Visiting Artists
Friday November 27, 2015 – Saturday October 22, 2016
LOMAA’s second Visiting Artist program built from the success of the first series, which functioned as “a creative incubator, aiming to increase the access to, as well as creation of, media and moving image art within London.” Between fall 2015 and fall 2016 exciting artists from across Canada joined the community to expand access to new works, usually inaccessible within the region.
Over the year, artists highlighted media praxis in the areas of analogue film projection, experimental cinema, gaming, sound art, as well as video and animation. Collectively, these artists touched on important issues within the field including: new investigations across media installation and storytelling, genre-bending approaches within moving images, spatial considerations of time-based work, and new avenues in narration.
Contributors include: Roger D. Wilson, Life of a Craphead, Player 2, Alex MacKenzie, Mike Hoolboom, Bent Light Collective, cheyanna turions, Clint Enns, Scott Fitzpatrick & Aaron Zeghers, and Christina Battle
Roger D. Wilson is an experimental film scientist who lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Roger’s artistic practice begins and ends with film, 16mm and 35mm formats; his need to continuously investigate the filmmaking process has lead him to discover innovative experimental film processes. He creates his films using techniques such as optical printing, contact printing, emulsion making, hand processing, and cameraless animation. Roger is known for his technique of manipulating film emulsion prior to photographing images. He has buried black and white film in soil, bathed it in baking soda, berg colour toner, household bleach and photographic bleach all before photographing images. Roger also explores the idea of alternative cinema experiences and has created a number of unique and new ways of viewing film as it projects
LIFE OF A CRAPHEAD is the collaboration of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley since 2006. Their work spans performance art, film, and curation. Projects include The Life of a Craphead Fifty Year Retrospective, 2006-2056 (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2013), an exhibition of all the work they will ever make; Double Double Land Land (Gallery TPW, 2009), a play about a second-rate city; and Free Lunch (2007), a public, anonymously-advertised free lunch serving everything on the menu of a restaurant (100+ items). Life of a Craphead also run and host the popular monthly performance art show Doored, which recently toured to New York (Flux Factory) and Rotterdam (Showroom MAMA) and is broadcast online at dooredtv.tumblr.com. Their work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Art in America. They live and work in Toronto, Canada.
Tom Sherman is an artist and writer. He works across media (mostly in video, radio, performance, print and the Web). From a phenomenological perspective, he is obsessed with description and writes all manner of texts. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1980, and over five decades his interdisciplinary work has been featured in hundreds of international exhibitions and festivals, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Modern Art, and Ars Electronica. He has published extensively, including Before and After the I-Bomb, Banff Centre Press, 2002. He received the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art in 2003, and Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art in 2010. Sherman is a Professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University.
Player 2 is the curating duo of Diana Poulsen and Matt Sparling. Their collaborative curatorial practice investigates gaming art and its ability to develop interactive environments. In particular, the vision of Player 2 is to explore games that stray from mainstream culture. Poulsen is an art historian and currently living in London ON where she teaches at Fanshawe College. Diana was a member of Team Vector which runs Vector Game + Art Convergence Festival. She holds a Masters degree in Art history from the University of Western Ontario and a BFA honours in visual arts (studio) from York University. Matt Sparling is an artist and photographer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Matt studied undergraduate art and art history at McMaster University, and subsequently completed his MFA in 2008 at the University of Western Ontario.
Diana Poulsen is a partial load professor of Art History at Fanshawe College, factory worker, robot lover, artist who focuses on new media, videogames and healthcare in form of patient experience.
Matt Sparling is an artist, writer and video-game enthusiast walking five dogs in Hamilton, Ontario.
Rokashi is a game developer, freelance writer, community enthusiast and certified weirdo. He has written for Polygon and the National Post. He loves cookies and hugs.
Soha Kareem is a digital media artist interested in glitch photography and the intersection of identity politics. She currently resides in Los Angeles working on diversity and inclusion efforts in the video game industry.
Kaitlin Tremblay is a writer, editor, and gamemaker, who focuses on using horror to talk about feminism and mental illness. Her writing and games can be found on her website, www.thatmonstergames.com
Alex MacKenzie is a Vancouver-based media artist working primarily with 16mm analog film equipment and hand processed imagery. He creates works of expanded cinema, light projection installation, and projector performance. His work has screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the EXiS Experimental Film Festival in Seoul, Lightcone in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin and many other festivals and art spaces worldwide. Alex was the founder and curator of the Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, the Blinding Light!! Cinema and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He was an artist in residence at Atelier MTK in Grenobles France, the Struts Gallery/Faucet Media in New Brunswick, Cineworks’ Analog Film Annex in Vancouver and Daimon in Gatineau. Alex co-edited Damp: Contemporary Vancouver Media Art (Anvil Press 2008), and interviewed David Rimmer for Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: David Rimmer’s Moving Images (Anvil Press 2009). Commissions include Portal, (Situated Cinema WNDX Winnipeg 2012), Auroratone: Digitalis (FilmPop Montreal 2012), The Film That Buys The Cinema (Cube Bristol 2013) and Hyborian Witch (Wrong Wave/Kensington Gore 2013). Alex is a founding member of the Iris Film Collective in Vancouver.
