Daniel Barrow, Barry Doupé, Amy Lockhart, Alex McLeod, Lorna Mills and Mark Pellegrino

NEW WORK COMMISSIONED BY THE TORONTO ANIMATED IMAGE SOCIETY

Toronto Animated Image Society (TAIS) in conjunction with Trinity Square Video (TSV) and Vtape, present Hello Amiga, a special animation project. TAIS has commissioned six artists to create experimental animations that return to the roots of digital culture by exploring Amiga computers that were popularized for graphics processing and image creation in the 1980s and early 1990s. Artists Daniel Barrow, Barry Doupé, Amy Lockhart, Alex McLeod, Lorna Mills and Mark Pellegrino have created works that generate necessary critical discourse around the use of old technology through new manipulations.

With an accompanying essay by Andrew James Paterson.

GALLERY EXHIBIT

HELLO AMIGA premieres at Trinity Square Video, Thursday, November 15, 7pm – 10pm.

The Exhibition will run November 15 – December 15, 2012

Gallery Hours Monday-Friday 12-6PM and Saturdays 12-4
Trinity Square Video
376 – 401 Richmond Street West
Toronto, Ontario
helloamiga.ca

Panel Discussion
Friday, November 16, 6:30-8:30pm, OCAD University, Central Hall, 230 – 100 McCaul St. FREE
Join Hello Amiga project artists Daniel Barrow, Barry Doupé, Amy Lockhart, Alex McLeod, Lorna Mills and Mark Pellegrino in conversation considering the meaning and creative potential of obsolete imaging technologies. Moderated by Philippe Blanchard, Assistant Professor, Digital Painting & Expanded Animation, OCAD University.

Workshop
Hello Amiga Workshop with participating artists Alex McLeod and Mark Pellegrino
Saturday, December 8, 2012, 2-5pm, TSV, 376 – 401 Richmond Street West
$15.00
$10.00 – TAIS and TSV Members
Workshop limited to 15 participants. To sign up please call 416-593-1332.

While addressing his work, Mark Pellegrino will provide a brief history of Amiga technology and offer an introduction to working with Amiga digital emulators. Alex McLeod will talk about the influence of Amiga animation on contemporary digital production while giving insight into his practical approach to image creation.

Artist Talk
Hello Amiga Masterclass with participating artist Lorna Mills: Animated GIFs and Technical Opportunism
Saturday, December 15, 2012, 2-4pm, TSV, 376 – 401 Richmond Street West
$15.00
$10.00 – TAIS and TSV Members
Masterclass limited to 15 participants. To sign up please call 416-593-1332.

Lorna Mills will present tips, tricks and strategies for image theft, along with a presentation on animated GIFs.

Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Barrow is the winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award.

Barry Doupé is a filmmaker living in Vancouver. His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Lyon Contemporary Art Museum, Pleasure Dome and the Tate Modern.

Alex McLeod constructs hyper-realistic 3D environments filled with crystalline mountains, fiery lakes and rotund clouds, all rendered in a sickly sweet and gooey candy-colored palette. Alex McLeod lives and work¬s in Toronto, Canada. He has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, San Jose, Denver, Sao Paulo, Barcelona, Toronto and Sweden.

Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990s. Her practice has included obsessive Cibachrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film and obsessive animated GIFs incorporated into restrained installation work.

Mark Pellegrino is a Toronto-based, multi-disciplinary artist and art technician. His digital practice utilizes antiquated video equipment, emulated computer systems and 3D animation to explore the history, discourse and anomalies of the video medium.

Amy Lockhart is an independent animator and artist. Her artwork and award winning films have been exhibited Internationally. Amy has educated herself through attending the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, completing an artist residency at the Quickdraw Animation Society and completing a fellowship at the National Film Board. She has received international acclaim, speaking and exhibiting her work at various art institutions including The California Institute of the Arts, where she just completed an artist residency.

Organised by: The Toronto Animated Image Society, Trinity Square Video and Vtape

New work by Francisco-Fernando Granados & Cressida Kocienski, Public Studio (Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky & Eshrat Erfanian), and Jamie Ross

Exhibition:
October 10 – November 3, 2012
Trinity Square Video
Closing Party:
November 2, 2012, 5 – 7PM

Screening:
Tuesday, October 9, 2012, 8PM
Jackman Hall (Art Gallery of Ontario)
317 Dundas Street West
McCaul Street Entrance

Screening tickets are available at Jackman Hall (on October 9 at 7PM)
or in advance at TSV
$6 for TSV Members / $8 for non-members
The evening’s programme will also feature other works produced for the trilogy.

