Archives 0 (Programming)

Exhibition
9 July - 20 August 2009

Opening Reception
Thursday 9 July    8PM

Workshop with Clark Ferguson | Let’s Make a Video Together: A four-hour relationship
Saturday 11 July    12PM @ Video Pool Media Arts Centre [call PLATFORM to register]

PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to present the solo exhibition, In Search of Desire, by Saskatchewan-based artist Clark Ferguson.

Featuring a mixture of video and installation, Ferguson’s exhibition explores weighty topics such as nihilism, voyeurism vis-a-vis mortality, and the futility of emotional experiences all through the lens of humour. Recent project collected here for this exhibition serve as an existential investigation and a search for meaning with the intent of creating more questions for the audience to underscore moments we do not truly understand.
As part of its commitment to critical discourse,  PLATFORM has commissioned local father-son creative team, C. Graham Asmundson + Jaimz Asmundson,  to write an interpretive essay to accompany this exhibition. This response will be influenced by the team’s forays into transgressive cinema, experimental video productions, and a sense of camaraderie.

Please join us for the opening reception Thursday, the 9th of July beginning at 8PM. This reception follows the opening of our annual Members’ Exhibition, Something Snappy [get it?] at The University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03. Refreshments will be served.

For more information about this exhibition, please contact the Centre directly:
PLATFORM | 121-100 Arthur Street | Winnipeg, Manitoba | R3B 1H3 | 204.942.8183 | www.platformgallery.org

Bios:

Clark Ferguson is a Saskatchewan-based visual artist interested in the spectacle, humour, and issues of gender and sexuality.  his practice utilizes print-media, photography, performance, video, and installation to create experimental, eccentric projects.  Ferguson’s recent work has been created so as to work as either a gallery installation combining video, photography, sculpture with performative elements or as a single channel video work that can be viewed in a screening or festival context.  He is also interested in working within self-imposed limitations that define in what manner work is developed and produced.  These ‘impositions’ mirror the conceptual interests explored in the artist’s work.  This process not only effects the final product becomes part of the research and is in effect, a performative aspect of the work. Ferguson’s projects utilize humour as a manner in which to explore ideas. <www.clarkferguson.ca>

C. Graham Asmundson has been active as an artist and cultural-worker in the Winnipeg arts scene for the last twenty-five years. His son, Jaimz Asmundson,  has been experimenting with film, video, and electronic music since 1998. Having recently collaborated on the wildly-successful short film, Drawing Genesis (2008), this long-time creative team entertain similar sources of inspiration but approach art-making from differing mediums: C. Graham’s body of work is made up almost entirely of autobiographical impulses has been labeled “quirky, queer, and sometimes controversial” drawings and paintings, where as Jaimz chooses the camera to tell subversive stories that have garnered him the dubious title of “Winnipeg’s enfant terrible of transgressive cinema”.  <www.dirtyundies.org>

EXHIBITION

RECEPTION + DISCO PARTY

ARTIST LECTURE + UTOPIAN CONVERSATION

For more information, please contact the Centre directly: PLATFORM | 121-100 Arthur Street | Winnipeg, Manitoba | R3B 1H3 | 204.942.8183 | www.platformgallery.org

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Clive Holden has exhibited his film and video works both nationally and internationally at venues including the Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; the International Festival of Films on Art, Montreal; Kosmopolis Festa Internacional de la Literatura, Barcelona; and the Festival di Palazzo Venezia, Rome. He has lectured and given talks for Kino Arsenal, Berlin; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; the Images Festival, Toronto; the Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen; aceartinc., Winnipeg; the Deutsch-Amerikanische Institut, Heidelberg; the Royal Danish Academy of Art, Copenhagen; and the University of Manitoba School of Architecture, Winnipeg. In 2003, his book accompanying the film project Trains of Winnipeg was short-listed for the Manitoba Book of the Year Award and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award.

