Michael Paul Britto, still image from the video Verbal Assault.
Featuring works by:
Daniel Bernyk (Windsor ON)
Broken City Lab (Windsor ON)
Michael Paul Britto (Bronx, NY, USA)
Katyuska Doleatto (Toronto ON)
Hans Gindlesberger (Blacksburg, VA, USA)
Arturo Herrera (Windsor ON)
Adriane Little (Kalamazoo MI, USA)
Ella Dawn McGeough (Toronto ON)
Susy Oliveira (Toronto ON)
David Poolman (Toronto ON)
Maayke Schurer (Ottawa ON)
Andrea Slavik / Alicia Chester (Windsor ON, Rochester, NY, USA)
Owen Eric Wood (Windsor ON)
Nicole June Wurstner (Buffalo NY, USA)
Jade Yumang (Vancouver BC, Brooklyn, NY, USA)
Our Flickr set of the 30×30 Part 2 reception.
Artcite Inc., Windsor’s non-profit, Artist-Run Centre for the Contemporary Arts, celebrated its 30th year in the community with a world-class roster of Artcite alumni, featuring recent works from award-winning artists from Canada, the United States and Europe. Artcite pioneered the showing of cutting-edge performance, video, installation and public art in our region, and through our member-juried selection process, has led the way in bringing the newest and best of contemporary art to local and national attention.
Artcite Admininistrative Coordinator Christine Burchnall led the students of Académie Ste Cécile International School through the exhibits at our 30×30 part2 show, Nov 2, 2013. Also at our Flickr
Our anniversary group shows have been split into 2 extra big, extra long-running exhibitions. Part 1, highlighted the works of some of our favorite alumni through the years of our programming. In September, we present pt. 2 of the 30×30 project with new works by 15 emerging artists, nominated by the artists showing in 30×30 pt.1, and our board and programming committee.
Daniel Bernyk
Physically and spatially compressed; indeterminate in scale, depth, focus – this enigma erodes while somehow (strangely) fusing with the surrounding inky, milky, blackened ‘ness’. Through its undulating surfaces and atmospheric haze, it appears to be located in some kind of ‘illusionistic’ space. Its essence, however, is found in its ability to situate itself within the weighty grasp of a very real (albeit abstract) contemplative and imaginative sculptural space. A parallel can be drawn between the image and the manner in which skin and ink ‘fuse’ together (how skin accepts the ink and vice versa) – simultaneously in and through the body.
Dan Bernyk is a sculptor from LaSalle, Ontario. He completed a BFA at the University of Windsor, ON and earned his MFA at the University of Victoria, BC. He has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Windsor and Artcite INC. (Windsor, ON), the Thames Art Gallery and the Woodstock Museum (ON), La Maison de la Culture de Gatineau (QU), Deluge Contemporary and Xchanges Gallery (Victoria, BC), as well as Fifth Third Bank (Grand Rapids, MI). Bernyk creates sculpture in order to facilitate a raw and wild exchange for the viewer – reminiscent of encountering a deer in the forest. In his work, he considers: presence / proximity, intuition / doubt, tension / materiality in relation to specific spaces.
www.danbernyk,com
Broken City Lab
Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, education, and creative practice leading towards civic change. Our projects, events, workshops, installations, and interventions offer an injection of disruptive creativity into a situation, surface, place, or community. These projects aim to connect various disciplines through research and social practice, generating works and interventionist tactics that adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the cities that we encounter.
Much of our activity has been focused on Windsor, Ontario, a once-collapsing, now gradually stabilizing post-industrial city at the edge of Canada. We believe that Windsor provides an exemplary vantage point from which to consider the role of artists in challenged communities, but we have also worked on various interventions, installations, and other creative endeavors in cities across Canada. Our work has been created across media – from temporary interventions to large-scale community events and from gallery exhibitions to various workshops and publications – but we also often take on the role of organizing and facilitating the activity of other artists and creative practitioners through residencies, conferences, and writing projects. We aim to creatively respond to the issues we directly experience in a community, while also negotiating the ways in which other community members experience the same issues, differently. See more at website.