TSV’s Themed Commission Program offers selected artists the opportunity to make a completely new work over a four-month period with full access to the centre’s facilities for production, postproduction, education and dissemination. For CENTRE, artists were asked to use material from the Archives of Ontario as subject or reference for the production of a video or video-based installation that examines contemporary politics.

The works created for CENTRE investigate the ‘centre’ in various ways: Francisco-Fernando Granados and Cressida Kocienski use the language of the archive to trace the construction of the linguistic figure of the migrant; the fourth of Public Studio‘s Kino Pravda 3G newsreels turns its eye to public dissent in Canada; Jamie Ross plumbs archives to fill in historical gaps in the representation of the homosocial landscape of Eastern Ontario.

Eshrat Erfanian (Public Studio) is a visual artist based in Toronto. She has an Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program in NYC. Her work has been exhibited in U.S., Europe, and Canada. Erfanian’s most recent work Start Dreaming includes a seven-year ongoing project that documents the industrial urban landscapes in the city of Toronto and Northern Ontario, an attempt to bring to a stand still the movement and the migration of manufacturing/capital to “elsewhere”. Erfanian is currently a PhD candidate at York University where she also teaches.

Elle Flanders (Public Studio) is a filmmaker and artist based in Toronto. She was raised in Montreal and Jerusalem and holds both an MA in Critical Theory and an MFA from Rutgers University. Her work has been screened and exhibited at the Berlin International Film Festival, the MOMA, TIFF, and festivals worldwide. She is a founding member of Public Studio with her collaborator, Tamira Sawatzky. Her most recent work includes: Public Studio’s Road Movie, a six screen installation on the segregated roads of Palestine that premiered at this year’s TIFF. Flanders is a PhD candidate in the Visual Arts Studio Program at York University where she also teaches.

Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Guatemalan-born, Toronto-based artist and writer working in performance, drawing, cultural criticism, teaching, and cultural practice. His work aims to create aesthetic (sensible) instances of contact between the intimate and the public. He has performed and exhibited in venues including Kulturhuset Stockholm, the Vancouver Art Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver), and the Images Festival (Toronto). He holds a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

Cressida Kocienski is a Toronto-based artist who received her MFA in Art Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). As a writer and artist she frequently works alongside architectures, and other human spaces, as images. She is interested in the collision of matter and diagrams, and intersections of language, the body, temporality, memory and theory. She recently screened her work as part of New Toronto Works, Pleasure Dome (Toronto).

Jamie Ross is an emerging artist based in Montreal and interest in personal psycho-geography, land and place. His artwork deals with mythology, genealogy, language, storytelling and dreams by creating and documenting queer communities based on a sincere engagement with magic. His work has been exhibited across Canada and Internationally. Ross holds a Linguistics degree from McGill University (Montreal).

Tamira Sawatzky (Public Studio) is an architect and artist working in Toronto. She worked for the award-winning firm MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects from 1998-2010. In 2010, she founded Public Studio Architecture and Public Studio with her collaborator Elle Flanders. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), the Art Gallery of York University (Toronto), Flux Factory (New York), and international film festivals.

Organised by: Trinity Square Video

September 26 and 27, 2012, 7pm
Trinity Square Video

During the 2012-13 programming season, Trinity Square Video will present exhibitions and screenings that examine artist’s video by asking difficult questions about the state of the medium. In just over 40 years, video has emerged from a fledging, alternative art form to a ubiquitous visual communication that is now, at times, inseparable from popular media: the form, content and politics of video art are nuanced by these changes. Furthermore, in the last decade, as single-channel video became part of the holdings of major museums and private collections, the development of publicly accessible, digital archives and social networks of images quickly rebuffed an ascension of video’s exhibition and exchange value.

If single-channel video can be seen anywhere, at anytime, why go to a cinema or gallery to see it? If it is available anywhere, why pay for it? If there is so much out there to see, will it find an audience?

In light of this, many artists and curators have turned away from single-channel video and in its place we have seen the rise of spatially determined video installation and a renewed interest in time-based mediums tethered to the cinema or exhibition space (celluloid film, performance and dance).

