Catalog available for $20 (plus s/h)

Opening reception: Sept 2nd at 7pm – Runs through Sept 29th.

In 2010, the Centre for Art Tapes piloted its first Local Curatorial Residency for local emerging curators specializing in media arts. In this program the Centre supports curators as they uncover the intricacies of building a media arts exhibition.The result of this residency will be see…n in the inaugural exhibition curated by Suzanne Caines and Claire Hodge titled Lies That Tell The truth, an exhibition scheduled to take place at the Khyber Institute for the Contemporary Arts between 15 July 2011 and 14 August 2011.

Lies That Tell The Truth gathers works from 6 artists using various reenactment strategies as the basis for their artwork. The artists are: Adad Hannah (Montreal), Johanna Householder and b.h. Yael (Toronto), Yam Lau (Toronto), Alison Kobayashi (Toronto), Jeanne Ju (Halifax), and Aoife Collins (Ireland).

Over the course of time, some events are viewed as significant enough to be memorialized. These moments in history are often re-enacted by actors who deliberately endeavor to be loyal to the minutest details of the events they perform. The artists in this exhibition constantly negotiate how closely aligned to the original their work will be. Making these choices, the artist becomes a curator of sorts, a curator of their own reenactment. The question remains, what is the relationship between the artistic gesture and the original upon which it is based? Even if an artist chooses not to include an aspect of the original, is it still there? Is it necessary for a visible trace to remain in order for its presence to be felt?

Please join us for the opening of Lies that Tell the truth at 7:00p.m. Friday, July 15, 2011 in the Khyber Ballroom (1588 Barrington St.).

The Centre for Art Tapes invites Local Emerging Curators to apply to the second Local Curatorial Residency program, applications will be launched at exhibition opening.

The installation Le mot traduit le bruit des contingences passées [“The Word Reflects the Noise of Past Contingencies”] is based mostly on sonic concerns. Although its form and the elements used in it all point toward what should be a video installation, the work actually highlights the main feature of sound: its evanescence. Sound exists only in an instantaneous temporality. Through an attempt at playfully piecing back together a vanished sound event, the installation sets a series of ambiguous relationships between sounds and pictures, past time and present time, unique perspective and mobile perspective. Surveillance cameras and monitors – the guards of our relationship to the present time and our fantasies of omniscience and ubiquity – spy the inanimate shards of one of their own, heavily fallen from the ceiling, taking with it the sound of a past event. Inescapably, time dissipates the clamour of the noisiest events… Lacerated matter – the sole clue of the event’s violence – contains in itself the trace of a noisy transformation of matter. Through multiple perspectives on the remains of this incident, the work makes sound reappear. The sound is not reproduced; it is suggested, implied; it is written. So the installation transforms sound into picture, pictures into word, and word into sound. Therefore, the work addresses a number of issues in relation to temporality and mobility, through a series of cognitive games and back-and-forths between moving images, real time, sound, multiple perspectives, and a
single perspective. Are we in the presence of a sound work, despite the physical absence of sound?

Eric Desmarais

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PALIMPSEST ISSUE/03: THE WORKERS INSTALLING A WORK

Palimpsest Magazine is an unbound anthology of multiples. Each issue consists of original work in print, audio, video, and mixed media. Palimpsest is an alternative medium for artists and writers to disseminate their ideas, celebrating the tactility of the object in favour of the flattening effect of traditional print and screen-based media. Palimpsest exists as a traveling exhibition and experiential object.

The upcoming installment of Palimpsest Magazine will take the form of an exhibition at the Khyber from June 9th to June 30th in Halifax, NS, as well as an accompanying publication. We are soliciting submissions of any nature: video works, audio works, print, text, performance, sculpture, etc, for either the exhibition or publication (or both).
We are interested in soliciting personal and critical reflections on the following: transference; the exchange of data and information; the degradation or protraction of the value of information; process; language and time; connectedness and distance; work and proximity; the distance between the initial and the conclusive; and, finally, the residue of these exchanges.

p a l i m p s e s t

Issue 08 features:

Jeff Wall interview by Brad Phillips
Robert Bateman interview by Aaron Carpenter
Tyler Brett interview by Tony Romano
Ron Giii by Rosemary Heather
David Cordero by Emily Jones

Projects by:

Mark DeLong
Rebecca Belmore
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
Kelly Mark
Joshua Jensen-Nagle
Matthew Shields

ARTISTS INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION:

JAY ISSAC | MAURA DOYLE | JESSICA EATON | PAUL BUTLER | AARON CARPENTER | BRAD PHILLIPS | TONY ROMANO | DAVID ARMSTRONG SIX | MARK DELONG | ANDERS OINONEN | CLAIRE GREENSHAW | ANDRE ETHIER

A grouping of solo exhibitions featuring: Maggie Boyd, William Vandermeulen, Allyce Holden, Annalise Prodor, Rian Davidson, Luke Norrad, Daniel Higham and Danika Vandersteen.

The actions of an individual or group at a particular time constitutes the work.

Friday- 6-9 Neil Lapierre, Andrew Mcleran, Andrew Maize, Zach Gough, Michael Fernandes & Noah Derek Logan, Neil Lapierre (Via Skype),Andrew Mazerolle

Saturday-6-9 Caberet Style performances Featuring Craig Leonard, Mr. Bossy Pants, Lisa Lipton with Jess Lewis, Victoria Parker and Laura Peek, Cassie Packham and Gary Markle, Hamburgerlar, David Albert

Sunday-6-9 Durational performances animating various rooms in the Khyber, such as the stairwells, turret and khyber club bar. Artist include Matthew Carswell, Valerie Salez, Aimee Brown, William Vandermeulen, and Carly Butler with Nate and Sam.