Michael Paul Britto
“Verbal” aggression has been determined to be more damaging than “Physical” aggression. There are many sources to blame for verbal aggression. These include human nature, ethics, victimization, abnormal psychology, and the mass media. In the video “Verbal Assault“ The roles of father and son are setup side by side to show how a son’s words, and level of aggression, can mirror that of his father’s. Even though the father seems to care for his son, the way he conveys his feelings is more detrimental than helpful. Through overlapping dialogue, you get a sense of the common fears society has placed on both the father and the son. For the viewer, processing the dialogue is as challenging as the father and sons relationship.
Much of my work is about being a person of color in America, and the misconceptions and assumptions that go along with that. My art allows me to make people more politically and culturally aware, by using the customary as metaphor. By manipulating popular culture, I can illicit a wide range of feelings causing the viewer to rethink many of mass media’s depictions of people of color. My goal is to use my art to give voice to marginalized communities and foster a better understanding in mainstream society.
www.brittofied.com
brittofied.tumblr.com
britto-fotowrk.tumblr.com/
100square.tumblr.com
globalgrind.com/hip-hop-culture/michael-paul-britto-takes-n-word-church-photos
Katyuska Doleatto
I was born in Torino and at the age of seventeen I moved to Rome, where I taught English and studied theatre for four years. It is within this Felliniesque setting that I was exposed to the nuances of theatricality and the process of storytelling. I have a compulsion to collect things that are chosen for their evocative properties. I use the constructed image to create narratives that oscillate between notions of the abject and the beautiful; between the real and the seemingly impossible. I am interested in the concepts of dualism and illusion, and I am intrigued by the idea of life as a by-product of decay. See more
Hans Gindlesberger
I’m in the Wrong Film is a consideration of our troubled relationship to the places we belong. The title of the series is a colloquialism used to indicate a speaker’s disorientation in regard to physical surroundings that have taken on a disconcerting, fictitious quality. In this series of staged and performative photographs, the experience of individual dislocation the phrase describes is applied more broadly to articulate the collective loss of identity that permeates the rural and post-industrial landscape of America.
Hans Gindlesberger’s practice examines how contemporary society constructs and represents our concepts of place. His projects span photography, video, and installation and have been exhibited widely in exhibitions, festivals, and screenings, including; Galleri Image (Aarhus, Denmark), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Jen Bekman Projects (New York), Voies Off Photography Festival (Arles, France), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Albuquerque), among many others. He is the recipient of national and international awards and grants, including a 2008 Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and is a 2011 recipient of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. He earned his MFA in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo and currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Digital Imaging at the Virginia Tech School of Visual Arts. See more
Arturo Herrera
Hot Pepper – In Latin-American culture there are various types of foods that symbolize sexual organs which that are considered to be enhancers for sexual activity; Chili peppers being foremost amongst them. The Chile Picante, featured in the series of aliments props is a hybrid form in which the chili has been modified with a valve to regulate the intensity of heat. The spikes seen at the end of the pepper are the back end of the seeds steams that are inside of the pepper, as to demonstrate what happens if the intensity of the chili has been turned to a level where it is too hot.
Maizito-Gold – Corn Nut is a food prop that speaks of our high intake of corn, our insatiable appetite for corn based products, and the value of corn to our economy.
Semilla de Mango Chupada – Sucked Mango Seed is an oversized mango seed that looks at food portioning, the amount of food we eat in every meal, how our culture is being shaped by calories and how the food is presented succulently. Size does matter, and this mango seed has been sucked free from the mango flesh.