So, is this where we stand, on the precipice of irrelevance? Or, is there a fundamental shift awaiting single-channel video, one that sees its dispersion open a space for a vital radicalism of the form?

COMPRESSION is a three-part two-night screening series at TSV for which three guest curators have been asked to consider contemporary video in the wake of changing modes of production, reception and dissemination.

Curators Jennifer Chan, Eli Horwatt and Julia Paoli have programmed screenings intended to initiate discussion around a central question: how have current modes of image access and distribution altered single-channel video art?

COMPRESSION

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

7pm 
Mise-en-abyme, programmed by Eli Horwatt
Including work by Kate Craig, Daniel Kotter, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Martha Wilson and others.

8:30pm
Dispersion, programmed by Julia Paoli
Including work by Seth Price, Hito Steyerl and others.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

7pm
HEAVY META, programmed by Jennifer Chan
Including work by Jeremy Bailey, Oliver Laric, Rosa Menkman, Jon Rafman and others.

8:30pm
Panel discussion with Chan, Horwatt and Paoli, moderated by Jean-Paul Kelly, Programming Director, TSV

Organised by: Jennifer Chan, Eli Horwatt and Julia Paoli

THE RE-ENACTMENTS
A Workshop with Basma Alsharif

July 10, 2012
10am – 5pm

Co-presented at Trinity Square Video by A Space Gallery, the Images Festival, and TSV
In conjunction with the exhibition Basma Alsharif: This Story Begins and Ends With Us at A Space Gallery, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 110, June 1 – July 14, 2012

This workshop is aimed at a small group of artists interested in exploring issues outside of their practice or current projects. A one-day workshop on July 10, 2012, 10am – 5pm, aimed at collaborative discussions, group exercises, and the viewing of work framed by the idea of the re-enactment as a mean for having an exhibition without original works. Participants will explore the functional uses of re-enactments within various societies and attempt to make sense of the re-enactment within their own works and through their own experience. The full day workshop will culminate in a one-night presentation in the TSV Gallery that reflects the activities of the workshop on July 12, 2012.

The students will be expected to do a bit of light reading in preparation for the workshop and will be expected to come with the following:

(1) a project to share (digital documentation would be best, though alternative means are also welcome on the responsibility of the participant)

(2) a text, image, video clip, or sound that is meaningful to you (other mediums not listed are also welcome)
Please contact Jean-Paul Kelly, Programming Director, Trintiy Square Video for more information: programming@trinitysquarevideo.com

Workshop fee:
TSV and Pleasure Dome Members: $25.00
Non-members: $30.00
Participant registration is limited to 12 individuals.

Organised by: Basma Alsharif

Winner! Images Prize 2012!

Puzzled, By Certain Things
Gary Kibbins

April 14-May 19, 2012

Opening April 14, 2012

Artist’s Talk: May 5, 2012, 2pm

Trinity Square Video and the 25th Images Festival are excited to present a process-based installation by renowned Kingston-based artist Gary Kibbins. Puzzled, By Certain Things is created as part of TSV’s yearly Artist-in-Residence program, which aims to advance video’s expanding sphere of experimentation. This year’s edition of the program will see Kibbins activate the TSV Gallery with a video-based work that will change throughout the festival.

Drawing on Kibbins’ significant contribution to Canadian video art, the exhibition is organized in two parts: Puzzled, By Certain Things and the presentation of two of the artist’s revered videos (Cop Out, featured in the first iteration of the Images festival and A Short History of Water, part of the TSV Purchase Collection, 1979-1999). In each work Kibbins uses humour, language games, and explorations of rhetoric and philosophy to exploit video’s capacity to break down linguistic and visual distinction. Kibbins new work will further develop his fascination with shifting structure and meaning in language through sight, sound, and the introduction of spatial form.

Visit the TSV Gallery throughout the festival to see the 

ongoing development of Puzzled, By Certain Things.

Organised by: Gary Kibbins

Trinity Square Video and Pleasure Dome are pleased to present No Place, an installation by artist Jenn E Norton. Using video and photography, Norton’s new body of work, is a playful reflection on real estate development and consumption through fantastical animated compositions.
 Through her depictions of fragile and unlikely structures, Norton explores the tenuous relationship we share with residence, ownership, and the idea of home.