This series has been organized and curated by Noah Derek Logan

Admittance by donation / proceeds to the Khyber

An exhibition of documents, artifacts, and ephemera.

ARTISTS INCLUDE: Bruce Barber, Matthew Carswell, Ali Nickerson, Carey Jernigan + Sera Senakovicz, Victoria Manzer, Joanna Pike, Alex Cooney, Emma Senft, Andrew Mclaren, Ella Tetrault, Jess Alley, Steven Macdougall, Ryan T. Dunn, Fionnuala Reynolds, Cassie packham, Liam logan, Carly Butler, Jeremy Macdonald, Patrick Burgomaster, Rian Davidson, Nathan Patterson, Enrique Ferreol, Emily Mckearney, Tara Macdougall, Andrew Mazerolle, Elise Goldstein, Andy Munro, Kim Morgan, Daniel Joyce, David Cullen, Miriam Moren, Andrew Maize, Nate Jones, Craig Leonard, Lauren Levine, Charles Fogarty, Noah Derek Logan and Audrey Hurd.

Photos from the opening: Here

Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin round!
(Translated from French)
It is from the prose of Jean Genet that the simulated gardens of Susy Oliveira find their source. In this cabinet of curiosities; a fantastic and monstrous Eden, we find; in the metaphor of ecstatic love that the title suggests, the respect and terror that invigorates the beauty and power of nature.

Following a distinct path, Oliveira proceeds with a double intention: materializing into real space the flatness of photography and confounding the reality of these images. This simplified geometrization evokes a synthetic modelling; in this, we find a skilful sculptural work that suggests, by the angular precision of multiple facets, the work of a diamond cutter and the art of
origami.

If the principles of photography are to probe and exploit the potential of light, Oliveira’s current research seems capable of advancing on the obscure terrain of uncertain darkness and sparkling sideral; favouring the night stars to the one of the day, fantasized love to lived relation, the idealized garden to natural experience. The frozen radiance which seems to emanate
vegetation and the crystalline perfection of the prismatic forms leave us to believe that this simulated nature is a creation pulled purely from the void. Here, light and obscurity, lucidity and blindness are relayed by the metaphors of admiration, of a loss of bearings and dazzling sight, themselves suggested by the image of a lover paralysed in love, transported outside one self
and deprived of the mastery of his conscience.

In front of the frightening strangeness of this supernatural garden, we are confronted with a troubling feeling which vaguely mixes the impression of reality and that of fiction, fascination and intimidation, pleasure and discomfort, as in a dream moreover, a nightmare.

Martin Dufrasne

Martin Dufrasne is an artist/curator living in Montréal. Well known for his numerous collaborations with Carl Bouchard (since 1998), he was the 2009 guest curator for the Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul. Currently he is Programming Coordinator at Dare-Dare in Montréal.

Patrick Howlett and Garry Spearin’s recent projects, Review (2007) and Toronto Riots (2010), are both process-based series’ using abstract painting as a medium for expressing concepts that focus’ on the manipulation of subject matter, as the subject itself.

“Review” was inspired by what Howlett has referred to as a “particularly florid” review of a Luc Tuyman exhibition. Howlett entered phrases from the review into a Google image search; phrases such as “largely emptied of meaning” or “drain his subject”.  Using the first random jpg that popped up, he would then abstract it using Photoshop filters; the final step would be to paint the digital image.  Spearin developed a similar process for his piece “Toronto Riots” by using 20 found images taken during the recent G20 riots as source material. For each photograph, Spearin would take the same ratio of oil pigments and mix them together to create a different tone of grey and cover a 12” square canvas with the flat monochrome. Titles of each work reflect the content of each photograph bringing the original context into the work.  The paintings are displayed in a grid formation, acting like a pixilated image as a whole.

Both projects look to the history of painting and to the art making process to communicate painting as a reference point, blocking or erasing the original image by means of performing the act of painting. For instance, Howlett’s paintings resemble geometric abstraction, whereas Spearin’s paintings resemble minimalist post-painterly abstraction.  What differentiates them from their historical references is the use of painting to reflect a form of censorship or abstraction of information as opposed to the abstraction of the picture plain, emphasizing the objectivity of the paintings.  The process replicates the idea of something lost in a world that is strife with technology and censorship, the mood has been set in the erasure of visual subject matter by means of process, a veil has been dropped.

Dan Joyce

(above) This Indeterminacy, 2007. From the series Review, by Patrick Howlett.

(below) Toronto Riots, 2010. By Gary Spearin

Christy Georg: Nautical Body.

“I exhaustively researched maritime history and culture to actualize a modern relationship to stories, lore, and tricks and trades of explorers, pirates, fishermen, ‘old salts,’ and sea-steading sailors. It forced me to live the life of my subject -living and working on the 83’ sailing schooner, Mystic Whaler, and later my own 23’ sailboat. This training instilled a rare insight into the “dying art” of maritime culture, practical techniques, and crafts, which inspire the work. Production began with a 2007-2008 fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, followed by a month residency at Ross Creek in Nova Scotia. The local environment of the Atlantic coast and its rich maritime history inspires and influences the work.  I make a contemporary reflection on history and the importance of the sea to culture… with the benefit of hindsight.”