Past
2011 Programming
Decisive Moments, Somewhere Else
Stephen Andrews (CA), Lorna Bauer (CA), Roberto Bellini (BR),
Jennifer Chan (CA), Chris Hondros (US), and Lisa Oppenheim (US)
Opening October 27, 2011, 5-7pm
The concurrent exhibitions Decisive Moments, Somewhere Else and Decisive Moments, Uncertain Times are part of an ongoing curatorial dialogue between Gallery TPW Curator, Kim Simon, and TSV’s Programming Director, Jean-Paul Kelly. The exhibitions respond to Kelly’s challenge to consider the “decisive moment” in contemporary visual arts; for photography in a time of video.
Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s described the “decisive moment” as a precise balance of form and content within a single photograph; where a photographer’s honed intuition allows time and geometry to meet, giving an “event its proper expression.”
Decisive Moments, Somewhere Else questions whether the “decisive moment” was ever really singular, or if it extends through a reading process that includes the indexical mark of the photograph as well as its representations over time and distance: the “decisive moment” as an event that includes the collaborations of photographer, photo-editor, publisher, and consumer.
Unlike the in situ indexicality associated with the “decisive moment,” …Somewhere Elseconsiders processes traditionally excluded from the concept, such as selection, circulation, and reception, as part of a changing definition. …Somewhere Else questions whether or not simultaneous production, consumption, and dispersion–through our instantaneous digital access to images in multiple form–have become, themselves, formal processes, and in so, fundamental to the expression of an event, proper.
…Somewhere Else features works in which the artist’s presence is reflected in, or in reaction to, their surrounding social landscape, often haunted by past or imminent threat. The exhibition proposes that this unsettling self-reflexivity may provide the “proper expression” of contemporary events: the artist and the conditions of artistic production as part of a holistic narrative, transmitting the distant event, “in a fraction of a second.”
Works in both …Somewhere Else and Decisive Moments, Uncertain Times raise ethical questions about the relationship between formalism and politics, spectacle and engagement, and about image consumption and responsibility.
Decisive Moments, Uncertain Times
Work by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (UK), Paolo Canevari (IT),
Ken Gonzales-Day (US), Jannicke Laker (DM), and John Moore (US)
October 20 to November 19, 2011
Opening: October 20, 5-7PM
For more information please visit www.gallerytpw.ca
Stephen Andrews is an artist based in Toronto. Over the last twenty-five years Andrews has exhibited his work in Canada, the US, Brazil, Scotland, France, and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Belkin Art Gallery, the Schwartz Collection, and Harvard, as well as many private collections. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including drawing, animation and recently painting. Stephen Andrews is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto).
Lorna Bauer was born in 1980 in Toronto and currently lives and works in Montreal. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions at Sporobole (Sherbrooke, Quebec), YYZ Artist Outlet (Toronto), Gallery Les Territoires (Montreal), and in the Projection Access space at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Her video work has been screened at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Nuit Blanche Toronto (2009 and 2007) and The University Of Toronto Art Center. She holds a Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2009) and a BFA (with distinction) from Concordia University (2005). Currently, Bauer is featured in the 2011 Quebec Triennial: Le travail qui nous attend.
Roberto Bellini is an artist based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is a graduate of the School of Fine Arts, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil (2002) and earned an MFA in Transmedia from the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin (2007). His work has been exhibited in various galleries and festivals internationally, including solo exhibitions at Centro Cultural São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) and Palácio das Artes (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) and in numerous group shows, including the 2007 Texas Biennial (Austin, Texas), Lone Star Video at the Center for Contemporary (Tel Aviv, Israel), This Land is Your Land at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, andTexas/Nexus at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.
Jennifer Chan is an artist and curator who works with video, performance, and web-based media. She has lived in Toronto and Hong Kong. Exhibiting both in and outside traditional exhibition spaces, her research explores notions of individuality and subversion after the popularization of the internet. She recently exhibited her work at the Portland Art Museum, Images Festival, and Low Lives III International Exhibition of Live Networked Performances. Chan is currently pursuing her MFA in Art Video at Syracuse University.