The new and recent works featured in No Place depict onscreen worlds where intricate architectural forms and delicate organic elements coexist: plush moss on a forest floor forms a city square as luxurious condo towers appear in boreal fungi; a tightly framed image of the cracks in a rock reveals an interior of a bustling metropolis replete with cars, suspended gondolas, and stylized skyscrapers. Using motion graphics and 3D animation, Norton’s digital tableaus articulate an anxiety that traverses the meeting of natural worlds and our built, electronically mechanized reality. The irony of the work corresponds to these concerns: instead of building from the ‘ground up’, Norton’s neighbourhoods are perfectly integrated into an existing natural landscape, appearing inviting and desirable, yet obviously impossible. These miniature civilizations are propositional vignettes, not unlike the concept renderings of architectural firms; often impossible to achieve, but sought after nonetheless–a utopia.

Organised by: Jenn E Norton

Trinity Square Video premieres four newly commissioned works that form the second part of our latest trilogy of Themed Commissions, LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER.

RIGHT

New work by Mark Dudiak, Gail Mentlik, Matthew-Robin Nye, and Carolyn Tripp

Premiere Screening:

Tuesday, February 7, 2012, 8PM
Jackman Hall AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario)
317 Dundas Street West – McCaul Street Entrance

Tickets available at the door or in advance at TSV
$6 for TSV Members / $8 for non-members

The evening’s programme will also feature work by renowned video artists Tom Kalin, Steve Reinke, and Michael Robinson

TSV’s Themed Commission Program offers selected artists the opportunity to make a completely new work over a four-month period with full access to the centre’s facilities for production, postproduction, education and dissemination.

For RIGHT, artists were asked to create work using appropriated writing as a primary source material for the examination of contemporary political issues, considering the idea of “right” from various positions: from the conservative demanding moderation and caution; from the Republican set against collectivism; from the correct and proper and those who question of their validity; from the lawfully just and fair who declare civil or human rights on a surface; from marks, cursive figures or typographic signs that “write” and transform.

Mark Dudiak’s Self-Reliance features a nameless protagonist alone in a vast agrarian expanse searching for human contact over the airwaves of his HAM radio set. This work conflates right-wing libertarianism with the sustainable living movement through the lens of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay, Self Reliance in order to question the individual’s place in a wider society.

Gail Mentlik’s Certificate of Life is part of an ongoing body of work exploring family, memory, and history through various quotidian documents. In her latest video, bureaucratic process meets humanity as the artist follows her mother’s annual visit to a German Consulate, providing proof of her life and ensuring her monthly compensation as a holocaust survivor.

Matthew-Robin Nye’s The Sailor’s Way is a vivid, dream-like animated sequence exploring Ayn Randian declarations of individual identity, changing political milieus, and the power and impotence of epic journeys and activist movements.

Carolyn Tripp’s We harrowed the wrong quarry., features graphic line drawings, patterns, and found photographs that float, weave, and burst in animated landscapes. Using the text of governmental environment assessments as a stepping point, Tripp’s creates an abstract narrative on pollution and mutation through the exploration of repetition and mechanical rhythm in sound and image.

Mark Dudiak is a Toronto-based artist who received a BFA from the Emily Carr University (Vancouver). He recently exhibited Hall, a monumental architectural intervention at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche (Toronto).

Gail Mentlik is a Toronto-based filmmaker who has been making the transition to working in video the last few years. Her work ranges from experimental to personal documentary and has been screened nationally and internationally. She received her M.A. in Media Study and Art History from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has worked as media educator, curator, and editor.

Matthew-Robin Nye is an emerging artist who has exhibited internationally in the New York Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (with Raketa Press) and the Benaki Museum (Athens) as a member of the Flux Factory collective (New York). He has recently created projects for the New York-based media collective Paper Tiger Television, the Art Gallery of York University, and collaborative projects at Modtar Projects and Spanien 19c (Denmark).

Carolyn Tripp is an artist and writer living in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited at the Blackwood Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, with Vini Vidi O at Khyber Center for the Arts (Halifax) and Lennox Contemporary (Toronto), The Factory Theatre (Toronto), The Toronto Underground Cinema, and the Toronto Urban Film Festival.

Organised by: Trinity Square Video