The act of representation is a process of mediation, of formalizing ideological frameworks, of exercising power dynamics, and of producing relationships between subjects and objects. An apparatus for self-imaging, representation both permits and precludes the naming and seeing of ourselves and others in the public realm, often resulting in dissonance, differentiation and exclusion.
Articles
Leslie Supnet began creating animated films in 2008. Although her films have screened at festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival and Oberhausen, she is particularly fond of the camaraderie offered at artist-run spaces and micro-cinemas. After studying in Toronto, she has recently returned to her hometown of Winnipeg, a place that has been pivotal in the formation and expansion of her practice.
In the more than forty years since the artist and theorist Lucy Lippard announced the dematerialization of the art, it has become apparent, particularly to Lippard herself, that this proclamation may have been premature.
PAVED Arts, the new media artist-run centre born out of the Saskatoon Photographers Gallery, has been a longtime advocate and supporter of local artists with contemporary practices in photography. PAVED brings a conceptually rich addition to the 2016 festival with an exhibition of local Saskatoon photographers working in film photography, “Resolution,” curated by artistic director David LaRiviere.
Since the advent of the Portapak video recorder in the 1960s, the tools for video have been increasingly accessible to artists. The images taken by early video equipment were markedly imperfect; faint and ghostly records of flat grey forms. New movements were pushing toward conceptual and performative art, and many artists would use video as a tool to bear witness to, and give evidence of, this newly evanescent art.
In-Between Worlds is an ongoing series by Ottawa-based artist Meryl McMaster that grapples with complex questions of identity; addressing the ways contemporary Indigenous and cross-cultural identities are represented.
The exploitation of Indigenous culture has a long and fraught history in Canada and abroad. The donning of headdresses by hipsters at music festivals and the appropriation of Indigenous patterns in luxury fashion lines, like Canadian designers DSquared2’s “Dsquaw” collection, indicates that the commodification and misappropriation of Indigenous belongings continues to occur in contemporary Canada.
Okwui Enwezor’s linchpin to the 56th Venice Biennale, All the World’s Futures, was the continuous live reading of Karl Marx’s
David Hoffos is widely recognized for his series of unique multimedia installations that draw inspiration from a variety of sources
A hoax is a possibility, provoking an examination on what is wondrous and what is banal, what is lost and how we follow this track to seek it out when it is right in front of us. It is a new perspective; an opportunity to view the world. In these in between spaces, where the imagined elbows up against what we know, between when we discover and when we prove, reality mingles with illusion and blurs.
Brooklyn-based artist Anna Plesset investigates and complicates the archives by culling lost or forgotten histories, and inserting new and personal narratives. Plesset’s conceptual practice resides between reality and illusion, recreating symbolic objects by employing a painting technique that literally fools the eye. Her gallery installations often utilize vitrines filled with hand-made and found objects, alongside carefully selected travel ephemera, bringing into question authorship, collecting activities, and museum display.