Current
Emanuel Licha – Striking a Pose
Curated by Marie-Hélène Leblanc & presented in association with PAVED Arts and Musée Régional de Rimouski
January 13–February 11, 2012 in the Main Space
Opening Reception: Friday January 13, 7:00 pm
Curator's Talk: Friday January 13, 6:00 pm
Follow Emanuel Licha's "War Tourist" from 2004 to the present in this series of videos. The War Tourist begins exploring sensationalistic zones of conflict in far-off countries in a strange colonialist attempt to reassure himself of their great distance. But as he follows the real stuff, he is slowly draw back towards home and the hyper-real consumer lifestyle, with stops at a French urban-operations police training ground, a Hollywood-built military facsimile of Iraq in California, and the splendour of unreal Italy in Las Vegas.
EMANUEL LICHA was born in Montreal in 1971. After earning a Master’s degree in urban geography, he pursued his education in visual arts at Concordia University in Montreal, followed by a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole nationale des beauxarts de Lyon, France, in 2001. Licha is associate Professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris-La Villette. He is a member of the Centre for research architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
His work focuses on public space and architecture, leading to a reading of the features of the urban landscape as so many social, historical, and political signs. His recent projects investigate the means by which traumatic and violent events are being looked at, and are shown as video installations.
Read the monograph essay by curator Marie-Hélène Leblanc
View posts about Emanuel Licha on the Latitude 53 blog.
Nicole Rayburn – Pollination Proposition
January 13–February 11, 2012, in the ProjEx Room
Opening Reception: Friday 13 January, 7:00 pm
Toronto-based former Edmontonian artist Nicole Rayburn proposes an absurd solution to agricultural problems caused by disappearing honeybee populations. This video records her efforts to pollinate flowers with a prosthetic nose. The androgynous Pinnochio penetrates orchid flowers, taking on the insect’s duty, a humorous act of play among the boundaries between humanity and animal, plant, and the mechanical, as Rayburn crosses the hierarchies through which we view the world.
View posts about Nicole Rayburn on the Latitude 53 blog.
Unstable Natures
March 2–April 7, 2012 in the Main Space
Opening Reception: Friday February 24, 7:00 pm
Kayla Cady, Alexandra Emberley, Anna Gaby-Trot, Megan Hahn, Megan Hildebrandt, Patricia Huijen, Annie King, Galia Kwetny, Nathalie Lavoie, Colin Lyons, Faye Mullen, Sam Pettengill, Kim Thomas, Alma Visscher, and Sam Walrod.
Curated by Alysha Creighton, Tessa Hawkins, and Andrea Kastner.
This group show, selected from an open call for works that deal with moments of rupture as catalysts for change through mechanical instability, provides the launchpad for The University of Alberta Art and Design Graduate Student Association's symposium, Instability in Visual and Material Culture, taking place on March 16-17, 2012.
The symposium hosts several panels taking place at the university, including a keynote speaker and graduate papers which will promote an understanding of instability as a pervasive condition that can be exposed and even harnessed to productive critical ends
More information about the artists.
Find out more about the symposium and the show as it comes together at adgsa.wordpress.com.
View posts about Unstable Natures on the Latitude 53 blog.
Image from Alma Visscher, “The Walk”.
Korapin Chaotakoongite – Anusawaree (Monuments)
February 24–April 7 in the ProjEx Room
Artist Talk & Opening Reception: Friday February 24, 6:30 pm
Edmonton-based artist Korapin Chaotakoongite returns to Bangkok, where she was born, to document monuments to economic collapse: derelict buildings. Informed equally by her background as an engineer and her concern for contemporary social realities, her photographs trace the way that derelicts become home to low-income workers, targets for scavengers, public spaces, and vehicles for graffiti artwork, and hint at ways that the buildings could again contribute to urban vitality, since their origin in the 1997 Asian economic crisis.
“Derelicts are often overlooked or forgotten due to lack of historical sig- nificance, or lack of appreciation for their significance. I am drawn to derelicts because of the visual beauty of nature’s process of decay, and am fascinated with how some derelicts have come to reshape the lives of people. I have observed derelicts become homes or other makeshift spaces serving the community, though often this occurs without legal authorization.”