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.
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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.
Away from the chaos of the crowded tourist destinations of the Rocky Mountains, the landscape provokes considerations of history, time and an enduring natural power. This overwhelming and oft unnerving force of the mountains is a fine setting for “Séance Fiction,” curated by Peta Rake at the Walter Philips Gallery. In her essay of the same title, Rake references the chapter, “The Slow Cancelation of the Future” in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014), in which he laments a kind of loss of loss; a 21st century ability to access countless moments and times. In his discussion of temporality, Fischer references the British sci-fi television series Sapphire and Steel wherein Time was an anachronistic force.
The tradition of cameraless filmmaking spans the history of experimental film; from the work of the Surrealists, to the field of visual music, to the mid-century abstractionists, to a contemporary vanguard of artists working in animation and chemical processes. The artists affiliated with this tradition used many tools in the course of marking, drawing, or in other ways affixing forms onto the film plane. From the direct exposure to light that creates the photogram, to controlled application of paint and emulsion scratches, the processes involved range from the aleatoric to the carefully deliberated.
Singing Lands is the culmination of several years of collaboration between two artists, Nicole Kelly Westman (Calgary) and Ryan Mathieson (Vancouver). Separated by the vast interior, they decided to meet in the “Centre of the Universe” to realize a project. The Centre of the Universe, according to some, is located at Vidette Lake in Deadman Valley, 70kms Northeast of Kamloops, British Columbia. This site has seen many variations; it is the sacred site of the Skeetchestn First Nations, later co-opted as a gold mine, a trading post, and now a spiritual retreat.