Swintak received a BFA in 2003 from NSCAD University and is committed to continual self-directed research.
Don Miller is an idea-based visual artist, intuitive carpenter and poet who lives near Shelburne, Ontario. Miller works in a number of media including performance, video, installation, experimental architecture, snow sculpture and written word. He also works with stone, steel and wood to generate income to fund his artistic pursuits; his creative endeavours infiltrate his life, and his life tends to be infiltrated by his art. Though the majority of his projects are produced independently, outside the gallery network, Miller has also presented performances, videos, readings and interventions at Ghost Ship (Amsterdam), York University (Toronto), Knock on Woods (Holland), Pleasure Dome/ Cinecycle (Toronto), Engine Gallery (Toronto), Tranzac (Toronto), and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax). His projects include an ongoing series of sensory deprivation and/or sensory enhancement snow caves, a large one-of-a-kind frankenhouse created from numerous century-old barns, spoken-word performances at various venues, and creating what he terms "a strategy for living." Miller received a BFA in 2002 from NSCAD University.
Christine Swintak and Don Miller met at NSCAD in 1998. Though they have been involved with each other's projects for the past decade, their upcoming Blackwood Gallery exhibition is their first large-scale exhibition together as an equal-authorship collaboration. Neither Swintak nor Miller had a cottage in their childhood.
Image: Swintak, The Thing That Won't Let You Walk Away (installation view, Art Gallery of Ontario), 2005-8.
Christine Swintak & Don Miller
Thursday 25 February 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, B124
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville, ON L6H 2L1
Christine Swintak is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in a number of media including performance, intervention, installation and multimedia. She has exhibited at galleries, festivals and museums across Canada and internationally, including HMK Mariakapel (Holland), Model Niland (Ireland), DCR Guest Studios (Holland), YYZ Artist's Outlet (Toronto), Toronto Free Gallery (Toronto), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Art City Festival of Art and Architecture (Calgary), Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax) and Rockefeller Centre (New York). Swintak has also presented numerous independent public interventions and relational happenings in places like Shelburne, Amsterdam, Banff, Vancouver, Teslin, New York, Salt Lake City, Death Valley and Los Angeles. Her projects include building a full-scale ship through collective improvisation, running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld, transforming a dumpster into a luxury boutique hotel, promoting urban quickand pits, creating a symmetrical frontispiece out of two mirrored rooms, attempting to give a shed a consciousness, and producing a series of impossible project proposals. Swintak received a BFA in 2003 from NSCAD University and is committed to continual self-directed research.
Don Miller is an idea-based visual artist, intuitive carpenter and poet who lives near Shelburne, Ontario. Miller works in a number of media including performance, video, installation, experimental architecture, snow sculpture and written word. He also works with stone, steel and wood to generate income to fund his artistic pursuits; his creative endeavours infiltrate his life, and his life tends to be infiltrated by his art. Though the majority of his projects are produced independently, outside the gallery network, Miller has also presented performances, videos, readings and interventions at Ghost Ship (Amsterdam), York University (Toronto), Knock on Woods (Holland), Pleasure Dome/ Cinecycle (Toronto), Engine Gallery (Toronto), Tranzac (Toronto), and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax). His projects include an ongoing series of sensory deprivation and/or sensory enhancement snow caves, a large one-of-a-kind frankenhouse created from numerous century-old barns, spoken-word performances at various venues, and creating what he terms "a strategy for living." Miller received a BFA in 2002 from NSCAD University.
Christine Swintak and Don Miller met at NSCAD in 1998. Though they have been involved with each other's projects for the past decade, their upcoming Blackwood Gallery exhibition is their first large-scale exhibition together as an equal-authorship collaboration. Neither Swintak nor Miller had a cottage in their childhood.
Image: Swintak, The Thing That Won't Let You Walk Away (installation view, Art Gallery of Ontario), 2005-8.
artist lecture: john brown
Art and Art History Presents
John Brown
Tuesday 11 February 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, B124
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville, ON L6H 2L1
John Brown has been working and living in Toronto since the mid 1970's. He was educated at the Ontario College of Art and the University of Guelph. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally since 1982 and is currently represented by the Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto and by Wilde Gallery in Berlin. His work is represented in public and private collections in Canada the US and Europe.
Brown: For the last few years I have been making large paintings in oil on wood whose main subject would appear to be indeterminacy. I am interested in making images that are in process of becoming or unbecoming. The paintings are not abstract but iconic. The images I start with are usually drawn from newspaper photographs, photos taken off the Internet or images from books in my studio. Sometimes the images are manipulated on Photoshop and sometimes they painted over with oil or gouache and sometimes they are left as they are and stapled on to the painting surface. The finished paintings often bear no relation to the image I started with.
Image: John Brown, May 26 2021 (2010), Oil on panel, 7 x 6 feet
John Brown
Tuesday 11 February 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, B124
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville, ON L6H 2L1
John Brown has been working and living in Toronto since the mid 1970's. He was educated at the Ontario College of Art and the University of Guelph. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally since 1982 and is currently represented by the Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto and by Wilde Gallery in Berlin. His work is represented in public and private collections in Canada the US and Europe.
