Media Space/Media Place
Saturday October 17, 2015 – Saturday November 28, 2015
LOMAA’s Media Space/Media Place series was originally developed and coordinated by board member Troy David Ouellette and designed to foster opportunities for collaboration between media artists, media arts organizations, and curators. Carried out over three sessions in fall 1015, the series covered different aspects of media arts creation, distribution, and documentation, and chronicled the difficulties faced in this new era of portable on-demand production/distribution as a method to contribute to a better understanding of media arts within Ontario and beyond.
Session I
New Strategies for Media Artists and Media Arts Organizations
Mary Baxter, Peter Lebel, Annie King
Mary Baxter is editor of Morelmag.ca, an online general interest magazine and outreach program serving Southwestern Ontario and feld editor/web editor of Better Farming magazine, the largest circulating farm magazine in Ontario and Canada’s top website for online farm news. In 2007, she, along with her Better Farming colleagues won the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Award for Investigative Journalism in the magazine category. In 2012, she also won the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists’ Star Prize for print journalism. Mary is based in London, ON and holds a B.A. (Honours) in English Literature from the University of British Columbia and a M.Phil in AngloIrish Literature from Trinity College, University of Dublin.
Annie King grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. She completed her BFA at Algoma University and received the President’s Purchase Award in 2009. Annie studied Drawing/Inter-media at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and received her MFA in January 2012. While at the University of Alberta she received scholarships from such organizations as the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, as well as participating in the Graduate Research Assistantship Program. She was included in The New Alberta Contemporaries, curated by Caterina Pizanias, which was the inaugural exhibition at the Eskar Foundation in Calgary, Alberta. In 2013, while participating in “The Lure of the Local”, she exhibited her work among six other women artists in Athens, Greece. Annie has worked as an adjunct professor of Fine Arts at Algoma University, in Sault Ste. Marie since 2012. She is a founder of 360 Sault Media Arts Collective, funded by the Ontario Arts Council. Annie’s work melds the borders of drawing, sculpture and media installation.
Multi-disciplinary artist, Peter Lebel, lives in London, Ontario, Canada. He currently works with performance, sound, photochemistry, installation, expanded cinema, social sculpture, games, composition, among other things. Since acquiring an education in visual arts, post-production, and social work, he has received awards/grants, completed residencies, co-founded/curated a number of community/contemporary artist-run initiatives, and has toured/exhibited his work in Canada and in the United States. Currently and more recently, he has been spending his time on a recording project with Egleston as well as an artist-run space and various collaborative works with a small group.
Session II
Media Now: Theories and Methodologies
Thomas Cermak, Michael Morritt & Troy David Ouellette
Thomas Cermak is a writer/contributor and executive director at London Fuse, a non-proft organization supporting London’s creative and cultural communities. London Fuse provides a promotional platform and operational support to London’s creative and collaborative people, events, projects, and groups. Thomas was also a technology director & partner for Thread Development, a digital creative agency that implements communication strategies through web products, platforms and apps.
Michael Morritt is a collaborative media producer and educator, whose career began as a participant in a media arts mentorship program in 2002. Since then, he has produced numerous documentary, short, commercial and feature works in Canada and abroad, often while mentoring frst-time flm makers throughout the process. His passion for arts education was refned in Dublin Ireland, where he developed techniques for instructing groups of young people in all technical aspects of a production, using a student-led model. He has been a founding member of several media arts organizations, including CrewTV in Ireland, MAP Media Arts Peterborough and most recently, ETCH Media Collective in Peterborough. He is also the founder and creative director of Whitebulb, an animation company working internationally.
Troy David Ouellette, PhD (York University), is an artist/researcher specializing in post-anthropocentric Assemblage theory. His practice has developed the concept of ‘particlism’ focusing on the behavior of materials at varying scales by exploring, non-human creativity. His visual work and writings describe how perception, insofar as it is an adaptive state of matter, plays-out in human and non-human creative acts. Ouellette is founding member of LOMAA and the sound art collective Audio Lodge.
Session III
Production Techniques and the Need for Media Arts Collectives
Roger D. Wilson & Christine Negus
Christine Negus is a multidisciplinary artist and writer employing humour and irony to investigate nostalgia and loss. Her works range from ephemeral objects, including glittery party banners, neon signs and artificially-flowered memorial wreaths, to single-channel animations and videos. Negus received her MFA in 2010 from Northwestern University and her BFA from Western University in 2008. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, with notable exhibitions and screenings including the Montreal Underground Film Festival, Cambridge Galleries, Art Gallery of York University, Xpace Cultural Centre and the Images Festival where, in 2008, she won the National Film Board of Canada’s award for Best Emerging Video/Filmmaker. Her first solo exhibition, you can’t spell slaughter without laughter, opened in January 2012 at Gallery TPW. Negus’s short video “the loneliest animals” was included in the anthology Blast Counterblast edited by Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke.
An independent filmmaker, Wilson received a degree in film production in 1993 from Confederation College in Thunder Bay, Ontario. His creative process is based on using techniques such as pixilation, time-lapse photography, cameraless animation, hand-processing and creating exhibition prints. Wilson is a founding member of The Windows Collective, a group of six Ottawa filmmakers who create and exhibit experimental film loops