Arturo Herrera is an artist working with notions of identity, migration, and food. Herrera’s most recent project includes Daily Bread, with the participation of artist Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge to work along side migrant workers in Leamington, Ontario. A community art project in the Summer 2013. Arturo Herrera’s most recently performance titled: The Tortilla Workshop was presented at VideoFag in Kensington Market in Toronto and at Broken City Lab in Windsor. A piece that speaks of male roles and food as a binding form in society. Herrera’s work has been shown in festivals across North America; theSHOW.13 at the Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ontario 2013, at STRUTT in St Catharines 2012, at the Nuit Blanche Toronto 2012, CONTACT Photography 2011, Winnetka Chicago Modernism Show, 2005. Arturo Herrera was born in Honduras, Central America and he has lived in the United States and Canada, he currently lives in Windsor, Ontario. Herrera has received a BFA from the University of Windsor, 2012. And a Photography degree from the New York School of Photography in 2006.See more
Adriane Little
Resuscitation by definition is to revive or be revived from an unconsciousness or apparent death. This project is about re-marking the landscape in ways that are inescapable in the present, while drawing attention to the location of each billboard that I have isolated within each photograph. In this way, each site has been marked by the photograph as a public space of loss and mourning or a site of trauma. By photographing mainly where I live and then when I travel, eventually this will create a trail of mourning. During the process of collecting images for this project, I found that I have documented billboards that no longer exist. Call Home Mothers Dead is both literal and metaphor. The dandelion is used to carve an entry point into these experiences and for a symbol of persistence. Call Home Mothers Dead is an impetus for continual renewal and the reality that beauty can grow and exist with little attention. Call Home Mothers Dead searches for a relationship to the matrilineal ghost. It is a void that is simultaneously overfull and almost empty.
Adriane Little’s studio practice originates from an investigation of ritual and trauma through the presence and absence of the maternal body. Her artwork has exhibited widely in both exhibitions and video screenings. Her work has been widely exhibited and screened at numerous festivals including; Real Art Ways (Hartford CT), CEPA Gallery (Buffalo NY), Lost Coast Culture Machine (Ft Bragg CA), The Institute of Culture (Trbovlje Slovenia), Hammes Gallery at Saint Mary’s College (Notre Dame IN), Peak Gallery (Toronto ON), Big Orbit Gallery (Buffalo NY), The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Chelsea Art Museum (NYC), Massachusetts Independent Film Festival (Somerville MA), Dawson City International Film Festival (Yukon), Three Rivers Film Festival (Pittsburgh PA), Rockport Film and Video Festival (Rockport TX) and the Leeds International Film Festival (Leeds UK), among many others. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography & Intermedia in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. More at website.
Ella Dawn McGeough
Existing somewhere between paint and sculpture, The Twins series have been caught mid pose—static and frozen in time—their physicality acts as a manifestation of their poeisis.
Ella Dawn McGeough (b. 1982, Vancouver, Canada) received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2013 and her BFA from the University of British Columbia in 2007. Nationally, her work has been exhibited in numerous art venues including G Gallery, Olga Korper Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, Richmond Art Gallery and Parker Branch. Internationally, she has exhibited in Finland and China. Along with artists Colin Miner and Liza Eurich she recently launched an online Contemporary Art journal entitled, Moire. McGeough currently lives and works in Toronto. See more
Susy Oliveira
My sculptures are made to appear as a virtual models. Photographic prints are mapped onto a faceted under-structure producing an image/object similar to the low-resolution graphics of virtual reality. The faceted nature of this work appears to make use of computer rendering, like a 3-D model that has been covered in a “skin”. I am interested in our relationship with nature in a highly mediated world and examine our preoccupation with replacing nature with fabrications while delving into ideas of digital and technological reproduction. The Girl and the Bear attempts to question these notions through the examination of pleasure and the total acceptance of nature.
Susy Oliveira lives and works in Toronto. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; the Hole, New York; the Khyber, Halifax and PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts, Winnipeg. She is the recipient of grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. More at website.