Brown: For the last few years I have been making large paintings in oil on wood whose main subject would appear to be indeterminacy. I am interested in making images that are in process of becoming or unbecoming. The paintings are not abstract but iconic. The images I start with are usually drawn from newspaper photographs, photos taken off the Internet or images from books in my studio. Sometimes the images are manipulated on Photoshop and sometimes they painted over with oil or gouache and sometimes they are left as they are and stapled on to the painting surface. The finished paintings often bear no relation to the image I started with.
Image: John Brown, May 26 2021 (2010), Oil on panel, 7 x 6 feet
artist lecture: therese bolliger
and Oakville Galleries Presents
Therese Bolliger
in dialogue with curator
Shannon Anderson
Tuesday 9 February 2010
Bus leaves Sheridan from AA Wing Loop at 12:15 PM
Talk starts at 12:30 PM at Gairloch Gallery
A light lunch will be served
Gairloch Gallery, Oakville Galleries
1306 Lakeshore Road East, Oakville
Therese Bolliger Four Echoes Curated by Shannon Anderson
5 December 2010 - 28 February 2010
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
This exhibition brings together a selection of recent drawings and sculptures by Toronto artist Therese Bolliger. Occupying the four gallery spaces of Gairloch Gardens, Four Echoes is an exploration of the essence of form, as Bolliger articulates memory’s place between past and present, translates mathematical and philosophical constructs into objects, and explores the outer reaches of the body.
Therese Bolliger Artist Statement
Since the mid-nineties, my practice has focused on the gaps between image and language, between object and viewer. A large body of wall-dependent text pieces addressed issues of reception of artworks.
The exhibition at Gairloch Gardens consists of three bodies of work, two series of works on paper and a group of floor sculptures. Fragments of forms, at the threshold of the perceptible, juxtaposed with elements of text, bring into consciousness specific works by artists with whom I have shared an aesthetic space and sensibility.
The floor sculptures, entitled Heffalumps suggest a slippage between what is animal and what is human. The idiosyncratic materials are destabilizing notions of abstraction, infusing the pieces with psychological connotations. There is a deliberate shift away from weighty substances and elaborate processes linked with traditional sculpture towards materials associated with the everyday. Abstract forms, derived from the context of knot theory act as a manifestation, a sensate residue of their process of production.
In the Interior Schema drawings, layered, abstract forms reference constructs of interiority and exteriority. They attempt to acknowledge and articulate the ephemeral nature of experience, memory and time.
Therese Bolliger Biography
Therese Bolliger was born in Switzerland where she studied at the Schools of Visual Arts in Berne and Basel before moving to Canada. She currently resides in Toronto. She has taught in the Visual Arts Department of the University of Guelph and at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Between 1983 and 2008 she was a professor in the Art and Art History Program.
Recent exhibitions include the following: Fray, Koffler Gallery, Toronto; The Cold City Years, The Power Plant, Toronto; Mask and Metamorphosis, Art Gallery of Hamilton; Ellipsis, Koffler Gallery, Toronto and University of Rochester; The Word in Contemporary Canadian Art, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto.
Shannon Anderson Biography
Shannon Anderson is a freelance writer, curator and editor based in Oakville, Ontario. Currently a member of Oakville Galleries Acquisition Committee, she was previously Curatorial Assistant and Registrar at Oakville Galleries for seven years, where she also curated such exhibitions as Burrow and numerous exhibitions from the permanent collection. Most recently, Anderson was Associate Editor for Designlines Toronto and Azure Magazine, publications dedicated to art, design and architecture.
Image: Therese Bolliger, Heffalump (2009)
Monday, January 18, 2010
call for submissions: freedom clothing collective
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Freedom is currently accepting submissions and proposals from emerging local artists for the 2010 program of exhibitions.
SPECIFICATIONS
We welcome all forms of media; being innovative and thinking outside the box are quite mandatory!
Submission Requirements:
- Artist’s statement (max 500 words)
- Medium-high res images of all works to be considered (file name is to correspond with work title)
- A detailed list of all submitted works to specify their dimensions, value, and medium
Please send in your submission package to arts.freedomcc@gmail.com with “GENERAL SUBMISSION – (ARTIST’S NAME)” as the subject. Please include your name in the file names of all attached documents.
No submission fee is applicable, however selected artists are subject to an exhibition fee of $20. All works sold in the premises will be subject to 30% commission.
APPLICATION DEADLINES
Round 1: FEBRUARY 8th, 2010
Round 2: MARCH 8th, 2010
Round 3: APRIL 5th, 2010
ABOUT US
Freedom Clothing Collective is a non-profit art and design space. Our collective passion is to provide emerging artists and designers with an opportunity for publication within our supportive network.
Any inquiries may be directed via e-mail.
the blackwood is looking for volunteers
The Blackwood Gallery is seeking volunteers to assist with our upcoming exhibition entitled "LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION!".
We are looking for Volunteer Gallery Attendants for Thomas Cottage (the old cottage near the Kaneff and the Student Centre). Thomas Cottage will be our 3rd site for this exhibition, in addition to the Blackwood (Kaneff) and eGallery (CCT).
The exhibition runs from Wednesday, January 27 to Sunday, March 7 and the hours of operation are:
Monday to Friday: 12 - 5pm
Wednesdays to 9pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12 - 3pm
(closed on civic holidays)
We are looking for punctual and reliable volunteers who can work 2 to 5 hours a week, during our hours of operation and throughout the entire 5-week run of the exhibition.