Vicky Chainey Gagnon holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in film studies and art history (Concordia University, 1999), as well as a Master of Arts degree in interdisciplinary studies with a specialization in the history and practice of avant-garde filmmaking practices (York University, 2005). She is presently working towards a Ph.D in Muséologie, patrimoine et médiation at UQAM while also working at the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, where she has been Curator since 2005. Her current research concerns emerging institutional curatorial practices in Canada. She is the author of several essays on visual and media artists such as Nelson Henricks, Denyse Thomasos, Lucie Chan, and Carla Zaccagnini, and has also been the organizer and curator of numerous exhibitions of Canadian and international art in Toronto, Winnipeg, Montréal and Sherbrooke.

This exhibition at PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, presented by the WNDX Festival of Film & Video Art and circulated by the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, will include the following Utopia Suite segments: Utopia Suite Disco and Ken Dryden, as well as the on-line, on-going community outreach and conversation:Y.O.U. (Your Own Utopia).

Circulated by:

Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University
2600 College St.
Sherbrooke, Quebec
Canada, J1M 1Z7
+1 819-822-9600, ext. 2260
Curator: Vicky Chainey Gagnon
www.ubishops.ca/foreman/index.html

All are invited to Salon Night at PLATFORM…

PLATFORM is pleased to announce the continuation of Salon Nights as part of our outreach initiatives.

… and even further pleased to announce the following Salon Night will be hosted by Rosalie Favell

Salon Nights are open to all members, no registration required. Come-one-Come-all! They are free evenings of informal critique and feedback where members can bring in their art projects for discussion.Whether you wish to present or not, you should come out to add to the dialogue and see what other artists have going on in their studios. Each session is hosted by a different local or visiting artist who will facilitate discussion and weigh in with their own experience.

Rosalie Favell is a visual artist constantly searching the universe for her true self identity. Born and raised in Winnipeg she currently resides in Ottawa where she is a pursuing a PhD in Cultural Mediations at Carleton. Rosalie received her M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque and her Bachelor of Applied Arts in Photographic Arts from the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, Toronto. Her art practice has taken her many places around the world. Favell has an extensive record of exhibitions, critical reviews, and awards dating from 1985. She has held many solo exhibitions since 1993, the most recent one Rosalie Favell: I searched many worlds at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (2003). Favell is a recipient of numerous awards from visual arts funding bodies that include the Canada Council, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, the City of Winnipeg, and the Canadian Native Arts Foundation. Favell’s work is held by public collections of the Canadian Contemporary Museum of Photography/National Gallery of Canada, Canada Council Art Bank, the Indian Art Centre, the Manitoba Arts Council Art Bank, Mount Saint Vincent University, the Rockwell Museum of Western Art, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Woodland Cultural Centre.

Exhibition

24 April - 30 May 2009

Reception

24 April, Friday 7-10PM

Artist Talk with DGC~CGA

25 April, Saturday 3PM

PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to present an exhibition featuring the work of two art collectives — The Icelandic Love Corporation [ILC] from Reykjavik, and The Discriminating Gentlemen’s Club ~ Le Club des Gentilshommes Avertis (DGC~CGA ) from Montreal — in association with Núna (now), a festival celebrating the contemporary artistic and cultural connection between Iceland and Canada,  now in its 3rd year.

Organized by J.J. Kegan McFadden + Freya Björg Olafson, this exhibition brings together lens-based [video and photo] performance pieces that explore constructions of gender, class, and tradition vis-à-vis cultural stereotypes, colonialism, and the slippages of memory and/or mimicry in our contemporary political and global climates.

In their video/photo series, Dynasty [2007] ILC offers a hypothetical, though highly plausible, reaction to the end of electricity due to global warming. They ask the question: What does the modern high-class housewife do when electricity is gone? In response, the ILC take on the roles of three such women, who have escaped from their safe town houses to enjoy the last moments on one of the Earth’s remaining snowcaps. Dressed in their warmest furs, they fish, hunt birds for food, sit by the fire and sing, crochet, and contemplate. Their phones do not work; their laptops are long gone. This is a luxury and a privilege, since most other places are sweltering hot.

