Gallery & Artists
Current Exhibition
In the Gallery:
Meaningful Code
October 26 – January 12, 2020
Opening reception: Thursday, November 7, 6 – 8 pm
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Meaningful Code looks at the ways in which artists are engaging with emerging technologies and tools in order to speculate on what our collective future might look like.
Featuring works in video, animation, 3D printing, photography, digital collage, augmented reality, AI and hacking, these works explore how we are integrating technology into our lives, how digital futures might change the ways we see ourselves, and what it might mean to live alongside artificial life forms.
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Participating Artists:
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Thoreau Bakker |
Nadine Lessio |
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Curated by Katie Micak
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For more information contact:
Katie Micak, Exhibitions and Residency Coordinator | Katie.micak@livingarts.on.ca | 905.306.6161
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Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese born Montreal based visual artist working with performance, photography, and video. Working within the gap between body as image and body as experienced reality, Chun Hua Catherine Dong uses the body—often her own body— as a visual territory in her work and a primary material to activate social commentary on gender, race, and immigration. Among her many performances, exhibitions and awards she has performed at Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival in Chicago, The Great American Performance Art in New York City, has exhibited work at Quebec City Biennial, The Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in Paris, MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image in Montreal, is the recipient of Franklin Furnace Award for contemporary avant-garde art in New York in 2014 and was listed as the “10 Artists Who Are Reinventing History” by Canadian Art in 2017.
https://chunhuacatherinedong.com/
Claire Scherzinger depicts the uncanny as a way of resisting systems of power and considering better ways to live within western civilization. Scherzinger is an interdisciplinary artist working with drawing, painting, gaming engines and podcasting to develop the core of her practice, which is the process of building new worlds. Her work has appeared in exhibitions across Canada and internationally in the US and UK. She was also purchase prizewinner of the 2015 Royal Bank of Canada funded Painting Competition and is currently a finalist for the Equitable Bank Emerging Digital Artist Award, 2019.
http://www.clairescherzinger.com/
Jean-René Leblanc is an Associate Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Calgary in Canada. He is president of the board of Emmedia Gallery and Production Society and co-founder of the Sensorium Lab a cross-disciplinary research group focusing on research that develops systems of interaction that encourage kinesthetic perception and interpretation.
Nadine Lessio has researched extenizlvey on AI, IoT and social robots. She is a researcher, artist, and creative technologist based out of Toronto, Canada.Nadine's practice explores ideas around useless technology, artificial (un)intelligence, bots, and game peripherals. Her current projects are focused on the internet of things, and personal assistants.
Her work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Long Winter, NeurIPS, Nuit Blanche, Indiecade, Vector, and the Game Developer’s Conference.
Jacqueline Mak is the Art Director for Ogilvy One and BBDO Asia turned full time Digital Collage artist since 2016. BDES Advertising, PgD Sculpture and Installation from Ontario College of Art and Design. As a visual artist my work challenges society's views on critical issues that affect our daily lives in which we seldom pay attention to. Mak is based in Mississauga.
https://jacqueline-mak.format.com/
Amrita Chopra uses 3D renderings, film, and photography to tell stories and create moments. She is an emerging artist based in Mississauga, ON.
Thoreau Bakker is a Toronto-based contemporary artist, with a current focus on three-dimensional (3D) media. He holds an honours B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Guelph, and a master’s degree (MFA) from OCAD University. His MFA thesis questioned Walter Benjamin’s generalizations about aura and the mechanical reproduction of art in the context of recent 3D technologies like 3D printing and Virtual Reality.
Current visual interests include neo-pop and mass-produced objects, of both aesthetic and utilitarian natures: toys, product packaging, etc.
Dave Kemp is a visual artist whose practice looks at the intersections and interactions between art, science and technology: particularly at how these fields shape our perception and understanding of the world. His artworks have been exhibited widely at venues such as at the McIntosh Gallery, The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Mississauga, The Ontario Science Centre, York Quay Gallery, Interaccess, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, and as part of the Switch video festival in Nenagh, Ireland. He currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Image Arts program at Ryerson University.
Laura Kay Keeling is an emerging interdisciplinary artist and current member of Toronto based arts collective, Akin. Her work has been profiled in numerous publications and her featured work is looks at themes of the Big Data, social media, and surveillance.
https://www.laurakaykeeling.com/
Adrienne Matheuszik is recent graduate from OCADU’s Interdisciplinary Masters in Art, Media and Design program. Featured in “Meaningful Code” is Matheuszik’s project Ambiguous Origins explores the boundary between the physical and the digital through augmented reality, installation and film. Drawing connections among science fiction, new media and mixed-race identity, Ambiguous Origins chronicles the journey of a space explorer and an Object of Ambiguous Origin. The works address the contingency of identity in different contexts and the process of being (mis-)identified.
http://www.adriennematheuszik.com/
Tobias Williams is a Toronto based artist and educator with an MFA from York University. His work investigates the historic and contemporary relationship between art and technology.
