Category: Exhibitions & Publications (Page 2 of 6)

Publication- Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies

March 11, 2020 /

Elastic Spaces directors, Leila Sujir (Concordia University) and Anthony Head (Bath Spa University), have contributed a chapter to the recently published book, Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies edited by Gabriel Menotti and Virginia Crisp by Oxford University Press.

To many, the technological aspects of projection often go unnoticed, only brought to attention during moments of crisis or malfunction. For example, when a movie theater projector falters, the audience suddenly looks toward the back of the theater to see a sign of mechanical failure. The history of cinema similarly shows that the attention to projection has been most focused when the whole medium is hanging in suspension. During Hollywood’s economic consolidation in the ’30s, projection defined the ways that sync-sound technologies could be deployed within the medium. Most recently, the digitization of cinema repeated this process as technology was reworked to facilitate mobility. These examples show how projection continually speaks to the rearrangement of media technology. Projection therefore needs to be examined as a pivotal element in the future of visual media’s technological transition. In Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies, volume editors Gabriel Menotti and Virginia Crisp address the cultural and technological significance of projection. Throughout the volume, chapters reiterate that projection cannot, and must not, be reduced to its cinematic functions alone. Borrowing media theorist Siegfried Zielinksi’s definition, Menotti and Crisp refer to projection as the “heterogeneous array of artefacts, technical systems, and particularly visual praxes of experimentation and of culture.” From this, readers can understand the performative character of the moving image and the labor of the different actors involved in the utterance of the film text. Projection is not the same everywhere, nor equal all the time. Its systems are in permanent interaction with environmental circumstances, neighboring structures, local cultures, and social economies. Thus the idea of projection as a universal, fully autonomous operation cannot hold. Each occurrence of projection adds nuance to a wider understanding of film screening technologies.

ISBN019093414X, 9780190934149

Santiago Tavera & Laura Acosta – If I saw you, I don’t remember – MAI exhibition

February 7, 2020 /

Photos x Paul Litherland

MFA alumni and current Elastic Spaces’ visiting scholar, Santiago Tavera, along his collaborator, Laura Acosta are currently exhibiting their new work, The Novels of Elsgüer (Episode 5); If I saw you, I don’t remember, at MAI – Montréal, Arts Interculturels.

February 8th – March 7th, 2020 Vernissage: February 8th, 2020 at 7:00pm

The Novels of Elsgüer (Episode 5); If I saw you, I don’t remember is an immersive audiovisual installation and performance piece that translates the movements of an unseen body into visual data in the form of hairlike filament animations, intermittent reflections, and flickering shadows. As a sensorial experience, this work asks how different individuals – visible or not- have the potential to create new spaces, raising questions on perception of visibility, inclusion and exclusion. This is the fifth episode in a series of transdisciplinary installations co-created by Colombian-Canadian artists Santiago Tavera and Laura Acosta since 2015.

Montreal, Arts Interculturels – MAI

Santiago Tavera – Passages Convergents CAM en Tournée

January 9, 2020 /

Photos x Franck Billaud

In 2018 visiting scholar, Santiago Tavera was part of Passages Convergents, an exhibition that was selected for the Conseil des arts de Montréal Touring program / CAM en Tournée.

The first exhibition opens this Thursday, Jan. 23 with a vernissage at the Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce in Montréal at 5:30pm.

January 24th, 2020 – March 29th, 2020 Vernissage: January 23rd, 2020 at 5:30pm

Exhibition – Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in the 1980s

October 24, 2019 /

November 9, 2019 –February 17, 2020

https://www.youraga.ca/exhibitions/rebellious 

Alberta women artists responded to the 1980s with rebellion, provocation and activism. This exhibition reveals the shifting mores of the most tumultuous era in Alberta’s history and includes work by the most influential Alberta artists of the 1980s who continue to shape Canadian art. These artists pushed boundaries with their methods of working, their subject matter, and by expanding the ways in which one could be an artist. Utilizing a range of tactics from satire and humour to social critique these artists exposed and worked against established artistic and societal conventions alike. Don’t miss this exhibition featuring the works of strong Alberta women artists of the 1980s, who significantly contributed to the contemporary landscape of Alberta art.

Organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta. Curated by Lindsey Sharman. Supported by artist patrons Maggie & John Mitchell, Bonnie Abel, Marianne & Allan Scott, Annika Nordhagen & James Wolfli, Marcia & Willem Langenberg, and Edward Stidworthy Johnson.

Sandra Bromley, Catherine Burgess, Isla Burns, Joane Cardinal Schubert, RCA, Vera Gartley, Alexandra Haeseker, RCA, Joice M. Hall, Faye HeavyShield, Liz Ingram, Mary Joyce, Toyo Kawamura, Jane Kidd, Lylian Klimek, Pauline McGeorge, Rita McKeough, Katie Ohe, Lyndal Osborne, Jane Ash Poitras, CM RCA, Teresa Posyniak, Mary Scott, Arlene Stamp, Leila Sujir, Carroll Taylor-Lindoe, Wendy Toogood

Curator
Lindsey V. Sharman is Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta. She has studied Art History and Curating in Canada, England, Switzerland and Austria, earning degrees from the University of Saskatchewan and the University of the Arts, Zurich. From 2012-2018 she was the first curator of the Founders’ Gallery at the Military Museums in Calgary, an academic appointment through the University of Calgary. Her primary area of research is politically and socially engaged art practice. Curatorial projects of note include TRENCH, a durational performance by Adrian Stimson; Felled Trees, an exhibition deconstructing national identity at Canada House, London; Gassed Redux by Adad Hannah; and the nationally touring retrospective The Writing on the Wall: Works of Dr. Joane Cardinal Schubert

Garden in the Machine Exhibition – Surrey Art Gallery

September 16, 2019 /

Artists in Conversation and  Opening Reception

Location:
Surrey Art Gallery, 13750 88 Avenue

Date & Time:
September 21, 2019
6:30 PM – 9:00 PM

Artists: Faisal Anwar, Helma Sawatzky, Leila Sujir, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and Paisley Smith, Robert Youds

Curator: Jordan Strom

Examine the complex relationship between computer technology and nature through digital art.

Reblog from City of Surrey :

The digital world changes as much as the natural world.

To mark the past 20 years of digital art programming, the Gallery is presenting new and recent work from leading artists in this field. Through large-scale images and environments, the artists invite visitors to question the limits of technology and nature.

In Data Mulch, Helma Sawatzky digitally stitches together dozens of photographs of a brimming compost bin at Granville Island Public Market. This market is one of Vancouver’s most celebrated sites of sustainable food and design. In addition to highlighting food waste, the artist shows how excess, accumulation, waste, and decay also mark our contemporary digital condition. As with organic waste, if we pay attention to our digital garbage, we can reclaim it to grow and harness new life and images for the future.

Faisal Anwar’s massive video CharBagh uses social media to generate a Persian-style Islamic garden known as char bagh (four gardens). This interactive artwork grows out of Anwar’s workshops with Surrey residents who took photos related to sustainable food production, climate change, and nature. Using algorithms, the artist morphs these photos into ornate geometric designs. This project exemplifies how social media can be a tool for positive social change. A variation of this artwork will play on UrbanScreen this fall.

Robert Youds explores the garden in a different manner in For Everyone a Fountain. Using computer software, he translates photographs of the iconic Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia into coloured light sequences spanning the four seasons. These images appear in a tower of gleaming metal building and office materials. Youds creates a compelling space that collapses the boundaries between architecture and nature, work and leisure, image and object, utopia and dystopia.

In Unceded Territories, VR artist Paisley Smith teams up with painter and sculptor Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Their virtual reality game invites participants to move through different natural landscapes inspired by Yuxweluptun’s bold paintings of colonization in British Columbia. As people play the game, their presence leads to sinister consequences such as forest fires and oil spills. The VR component of this installation is available for public viewing Thursdays between 3pm and 7pm.

On a similar note, Leila Sujir’s Forest Breath highlights nature as a space of spiritual connection and renewal that needs protection. She uses stereoscopic 3D video to show a section of dense woodland on Canada’s West Coast that is under threat of deforestation. The ethereal imagery encourages viewers to reflect on old-growth forests in relationship to cultural history, personal health, and mortality.