In comparison, the DGC offer their hilarious video spoof of an English foxhunt. Dressed in long johns rather than proper breeches, and riding a Styrofoam cut-out of a horse rather than the real thing, this crew follows a taxidermy fox being pulled across a frozen pond. The faux bravado climaxes with a jubilant feast once the creature is ‘shot. ‘

These over-the-top performances of seemingly ridiculous, passé acts of high-society ask the audience to reconsider contemporary traditions and whether, in the instance of climate change or the future of endangered species [animal or human], they maintain relevance.

As part of its commitment to critical discourse,  PLATFORM has commissioned PhD candidate, Laurie K. Bertram,  to write an interpretive essay to accompany this exhibition. Bertram reads the work of these two collectives through a historical lens of the Icelandic Independence Movement and subsequent development of the Fjallkona [a fictional mountain woman-turned-symbolic princess].

Please join us for the opening reception Friday, the 24th of April beginning at 7PM. Refreshments will be served.

For more information about this exhibition, please contact the Centre directly:
PLATFORM | 121-100 Arthur Street | Winnipeg, Manitoba | R3B 1H3 | 204.942.8183 | www.platformgallery.org

For more information on other events happening throughout the Núna (now) Festival, log on to: www.nunanow.com

Bios:

The Icelandic Love Corporation [Jóní Jónsdóttir, Eirún Sigurdardóttir, and Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir; aka: The ILC] are a dynamic Icelandic performance art trio, who have received considerable attention in recent years in their ambitious pursuit to spread their message of ‘Love conquers all. The future is beautiful.’ Performing in diverse locations –spaces ranging from live television broadcasts to barren locations in the interior of Iceland, the ILC are committed to reaching a wide audience. Demonstrating intimacy and surprise they demand reaction in their uninhibited display of extravagance and beauty. Their work is bittersweet, flirting with amateurism and developing affection with their audience. Existing outside the parameters of critical discourse and art history, their work finds more in common with tragic fairytales and everyday pop songs. <www.ilc.is>

The Discriminating Gentleman’s Club ~ Le Club des Gentilshommes Avertis (DGC~CGA) is a private order in the form of an artist collective. The club’s presence is manifest in two distinct ways. The first is a public façade constituted of varied social events, the planting of public gardens, kite flying, film making, sculptural ephemera and the like. The second is a closed aesthetic inversion of the club’s public customs performed to a select audience and regulated by legally binding non-disclosure agreements. The DGC~CGA holds three honorary chapters in Melbourne (Australia), Birmingham (UK) and The Hague (the Netherlands). < www.dgc-cga.org>

Laurie K. Bertram is an intermittent Winnipegger and a history PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the development of Icelandic Canadian culture in the twentieth century via alternate terrains of ethnic expression, including material culture, food, ghost stories, and knitting patterns.

PLATFORM wishes to thank Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council, and The Winnipeg Foundation for their continued support; as well as Núna [now], The Manitoba Museum, and The Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Winnipeg for their sponsorship and assistance with this exhibition.

Ruby Arnga’naaq, Jack Butler, Sheila Butler, Myra Kukiiyaut, Patrick Mahon, + William Noah

Exhibition

13 February - 4 April 2009

Opening Reception

13 February, Friday 7 - 10 PM

Panel Discussion

14 February, Saturday 3PM

PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to present the group exhibition, Art and Cold Cash, featuring the work of: Ruby Arngna’naaq, Jack Butler, Sheila Butler, Myra Kukiiyaut, Patrick Mahon, and William Noah. A critical exploration of the introduction of capitalism into Northern economies, Art and Cold Cash considers the connection of contemporary art to discourses surrounding money in a series of artistic activities and experiments. Exhibition audiences will be able to consider these topics and how they are navigated through artwork in a variety of media, including: drawing, painting, installation, audio, and video.

As part of its commitment to critical discourse,  PLATFORM has commissioned local curator Jenny Western to write an interpretive essay to accompany this exhibition.

