Artspace x VP

line drawing of the artspace building with a large "40" candle on top

VP Celebrates Our Good Friends' 40th!

Join us for a night of sound art, projection art, interactive art and donuts as we support our very good friends at Artspace during their 40th anniversary fundraiser. Besides hanging out in our Adventure Lab and Immersion Studio, or picking up a cool 3D print designed by Ashkan, you can also check out the artworks we're presenting throughout the night.

FEATURING

jaymez: foreteeth and uncertainty - a site specific projection based installation commissioned by Video Pool for the Artspace 40th Anniversary (2nd floor hallways + The Pivot)

Fern De Avila: There Will Be Donuts - an interactive projection piece fragmenting time and perception. And yes, there will be donuts (2nd floor - The Output)

Manufacturing Entertainment x XIE x Groundswell (David Litke): Sound and visuals spread across and throughout various locations (3rd floor hallways, Poolside Gallery, Stairwells) featuring live and pre-recorded sampling, EMF sensors, reactive visuals and roaming musicians

David Litke / Groundswell: Poolside Gallery

Manufacturing Entertainment: 3rd Floor foyer

eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE): Roaming

About the Artists and Artworks

"foreteeth and uncertainty" is a site specific projection based installation commissioned by Video Pool for the Artspace 40th Anniversary.The work explores design from the ambiguous perspective of youth combined with the design style of VP. Embracing the "low-brow" aesthetics of tattoo flash, clip art and graffiti, the work explores the use of simplistic designs as adornment, decoration and a form of self expression.

bio:
With a diverse background in visual art, projection, stage design, installation and sound, jaymez brings a unique and multifaceted approach to art and technology, refined over two decades of professional practice. He has worked as a solo artist and a stage designer, crafting dozens of lighting, video, and sound designs for a wide array of directors, choreographers, artists, and musicians. His artwork and designs have garnered international recognition across multiple continents, several commissions, a solo exhibition, a number of group exhibitions as well as two Winnipeg Theatre Awards. jaymez is currently based in winnipeg.

Website: ifitmoves.net

3 people stand around a table with a light hanging overhead. in the background is a projection screen showing a person waving

There will be donuts.

2026

cameras, projectors, computers, a table full of donuts

What makes a place? Is it where we are, or everything that has passed through?

And what is the present? A fleeting moment, a position from which we experience the world, or a meeting point between countless unfolding paths?

You are invited into a familiar gathering where moments begin to overlap. Your image returns to you and gestures echo. Past encounters enter the present. As you observe and interact, consider how your presence changes the room. What paths do we trace? What might we leave behind for someone else to encounter? Can two people share a place without ever sharing a moment?

The room remembers fragments of experience and brings them into new relationships. What does it mean to be present when the present is never quite our own? Who decides what returns? And what are we making together, across time, that none of us could make alone?

Bio:

Fern De Avila is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg; a cellular prism refracting the sensory input packets from the many facets of lived experience in the not entirely pellucid ocean of art-making. Their practice begins with a curiosity about the overlooked and the spaces between. Working with sound, light, and our relationships to both through digital media, Fern transforms familiar environments into encounters that unsettle perception and invite new ways of paying attention. Informed by music-making and collaborative art-making, their installations explore how everyday spaces might hold unexpected possibilities for connection, wonder, and change. At the heart of Fern’s work is a simple but persistent question: what might the world become if we open our awareness and learn to experience it in new ways?

Manufacturing Entertainment will be utilizing hand-built EMF sensors and a basic 4-oscillator synth to build drones and rhythmic catharsis that feed software patches for audio-reactive visuals. They will be improvising A/V throughout the night picking up hidden electromagnetic frequencies for your listening pleasure.

Manufacturing Entertainment is Julie Gendron + Emma Hendrix. Since the mid-2000’s, they have collaborated using multiple media, including video, sound, installation, analog/digital technologies, the internet and performance. Hendrix + Gendron create in order to express what is hidden in plain sight and to encourage the creative capacities of observers and participants. Using sound, installation and visual forms, Gendron + Hendrix take everyday actions, objects and environments, and manipulate them in order to conjure multiple meanings from an unending exploration occurring within themselves with the goal of helping to form new points of view for their audiences.

Jordan Erickson

Makenna Graham

Jake Romaniuk

Gordon Fitzell, director

The eXperimental Improv Ensemble is an interdisciplinary performance group of the University of Manitoba Desautels Faculty of Music. Directed by Gordon Fitzell, the ensemble’s activities vary widely, ranging from music for film and dance to telematic concerts and media installations. Over the years, the group has collaborated with numerous other faculties and departments at the University of Manitoba including the Faculty of Architecture, the School of Art, the Department of Computer Science/Human-Computer Interaction Lab, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Religion, as well as with external partners such as the Winnipeg New Music Festival, the Cluster Festival, GroundSwell, Cinémathèque/Winnipeg Film Group, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and Amnesty International.

art/space/art finds its starting point in the sounds of Artspace building itself, generating textures from samples recorded while moving though the building in a typical day: the squeaky doors, the creaking floors, the hum of the elevator, and so on. Added to these raw materials are sounds from those who enliven this space, sampled in real-time through the microphone placed in the room. Both the sounds of the building and those of the people within it are ultimately combined with resonances found within the building’s spaces through a process of audio convolution, thereby reflecting on the relationships between this space that fosters creativity and the creative humans who work within it.

BIO
David Litke is a composer, educator, and arts administrator who has lived and worked across Canada, as well as in the southern US. Currently based in Winnipeg, he holds degrees in composition from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, having completed doctoral studies at the latter under the supervision of Dr. Keith Hamel in 2008. He has taught at the University of Manitoba since 2019; prior to this he taught at the University of Georgia, the University of Windsor, and UBC. His music has been performed across Canada, in the US, and in Europe by many fine musicians, including Ensemble l’Arsenale, the National Broadcast Orchestra, l’Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, the Bozzini Quartet, l’Orchestre de la Francophonie, and the Turning Point Ensemble. His work has been recognized nationally and internationally, in composition competitions (NBO, SOCAN, and MUSCAN competitions) as well as in emerging composers’ programs (Composit 2013, acanthes@ircam New Technologies 2012, Bozzini Quartet's Composer's Kitchen 2010, NAC Young Composers 2008, ECM’s Génération 2006). He has also been active in electroacoustic music research, and has presented at SMC’07, TES’13, TIES’14, SEAMUS’16 and '17, and ICMC’07 and ’16.

David is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre is the Artistic and Administrative Coordinator of GroundSwell New Music.