Category: Programming (page 24)

The Pit Bar, Dawson City deconstructs the seamless representation of perspective and movement in traditional video. Artist Allison Hrabluik meticulously constructs a miniature, three-dimensional stage with paper
cut-outs of figures taken from each frame of her original video and recreates her source footage using stop motion techniques. The video will be installed alongside its toy-like theatrical set and paper figures, providing viewers with a glimpse of the artistic process. The Pit Bar features Canadian indie-rock stars The Constantines and was recorded in Dawson City.

Any Port in the Storm is an eight-channel, site-specific video installation housed in a semi-subterranean building constructed especially for the piece.

The work develops the theme of shelter – both physical and psychological – by leading viewers though multiple, loosely connected narratives. Filled with multiple speakers and monitors, the bunker-like installation space comes alive with the sights and sounds of the world around us. Emerging from the installation into the surrounding forest, the viewer’s experience of this natural site is reframed by the introspective mood of the installation.

This screening traces Culp’s development as an activist film maker – moving from documentarian and agit prop styles to a poetic reflection on personal politics. Recently he has engaged in blurring genres by introducing elements such as found footage and hand processing techniques into the familiar format of the documentary film.

I wish to challenge activist video’s secondary, ‘service’ status within activist movements, asserting video production in itself as an ideological struggle that must be rendered visible. – Jonathan Culp

Curated by Ingrid Mayrhofer, Active Layers presents the work of five women artists using interactive technologies to engage the viewer’s imagination and experience.

Interacting and performing with, through and to the artworks, the viewer explores hidden layers and renders active images.

Following the screening, Walking and Being will be available for viewing February 17-24 during regular Video Pool hours, in the Video Pool third floor studio. Includes Video Pool Media Arts Centre artists: Grant Poier, Brenna George, Nida Home Doherty, Ley Ward and John Morgan, Jack Lauder, Marian Butler, Janet Hawkwood, Terry Billings, Alex Poruchnyk, Erika MacPherson, Val Klassen, Nicole Shimonek, Lori Rogers.

Art’s Birthday is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou. He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on the 17th of January to be precise, Art was born. According to Filliou, it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications art.

On Saturday January 14th the glycemic index shot up sky-high at Video Pool, when the Art’s Birthday cakes hit the palates of our discerning celebrity judges. The competition was tooth and nail, icing and fork! The results are in…

Real & Surreal Cake Contest Winners

Cakes were judged on their artistic and culinary merits by local food and art critics, Morley Walker (Winnipeg Free Press), Kristin
Pauch-Nolin (Uptown Magazine), Jaeny Baik (CBC Radio) and Cyrus Smith (artist, chef and bon vivant).

McSwain writes that Wendy Geller’s video work “encompasses a voice and structure that strips away the habits and politeness that shield us from the forces of nature, and the hierarchies of power that suffuse western society. In her humorous satire, her feminist sensibility revels in critiquing Freudian psychoanalysis as well as the role(s) of actresses within the Hollywood star system. However, Geller’s voice finds its most multilayered synthesis in her series Stories for the Garden.

September 20, 2005
Video Pool and aceartinc. present a lecture by writer and curator Sarah Cook

Sarah Cook is a Sunderland University doctoral researcher in New Media Curation (a collaboration with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art). She worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and organised the EAT on-line forum there. She has been a curator-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Alberta, Canada and has worked at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.