Volunteers will be responsible for opening the gallery on time, greeting visitors to the space and answering questions about the exhibition. This is a great opportunity for anyone who wants experience working in a gallery environment and are curious about the contemporary art world.
One thing we would like to mention upfront is that Thomas Cottage is an old building that has not been well maintained over the years. Unfortunately it has a mild odour and I would discourage anyone with severe respiratory conditions or allergies (especially to dust) from signing up. That being said, the space has been carefully cleaned and is heated. Attendants will be allowed to have a friend sit with them while they are watching the space. If you have any questions or concerns about sitting the cottage, please let me know.
We promise that Thomas Cottage will offer a truly "unique" gallery sitting experience. Making "gallery spaces" from the most unlikely habitats and altering environments is very much "on par" with what is happening everywhere else in contemporary art. To participate in an exhibition this ambitious, especially at a university gallery is a remarkable thing. I hope that you will consider taking at least one shift at the space and help support the gallery.
If you are interested in a shift, please send me your date and time preference by Friday January 22rd. If you have any friends that are interested, please feel free to pass on this message. For more information on the exhibition, please read below.
Lastly, we are hosting a special tour THIS Wednesday at 2pm starting at the Blackwood Gallery in Kaneff. It is called the "Hard Hat Tour" and the artists will be giving a personal tour of the galleries AND the cottage. (See attached poster.) So, if you would like to get a "peek" of the cottage, please join us on Wednesday. I will be in attendance and can answer any questions you might have about this volunteer opportunity.
Best,
Juliana Zalucky
Exhibition Coordinator
----------------------------
Blackwood Gallery
University of Toronto at Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd. N.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
T: 905 828 3789 F: 905 569 4262
www.blackwoodgallery.ca <http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOCATION! LOCATION! LOCATION!
January 27 – March 7, 2010
Collaborative work by Christine Swintak and Don Miller
Curated by Christof Migone
Opening Reception
Wednesday, January 27th 6 – 9pm.
A free bus leaves OCAD (100 McCaul Street, Toronto) at 6:30 pm and returns to OCAD at 9 pm.
Artists in attendance.
Three sites. Three stages. Three locations, and one event intertwines the three. First, in one location, a cottage is gutted. Second, the cottage's interior is reconstituted in our two gallery locations as a temporary display which functions simultaneously as an architectural autopsy, a time capsule, a resuscitation, a dump display, a scavenger manual, a surgical dismantlement, a reverse gentrification, a study of inefficiency, an erased erasure, and a memento mori. The second stage enacts a delayed forgetting, it forestalls the inevitable discarding, it impedes the third unknowable stage of oblivion from ever occurring. Christine Swintak and Don Miller intervene in the course of a campus in the midst of a growth spurt; they balance the equation whereby as new buildings break ground and emerge, others fade underground. The cottage in question, the Thomas Cottage, is a small late 19th century building that sits in the middle of the UTM campus and precedes the establishment of the campus and even its predecessor, Erindale College. The artists methodically take apart the dilapidated and maligned cottage and not only stage a slowing down in anticipation of its impending demolition, they also animate and transform it into a chimerical entity. The cottage, now in a pseudo post-mortem state and no longer listed in the property registry, enters the realm of sitelessness. Robert Smithson described his non-sites as "maps of material" which not only delimit space but also "involve a consciousness of time." Swintak and Miller provide a similar sensitivity to this continuum. The layered histories of the cottage, from the banal to the apocryphal, are present in both gallery spaces. The installation presents a portal to a pastoral past, but also reflects its university-based gallery setting as a white cubed cog in the knowledge industry. Neither narrative is idealized or demonized, in other words, the project acknowledges the fissures and fractures inherent in architecture. The invisible structures of society are made manifest in the structures of our buildings. In short, architecture not only speaks volume, it also speaks power. Consequently, with a conviction that is both resolute and risible, Swintak and Miller pervert the conventions and dub the cottage a sovereign. In honor of what would otherwise be an unnoticed demise, they then produce an installation which proclaims, The Cottage is dead! Long live the Cottage!
Christof Migone, Director/Curator
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Christine Swintak is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in a number of media including performance, intervention, installation and multimedia. She has exhibited at galleries, festivals and museums across Canada and internationally, including HMK Mariakapel (Holland), Model Niland (Ireland), DCR Guest Studios (Holland), YYZ Artist's Outlet (Toronto), Toronto Free Gallery (Toronto), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), ArtCity Festival of Art and Architecture (Calgary), Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax) and Rockefeller Centre (New York). Swintak has also presented numerous independent public interventions and relational happenings in places like Shelburne, Amsterdam, Banff, Vancouver, Teslin, New York, Salt Lake City, Death Valley and Los Angeles. Her projects include building a full scale ship through collective improvisation, running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld, transforming a dumpster into a luxury boutique hotel, promoting urban quicksand pits, creating a symmetrical frontispiece out of two mirrored rooms, attempting to give a shed a consciousness, and producing a series of impossible project proposals. Swintak received a BFA in 2003 from NSCAD University and is committed to continual self-directed research.