Chris Hondros was an American Pulitzer Prize-nominated photojournalist. Hondros studied English literature at North Carolina State University and earned a Master’s degree from the School of Visual Communications, Ohio University. Hondros covered most of the world’s major conflicts since the late 1990s, including wars in Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, Liberia, and Libya. His work has appeared on the covers of magazines such as Newsweek and The Economist, and on the front pages of most major American newspapers, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Hondros’s images have been displayed in galleries and at exhibitions internationally. Among his many awards, Hondros won the Robert Capa Gold Medal (2006), war photography’s highest honor, for his work in Iraq. Chris Hondros was killed while on assignment in Libya on April 20, 2011.
Lisa Oppenheim lives and works in New York. She is a graduate of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (BA in Art and Semiotics, 1998) and received an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam (2001). She participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (2003). Her recent exhibitions include Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilboa (2010), Free at the New Museum, New York (2010), and the solo exhibitions Heliograms at Art Basel 42 with Galerie Juliette Jongma (2011), Blood to Ghosts, Martin Klosterfelde Gallery,
Berlin (2010), and Invention without a Future, Harris Lieberman, New York (2009). Lisa Oppenheim is represented by Galerie Juliette Jongma (Amsterdam), Klosterfelde (Berlin), and Harris Lieberman Gallery (New York).
Image credit: Lorna Bauer, Kaleidoscope, 2009. Video, 8’24”
Organised by: Trinity Square Video
Patrick Kaipainen
Patrick Kaipainen: Elegy for Billy Ray Moore
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 8, 7-9pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, September 10, 2011, 2-4pm
At times both irreverent and plaintive, Patrick Kaipainen’s video installation Elegy for Billy Ray Moore begins with a contract to pray daily for a soldier that the artist does not know. Proceeding with only the soldier’s name, Kaipainen conducts a disparate search–co-opting codes of documentary and evidentiary collection along the way–attempting to ameliorate questions around the absent figure. Using online sources to track the life of an unfamiliar soldier, Kaipainen builds an allegory to the paradoxical liabilities of contemporary military intelligence strategy: defensive investment in early Internet technology (ARPANET), and its connection to remote surveillance and the privatization and capitalization of information, infiltrated and destabilized by an emancipating dispersion integral to the medium (WikiLeaks).
Elegy for Billy Ray Moore operates initially as another satirical indictment of the blind rhetoric of “supporting our troops” but through a combination of repetition, temporal elision, humour, and the evocation of the everyday, Kaipainen builds a lamentation that is both cutting and humane. In his installations, public art, and socially engaged performances, Kaipainen investigates contemporary representations of activism, simultaneously recognizing the contradictory nature of political art: in the contested relationship between art and cause, one side often undoes the other. Kaipainen embraces these incongruities in his projects. Working against the romantic and radical forces that often intrude upon social actions, he allows a cause to be depicted with the possibility of simultaneous earnest investment and ironic detachment.
Organised by: Patrick Kaipainen
LEFT
LEFT
Exhibition: May 12 – June 12
@ TSV
Premiere: Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 8 PM
@ TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King Street West
Trinity Square Video premieres five newly commissioned works by Yuula Benivolski & Geoffrey Pugen, Lee Henderson, Madi Piller, Andrew Szatmari and Pudy Tong. These videos form the first third of TSV’s latest trilogy of Themed Commissions, LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER.
The May 10 screening will also include a special presentation of David Wojnarowicz’ A Fire in My Belly in reaction to the Smithsonian’s removal the film from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (Washington DC).
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 LEFT, artists were asked to create work using audio as a primary source material for the examination of contemporary political issues, considering the idea of “left” from various positions: from the egalitarian leftist or the undecided left-leaning; from a place of possible difference on the left-side or in leftfield; or from those remainders that haunt us–what is leftover, what is left unsaid or what has been left hanging.
Yuula Benivolski & Geoffrey Pugen’s ONGIARA recreates the experience of being on a Toronto island ferry through filming a constructed prop of that same vessel. The video generates a metaphoric comparison between physical experience and subjectivity, poetically linking nautical disequilibrium to living in isolation in a larger allegory to life on the island.
