DATA Mentorship
DATA Mentorship recipients have been anncounced!
The Diversity through Access to Technology + Art program (DATA) provides mentorship, education and career development opportunities to artists with disabilities who are interested in incorporating technology into their arts practice. It is a year long mentorship and includes both mentor and mentee exhibitions throughout the next year.
DATA is a collaboration with the Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba (AANM) and is generously supported by the Winnipeg Foundation and the Manitoba Arts Council, with additional support from Assiniboine Credit Union.
Gratitude and congratulations to this year’s participants:
Mentees
Andrea Von Wichert
Susan Aydan Abbott
Yvette Cenerini
Susan Lamberd
Mentors
Reva Stone
Ken Gregory
Helga Jakobson
Erika Lincoln
Participant Bios:
Andrea von Wichert
Andrea von Wichert is a Winnipeg visual artist/writer/performer who’s recent work focuses on abjection as self-identity. A scenic artist in the Winnipeg film and theatre industries for over 20 years, she is now focused on her own visual art practice, most recently as a participant in the “Making Our Mark III” residency at Martha Street Studio.
Her words have been heard all over the country, been published in Prairie Fire Magazine and this past summer have been included in Frontenac Press’s GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times. Performances include numerous Canadian Festivals of Spoken Word, the 2012 Brighton Fringe Festival as part of PAZZIA Live Art Collective, and a one-person show Andrea von Wichert is OVEREXPOSED.
Instagram @vonwichertstudio
Susan Aydan Abbott
Susan Aydan Abbott is an interdisciplinary artist, living and working in Winnipeg. Her work focuses on themes of social justice. The R.O.T. Series is part of a larger body of work titled BOOBY HATCH (WO)MANIFESTO: a feminine perspective of Century Manor. This project was supported by grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council.
Susan Lamberd
Susan is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in challenging the preconceived notions of what an artist with a disability can create. She works with sculpture and visual arts to communicate ideas of access in the arts, rejecting the view of disability that conventional artists have maintained. Susan uses the body to aid in discovering radical new ways in which to express these beliefs. Susan has been volunteering for Arts AccessAbility for eight years.
Yvette Cenerini
Reva Stone
Reva Stone’s work is concerned with an examination of the mediation between our bodies and the technologies that are altering how we interact with the world. She engages with a variety of forms of digital technologies to initiate discourses about how biotechnological and robotic practices are impacting upon the very nature of being human. Her work has included pieces such as Imaginal Expression, an endlessly mutating responsive 3D environment, Carnevale 3.0, an autonomous robot that reflects on the nature of human consciousness, and Portal (iphone), a work that combines custom software, media, robotics and mobile phone technology to create a work that appears to be sentient. Recently, she has been developing a series of works that critique how drone technologies are being integrated into society, titled Fragments, She has received many awards, including the 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Manitoba, 2015 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts and an honorable mention from Life 5.0, Art & Artificial Life International Competition, Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, Spain. She has exhibited widely in Canada, the US and Europe, has presented at symposia and has been published in journals such as Second Nature: the International Journal of Creative Media.
Ken Gregory
Winnipeg artist Ken Gregory has been working with DIY interface design, hardware hacking, audio, video, and computer programming for over 25 years. His performance and installation work has shown publicly in Winnipeg, other parts of Canada and many international media and sound arts festivals. These works are presented in the form of gallery installations and live performances. Recent career highlights amongst others is the exhibition of wind coil sound flow, a large sound installation at San Jose’s City Hall Rotunda as part of the 2010 01SJ Biennial and the installation of Prototype Electric Light Machine for a Modern Room, a kinetic/robotic machine at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin as part of the exhibition Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Sensing the Future October 8 2014 to January 12 2015.
Helga Jakobson
With work that often incorporates detritus from her immediate atmosphere, whether components of the natural landscape or relics from her great grandparents’ homestead, Helga’s practice is a responsive and reflective attempt to quantify experience. Her practice often revolves around themes of philosophy, mortality, and the human experience. Her interests are in the hand-made, pseudoscience, and the role of the creative producer as responder, explorer and critical engager of the current cultural climates within which they exist.
Erika Lincoln
Erika Lincoln is a Canadian artist whose practice is centred around the nature of systems; how they hold knowledge, transmit ideas, and control behaviour. Her work has shown in media art festivals, museums, and galleries in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Australia. She is a multi-year grant recipient from the Canada Council for the Arts, and has participated in residencies at the Banff New Media Institute in Canada and Medialab Prado in Spain and the City of Winnipeg’s Planning Department.