Don Miller is an idea-based visual artist, intuitive carpenter and poet who lives near Shelburne, Ontario. Miller works in a number of media including performance, video, installation, experimental architecture, snow sculpture and written word. He also works with stone, steel and wood to generate income to fund his artistic pursuits; his creative endeavours tend to infiltrate his life, and his life tends to infiltrate his art. Though the majority of his projects are produced independently, outside the gallery network, Miller has also presented performances, videos, readings and interventions at Ghost Ship (Amsterdam), York University (Toronto), Knock on Woods (Holland), Pleasure Dome/Cinecycle (Toronto), Engine Gallery (Toronto), Tranzac (Toronto), and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax). His projects include an ongoing series of sensory deprivation and/or sensory enhancement snow caves, a large one of a kind frankenhouse constructed from numerous century old barns, spoken word performances at various venues, and creating what he terms "a strategy for living." Don received a BFA in 2002 from NSCAD University.
Christine Swintak and Don Miller met at NSCAD in 1998. Though they have been involved with each other's projects for the past decade, this is their first large scale exhibition working together as an equal authorship collaborative. Neither Swintak nor Don had a cottage in their childhood.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Sunday January 31st, 11:30-5:30pm.
FREE Contemporary Art Bus Tour
Tour starts at 11:30 am at 23 Beverly Street (Koffler Centre off-site space) and then departs for Blackwood, Art Gallery of York University and Doris McCarthy Gallery. To make a reservation, contact the Blackwood Gallery at blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca or 905-828-3789.
Monday March 1st, 2-4 pm
The Blackwood Talks:
Location is Everything: site and non-site in the work of Christine Swintak and Don Miller
Narrated tour by Michelle Jacques (Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Ontario).
At the Blackwood Gallery.
For more information, call 905 828 3789 or visit www.blackwoodgallery.ca <http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/>
Support generously provided by The Canada Council for the Arts, University of Toronto Student Housing and Residence Life (Mississauga) and The Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Blackwood Gallery
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd. N.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
www.blackwoodgallery.ca <http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/>
blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca <mailto:blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca>
905.828.3789
Gallery Hours
Monday to Friday: 12 - 5pm
Wednesdays to 9pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12 - 3pm
(closed on civic holidays)
We are looking for Volunteer Gallery Attendants for Thomas Cottage (the old cottage near the Kaneff and the Student Centre). Thomas Cottage will be our 3rd site for this exhibition, in addition to the Blackwood (Kaneff) and eGallery (CCT).
The exhibition runs from Wednesday, January 27 to Sunday, March 7 and the hours of operation are:
Monday to Friday: 12 - 5pm
Wednesdays to 9pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12 - 3pm
(closed on civic holidays)
We are looking for punctual and reliable volunteers who can work 2 to 5 hours a week, during our hours of operation and throughout the entire 5-week run of the exhibition.
Volunteers will be responsible for opening the gallery on time, greeting visitors to the space and answering questions about the exhibition. This is a great opportunity for anyone who wants experience working in a gallery environment and are curious about the contemporary art world.
One thing we would like to mention upfront is that Thomas Cottage is an old building that has not been well maintained over the years. Unfortunately it has a mild odour and I would discourage anyone with severe respiratory conditions or allergies (especially to dust) from signing up. That being said, the space has been carefully cleaned and is heated. Attendants will be allowed to have a friend sit with them while they are watching the space. If you have any questions or concerns about sitting the cottage, please let me know.
We promise that Thomas Cottage will offer a truly "unique" gallery sitting experience. Making "gallery spaces" from the most unlikely habitats and altering environments is very much "on par" with what is happening everywhere else in contemporary art. To participate in an exhibition this ambitious, especially at a university gallery is a remarkable thing. I hope that you will consider taking at least one shift at the space and help support the gallery.
If you are interested in a shift, please send me your date and time preference by Friday January 22rd. If you have any friends that are interested, please feel free to pass on this message. For more information on the exhibition, please read below.
Lastly, we are hosting a special tour THIS Wednesday at 2pm starting at the Blackwood Gallery in Kaneff. It is called the "Hard Hat Tour" and the artists will be giving a personal tour of the galleries AND the cottage. (See attached poster.) So, if you would like to get a "peek" of the cottage, please join us on Wednesday. I will be in attendance and can answer any questions you might have about this volunteer opportunity.
Best,
Juliana Zalucky
Exhibition Coordinator
----------------------------
Blackwood Gallery
University of Toronto at Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd. N.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
T: 905 828 3789 F: 905 569 4262
www.blackwoodgallery.ca <http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOCATION! LOCATION! LOCATION!
January 27 – March 7, 2010
Collaborative work by Christine Swintak and Don Miller
Curated by Christof Migone
Opening Reception
Wednesday, January 27th 6 – 9pm.
A free bus leaves OCAD (100 McCaul Street, Toronto) at 6:30 pm and returns to OCAD at 9 pm.
Artists in attendance.