“Though not operating dogmatically on the subject, the artwork of “Art and Cold Cash” attends to an important dialogue surrounding the current state of art in the north. While many of the pieces deal with the exchange of personal stories from community members in Baker Lake regarding art and economy, perhaps the exhibition begs the question –  in an age of global communication which allows for conversations to occur between northern and southern art practices, has information now become our most desirable luxury item? ” - J. Western

Please join us for the opening reception Friday, the 13 of February beginning at 7PM. Refreshments will be served.

In association with Art and Cold Cash, Video Pool Media Arts Centre presents the work of ARNAIT VIDEO PRODUCTIONS [Igloolik]. All are welcome to a free public screening of video work by this collective of women producers of the north, 4 April 2009, Saturday at 2PM [Cinematheque]; discussion to follow.

For more information, please contact the Centre directly: PLATFORM | 121-100 Arthur Street | Winnipeg, Manitoba | R3B 1H3 | 204.942.8183 | www.platformgallery.org

PLATFORM wishes to thank Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council, and The Winnipeg Foundation for their continued support, as well as the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting this project. The Centre would also like to acknowledge the support from its membership, volunteers, and network of artist-run enthusiasts (you know who you are!).

The Art and Cold Cash collective wishes to acknowledge the support received from the following institutions: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, University of Western Ontario, The Hamlet of Baker Lake, Nunavut, The Jessie Oonark Centre, and Heli-Max Helicopter Company and Cumberland Resources, and Calm Air.

Exhibition

18 December - 24 January 2008*

Opening Reception

Thursday 18 December 7PM

(Image: Jason Dee, “We’re going for a trip across the water”, 2006)

* Please note the centre will be closed for holidays beginning the 21st of December 2008 until the 6th of January 2009.

Exhibition

31 October - 13 December 2008

Opening Reception / Costume Party!

Friday 31 October 7-10PM

Artist Talk

Saturday 1 November 3PM

PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to present the solo exhibition, DEATHS/MEMORIALS/BIRTHS, by Toronto-based artist, Erika DeFreitas. This is a digital re-imagining of a project where the artist collected the DEATH/MEMORIALS/BIRTHS pages from the The Toronto Star and systematically subtracted information from the page by cutting out and removing all photographic images, along with practically all text. The artist has stated that since these obituaries, as objects, are deteriorating over time, she has taken to photographing them in order to challenge the notions of absence and the limits of time. When installed, the individual pieces that comprise this series take the form of a memorializing structure, creating a monument that alludes to remembrance, grief, preservation, tension and trauma.

As part of its commitment to critical discourse,  PLATFORM has commissioned local artist Heidi Eigenkind to write an interpretive essay to accompany this exhibition.

Defacement, expunging, obliteration, removal: these terms can apply both to DeFreitas’ initial reworking of the announcements from The Toronto Star and to the effects of death or loss. An artist wielding scissors or blade to remove names, faces and life stories does carry an echo of the Grim Reaper swinging a scythe through aeons of human existence. Cutting out and cutting down are not that far apart. In a sense, DeFreitas’ cutting away of all but the headings, dates and announcement borders is analogous to the reduction of flesh to bone that, barring cremation, is the fate of any body returned to air, water or earth. - Heidi Eigenkind

Please join us for the opening reception Friday, the 31st of October beginning at 7PM. Refreshments will be served. *Costumes encouraged.

Influenced by a do it yourself attitude not unfamiliar to Winnipeg audiences, Dearraindrop creates psychedelic video/performance/ installation work using lo-fi technology and an electric palette. The screening will include brand new video, animation, and music made from video and audio synthesizers developed  by the group. This screening of Dearraindrop’s videos is part of a larger initiative where local organizations are co-presenting this multi-faceted group’s frenetic output. Other venues include: aceartinc. with send+receive, and Martha Street Studio. More information; www.dearraindrop.org

Saturday 18 October 2008
Start time: 11:45 PM @ Cinemateque
Running time: approximately 45 minutes
Admission: by donation

*post-screening reception hosted by PLATFORM

Exhibition

Friday, 12 September - 24 October, 2008

Opening Reception
Friday 12 September 7-10PM

Panel Discussion with abbas akhavan, Marina Roy, and Colleen Wolstenholme, moderated by J.J. Kegan McFadden, co-sponsored by MAWA