Mike Hoolboom. Korean War, the pill, hydrogen bomb, playboy mansion. 1980s: Film emulsion fetish and diary salvos. Schooling at the Funnel: collective avant-geek cine utopia. 1990s: experimentalist features, transgressive psychodramas, questions of nationalism. 2000s: Seroconversion cyborg (life after death), film-to-video transcode: feature-length-found-footage bios. Fringe media archaeologist: copyleft author 7 books, co/editor 12 books. Curator: 30 programs + www.fringeonline.ca Occasional employments: artistic director Images Fest, fringe distribution Canadian Filmmakers. 80 film/vids, most redacted. 10 features. 70 awards, 15 international retrospectives. 3 lifetime achievement awards. www.mikehoolboom.com
In August of 2012, the Bent Light Collective was formed in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Collective was formed with the intention of sharing resources, ideas, and research while showcasing expanded cinema and experimental film. Bringing together five inventor-filmmakers the collective’s vision is to illuminate forgotten futures and technological mythologies from the broken machinery of an unrealized cinema, while supporting the creation and exhibition of work by film artists through physically driven techniques. (Contact Printing, Direct Animation, Inventing, Building and Re-purposing Projectors and Cameras, Optical Printing, Pinhole, Slit-Scan, Bathtub Film making – to name a few.) The founding members of the collective are Mike Maryniuk, Heidi Phillips, Leslie Supnet, Doreen Girard and Andrew John Milne.
Doreen Girard is a visual artist and musician living in Winnipeg, MB. She uses handbuilt and repurposed slide and animation reel projectors, which are operated live, producing mutable images that are often guided and accompanied by a soundtrack of dirgeful music. Her interests include thrift stores, Ukrainian folk choirs, 80s thrash, funereal doom and black metal, the physics of light and the early history of cinematography. She has performed her films at various festivals, such as the Plastic Paper Festival, WNDX, Suoni Per Il Popolo and Film Pop.
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.
Andrew John Milne is an Interdiciplinary Artist working in the Media Arts, Film and Video, Photography and Performance. He is based out of Winnipeg Manitoba although can increasingly be found traveling throughout Canada in the Museum of New Ideas. He has a background in contemporary dance, photography and film as well as mechanical, electrical and computer design. Andrew creates Post-Cinematic Mechanisms which interrogate the technologies of seeing. In this work he approaches emergent media processes with obsolesced technique creating mechanical ruins, decaying monuments that realize future utopias, dragging them backwards toward obsolescence, futility and critique.
Andrew is the founder of the Museum of New Ideas, a mobile media art exhibition and studio space, and is a founding member of Bent Light a post-cinema film collective.
Audio Lodge
Speakers and Magnetic Resonance
2016
Audio Lodge is a Canadian sound art collective dedicated to the aural exploration of cultural systems and their unexpected analogues in the environment. Comprised of multidisciplinary artists Kevin Curtis-Norcross, Troy David Ouellette and Paul Walde, the collective was established as a platform for interdisciplinary research using sound as a point of departure. Each artist brings to the fore concerns regarding environmental and social practice through the inherent hidden systems of the locations explored. Audio Lodge has exhibited their work in galleries in Canada and Australia and has developed a series of live performance sound works for galleries and concert settings.
cheyanne turions Curates
In Describing Relationships, Rhythm is Important
By Nika Khanjani
2007-2016
Nika Khanjani is a film and video artist, writer and educator. Her work is marked by contrasting extremes and a patient sense of beauty. She combines landscape photography, subtle sound design, and portraiture to invoke internal states responsive to political and historical forces, as well as intimate relationships. She is based in Montréal.
cheyanne turions is an independent curator and writer currently based in Toronto. Her work approaches the space of exhibition as alive—the gallery or cinema is a space of dialogue where the propositions of artists come into contact with publics, questioning ways of seeing and being in relation. She is the director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) and the Artistic Director at Trinity Square Video.
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 microcinemas. 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 Leonardo, Millennium Film Journal, Incite! Journal of Experimental Media andSpectacular Optical.
SCOTT FITZPATRICK is a visual artist (Libra) from YWG, whose film and video work has screened at underground festivals and marginalized venues worldwide. He studied film theory and production at the University of Manitoba, and began conducting lo-fi moving image experiments in 2010. Primarily a filmmaker, also invested in photography, re-photography, kaleidoscope and collage. In addition to producing his own work, S.F. presents the work of others in through the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival and Open City Cinema.