Three sites. Three stages. Three locations, and one event intertwines the three. First, in one location, a cottage is gutted. Second, the cottage's interior is reconstituted in our two gallery locations as a temporary display which functions simultaneously as an architectural autopsy, a time capsule, a resuscitation, a dump display, a scavenger manual, a surgical dismantlement, a reverse gentrification, a study of inefficiency, an erased erasure, and a memento mori. The second stage enacts a delayed forgetting, it forestalls the inevitable discarding, it impedes the third unknowable stage of oblivion from ever occurring. Christine Swintak and Don Miller intervene in the course of a campus in the midst of a growth spurt; they balance the equation whereby as new buildings break ground and emerge, others fade underground. The cottage in question, the Thomas Cottage, is a small late 19th century building that sits in the middle of the UTM campus and precedes the establishment of the campus and even its predecessor, Erindale College. The artists methodically take apart the dilapidated and maligned cottage and not only stage a slowing down in anticipation of its impending demolition, they also animate and transform it into a chimerical entity. The cottage, now in a pseudo post-mortem state and no longer listed in the property registry, enters the realm of sitelessness. Robert Smithson described his non-sites as "maps of material" which not only delimit space but also "involve a consciousness of time." Swintak and Miller provide a similar sensitivity to this continuum. The layered histories of the cottage, from the banal to the apocryphal, are present in both gallery spaces. The installation presents a portal to a pastoral past, but also reflects its university-based gallery setting as a white cubed cog in the knowledge industry. Neither narrative is idealized or demonized, in other words, the project acknowledges the fissures and fractures inherent in architecture. The invisible structures of society are made manifest in the structures of our buildings. In short, architecture not only speaks volume, it also speaks power. Consequently, with a conviction that is both resolute and risible, Swintak and Miller pervert the conventions and dub the cottage a sovereign. In honor of what would otherwise be an unnoticed demise, they then produce an installation which proclaims, The Cottage is dead! Long live the Cottage!
Christof Migone, Director/Curator
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Christine Swintak is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in a number of media including performance, intervention, installation and multimedia. She has exhibited at galleries, festivals and museums across Canada and internationally, including HMK Mariakapel (Holland), Model Niland (Ireland), DCR Guest Studios (Holland), YYZ Artist's Outlet (Toronto), Toronto Free Gallery (Toronto), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), ArtCity Festival of Art and Architecture (Calgary), Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax) and Rockefeller Centre (New York). Swintak has also presented numerous independent public interventions and relational happenings in places like Shelburne, Amsterdam, Banff, Vancouver, Teslin, New York, Salt Lake City, Death Valley and Los Angeles. Her projects include building a full scale ship through collective improvisation, running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld, transforming a dumpster into a luxury boutique hotel, promoting urban quicksand pits, creating a symmetrical frontispiece out of two mirrored rooms, attempting to give a shed a consciousness, and producing a series of impossible project proposals. Swintak received a BFA in 2003 from NSCAD University and is committed to continual self-directed research.
Don Miller is an idea-based visual artist, intuitive carpenter and poet who lives near Shelburne, Ontario. Miller works in a number of media including performance, video, installation, experimental architecture, snow sculpture and written word. He also works with stone, steel and wood to generate income to fund his artistic pursuits; his creative endeavours tend to infiltrate his life, and his life tends to infiltrate his art. Though the majority of his projects are produced independently, outside the gallery network, Miller has also presented performances, videos, readings and interventions at Ghost Ship (Amsterdam), York University (Toronto), Knock on Woods (Holland), Pleasure Dome/Cinecycle (Toronto), Engine Gallery (Toronto), Tranzac (Toronto), and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax). His projects include an ongoing series of sensory deprivation and/or sensory enhancement snow caves, a large one of a kind frankenhouse constructed from numerous century old barns, spoken word performances at various venues, and creating what he terms "a strategy for living." Don received a BFA in 2002 from NSCAD University.
Christine Swintak and Don Miller met at NSCAD in 1998. Though they have been involved with each other's projects for the past decade, this is their first large scale exhibition working together as an equal authorship collaborative. Neither Swintak nor Don had a cottage in their childhood.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Sunday January 31st, 11:30-5:30pm.
FREE Contemporary Art Bus Tour
Tour starts at 11:30 am at 23 Beverly Street (Koffler Centre off-site space) and then departs for Blackwood, Art Gallery of York University and Doris McCarthy Gallery. To make a reservation, contact the Blackwood Gallery at blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca or 905-828-3789.
Monday March 1st, 2-4 pm
The Blackwood Talks:
Location is Everything: site and non-site in the work of Christine Swintak and Don Miller
Narrated tour by Michelle Jacques (Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Ontario).
At the Blackwood Gallery.
For more information, call 905 828 3789 or visit www.blackwoodgallery.ca <http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/>
Support generously provided by The Canada Council for the Arts, University of Toronto Student Housing and Residence Life (Mississauga) and The Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Blackwood Gallery
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd. N.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
www.blackwoodgallery.ca <http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/>
blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca <mailto:blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca>
905.828.3789
Gallery Hours
Monday to Friday: 12 - 5pm
Wednesdays to 9pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12 - 3pm
(closed on civic holidays)
jen chan's curatoral incubator: VTAPE
Curatorial Incubator v.7:
FRAK FACEBOOK: celebrating the anti-social
This year, The Curatorial Incubator, v7 – FRAK FACEBOOK: celebrating
the antisocial called for proposals to participate in this research and presentation
project that aims to uncover works that buck the current trend of "social
networking" and "living in public" that is so prevalent today. FRAK FACEBOOK:
celebrating the anti-social explores the urge to burrow under the covers, to hide in
the basement -in short, the drive to NOT connect, to NOT be nice. Our 3 emerging
curators have answered the call with gritty aplomb. With her programme, Mireille
Bourgeois posits stupidity as “an act so powerful that it can interrupt the very
foundation of thought.” The gross and the abject figure prominently in Jennifer Chan’s
selection. And Ted Kerr asks if the internet has changed gay cruising.
