25th Anniversary
Commissioned Works - March 26, 2008
Video Pool Media Arts Centre proudly celebrated 25 years of support to Manitoban artists through the commission of six projects by seven artists who have made dynamic contributions to Video Pool's history and to media arts in Canada.
decay. At times, media art is approached as a problem: what is the importance of new technologies to new media works, and what happens when the technologies donât work?The curators noticed a curious shift in media arts practices â as technology-based arts have matured, artists appeared to be using electronic media to replicate the past rather than to speculate on the future. They described an aesthetic attitude particularly suited to Winnipeg as a city equally haunted and inspired by the past. It was a view of technology as something mythical and broken, as opposed to clean and slick.The commissioned works purposefully introduced a ghost into the machine of media art. Daniel Barrow worked with outdated technologies, such as an â80s era Amiga editing station and an overhead projector to re-imagine early animation techniques. Peter Courtemanche and Lori Weidenhammer evoked Dr. Frankenstein through the haunting of clothing with circuitry to electronically revive mythological creatures. Richard Dyck encouraged us to scrutinize the surface of a mysteriously ominous vintage photograph. Steven Loft explored societal rather than technological disintegration by drawing attention to the racism exhibited by the broken down and the down and out. Injecting manipulated images of the natural world into constructed environments, Sharon Alward and Victoria Prince escaped the hustle of our technology-obsessed society to achieve time and space for meditative contemplation. Most significantly, each of the featured projects focused on creating an active media arts experience.The works were showcased over six weeks as follows:With an illustrious honour from the Toronto Images Festival (April 3-13, 2008) Daniel Barrow's work was presented at the Plug In ICA's satellite space, which is at 290 McDemot Ave. The exhibition opened on Saturday, April 12 and ran until Saturday April 19.On that note, at the Images Festival Award Daniel was presented with the Prize for Best Canadian Media Artwork for his performance project, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry.
Winnipeg based multi- disciplinary artist Victoria Prince's  sculptural video installation was presented at the Adhere and Deny Pocket Theatre on 70 Albert Street on April 18 and ran until April 25th, 2008
Richard Dyck's new media installation, The day we cut Nettie's curls, she was 7 years old, was presented on April 2nd at  Aceartinc on 290 McDermot Ave and continued on until May 2nd, 2008.
Peter Courtemanche and Lori Weidenhammer's "The Laughing Dress" performed on April 24th and 25th at the PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, on100 Arthur St.
Steve Lofts's " A History of Two Parts" opened May 6 at The Duke of Kent Legion, on 227 McDermot Ave. The exhibition was presented in-part through the generosity of On Screen Manitoba
Sharon Alward's latest collaboration with Alex Poruchnyk, a performance-driven video installation titled Bushi, opened Friday May 16th and continued on until May 24, 2008. The work was showcased from 7:00 â 9:00 p.m. at the Rachel Browne Theater, which is on 211 Bannatyne Ave. (formerly the Winnipeg Contemprary Dancers Studio).
For more information about Sharon Alward and Bushi, please visit: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~alward/Bushi and http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~alward/Bushi2.htm
Video Pool's 25th Anniversary Commissions were made possible by the generous
support of the Winnipeg Arts Council through the New Creations Fund.
Further financial contributions have been kindly provided by:
Video Pool is also pleased to acknowledge contributions from numerous local
organizations; we are deeply grateful for their partnership and
assistance:
ADHERE + DENY
The Duke of Kent Legion
Reviews and Previews:
Video Pool marks 25 years with new works Stacey Abrahamson, Winnipeg Free Press, April 25, 2008
Video Pool Media Arts Centre has much to celebrate on its 25th birthday.
The organization has promoted, pushed and loved video art since the early days of the medium. Rooted in community art ideals, Video Pool has been one of the most welcoming homes of creativity in Canada â it began as a way for artists interested in working in video to "pool" together their resources.
To celebrate its anniversary, Video Pool commissioned six new media art works by Prairie artists through local curators Grant Guy and Sigrid Dahle. Each of these works gets a one-week run at various locations in the Exchange District. Dahle commissioned Richard Dyck, Steven Loft and the collaborative artistic duo of Peter Courtemanche and Lori Weidenhammer through the curatorial concept of Temporarily out of order: downtime. Seen/Unseen is the curatorial vision of Guy through the work of Sharon Alward, Daniel Barrow and Victoria Prince.
Guy's curatorial intent has more to do with performance-based artists and their works, while Dahle's intent has more to do with the vulnerabilities that occur within both the technology surrounding video and the artists who make the works. Both concepts are true to the beginnings of Video Pool, where both performance and conceptual art came together to create a base for artists looking to explore the new medium of video art.
The works by Dyck and Prince are currently showing. Barrow's Trying to Love the Normal Amount was the first of the works to debut in the city on April 12. Barrow normally performs his animations by overlapping colourful transparencies onto one another to create movement and life on screen. In this case, he puts the role of performer onto the audience. Audience members are invited to perform the work through the directions on a screen that's set up like a karaoke prompter. They are asked to play out the sad tale of a woman looking for love and comfort.
Dyck's work always has a feeling of home and history. His video The day we cut Nettie's curls, she was 7 years old is no different. Taking the story behind a 1947 photograph, Dyck
creates a 3-D environment that explores the twists and turns of it tale. The environment is a series of black and white hills and gorges that the viewer travels through with the assistance of a glowing tonal orb. The sadness and strength of the story that is told through text on the screen is heightened by the silence in the room and the 3-D space. Dyck invites the viewers to ponder the scene and story that is given to them through the serenity of the created artificial hush of its backdrop.