Photo Credits from top to bottom: 
- Robert Youds, Installation detail of For Everyone a Fountain presented at Open Space, Victoria, 2017, aluminum panels and sawhorses, desk lamps, and electronics. Photo by Tara Nicholson.
- Leila Sujir, Forest Breath, 2018, stereoscopic 3D video lightbox with stereo audio.

Reblog: Canadian Art Review – Outer Worlds

July 8, 2019 /
A new touring project of commissioned IMAX shorts pushes the boundaries of a medium usually reserved for commercial action cinema
 
 
REVIEWS / MAY 23, 2019
 

by Jesse Cumming

Film has long negotiated a complex relationship with questions of scale. As blockbuster film budgets continue to inflate and cinemas eternally seek ways to amplify the audience experience through enhanced sound, larger screens or other novelties (with 3D film experiences now accented by extra “dimensions”—more than one can count on two hands), in certain contexts a film’s scale has come to be seen in inverse proportion to its artistic merit. Such developments have in turn lead to an equally reductive valourizing of small-scale or artisanal filmmaking as work of integrity and value. All of this makes “Outer Worlds” (also known as “XL Outer Worlds”) a refreshing intervention in an increasingly distant and rigid dichotomy. Instigated and curated by Janine Marchessault with film producer Christian Kroitor, the touring project consists of commissioned IMAX short films by artists Oliver Husain, Lisa Jackson, Kelly Richardson, Michael Snow and Leila Sujir, all of which push the experimental boundaries of a medium most often reserved for commercial action cinema.

“The idea was to give artists access to large-format film,” Marchessault stated matter-of-factly by way of introduction at the project’s recent world premiere as the closing-night event of the 2019 Images Festival. (Future screenings are planned for Victoria, Sudbury, Edmonton and Montreal.) Produced with access to advanced digital equipment and technologies like IMAX 3D, the individual projects occasionally gestured to the unspoken spectacle of contemporary narrative cinema, but just as often reflected on past histories of IMAX film, both as a technology and as a trademark.

Such connections were explicitly evoked by the choice of venue: the Cinesphere, located on the grounds of Toronto’s waterfront Ontario Place. Designed by Eberhard Zeidler and constructed in 1971 as the world’s first dedicated IMAX cinema, for decades the geodesic-like dome exhibited IMAX productions, and continues to screen recent films in the format. The venue’s history, including its inaugural screening of Graeme Ferguson’s North of Superior (1971), with its iconic opening moments shot from a soaring plane, seemed to inform the projects in “Outer Worlds,” whether they were drone shots of Leila Sujir’s Aerial (2019) or the shifting horizons of Michael Snow’s Cityscape (2019).

Earlier points of reference for both the films in “Outer Worlds” and the Cinesphere itself include the large-scale artist projects that animated Canada’s centennial celebrations in 1967, which gathered ambitious multi-screen works, expanded cinema performances and other unconventional film installations presented in custom-built pavilions as part of Expo 67 in Montreal. Chief among them was the National Film Board of Canada–produced In theLabyrinth (1967), a multi-screen, multi-theatre film work directed by Roman Kroitor (Christian Kroitor’s grandfather), Colin Low and Hugh O’Connor, and featuring footage drawn from a mix of 35mm and 70mm film stock. Kroiter, along with fellow filmmakers Graeme Ferguson and Robert Kerr, and engineer William C. Shaw, established the IMAX Corporation a year later as a company for experimentation in large-scale film production and exhibition, later debuting the technology at the 1970 Expo in Osaka.

The five new works for “Outer Worlds” may not have used traditional 70mm film stock, but they do share the format’s signature 1.43 aspect ratio, not to mention the enthusiasm for experimentation that characterizes early IMAX productions, which seized the potential afforded by increased technological speed, resolution and mobility.

During the post-screening discussion at the Images Festival premiere, Marchessault noted that the filmmakers worked independently of each other on their projects, which perhaps explains the extraordinary fact that two of the five artists took inspiration from the same location, namely the verdant unceded traditional territory of the Pacheedaht First Nation, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.