AARON ZEGHERS is a Winnipeg-based artist working in film, video and photography. He is often found working with analog mediums, found footage, lo-fi technology, experimental processes and expanded cinema. Zeghers is a founder of the Open City Cinema collective and a programmer for the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival. For the past three years he has also been the Artistic Director of the Gimli Film Festival, and was previously the editor of the now defunct Cineflyer film blog. Zeghers’ films have played at festivals and venues around the world.
Originally from Edmonton (AB), Christina Battle is currently based in London (ON). She has a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Ryerson University and a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her works are often inspired by the role of official and non-official archives, our notions of evidence and explore themes of history and counter-memory, political mythology and environmental catastrophe. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries, most recently at: Le Centre des arts actuels Skol as part of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (Montreal), Thames Art Gallery (Chatham, ON), Casa Maauad (Mexico City); SOMArts (San Francisco); Third Space Gallery (New Brunswick); RL Window Gallery (New York); Redline Gallery (Denver); Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC); The ODD Gallery (Dawson City, YT); Gallery 44 (Toronto); WNDX Festival of Moving Image (Winnipeg); The Images Festival (Toronto); MCA Denver; the Aspen Art Museum; and the Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto). Christina is currently working toward a PhD in Art & Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario.
BWITCHES is a feminist comedy about two girls who happen to be witches. Starring and co-created by Johanna Middleton and Martine Moore, it’s a witches brew of comedy, camp, and commentary. You’ll see talking cats, floating objects, magic spells, and micro-aggressions.
Laura Conway is a filmmaker, DJ, and curator based in Denver, Colorado.
Laura’s filmmaking practice uses absurdity and surrealism to grapple with the complexities of life in late capitalism. As a DJ and musician, Laura’s films operate as visual remixes and often start with music as a centerpoint. Employing whimsy to confront power structures Laura’s films navigate a terrain between the grotesque and the sensual, the sonic and the visual, and the cliched and the still-possible.
Laura believes that cultivating creative communities is as crucial as the creative act itself and aims to facilitate and create in equal measure. Laura, therefore, curates art events, hosts DIY music shows, and books alternative film events.
FASTWÜRMS is the name of the collaboration and joint authorship of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse. Working together as multidisciplinary and installation artists for over 26 years, FASTWÜRMS has an extensive international and national exhibition history. FASTWÜRMS is famous for creating complex narratives that use craft, performance, cinema, relational aesthetics, and event architecture, to build unique artworks. This very well-known collaborative team is at present working with art students at the University of Guelph.
Currently based in London (UK), Rachel McRae has a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD).
Her work has recently been shown at: Obsidian Coast (Bradford-upon-Avon/UK), Arebyte Gallery (London, UK), South London Gallery (London, UK), LADRÓNgaleria (Mexico City, MX), Super Dakota (Brussels, BE), ICA (London, UK), A Space (Toronto, CA) FullHaus (Los Angeles, USA), Metsä2, (Helsinki, FI), London Media Arts Association (LOMAA) (London, CA) and Pi Artworks, (London, UK).
Excerpts from Rachel’s research into the politics of archeology, the man/nature divide and the Piltdown Man “discovery” was included
in artist/curator Abigail Sidebotham’s Sea Empress: Animism Edition published by The Reading Room, Pembrokeshire (UK). Her writing on language, the internet and the Antropocene has been included in Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life by Smudge Studios (USA).
Her work is held in the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) collection.
Rachel is Visiting Artist at Arts University Bournemouth.
Rachel is 1/2 of the collective, Digital&Dead.
Nicole Rayburn- My artistic practice is a blundering convergence of video, text, and still imagery. With rose-coloured glasses, I examine the intersections of popular culture, capitalism, mental health, & the nature – the sources of all things wondrous & cruel.
I have screened at video festivals nationally & internationally, including Athens Digital Art Festival (Greece), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), Lausanne Underground Film Festival (Switzerland), The Fine Art Film Festival (USA), Antimatter [Media Art] Festival (CA), & Festival de Cine Experimental de Bogotá (Colombia), and exhibited at galleries such as Ohio State University Mansfield Gallery (USA), Latitude 53 (CA), Stride Gallery (CA), Harcourt House (CA), & Artspace (CA), with upcoming solo exhibitions at Brotherly Love Gallery (USA) & Penny Contemporary (Australia). I hold an MFA from the University of Western Ontario and am currently an Assistant Professor at SOVA teaching 4-D Studio, 2-D Studio, & Visual Studies.
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.
Gwen Trutnau is a filmmaker, designer, musician, FX makeup artist, and stylist living in Winnipeg, Canada. Gwen’s existence is comprised of designing original clothing and accessories, fabricating prosthetics, making super 8 films and playing analog musical equipment. Her interest includes ancient mysticism, vintage synthesizers, street style, horror films, heavy music, and subculture.