Visiting Artists
Saturday September 2, 2014 – Thursday June 4, 2015
LOMAA’s Visiting Artist program was a creative incubator, aimed at increasing the access to, as well as creation of, media and moving image art within London. Between summer 2014 and spring 2015 leading practitioners from across Canada visited the city to share their work and connect with the community while highlighting the myriad of possibilities in contemporary, time-based media praxis.
Through a series of skills-building workshops, talks, performances, screenings, and interactive installations the selected artists touched on important topics in both the social and cultural sphere, which ranged from: institutional trauma, techno-feminism, queer connectivity, community building, mediated histories, and digital archivization.
Contributors include: Thirza Cuthand, Jennifer Chan, Deirdre Logue & Allyson Mitchell, Dermot Wilson, Brendan Fernandes, Noiseborder Ensemble, Marc Couroux, Leslie Supnet, Regional Support Network, Chris McNamara, and Andrew James Paterson
Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, Hot Docs in Toronto, Imaginenative in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Out On Screen in Vancouver, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany where her short Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I” Statement won honourable mention. She completed her BFA majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her work has also screened at galleries including the Mendel in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg. In 1999 she was an artist in residence at Videopool and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg, where she completed Through The Looking Glass. In 2012 she was an artist in residence at Villa K. Magdalena in Hamburg where she completed Boi Oh Boi. She has also written a feature screenplay called Bunnyhug and sometimes does performance art. She is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a Status Aboriginal (not Metis) and currently resides in Toronto, where is is completing an MA in Media Production at Ryerson.
Jennifer Chan was born in Ottawa and raised in Hong Kong. She completed her HBA at University of Toronto-Mississauga and completed her MFA in Art Video at Syracuse University. She has shown extensively in festivals around the globe and in gallery spaces such as Eastern Bloc, VideoFag, Gallery TPW, Trinity Square Video, and the Marshall McLuhan Salon at the Canadian Embassy for Transmediale 2012 in Berlin. She recently showed a retrospective of her work at the Canadian Artist spotlight screening at the 2014 Images Festival. Jennifer Chan has been praised as one of the major forces leading Net Art today. She is currently teaching at School of the Art Institute Chicago.
Dierdre Logue & Allyson Mitchell
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
Deirdre Logue holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Kent State University. Her performance-based film, video and installation works are self-portraits uniquely located between comfort and trauma, self-liberation and self-annihilation. By using domestic objects and spaces to contrary ends, her works capture gesture, duration and the body as both subject and object. Recent solo exhibitions of her award winning work have taken place at Open Space in Victoria, Oakville Galleries, the Images Festival in Toronto, the Berlin International Film Festival, Beyond/In Western New York, YYZ and at Articule in Montreal. She was a founding member of Media City, the Executive Director of the Images Festival, the Executive Director of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and is currently the Development Director at Vtape.
Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working predominantly in sculpture, installation and film. Since 1997, Mitchell has been melding feminism and pop culture to play with contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography, and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. Her work has exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US, Europe and East Asia. She has also performed extensively with Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off, a fat performance troupe, as well as publishing both writing and music. She is an assistant Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University.
Dermot Wilson, Director/Curator of the WKP Kennedy Public Art Gallery in North Bay from 2002-2012, is a founding member of the Nippissing Region Curatorial Collective and the Ice Follies Biennial. He is an active member of the northern Ontario arts community and was founder of the Near North Mobile Media Lab (N2M2L), a media arts collective mandated to provide access to media arts education, opportunities for media arts dissemination, and support to media artists in Northern Ontario. Dermot was also a former board member liaison for the North Bay’s White Water Gallery and Artcite in Windsor, Ontario. As the first Director of Paved Arts in Saskatoon, Dermot is an experienced administrator and curator of media art.
He has produced international and national group and solo exhibitions for the past ten years as the Director of the WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, Ontario. He has curated the Ice Follies Biennial since 2004 and is currently on leave from the Board of the Media Arts Network of Ontario.
Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from The University of Western Ontario and his BFA (2002) from York University in Canada. He has exhibited internationally and nationally including exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Art and Design New York, Art in General, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, The Andy Warhol Museum, the Art Gallery of York University, Deutsche Guggenheim, The Bergen Kunsthall , Manif d’Art: The Quebec City Biennial, The Third Guangzhou Triennial and the Western New York Biennial through The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Fernandes has participated in numerous residency programs including The Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Trinidad and Tobago (2006), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Work Space (2008), Swing Space (2009) and Process Space (2014) programs, and invitations to the Gyeonggi Creation Center at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea (2009) and ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2011). He was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award Canada’s pre-eminent award for contemporary art. (2010), and was on the longlist for the 2013 prize. He recently debut a new performance at the Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY and participated in Stage It! (Part 3) – SCRIPTED at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. A nati0nal tour of his work organized by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery continues to travel into 2015 and includes exhibitions at Rodman Hall, Brock University, The Varley Art Gallery, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery and The Contemporary Art Gallery - Vancouver. He will participate and create a new commission for “Disguises: Masks and Global African Art” organized by Seattle Art Museum in 2015 that will tour to and Fowler Museum of Cultural History, LA and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. He is a 2014 recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Residency Fellowship.
The Noiseborder Ensemble creates and performs multimedia works featuring a combination of acoustic and electronic instruments as well as live processing and mixing of sound and video. Based in Windsor Canada, the group has created over twenty original multimedia pieces since its inception in 2008, and performed at festivals in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, the U.K., Iceland, Italy, and Germany.