Walking up the stairs to Prince's installation, the viewer is pummelled with the powerful fragrance of incense. When the viewer reaches the top of the stairs and the entrance to the installation room, the scent becomes almost unbearable. The candle-lit room holds Light and Alter, Prince's glistening watery installation. Two Plexiglas waterfalls stand on either side of a stone- and salt-laden path leading into a video projection and light. Viewers are invited to walk through the path to what Prince calls a "tabernacle."
She creates a new media metaphor of spirituality that is not only witnessed but experienced, and is unlike any work she has done before.
Still to come are works by Alward, Loft and the duo of Courtemanche and Weidenhammer, details of which can be found on the Video Pool website.
The six commissions and artists represent a sampling of the best artists working in new media in Canada. It is a fabulous way to celebrate the organization's achievements and is indicative of the creative and conceptual past it has had and the potential of its future.
Check out this fantastic 25th Anniversary coverage by Whitney Light that appeared in an edition of Uptown.
Click on the image to read the full articleâŚ
We were very happy to discover Walter Forsberg's preview of our 25th Anniversary programming in Uptown Magazine. We're sure this will mean an even bigger party tonight!
Click on the image for a larger versionâŚ
Mike Landry, walrusmagazine.com/blogs, April 16th, 2008
To celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, Winnipegâs Video Pool media art centre made a poster detailing its history. But the twenty-five year history of an artist-run centre is as harried as they come. Rather than a straight timeline, Video Poolâs history looks more
like a brainstorming session gone wrong. In the aptly titled The Incomplete, Contested, Anecdotal, Unedited, Messy, Nostalgic, Faulty, Controversial History of Video Pool So Far⌠,bubbles of people, places, moments in time, and minor scandals are connected with AV cables.
But Video Pool isnât just celebrating their milestone with a poster. For the next month Video Pool takes Winnipeg by storm with six commissioned works from the centre at spaces around town.
The works are from two big names in Winnipeg: Sigrid Dahle, and Grant Guy. Dahle has been living and working as a risk-taking independent curator in Winnipeg about as long as Video Pool has been around. Guy, who comes from a background in theatre, has been involved with the centre from the very beginning.
Video Poolâs initial idea was to have the curators explore media artâs past, present, and future. But both Dahle and Guy took that theme in their own direction, and commissioned artists at different stages in their career who all have ties to Video Pool. Having a diverse representation is always important to Video Pool, says programming coordinator Milena
Placentile.
âItâs really about keeping the dialogue going between different generations and making
sure everyone has access to what they need at all points in their career.â
Dahle commissioned Steven Loft, Richard Dyck, and Lori Weidenhammer and Peter Courtemanche to explore âthe implications of an artwork in which vulnerability, failure,
requirements for regular maintenance and a reliance on (unstable) shared networks are foregrounded?â Loft tackles the question with a video installation tackling the racism, violence, and filth of an average Manitoba video lottery terminal-cursed bar. Weidenhammer and Courtemanche combine performance and sound art with a dress laden with speakers. But itâs Dyck who takes the cake for the most mind-altering reaction to Dahleâs question, âHow might [a] pieceâs âmalfunctioningâ serve to create a time and space for quiet contemplation and memory.â He does this with a computer program simulating a camera moving through a 3D rendering of a photograph from 1947 according to mathematical algorithms that result in a new video each time. Yowzah.
Guy combined his theatrical background with the performance aspects of media art. He did this by asking Daniel Barrow, Victoria Prince, and Sharon Alward to address the concept of light as material or metaphor. Barrow does this a do-it-yourself version of his famed overhead projection performance. Alward brings a healthy dose of insanity with her
not-quite-in-performance piece featuring martial arts and one-on-one tea ceremonies. And Prince used her commission as an opportunity to branch out from her single-channel work, presenting a video-based sculptural installation that includes water and salt, among other things.
For those familiar
with Video Pool from the beginning, it should be no surprise they used
this celebration to commission new work. Thatâs exactly why Video Pool
was founded in the first place. Well, that and to pool video resources.
âThat it is something designed with a celebration in mind and also designed specifically for our programming as opposed to just supporting production in principle makes it quite original for what we normally undertake,â says Placentile.
Because Video Pool doesnât have its own programming space, it has partnered with several Winnipeg galleries and theatres to exhibit the new works. With such a tight-knit community though it wasnât a problem getting collaborators for Video Poolâs celebration. For Placentile, who moved to Winnipeg from Toronto recently, itâs exactly this atmosphere that attracted her.
âWhether itâs something as simple as loaning equipment and then even sharing space,
it can just happen in a flash. Everyone realizes how important it is to do that to be here and be successfulâ
For a little film collective that blossomed into a non-profit artist-run centre, Video Pool certainly has grown up. Rightly, this celebration marks its most ambitious year yet. Increased planning has led to more generous grants, which in turn has led to more programming. Thereâs even talk of trying to tour the six new works. With their artists becoming more and more recognized, Video Pool is starting to receive replies to their emails from around the world.
In Winnipeg though, people just appreciate that Video Pool exists. With new and expensive technologies like high-definition media, the centre is the only place where many artists can dream of accessing these high-end materials.
âItâs hard for people to enter, and they have ideas of what they want to make and
do, and being part of a larger community makes it all possible,â says Placentile. âThis is what drew me to Winnipeg, and Video Pool really embodies it.