Lee Henderson’s De Mortuis appropriates clips from the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in which Hitchcock addressed viewers before and after each episode. The fragments of footage are meticulously edited so that Hitchcock delivers a soliloquy on the metaphysics of the electronic image and the television as a metaphor for the human body, offering a tongue-in-cheek manifesto on the cinematic auteur’s relationship to mortality.
In Madi Piller’s Left to Paradise, images and sound confront in a poetic montage. The video incorporates photographs of places the artist has lived and left behind. Piller’s animation of these documents stimulates a haunting reflection on the notion of ideal space, of what is and what is not lived.
In Andrew Szatmari’s video Start From Now, an interview with a disenfranchised youth is heard against prosaic landscape video footage. Juxtaposing these audio and video sources, Szatmari explores how subjective experience is represented through technology.
Pudy Tong’s tele-monumental is an elegiac meditation on delegated commemoration, historical markers, mourning and celebration. In the video images of words found on memorial plaques scroll across the screen, paired with a voice-over by Stephen Harper speaking “on behalf of all Canadians.”
Born in Moscow, Yuula Benivolski grew up in Northern Israel and currently lives and works between Toronto and Montreal. She works with sculpture, photographs, video and installation and is interested in ritual, acclimatization and survival. Benivolski holds an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal). Her art and video work has been shown in Canada and internationally.
Lee Henderson is a multi-disciplinary artist who has studied art in Canada and Berlin and completed an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Regina in 2005. His work has been shown in Canada and abroad, with recent and forthcoming exhibitions and screening at Zero Film Festival (Los Angeles), The Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), The Rooms (St. John’s) and SAW Video (Ottawa). Henderson has taught at OCAD University (Toronto) and the University of Western Ontario (London).
Madi Piller is a Toronto-based animator and filmmaker, born in Lima, Peru. Her films often combine digital and analogue techniques using diverse practices such as hand painted, sand and cutout animation with digital rotoscoping. Piller’s works have been shown at many festivals and venues across Canada and abroad. She is a graduate of the University of Lima in Communication Sciences and is President of the Board of Toronto Animated Image Society (TAIS).
Geoffrey Pugen works with video, film and photography, exploring relationships between real and staged performance, the natural and the artificial, and tensions of virtual identity, through altering and manipulating images. His work has exhibited nationally and internationally in places such as Berlin Transmediale 05, Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), International Media Art Biennale WRO 07 (Poland), Gallery TPW (Toronto) and the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art (Toronto). Pugen is an MFA graduate in Film and Video from York University (Toronto) and is represented by Angell Gallery (Toronto).
Andrew Szatmari is a Toronto-based artist and photographer. In general, his work is concerned with how “experience” is represented and rendered through form. He attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax), Concordia University (Montreal) and the University of Guelph.
A news junkie from an early age, Pudy Tong‘s work is engendered by the poetics and politics of the journalistic engine. Tong recently completed his MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (Halifax).
Organised by: Trinity Square Video
Hawkers
Trinity Square Video and the Images Festival are excited to present the installation Hawkers (2011) by Toronto-based artist Abbas Akhavan (Iran/Canada). Created during Trinity Square Video’s semi-annual, month-long Artist-in-Residence program, Hawkers includes a short video shot in Dubai, UAE where falconry, a traditional part of desert life, has been practiced for centuries. The video is a quick glance at the relationships between locals and visitors, humans and animals, tradition and new economies.
TSV’s Artist-in-Residence program intends to encourage video’s expanding sphere of experimentation by providing an artist (or collective) with full use of the centre’s equipment resources and the use of the gallery as a studio to develop a new video installation. The residency culminates with the work’s premiere during the Images Festival.
