This program presents five original IMAX commissions, giving artists a unique opportunity to experiment with the large screen format. In keeping with the cinematic genre typical of IMAX films—the larger-than-life landscape that forms an outer world beyond the limits of the human sensorium—each of the films explores expanded cinema through different ecologies of the non-human: the forest, lichen, snails, water, and sky. The works propose different worlds of experience and distinct grammars of immersion through a meeting with the camera.

The invited artists in this program, Oliver Husain, Lisa Jackson, Kelly Richardson, Michael Snow, and Leila Sujir, imagine common worlds by reflecting upon the exigencies of intercultural and interspecies communication. This task has taken on great urgency in the 21st century as we grapple with how to adapt to the ecological realities brought about by anthropogenic climate change.

The Outer Worlds world premiere is on April 18, 2019 at Cinesphere, in Toronto, Canada part of the closing night of the Images Festival. Images festival runs from April 11-18, 2019

Click here for more details about the Images closing night screening and party:
https://www.imagesfestival.com/program/closing-night-outer-worlds

CDEx Centre de Diffusion et d’Expérimentation des étudiants de la maîtrise en arts visuels et médiatiquesUniversity of Quebec at Montreal
405 Ste-Catherine / St-Denis
J-Jasmin Pavilion, Room J-R930
Montreal, QC

Exhibition: August 4-12, 2018
Vernissage: August 3, 2018 at 4:00pm

Artists:
Shoji Kato
Paul Landon
Marjatta Oja
Pépite & Josèphe – Expédition
Kévin Pinvidic

Re-excavation reflects on archaeological methods of unearthing and digging up. With this exhibition project it is the urban landscape that is re-dug up. The present and past city is reconsidered, what has been found repurposed for its future. Urban space is uncovered, expanded and upturned, interpreted as an abstract diagram, as material residue, as rumours of past usages and activities, as oral accounts and lived experience.

In 2017 Marjatta Oja, Shoji Kato and Paul Landon developed new works for the exhibition Excavations at the Saariaho Järvenpää gallery in Helsinki. These works were drawn from reflections on Helsinki’s Viiskulma neighbourhood where the gallery is located, an area characterised by a five-corner intersection. This year’s exhibition project Re-excavations is built on new, site-specific, works by Kato, Landon and Oja as well as on new works by Expédition (Pépite & Josèphe) and Kévin Pinvidic. All of these works respond to material and structural characteristics of downtown Montréal.

Shoji Kato is a Helsinki-based artist who works in drawing, painting, photography and installation. His intricate works reflect on geologies as both material conditions and forms of collective memory. Kato has exhibited extensively in Europe and Asia and he recently completed a Doctorate in Fine Arts at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.

Paul Landon lives and works in Montreal. His installation and media-based visual art practice looks at modern architecture and urban planning as sites inscribed with the potential of psychological trauma and social unease. Landon is a professor in the École des arts visuels et médiatiques of UQÀM and he recently completed a Doctorate in Fine Arts at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.

Marjatta Oja is a Helsinki based artist working in video, painting and installation. Her ‘situation sculptures’ render dialogues and conversations into archirectural moving image projections. Oja recently completed a Doctor of Fine Arts at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts where she teaches video.

Expédition is an artist duo based in Montréal. Their practice rooted in painting and printmaking is based on walking in the city, collecting residue and remnants and repurposing these. Pépite Biron-Chalifour is completing a BFA in Photography at Concordia University. Josèphe Landreville is a student in the Maitrise des arts visuels et médiatiques programme at UQÀM.

Kévin Pinvidic is a Montreal based visual artist. His work takes the form of three-dimensional drawing; it draws on his wandering in the city and on the archiving of found discarded elements. Pinvidic is a student in the Maitrise des arts visuels et médiatiques programme at UQÀM.

Exhibition:
July 21 – August 18, 2018

Opening event: Saturday July 21st, from 3pm to 6pm
Artist in attendance

Location
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain
65 George Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5A 4L8

More Information
http://www.pfoac.com/Toronto/JL_2018_EN.html

ABOUT THE SHOW

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present Therebefore and Hereafter, a solo exhibition of work by Montreal artist John Latour.

An ongoing theme in Latour’s work is the idea of “the past”, and how our experience of it is mediated through objects, images and texts. More recently, the artist has looked to the history of spirit communications as a metaphor for dialoguing with the past.

The focal point of Therebefore and Hereafter is the artist’s Psychic cabinet (2010) an interactive installation based on the tradition of spirit cabinets – enclosed spaces created from furniture and curtains that were used by mediums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to focus their psychic powers before or during séances. The presentation of Psychic cabinet in downtown Toronto draws attention to the city’s long and sometimes complicated history with spirit communications. Toronto was the locus of at least three Spiritualist organizations at the turn of the 20th century (the Canadian Spiritualist Association, the Spiritualist National Union of Canada and the Toronto Spiritualist Association); although as Stan McMullin notes in his Anatomy of a Seance, mediums in Toronto (and elsewhere) at that time could be – and were prosecuted through the Canadian Criminal Code under the Witchcraft section of the Vagrancy Act.[1]

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Photo: Leila Sujir combines video of lost-looking but regal peacocks with floating animations in her stereoscopic 3D video projection, “Peacocks Dream.”