After the VIDI THIS! VIDI THAT! marathon screening, all 3 programmes
will be available on request at Vtape in the Video Gallery, February 2-20, 2010.
VIDI THIS… VIDI THAT…
Screening marathon of all 3
Curatorial Incubator v.7 programmes:
FRAK FACEBOOK: celebrating the anti-social
curated by:
Mireille Bourgeois (Ottawa) "Growing Up Stupid"
Jennifer Chan (Toronto) "Feeling Video: Are You Done with Judgment?"
Ted Kerr (Edmonton) White Buffalo’s Return to Emerald Island
Curators will be present
LOCATION:
230 College Street, auditorium, 1st floor
(northeast corner of Huron and College)
Marathon screening and curators’ talks
Saturday, January 30, 2010
12-5pm
Jubal Brown, Operation, 10:00. Courtesy of Vtape.
FRAK FACEBOOK: celebrating the anti-social
This year, The Curatorial Incubator, v7 – FRAK FACEBOOK: celebrating
the antisocial called for proposals to participate in this research and presentation
project that aims to uncover works that buck the current trend of "social
networking" and "living in public" that is so prevalent today. FRAK FACEBOOK:
celebrating the anti-social explores the urge to burrow under the covers, to hide in
the basement -in short, the drive to NOT connect, to NOT be nice. Our 3 emerging
curators have answered the call with gritty aplomb. With her programme, Mireille
Bourgeois posits stupidity as “an act so powerful that it can interrupt the very
foundation of thought.” The gross and the abject figure prominently in Jennifer Chan’s
selection. And Ted Kerr asks if the internet has changed gay cruising.
After the VIDI THIS! VIDI THAT! marathon screening, all 3 programmes
will be available on request at Vtape in the Video Gallery, February 2-20, 2010.
VIDI THIS… VIDI THAT…
Screening marathon of all 3
Curatorial Incubator v.7 programmes:
FRAK FACEBOOK: celebrating the anti-social
curated by:
Mireille Bourgeois (Ottawa) "Growing Up Stupid"
Jennifer Chan (Toronto) "Feeling Video: Are You Done with Judgment?"
Ted Kerr (Edmonton) White Buffalo’s Return to Emerald Island
Curators will be present
LOCATION:
230 College Street, auditorium, 1st floor
(northeast corner of Huron and College)
Marathon screening and curators’ talks
Saturday, January 30, 2010
12-5pm
Jubal Brown, Operation, 10:00. Courtesy of Vtape.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
1st and 2nd exhibition walk-through w/ christof migone
Art and Art History Presents
Christof Migone
Tuesday 26 January 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, The Gallery
Christof Migone will comment on the work in the First- and Second-Year Show
Christof Migone is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 2007.
Migone co-edited the book and CD Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and his writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki, Esse, Inter, etc. He has released six solo audio cds, has appeared on numerous compilations and runs the diminutive label, squintfuckerpress. A monograph on his work, Christof Migone - Sound Voice Perform, was published in 2005. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM presented a retrospective on his work accompanied by a catalog and a DVD entitled Christof Migone - Trou. Migone currently lives in Toronto and is the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Image: portrait of Christof Migone by Crys Cole
exhbition: agyu (oliver husain/brendan fernandes)
AGYU: out there & centre stage.
AGYU is HOT this season!
AGYU is HOT this season!
We’re playing out there centre stage; performing as usual and featuring a whole new cast of characters, who will light up the dark days of winter:
Oliver Husain: Hovering Proxies
21 January – 14 March 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 21, 6 – 9 pm
21 January – 14 March 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 21, 6 – 9 pm
…You are surrounded by the late summer in Tandun's garden in downtown Jakarta where two dogs, Ziggy and Uma, scuffle on the dry grass. Ziggy, the husky, is a bit crazy from the heat. Elegant wrought iron furniture balancing on thin legs, withered vines, broken flowerpots: this is the set for a tropical drama. You are part of the action: invited to step behind the flapping curtain where you might find yourself in the position of an understudy, waiting for the star's fatal slip... As always, the really exciting part happens backstage. Or rather, the really exciting part is that one step through the curtain, that thin in-between space, that slice of a moment…
Brendan Fernandes: Relay League
21 January – 6 June 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 21, 6 – 9 pm
21 January – 6 June 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 21, 6 – 9 pm
…Flashing from the wings, Relay League signals sympathetically to the AGYU’s current exhibitions and, staged as a choreographed light performance. As well, it spills out there onto the York University campus acting as a primitive communications device.
· · · — — — · · · Relay League is a chain of forwarding optical telegraphs used to convey messages of distress or celebration. · — — — · · · Pulsing within the AGYU VITRINES, SOS messages are sent and received. — — — — — Morse code patterns pulse softly and slowly. Neon African mask vibrates more rapidly. The flashes of this optical trance are less scientific than supernatural, less advertising seduction than Voodoo probe. A searchlight maneuvering through an unidentified space adds to the mystery …
A text by Kenneth Montague accompanies the exhibition, published in another coded format as a free take away item at the AGYU.
Get on The Performance Bus with Mantler!
Make the familiar trip out there stranger on the one and only Performance Bus with Toronto performer Mantler (a.k.a. Chris Cummings). Mantler’s Tour Bus is your free ticket to Oliver Husain’s and Brendan Fernandes’ opening night and your serious comic relief for the evening! Part tour guide and part musician, this “childman” is all entertainer! You don’t want to miss this performance! The free AGYU Performance Bus departs OCAD (100 McCaul St.) on Thursday, January 21 at 6 pm sharp and returns downtown at 9 pm.