Kelly Richardson’s Embers and the Giants (2019) was the most reduced of the films shot on Vancouver Island, offering a single, fixed view of a gargantuan tree that forms part of the region’s Avatar Grove old-growth forest. Over the film’s seven minutes, the tree trunk—which managed to match the grandeur of the Cinesphere screen—was gradually encircled by a host of (digitally rendered) fireflies that swelled from a lone itinerant beam into a full swarm. During the group Q&A after the screening, Richardson spoke of the work in terms of conservation and advocacy, noting threats to the forest at the hands of developers and the need to amplify nature in order to convince the public of its worth. That the extraordinary natural-growth forest, which provided a backdrop for the film’s subtle spectacle, shared a name with and invoked James Cameron’s earlier sci-fi spectacle, also released in IMAX 3D, was surely not lost on the filmmaker nor curator.

Leila Sujir’s Aerial offers a portrait of the lush region from a variety of perspectives, including shots inspired by the movements of a hummingbird that zigzags through and above the forest trees and rivers. Where Richardson’s contribution emphasizes the contemplative, Sujar’s kinetic short seems most interested in the dynamic potential for montage, with the film punctuating footage of the forest with shots of abstract representations of tree farm licences placing the domain at risk of harvest.

Despite the project title “Outer Worlds,” the majority of the films produced focused on the natural environment, with varying degrees of homage to the educational IMAX science films of earlier decades. Two of the most impressive contributions—Lisa Jackson’s Lichen (2019) and Oliver Husain’s Garden of the Legend of the Golden Snail (2019)—further situate their work in the context of earlier films through their use of voice-over and 3D images.

Seemingly in response to the questions of scale that surrounded and informed the project, Jackson’s remarkable Lichen consisted of close-up footage of the composite organisms, accompanied at first by the fluttery compositions of Japanese ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura before being supplemented by the voice of self-taught lichen specialist Trevor Goward. Shot in a darkened studio where the specimens were accented by impressionistic movements that produced the effect of passing planets, the tiniest objects of inquiry here became the most cosmic and otherworldly.

Husain’s Garden of the Legend of the Golden Snail offered a similar, even more playful engagement with questions of macro and micro. Taking the Cinesphere as a starting point (with a plastic-straw replica of the building making a cameo in the film), Husain’s project begins with an examination of other cinemas built for IMAX film, leading to the still-operational Keong Emas (or Golden Snail) cinema in Jakarta, Indonesia, which for several years in the 1980s and 1990s retained the honour of being the largest film screen in the world. Incorporating 3D footage of a real golden snail, a slightly tongue-in-cheek voice-over recounts a famous Indonesian fairy tale about a princess who is magically transformed into the slimy gastropod, while elsewhere detailing the history of the domestic introduction and promotion of the golden Apple Snail as a new and advanced source of protein.

Described as an “elaboration” on his iconic abstract landscape film La Région Centrale (1971), which debuted the same year as the Cinesphere, Michael Snow’s Cityscape (2019) again worked with a mechanically augmented camera apparatus in order to free its movements from the hands of the filmmaker. As part of the post-screening discussion, Snow recounted how upon the initial release of La Région Centrale, IMAX co-founder Graeme Ferguson approached and encouraged Snow to make a follow-up to the film using IMAX technology, a prompt now realized almost five decades later, and which Ferguson was in attendance to see. Filmed from the Toronto Islands, Cityscapebegins with a shot, trained upward to the sky, that gradually tilts down to reveal the spindle of the CN Tower, the city’s skyline and Lake Ontario. The pleasures of being carried away by Snow’s apparatus risk reduction by a detailing of their dizzying pans, rotations and other motions, but the shifting speeds, sense of depth and percussive score experienced on the scale of screen like the Cinesphere’s proved that the artist continues to disorient his audience and gleefully test the limits of perception. While several of the films in “Outer Worlds” opted to gaze downward, at the wonder of plants and animals, it seems appropriate that Snow’s film starts and ends with its perspective directed upward, calling to mind the evocative title of a past IMAX film produced in the early 1990s: Reach for the Sky.

Leila Sujir, Aerial (still), 2019. Digital IMAX, 9 min 20 sec. Courtesy the artist.

ORIGINAL POST

 

Forest of Pixels by Nancy Tousley

June 8, 2019 /
Writer and curator Nancy Tousley has recently written a chapter on Leila Sujir’s Forest project titled, Forest of Pixels, which is included in the new book, INTERTWINED HISTORIES: Plants in their Social Contexts, Edited by Jim Ellis from University of Calgary Press. 
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