Brent Lee is a composer, media artist, and musician whose work explores the relationships between sound, image, and technology, especially through multimedia performance. He has created more than one hundred works, ranging from orchestral music to interactive media pieces to film soundtracks.
An active instrumentalist, he has performed in many countries with groups such as the Noiseborder Ensemble, blackhole-factory, and Modus vivendi. His most recent project is entitled Homstal, and brings together composition, improvisation, saxophone performance, videography, and Max programming.
Sigi Torinus creates hybrid, new media works with an emphasis on improvisatory live-video performance and site-specific installation. Her research explores perceptions of space, time and materiality as they meet or collide in the virtuality of digital space or physicality of a geographic location. Playing with concepts like presence and absence, visibility and intangibility, her installations often combine sculptural elements with video, audio, and performance, creating an immersive environment that activates our different senses both viscerally and intellectually. She holds MFAs from the Braunschweig Art Institute, Germany, and San Francisco State University, California. Her works have been exhibited in the US, Caribbean, Europe, Australia, Russia and Canada.
Marc Couroux is an inframedial artist, pianistic heresiarch, schizophonic magician, teacher (York University, Visual Arts) and author of speculative theory-fictions. His xenopraxis burroughs into uncharted perceptual aporias, transliminal zones in which objects become processes, surfaces yield to sediment, and extended duration pressures conventions beyond intended function. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally (Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Glasgow, London) and published by Manchester University Press. With Asounder, a sonic tactic collective, he coordinated the (un)sound occupation workshop (collapsing sound and politics) in Toronto in 2013. He is a founding member of The Occulture (with eldritch Priest and David Cecchetto), a Toronto collective investigating the esoteric imbrications of sound, affect and hyperstition through (among other constellating ventures) Tuning Speculation: Experimental Aesthetics and the Sonic Imaginary, an ongoing workshop with yearly iterations, and the Sounding the Counterfactual stream at the 2014 London Conference in Critical Thought (a blog at theocculture.net documents their evolving thought-forms). Recent talks occurred at the Signal Path workshop (New York, Center for Transformative Media, Parsons), Kingston University (London), Goldsmiths, University of London and the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in Sydney, Australia. His hyperstitional doppelgänger was famously conjured in Priest's Boring Formless Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Leslie Supnet is a Toronto-based moving image artist, originally from Winnipeg, MB. Supnet utilizes animation, found images + sound, lo-fi and experimental practices to create documents of her personal vision. She is currently pursuing her MFA at York University, and teaches animation workshops with various artist-run centres.
Her work has screened at microcinemas, galleries and film festivals such as Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Images Festival, Antimatter, Melbourne International Animation Festival and various others.
RSN is a nomadic screening series started in Toronto, Ontario out of a desire to show experimental moving images from other cities unmediated by a Toronto curatorial lens. Explicitly, the work is not curated by RSN as we invite curators from other areas to present work from their community. The only condition is that the curator must be an active member of their community and that they must present their own work in the program. Through RSN we are attempting to challenge a culture of moving image curation in Toronto, a place that we feel is in need of a paradigm shift away from old routines. The oppressive conservatism we struggle with politically in our day to day lives, we see in our community of experimental moving images and must be challenged with at least another voice to speak alongside the dominant ways of working. In addition, we are hoping to challenge Toronto moving-image aesthetics by allowing work to show that may offend our sensibilities, both in terms of content and form. What we desire is evolution.
Clint Enns is a video artist and filmmaker living in Toronto, Ontario. His work primarily deals with moving images created with broken and/or outdated technologies. His work has shown both nationally and internationally at festivals, alternative spaces and mircocinemas.
He has a Master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Manitoba, and has recently received a Master’s degree in cinema and media from York University where he is currently pursuing a PhD. His writings and interviews have appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Incite! Journal of Experimental Media and Spectacular Optical.
Leslie Supnet is a Toronto-based moving image artist, originally from Winnipeg, MB. Supnet utilizes animation, found images + sound, lo-fi and experimental practices to create documents of her personal vision. She is currently pursuing her MFA at York University, and teaches animation workshops with various artist-run centres.
Her work has screened at microcinemas, galleries and film festivals such as Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Images Festival, Antimatter, Melbourne International Animation Festival and various others.
Christopher McNamara is an Ann Arbor & Windsor-based video and sound artist and educator. He has exhibited and performed his work extensively in Canada the U.S. and in Europe. In the Fall of 2004 his work was included in Shrinking Cities at Kunst Werke in Berlin and most recently he presented a solo exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, ON and at the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, ON.
He is the recipient of numerous grants, awards and fellowships including the OAC Media Arts Grant (2008, 20101, 2012) and the Joan Chalmers Fellowship (2015).
His video, Establishing Shots premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2007 and it went on to numerous other festivals.
His Festival appearances include Mutek in Montreal, the Detroit Electronic Music Festival and Spark Festival of New Electronic Music at the University of Minnesota.
McNamara was a founding member of the electronic music and art collective, Thinkbox. His more recent music and live cinema projects and collaborations include Noiseborder Ensemble and nospectacle. He has releases on Affin, Overlap.org, & Detroit Threads.
Andrew James Paterson is an inter-media artist working with video, film, performance, writing and music, based in Toronto. Paterson has lately been making non-camera video works, many of them musically-based, working with his own drawings or with the materials of the Final cut Pro editing system. His body of work focuses on systems, inventories, tensions between bodies and technologies, and language.