Four of FotoFest’s dazzling displays focus on Indian portraiture

Most of the 47 featured artists live and work in India. That context matters.

Gupta contrasts India’s contemporary photography scene with that of China, which has 60 schools, a thriving publishing industry and numerous art fairs. In India, art photography is still the activity of the English-speaking elite, he said.

FotoFest’s abundance of documentary photography from numerous regions reflects artists’ familiarity with India’s documentary filmmaking tradition, he said. “It’s not because they know Walker Evans.”

But they do know technology. Like others around the world, India’s contemporary artists have embraced new technology because it’s accessible, cheap to produce and gives them “a certain kind of global credibility,” Gupta said.

About a third of this biennial features new media installations — the most ever — although it doesn’t feel that way because the rooms devoted to projected work are sprinkled across the venues.

Four installations — three by female artists — have stayed with me for their evocative storytelling. There’s one more week to see those at the three locations near Fotofest headquarters; Asia Society Texas Center’s smaller portion is up through late July.

‘Peacocks Dream’

During the opening reception in March, Leila Sujir’s “Peacocks Dream” turned an alcove of the Silver Street Studios building into a spectacle. I fell into its spell on a quieter day, when the nearly 16-minute stereoscopic 3-D (SD3) video, or anaglyph, was projected onto just one wall and I could don 3-D glasses, sit on a bench and hear the audio component.

Regal peacocks amble through a garden of mazes at what appears to be an ancient estate in England, looking out of place with their exotic, brilliant plumage, as viewers hear the measured reading of letters between family members who are worlds apart. Sujir layers funny animated peacocks, floating paisley designs and a fanciful border onto the photography, touches of levity that balance the melancholy tone.

She lives in Montreal. The letters are from her family’s archive, written from her paternal grandfather in Mangalore, India, to her father, who died young, in his mid-30s, in a plane crash in Canada. For years, she feared that her father’s story would become her own because his journeys placed him in precarious positions, too far away from home. Her narrative is abstract enough that “Peacocks Dream” expresses a universal sense of disorientation and loss.

SD3 dates from the mid-1800s but has evolved. Anaglyphs combine superimposed imagery and colored filters. Sujir has experimented with projection mapping, which places SD3 video space into the built environment — to create installations — for more than a decade. She appreciates the “haptic sense of space” it creates to help convey themes of migration that have intrigued her for 30 years. “SD3 video spaces are elastic and dream-like places, ephemeral, yet capable of extending a sensation of volume, physicality, and presence to the viewer,” she writes.

Watching “Peacocks Dream” made me wish I could see Sujir’s entire “Elastic City Spacey” series.

To read the full article click here

REVERBERATIONS OF A TOPOLOGICAL DAYDREAM

A solo exhibition by Santiago Tavera
March 2, 2018 to April 13, 2018
Opening reception: Friday, March 2, 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Reverberations of a Topological Daydream is a multimedia architectural installation that presents a virtual space in constant translation between physical and digital experiences. Multiple video projections and 3D graphic animations immerse the gallery space, taking viewers into the vastness of a virtual suburban galaxy. Within this constructed digital environment, plexiglass and vinyl structures are used as reflective screens and visual filters, which are activated through the light of the projected image. Memories and sensations are translated around the space through the repetitions and echoes of images and sounds, creating a perceptual topology of virtual reverberations. Topology, as a mathematical term, refers to the exploration of how shapes preserve their permanence in change, by only bending, twisting and stretching, without ever breaking and losing their original self.

This multimedia exhibition presents digital architectural houses as sites of refuge, where memories and illusions emerge, and where perception collides with that of the immediate future and the re-constructed past. Interlacing the role of an outside observer with the one that inhabits an interior site, viewers virtually journey through a familiar place. Viewers inhabit the exhibition space, while virtual spaces are consequently inhabiting them. Reverberations of a Topological Daydream, aims to illustrate the impact digital culture has on how we form our identity within multiple realms. Digital media allows subjects to constantly navigate between perception, memory, physicality and the virtual. Individuals find themselves in a never-ending process of constructing and re-constructing their sense of being, and in turn their sense of belonging. Dislocation, familiar to those who have experienced cultural displacement, has become more apparent as subjects now live as virtual immigrants within the realm of the digital. In cyberspace, subjects and objects exist as images that are constantly moving from one screen to the next, a virtual dislocation similar to the one of a migrant body. Within a state of dislocation, as the displacement of the conscious mind, the body experiences a double sense of place with multiple perceptions and memories. There is a simultaneous sense of being physically here and virtually there, while belonging everywhere and nowhere.