David Poolman
David Poolman depicts the generic–baseballs, cinder blocks, hot dogs, empty buckets and figures that one might see standing on a street corner waiting for a bus. Everything seems out of context, overlapping, bundled, and balanced precariously as if trying to maintain equilibrium. The tangled, odd circumstances combined with a certain familiarity incites intrigue, and it all seems to make sense for a while within that space. But, these intricate scenarios are frozen moments, emblematic of the uneasiness that forced intimacy brings, and situations where a step in any direction would prove fatal, upsetting the fine balance that they must maintain to simply exist.
David Poolman was born in Wallaceburg, Ontario. He is an MFA graduate from the University of Windsor, and a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Working in drawing, video, print media, and installation, Poolman has exhibited in art galleries and screened in festivals both nationally and internationally. Poolman currently lives in Toronto and is a professor of Drawing at Sheridan Institute and Visual Arts Editor of The Rusty Toque. His video work is distributed through VTape and Ouat Media in Toronto. See more
Maayke Schurer
I spend my time experimenting to create real-time magic realism. Nothing is digitally created or altered. All works are hand-made in miniature with various techniques ranging from filming under water to the use of reflection. The primary motivation behind this approach is two-fold. First: a deep concern for the environment and a belief that our impact will not truly change without genuine heartfelt appreciation, as opposed to feelings of guilt and blame. Second: A theory that viewers afford greater value to that which has been preprocessed by another human being than truth alone. Hence, while the works are firmly rooted in the here and now, scenes are constructed from memory and the imagination. In this way, these works are highly dramatized nature documentaries.
Maayke Schurer holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, UK, as well as a BSc (hons) in Biology and a BFA (hons) Fine Art from Queen’s University, Kingston, On, Canada.
Andrea Slavik / Alicia Chester
Vito Acconci’s canonical early video work engages hierarchical power struggles, sexuality, violence, control, and resistance. Every Acconci in the Video Data Bank is a collaborative project by Alicia Chester and Andrea Slavik to remake every video by Vito Acconci in the collection of the Video Data Bank, but with women and an HDSLR camera. These seem to be simple enough parameters to explore the intersections of performance and video and to ask: what does it mean to change the gender dynamic and remake Acconci’s work forty years later? We are producing videos not with actors or people acting simply as standins for Acconci but with mostly female artists whose work resonates with the specific videos we match with them. Using Acconci’s original performances as scripts and working within the parameters we set, they are free to interpret Acconci’s performances as they wish. Some stray far from the original works, although the seeds remain recognizable. The results are collaborative performances created for video in which highly personal aspects of each person’s work and personality are tangibly present.
Andrea Slavik is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and co-founder of the Momentum Film and Video Collective. Her work seeks to deconstruct popular narrative practices and forms of representation active in our visual environment. Through juxtaposition, adaptation and appropriation of these visual texts and strategies, she hopes to bring to light intentional and unintended ideological structures at work in the visual culture of everyday late-capitalism in its most ubiquitous, often humorous forms.
Alicia Chester is an artist, writer, curator, educator, and PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She works in lensbased media and installation and is interested in building creative communities through collaboration. Her work has been exhibited in such venues as the Chicago Cultural Center; MDW Fair (Chicago, IL); the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI); Paragraph Gallery (Kansas City, MO); and the Koehnline Museum of Art (Des Plaines, IL). In 2012, she completed an ACRE artist residency in Wisconsin and co-curated Peripheral Views: States of America at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), where she held the Collections Research Fellowship (2011–2012). Alicia was a coeditor and contributing author for the anthology Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (Routledge, 2012) and is a staff writer for the online publication ArtSlant.
Andrea and Alicia met while completing their Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Owen Eric Wood
Using video rather than still photography, the artist makes a self-portrait that is constantly in flux. The super-imposed imagery created through a multi-stage projection process adds to the expression of the self as an ephemeral existence by facilitating a distortion of the original image content. Instead of recording the details of artist’s physical body or social identity, Mirror captures the essence of his being, thus questioning the value we place on our sense of permanence or certainly in terms of who we are.