Alex Wolfson and Bojana Stancic: And so, the animal looked back…
28 January – 14 March 2010
Opening Performances:
Thursday, January 28, 7:30 pm [opening night!] & Friday, January 29, 7:30 pm
Closing Performances:
Thursday, March 11, 7: 30 pm & Friday, March 12, 7:30 pm
28 January – 14 March 2010
Opening Performances:
Thursday, January 28, 7:30 pm [opening night!] & Friday, January 29, 7:30 pm
Closing Performances:
Thursday, March 11, 7: 30 pm & Friday, March 12, 7:30 pm
[Seating is Limited, please call 416.736.5169 to reserve free tickets. Thursday tickets are reserved for individuals on the free performance bus departing from OCAD at 6 pm sharp. There is no bus for the Friday performances.]
Writer/Director: Alex Wolfson/ Set Designer and Visual Concept: Bojana Stancic/Costume Designer: Vanessa Fischer /Sound Designer: Matt Smith Actors: Amy Bowles, Lindsey Clark, Vanessa Dunn, Nika Mistruzzi, Liz Peterson, Evan Webber
…One day Max begins to speak. Then to write. The primatologists are unsure of what to do with this new development. Soon Max begins to compose a long essay on the subject of the separation between man and animal, chimpanzee and animal, man and chimpanzee. Word leaks out to the world at large about Max. People become frenzied. Strange things begin to occur as the world starts slowly to fall apart. Pairs of animals, both human and otherwise, begin to congregate around the laboratory. Finally it becomes clear, Max’s essay is the last words to be spoken before a new flood, a new apocalypse, but unlike the deluge that occurred before the first play, this flood does not simply destroy, it also reconfigures new identities, new shared subjectivities. The play ends not with a prescription of what must come but simply with an understanding that things must change, and what will come is a mystery to them all…
And so, the animal looked back... is a unique venture of the AGYU into the world of experimental theatre, a theatre that has its roots equally in the art world and queer performance. The AGYU has commissioned two new plays under the overall title of And so, the animal looked back..., the performance of which open and conclude an installation that will retain props, performance elements, and projections from the first play.
WITH AN OFF-OFF BROADWAY PRODUCTION!
The Glimmering Grotto: Seven plays over seven days
February 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 8:30 pm
AGYU @ The Department, 1389 Dundas Street West (Toronto)
The Glimmering Grotto: Seven plays over seven days
February 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 8:30 pm
AGYU @ The Department, 1389 Dundas Street West (Toronto)
The Glimmering Grotto is an outcrop week of performances by Oliver Husain, Bojana Stancic, and Alex Wolfson whereby the artists work through a system of limitations with each performance set-up like a game of round robin: three solos, three duos, one group. Each non-performing artist sets limitations upon the two performing. And as for the limitations…there are no limitations on the limitations! The Glimmering Grotto is both a place and an idea. A location and a game. A limitation and an opening...
AND AN ENCORE!
Audio Out
Conducting the Audio Out series from 6 January – 24 February will be Gwen MacGregor and Lewis Nicholson in the production of New Time, a 24-hour sound loop building on recordings of sea clocks made by John Harrison between 1735 and 1759 for reliable global ocean navigation.
The following work, Outside Our Doors, will be under the musical direction of Janice Gurney from 25 February – 7 April. This recording meditates on The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, with translated readings in numerous languages outside the door of the speakers’ homes to the outside of ours.
Foreign Agent
Our new online Foreign Agent series continues with a trip to Colombia as our cultural attaché Astrid Bastin weathered the rain to take you into countless artist studios. She brings you the latest from Bogotá in her feature report exhausting all that the city has to offer from food to cultural institutions, with a special insider’s look at the ArtBo fair.
Look for our upcoming report from Mexico as Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez sets the stage for a cultural getaway in Puerto Vallarta. http://theagyuisoutthere.org/everywhere/
The Art Gallery of York University is a university-affiliated public non-profit contemporary art gallery supported by York University, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council and our membership.
The AGYU is located in the Accolade East Building, 4700 Keele Street Toronto. Gallery hours are: Monday to Friday, 10 am–4 pm; Wednesday, 10am–8 pm; Sunday from noon–5 pm; and closed Saturday. Admission to everything is free.
Out There. AGYU. Where the ordinary is always extraordinary.
www.theAGYUisOutThere.org
~30~
Do you have questions or require further information or images? Please contact Emelie Chhangur, Assistant Director/ Curator, AGYU, +1.416.736.5169 or emelie@yorku.ca
Image: Vlackie O
faculty print exhibition
•
Art & Art History Faculty when-they-were-students
Print Expo
Live late-modernist education. See what the 1940s to 90s were really like. Right here in the Annie Smith Arts Centre. Get to know your faculty as they once were: Young, vibrant and impressionable.
•
Art & Art History Faculty when-they-were-students
Print Expo
Live late-modernist education. See what the 1940s to 90s were really like. Right here in the Annie Smith Arts Centre. Get to know your faculty as they once were: Young, vibrant and impressionable.