Curated by Katie Micak
Katie Micak is the Exhibitions and Residency Coordinator at the Living Art Centre, and is also an independent curator who has produced such projects as Vector Festival, Toronto Kids Digital Festival and Spark Video. In addition to curation and administration, Micak is an artist and researcher primarily interested in our emotional relationship with technological devices, most recently exploring what it’s like to live with artificially intelligent chatbot, the Amazon Alexa in “The Alexa Experiment.” www.katiemicak.com
Public Spaces
Astra Zenica (2nd Floor)
Dual Tones
Amrita Chopra, Whyishnave Suthagar, and Pranavi Suthagar
Curated by Hibah Mian, founder of The Open Gallery
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“Dual Tones” features three multi-talented women of colour, who visual stories illustrating an evolving chemistry between art, visual representation, and their own cultural history.
Amrita Chopra, Whyishnave Suthagar, and Pranavi Suthagar leverage digital tools and processes to manipulate images in order to share messages of alternative realities, tell open- ended stories, and expose the duality contained in representation and common imagery.
The title “Dual Tones” reflects on the double meaning, present as an undercurrent in each image; the works oscillate between the real and unreal, the intended and the interpretive, between playfulness and criticality, all the while reflecting on the artist’s particular position and personal cultural context.
1st Floor Exhibition Cabinet
Aphasia
Yasmeen Nematt Alla
In this exhibition, Yasmeen Nematt Alla showcases how the immigrant experience of being “othered” is often translated into trauma, and how such trauma can cause Aphasia.
Aphasia is defined as, the loss of speech and language as a result of a traumatic incident.
In this exhibition, Yasmeen Nematt Alla showcases how the immigrant experience of being “othered” is often translated into trauma, and how such trauma can cause Aphasia. The exhibition highlights the gaps the artist feels in her inability to express a thought using either of the languages she speaks, English and Arabic.
The "tip of the tongue feeling" takes a different level of ache when one realizes that it is possible to not have the right words in the language you need it in. Using laser cut hand bent plexi glass, the artist explores how material and language can translate into a fragile yet resilient state of being.
While the text sometimes offers a direct translation in either Arabic or English, while encompassing notions of nostalgia, pain and the grief associated with losing your ability to communicate in the only ways you know how.
This show recognizes the unseen labour of having to translating every thought in order to be able to exist and communicate in a foreign society.
2nd Floor Exhibition Cabinet
Spaces Within
Heidi McKenzie
“My studio practice engages issues of identity and belonging. Through abstract portraiture, I capture self, an individual, a culture, or society. Since graduating from Sheridan in 2012..."
“My studio practice engages issues of identity and belonging. Through abstract portraiture, I capture self, an individual, a culture, or society.
Since graduating from Sheridan in 2012, I have been working with abstract self-portraiture. In 2017 I embarked on a new arc in my creative development that addresses a broad range of publics and draws in the breadth of immigrants and indigenous peoples with whom we live to engage in forms that were previously restricted to Western aesthetics.
The forms are inspired by iconic modernists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth —modern minimalism: clear lines, and hollow negative spaces, where the interior space represents a simultaneous sense of loss, renewal, and overall belonging.
This abstract representation leaves the viewer to unravel their own truth about the art—and perhaps to glean a hint of their own reflection within the works.” –Heidi McKenzie
This abstract representation leaves the viewer to unravel their own truth about the art—and perhaps to glean a hint of their own reflection within the works.” –Heidi McKenzie
LIVE Restaurant
Landscapes
Dori Vanderheyden
Vanderheyden’s work reflects on how we are becoming dissociated from natural landscapes, and by extension our responsibility towards the environment. Pulling source material from photographs...
Vanderheyden’s work reflects on how we are becoming dissociated from natural landscapes, and by extension our responsibility towards the environment.
Pulling source material from photographs, this painting series separates the viewer from the landscape’s image, creating colour boundaries over mountains and open vistas.
Other Exhibitions:
2nd Floor Showcase Cabinet: Works from LAC Community Courses and Camps
2nd Floor Hallway: Artworks from Iona Secondary School, Gr. 12, Digital Arts
2nd Floor Hallway: Trung Tran, paintings
3rd Floor Hallway: Photography exhibitions from our adult Community Courses
3rd Floor Hallway: Photographs of Artists at work representing what our Resident Artists do at the LAC
3rd Floor Hallway: Artwork by children made during Summer Camp 2019