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.