•
Monday, January 11, 2010
lecture: jp kelly
Art and Art History Presents
JEAN-PAUL KELLY
Thursday January 21 /12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
RM: B124
“Grounded in self-reflection and readings from psychology and film theory, [his work] addresses issues of self-doubt and personal anxiety, seeking to understand and work through a profound sense of “anticipatory melancholia”… Anticipatory melancholy borrows from the phrase “anticipatory grief” … The loss has not yet happened but is inevitable, and all the more devastating for being imminent yet in the future. For Kelly, the term also refers to his everyday anxieties about aging parents, love relationships, and his own eventual demise. But [his work] is also… witty and amusing work of great charm and self-deprecating humour, conjuring wicked pleasure and irony at the very edge of the abyss.” – Peggy Gale, writing on Kelly’s The Lie in Wait (2006) in the University of Toronto MVS Programme Inaugural Graduating Exhibition catalogue.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
artist lecture: richard purdy
Art and Art History Presents
Richard Purdy
Tuesday 19 January 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, Annie Smith Mezzanine
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville, ON L6H 2L1
Richard Purdy: I am particularly drawn to in situ installations, monumental and serial artworks, texts, sensory art and the creation of videos and performances. Primarily active in the scientific humanities, I work in all mediums. I believe that art is about symbols, and that the symbol colonies I create are larger than fields, techniques or specific disciplines. Embracing the cultural bulimia of our début-de-siècle, I try to fuel the fire ... delighting in enigmas, searching out obscure subject matter, lies, minutiae, and meretricious figures of speech, weaving fictions into them, and teasing them up by the hair.
Born in Ottawa, Richard Purdy is presently a tenured professor of drawing at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. He has mounted over 150 expositions over three decades of practice, and is known as much for his writing as his art making, having published 24 books and catalogues. Recently, Purdy has been active with three-year individual research creation subsidy by both the FQRSC (2004-2007) and the SSHRC (2007-2010). His work is the subject of three Master's theses in Art History, and 266 reviews. In 1998 Richard Purdy launched Les industries perdues with François Hébert, realizing 28 projects in public art with a long list of collaborators, notably Carmelo Arnoldin. In 2001 he received his PhD in artistic practice from UQÀM; his thesis looked at the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist stupa. In 2006 he was awarded his University's Institutional Research Prize. Presently, he is directing the Research Creation Laboratory in Sensory Art at UQTR. This summer Richard Purdy will mount a large-scale installation at the Espace Shawinigan, Quebec.
Image: L'Oeil de l'artiste (2008), digital photograph
Richard Purdy
Tuesday 19 January 2010
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, Annie Smith Mezzanine
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville, ON L6H 2L1
Richard Purdy: I am particularly drawn to in situ installations, monumental and serial artworks, texts, sensory art and the creation of videos and performances. Primarily active in the scientific humanities, I work in all mediums. I believe that art is about symbols, and that the symbol colonies I create are larger than fields, techniques or specific disciplines. Embracing the cultural bulimia of our début-de-siècle, I try to fuel the fire ... delighting in enigmas, searching out obscure subject matter, lies, minutiae, and meretricious figures of speech, weaving fictions into them, and teasing them up by the hair.
Born in Ottawa, Richard Purdy is presently a tenured professor of drawing at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. He has mounted over 150 expositions over three decades of practice, and is known as much for his writing as his art making, having published 24 books and catalogues. Recently, Purdy has been active with three-year individual research creation subsidy by both the FQRSC (2004-2007) and the SSHRC (2007-2010). His work is the subject of three Master's theses in Art History, and 266 reviews. In 1998 Richard Purdy launched Les industries perdues with François Hébert, realizing 28 projects in public art with a long list of collaborators, notably Carmelo Arnoldin. In 2001 he received his PhD in artistic practice from UQÀM; his thesis looked at the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist stupa. In 2006 he was awarded his University's Institutional Research Prize. Presently, he is directing the Research Creation Laboratory in Sensory Art at UQTR. This summer Richard Purdy will mount a large-scale installation at the Espace Shawinigan, Quebec.
Image: L'Oeil de l'artiste (2008), digital photograph
Monday, January 4, 2010
call for submissions
Hello Art and Art History Faculty,
I am writing you to solicit student art work from your classes. I am currently working on a small installation piece in conjunction with the Blackwood Gallery for an event entitled “Art’s Birthday” taking place at the Erin Meadows Community Centre on Jan 16th from noon - 5pm.
The work is called “Purposeful Purposelessness” and based on the work of Arman, a Neo- Dadaist French sculptor. In the spirit of his accumulation pieces, I would like to invite students to submit unfinished or abandoned work or research for the show. The purpose of this installation is to showcase the art that will never be showcased, art that has been considered a failure or incomplete or abandoned. Research is welcomed as well.
Multimedia art such video or audio art pieces will also be included in this installation.
Students must submit all work with their names clearly marked on the piece. Should any student submit video work, it should be placed on a CD in a .mov format or sent to the following e-mail address, Shell.c.johnson@gmail.com. Work should be dropped off by January 14th by 5 pm at the latest at a location designated by faculty. There is some risk that work may be damaged in the process of installation, as in the nature of Arman’s work, the small display case will jammed full of all the submitted work. We will attempt to return work to students. All participants will have their names included in the exhibition labeling.
I thank you for your time,
In conjunction with the Blackwood Gallery,
Michelle Johnson
M.A. candidate in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies
Columbia University
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