artist lecture: lee goreas

Art and Art History Presents
Lee Goreas
Thursday 5 February 2009
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sheridan, Lecture Hall B124



Toronto artist and Art and Art History professor Lee Goreas maintains a multi-disciplinary practice with a focus on drawing and installation. His work questions the persuasive authority of both popular and institutional culture. Goreas's recent work, entitled Pars & Stars, is currently on view at Hallwalls Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Exhibition curator John Massier: "In what often turns out to be the telling equation in Goreas' work, what at first appears ludicrous eventually blossoms into entirely unexpected but fulsome significance. By collapsing the art and golf worlds, Goreas is mocking neither art nor golf, but recognizing their shared attitudes - either can be aggressive, elegant, frustrating, or sublime."

Goreas completed a MFA at York University and a BFA at the University of Victoria; he also holds a Diploma from UBC Okanagan. He has been a practicing professional artist for 19 years, and exhibits locally, nationally and internationally. Goreas is represented by BirchLibralato in Toronto.

BLK: 1st and 2nd year exhibition

exhibition: daryl vocat

lecture: cheryl sourkes

Art and Art History Presents

Cheryl Sourkes

Thursday 27 January 2009
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

Sheridan, Lecture Hall B124

Cheryl Sourkes is a lens-based artist, writer and curator. She studied psychology and biology at McGill University before moving to Vancouver in 1967. There, she became involved with Intermedia, a Dadaist artist organization that prefigured Canada’s artist-run movement. Presently, she divides her time between Toronto and Manchester, England. Sourkes’s work investigates the visual dimension of technology, especially social and cultural developments that have arisen with Internet webcams. Selections of this work, Public Camera recently toured to The National Gallery of Canada. Sourkes is represented by Peak Gallery in Toronto, Division Gallery in Montreal and twenty + 3 projects in Manchester, England. Cheryl Sourkes also curates the project space at akau.

electronic shamanism

"It is through the flesh that we will make the metaphysical manifest in our spirits."
- Antonin Artaud

ELECTRONIC SHAMANISM
Jackson 2bears & Ted Hiebert, Joseph Lefevre & Martine Koutnouyan, Geoffrey Pugen and Alyce Santoro

Curated by Min-Jeong (M.J.) Kim.

Alyce Santoro's Satellite Dish Hat

Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 8pm
Exhibition runs January 23-February 28, 2009
InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, 9 Ossington Ave, Toronto

InterAccess is pleased to present Electronic Shamanism, an exhibition of four interactive electronic media art works from Victoria, Toronto, Montreal and Texas that incorporate kinesthetic interaction and a wide range of sensorial engagements to examine the similarity between the shamanic experience and our interactions with high technology. The works in the exhibition also consider technology as a vehicle and mediator of shamanistic experiences, bringing spirituality and technology together, combining age old rituals and emergent media.

Please join us on Friday, January 23 at 8pm for a special opening reception, with an interactive performance by Victoria based artists' Jackson 2bears and Ted Hiebert.

More about the works in the exhibition:
Bringing together contemporary techno-cultural studies and indigenous teachings, 2bears and Hiebert's (Victoria) performance Electronic Shamanism is a study in the manifestation of an alternative self through the application of technology and trance. The performance incorporates experimental sound and video, brainwaves, neurofeedback and hardware self-hypnosis techniques to create an ever-looping process of self evaluation and activation.

Joseph Lefevre & Martine Koutnouyan's (Montreal) The Shaman's Space is an interactive web installation that prompts gallery goers to take on the role of shaman: they wander through this cyber realm, meet spirits of the past, become friends with a family of Siberian bears, beat on caveman drums and float through the air. This uncanny yet welcoming world converges with reality through links acting as mediators connecting the human and the sacred, the real and the imaginary.

Toronto's own Geoffrey Pugen's Aerobia is a whimsical interactive piece that seeks to identify a person's inner animal and manifest it spiritually and physically. Participants enter a lycra-enclosed cocoon-like structure where they are prompted to discover their inner animal through a video that is reminiscent of a 1980s instructional workout video. This playful piece promotes the rediscovery of human beings' primitive urges to revisit their deepest subjective animal desires.

Finally, Texas based Alyce Santoro plays with notions of past lives and other world life. With Sonic Dress, communication with the past is made easy through this playful piece created out of woven audio cassette tape that, when rubbed with a special glove, culls forth voices of other times. Likewise, in Satellite Dish Hat, the participant is able to connect with otherworld beings through pseudo scientific interaction. For Santoro, anything in our everyday life can be interacted with as a sacred object that inspires us spiritually and connects us with the spiritual world.

For more information about the exhibition, please go to: www.interaccess.org.

InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre
9 Ossington Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M6J 2Y8
Canada
T +1.416.599.7206
F +1.416.599.7015
help(dot)me(at)interaccess(dot)org

nelson henricks: exhibition and artist talk

Trinity Square Video presents
Map of the City
Nelson Henricks

Exhibition:
January 16 - February 14, 2009
Opening Reception:
Friday, January 16, 2009, 5 - 8pm
Artist Talk:
Saturday, January 17, 2009 2 - 4pm

Trinity Square Video is pleased to present the Toronto premiere of Map of the City by Montreal-based artist Nelson Henricks. Initiated during a six-month artist residency in Rome, Henricks was inspired by chapels and cathedrals that are three-dimensional representations of biblical texts. From the central concept of a "building-as-book", Henricks builds a vision of the urban environment as a library that requires both readers and writers.

Map of the City is constructed as a sequence of exuberantly colourful still images interspersed with text written by Henricks and culled from The Gospel of Thomas and The Bible. Echoing themes in Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Library of Babel, Henricks presents himself as a dutiful librarian classifying and preserving the endless images he encounters in the city.

Bio: Nelson Henricks teaches at Concordia and McGill Universities. He is a graduate of Alberta College of Art and Design (1986) and Concordia's Film Production Program (1994). His works have been presented at galleries, museums and festivals worldwide and are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museo des bellas artes Buenos Aires. Henricks was awarded the Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art.

Trinity Square Video Gallery
401 Richmond St. West, Suite 376
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
416 593-1332
www.trinitysquarevideo.com

Exhibition hours:
M - F 10am - 6pm, S 12 - 4pm

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MEDIA CONTACT
Roy Mitchell
Executive Director
Trinity Square Video
roy@trinitysquarevideo.com
(416) 593-1332

a night of performance