Born in Tehran, Abbas Akhavan is currently a Toronto resident. His practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing and video. Akhavan’s work has been exhibited in galleries such as Vancouver Art Gallery and Artspeak (Vancouver), Kunsten Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Le Printemps de septembre a Toulouse (France), The Third Line (Qatar and Dubai), with upcoming solo exhibitions at Araan Gallery (Iran), Modern Fuel (Kingston), and The Darling Foundry (Montreal)
Organised by: Trinity Square Video
Andrew James Paterson
The Ghosts of Home Entertainment
Performance & Opening Reception: February 17, 2011, 5-7 PM
Artist Talk: February 23, 2011, 6-8 PM
ANDREW JAMES PATERSON’S INTERVIEW ON ARTSYNC
SALLY MCKAY ON ANDREW JAMES PATERSON
ANDREW JAMES PATERSON’S HIT LIST ON AKIMBO
In celebration of our 40th anniversary, TSV has expanded its annual single-evening screening, Spotlight on a TSV Member, into a gallery exhibition, this year featuring the work of lifetime member and former Board Chair, artist Andrew James Paterson. The exhibition will present Paterson’s recent work, including a venue-specific performance incorporating TSV’s historic video collection, with a previous video from his significant body of work. As part of the Spotlight – which asks profiled artists to select a work by another artist that has influenced or resonates with their own practice – Paterson has chosen an early video by the late Colin Campbell for inclusion in the show.
The Ghosts of Home Entertainment showcases some of the core interests of Paterson’s extensive artistic practice. Highlighted by his pointed, sometimes petulant, questioning of contentious cultural and philosophical issues, the works featured at TSV illustrate the artist’s longstanding play with speech and language as repositories for divisions of discourse and power. Paterson’s conversational scripts, with their droll parodying of the caustic symbiosis between artists and art bureaucrats, art and art galleries, making and collecting, image and meaning, attest to a world of blank and bored cultural production and consumption. His aesthetic aping of post-punk, new wave irony calls to attention slippages between discursivity and surface – between the text of art and its experience, between the self and its representations, where word and image, analysis and sensation, blend. In a clairvoyant turn, Paterson’s work outlines the digital age: the videos are fraught with characters stuck between consuming and producing, who just sit back and talk and watch – and talk in text – absorbed by their ghostly boundaries.
Andrew James Paterson is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, video and film, musical composition, critical writing and fiction. His performances and videotapes have been presented and exhibited internationally and throughout Canada. Paterson was formerly the lead singer and principal writer for the band, The Government, which, between 1977 and 1982, made several recordings and one “music video”, How Many Fingers?. He has curated media-art programmes for various galleries and artist-run centres and has written on media-art and cultural politics for FUSE, PUBLIC, IMPULSE and FILE, as well as contributing to anthologies published by Gallery TPW, Pleasure Dome and YYZBOOKS. He is the co-editor of Money, Value, Art (2001), and editor of Grammar & Not-Grammar: Selected Scripts and Essays by Gary Kibbins (2003), both published by YYZBOOKS. Paterson has served as a board member for A Space, YYZ Artists’ Outlet and TSV, where he was Board Chair in 1992.
Organised by: Trinity Square Video
Apprehensions
Apprehensions includes two individual works by Christian Morrison and Paulette Phillips and a rarely exhibited video from 1986 by Morrison featuring performances by both artists. These videos follow a common allegorical current that has come to characterize the work of each artist: Morrison and Phillips examine human subjectivity–and its relationship to story–through the use of a poetic form that functions in the slippery gap between the present and the past. With reference to familiar stories and oblique historical tales, these works mine uncanny territory, where what is witnessed or perceived returns repeatedly, manifesting in a different, often physical form.
Morrison and Phillips were founding members (along with artists Edward Lam, Dimitrije Martinovic and Geoffrey Shea) of United Media Arts Studies (UMAS), an artist’s collective that produced, exhibited and disseminated the work of its members and other video artists, performance artists and filmmakers in various contexts from 1984 to 1989. In its brief history UMAS was a vital contributor to the media arts landscape of Toronto: foreshadowing the interdisciplinary practices that would follows its collective activities; negotiating independent experimentation and populism with the institutionalization of previously marginal practices like video art; and activating changes in access to the means of visual and lens-based art production. Prior to and during this period Morrison and Phillips were both staff and active members of TSV, with Phillips serving as Chair of the Board in 1982.
TSV is pleased to highlight this vital connection to our own history through the presentation of these important works as part of our 40th Anniversary celebrations, 1971-2011.
Organised by: Trinity Square Video