Owen Eric Wood (b. Toronto, Canada) has established a signature style through his video portraits. Challenging concepts of identity where individuals must constantly reinvent or appropriate their own image, the artist presents contemporary social issues in the context of personal narratives and existential themes. His award-winning videos have shown at more than 100 exhibitions and festivals in 30 countries. Wood holds a B.F.A. in studio art from Concordia University (Montreal), a B.A.A. in journalism from Ryerson University (Toronto), and an M.F.A. from the University of Windsor. See more
Nicole June Wurstner
In my most recent work, I build on this interest in identity, while exploring the vulnerability of memory. It reflects upon romantic loss in which the memory of a lover degrades and alters with time. The title Fragments refers to a term used by Roland Barthes in his book A Lover’s Discourse to describe “fragments” or thought processes a lover speaks to oneself during the course of a relationship when alone.
To achieve this work I use a wet plate collodion process first introduced in the eighteen-fifties in which glass or metal plates are coated with collodion (a mixture of USP Collodion, Alcohol, Ether, Cadmium Bromide, Ammonium Bromide, and Ammonium Iodide) and made light sensitive with a bath of silver nitrate. The treated plates are loaded directly into an 8” x 10” format bellows camera, requiring exposures of around forty-five seconds in length. After the plates are exposed they are moved to the developer, all while they are still wet. Due to these long exposures I have begun using other people as the subjects of my work. The images are further manipulated by spraying the collodion onto the plate with assorted plant misters and spray perfume bottles, controlling lighting during the exposure, and developing the plates unevenly. The images that appear seem to emerge out of clusters of particles. The inconvenience, frustration, and uncertainty of this process injects a performative element into the work. The resulting images are scanned and blown up as large format digital prints that reveal nuances of the images that are not easily visible in the original plates.
These Fragments often appear nearly unrecognizable with a sense of incompleteness and deterioration, evoking the recollection of unattained desire. The figures seem transformed as if by emotional conflict and the passing of time. See more
Jade Yumang
The drawings are possible designs for a performance, Shut Up and Smile, and the costume is the realized version of one of the drawings that was worn and performed specifically for the SUPERNOVA Performance Art Festival 2013 in Rosslyn, VA. This work is a continuation of a series of smile performances that I started in 2011 in combination with a series, called Queer Monsters, where I create elaborate sculptures, costumes, or installations to frame and visually complicate queer folklore. For Supernova, I interacted with a video projection of my smile by nailing the costume that I was wearing into the projected drywall, eventually destroying the wall and detaching myself from the costume and the image. The smile represents this push on universality in mainstream queer politics and the endurance and the breaking down of the smile through performance is a form of critique. I employ laborious techniques as a way to exorcise form. Through exhaustive repetitions – in creating the costume, holding the smile, and nailing – I want to push the limits of the body and what I extend is a physical residue of queer form.
Jade Yumang focuses on the concept of queer form through sculptural abstraction, installation, and performance. His solo exhibitions include Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, New York, NY (2011); Malaspina Printmakers Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2009); Plank Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2008). Selected group exhibitions include Fuchs Project, Brooklyn, NY (2013); The Kitchen, New York, NY (2012); and Reverse Art Space, Brooklyn, NY (2012). Selected performances include SUPERNOVA Performance Art Festival, Rosslyn, VA (2013); Art In Odd Places, New York, NY (2013); Ideas City, The New Museum, New York, NY (2013); Glasshouse, Brooklyn, NY (2012). He was awarded the Fire Island Artist Residency (2012); Atlantic Center for the Arts, Master Artists-In-Residence Program (2012), and Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship Fund (2012). Yumang received his MFA at Parsons The New School for Design with Departmental Honors in 2012 and BFA Honours in University of British Columbia as the top graduate in 2008. He was born in Quezon City, Philippines, grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, immigrated to Vancouver, BC, Canada, and presently lives in Brooklyn, NY, USA. He is currently doing a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space and prepping for a solo and performance in 2014 at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY. See more