Saturday 13 September 2PM

Abbas Akhavan + Marina Roy, Victoria Day (Bombay Sapphire) 2002 (video projection)

PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to present, in his debut as Director/Curator, J.J. Kegan McFadden’s group exhibition, When the Mood Strikes Us… With this focused collection of photography, video, and sculptural installation, the audience is asked to contemplate the poetics and politics of narcotics, as well as the search for escape they represent through their application in contemporary art practices. This exhibition includes six Canadian artists with international reputations. Themes addressed in McFadden’s curatorial thesis include: the shift in drug culture over the last forty years; the over-prescription of mood-elevators (particularly in terms of a post-Third Wave Feminist society); as well as socio-economic development in relation to colonialism and the drug trade.

Artists featured in When the Mood Strikes Us… include: abbas akhavan + Marina Roy [Vancouver] , Paul Butler [Winnipeg], Larry Glawson [Winnipeg], Jeremy Shaw [Berlin], and Colleen Wolstenholme [Hantsport].

Please join us for the opening reception Friday, the 12th of September beginning at 7PM. Refreshments will be served.

For more information, please contact the Centre directly.

Performance Lecture

Friday 8 August 2008 8PM

PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is thrilled to present The Critical Object, a performance lecture by Winnipeg-based psychoanalytic theorist, Jeanne Randolph. This presentation will act as a digital redux of her infamous lecture, previously presented at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, UK. The lecture will be free and open to the public. All are welcome + encouraged.
This lecture performance is presented in conjunction with the exhibitions Staged by Adrian Fish and Voice Over by Brian Joseph Davis, which take into consideration the performative space of theatre and its related culture of promotion.
For the past twenty-five years Dr. Jeanne Randolph [MD, FRCP], psychoanalyst, theorist, critic, art writer, and performer, has published consistently and lectured widely in universities and galleries across the country and abroad.

Randolph was the first and only writer in Canada to develop Object Relations psychoanalytic theory as a medium for cultural criticism. Randolph counters the conventional Freudian interpretation of “art-as-neurosis,” with an invitation for us to consider the implications of the writings of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971). Her pivotal essay “The Amenable Object,” (1983) is required reading in many university art courses. In the 1980s Randolph’s theoretical position on art and contemporary society had been established by major essays such as “Influencing Machines: the relation between art and technology”(catalogue essay for group exhibition curated by Randolph 1984), “Fifty Normal White Men” (Impulse magazine, Toronto, 1987) and “Illusion and the Diverted Subject: a psychoanalysis of art and entertainment,” (Parachute, Montreal, 1989).

Since 1983 the politics and ethics of writing about art and artists are being explored through Randolph’s practice of ficto-criticism. She has worked with such notable Canadian artists as Joey Morgan, Robin Collyer, Nicole Jolicoeur, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Stan Denniston, Joanne Tod, Fastwurms, Bernie Miller, Ian Carr-Harris and Vera Frenkel, all of whom welcomed an approach to the exhibition catalogue that explores narratives of ambivalence, issues of authorial/authoritative individuality, collegial contemplation of issues specific to each artist’s work and playful absurdity. YYZ Books, the publishing arm of the artist-run YYZ Artists’ Outlet gallery published the first edited collection of Randolph’s critical essays as Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming and other writings on art in 1991. It was extensively reviewed, and within one year it was out of print.Ficto-criticism performs an analysis of art criticism itself. Numerous examples of this method of criticism were reprinted in the second YYZ Books publication of Randolph’s collected writings, Symbolization and its Discontents (1997). A third edited collection Why Stoics Box: essays on art and society was published in 2003. In 2007, her treatise Ethics of Luxury – materialism and imagination was co-published by Plug In Editions and YYZ Books.

For more information, please contact the Centre directly: PLATFORM wishes to thank Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council, The Winnipeg Foundation, and Canada Council for the Arts for their continued support.