September 18th – October 17th, 2009.

The post Change first appeared on PAVED Arts.

June 5th – July 30th, 2009.

Project Website: http://www.otherartists.com/zaxis

Events featured in Z-Axis include a group video screening, two new media art installations, audio/video workshops, a grand finale concert, and a panel discussion on collaboration and strategies for new media art practices.

• Exhibition (Installations and Video Screening) – June 5th – July 30th, 2009
• A/V Workshop 1:Pure Data Dance Party – Saturday, June 13th, 1-5pm
• A/V Workshop 2: DIY Video Mixing – Saturday, June 27th, 1-5pm
• A/V Workshop 3: Slammin’ Jammage – Saturday, July 4th, 1-5pm
• A/V Workshop 4: VJ – DJ Collaboration – Thursday, July 9th, 7-11pm
• Concert – Friday, July 24th, 8-?pm
• Panel – Saturday, July 25th, 2-5pm

All events take place at Paved Arts, 424 20th Street West, Saskatoon, 652-5502 x.1

Z-Axis is a five part new media event in Saskatoon, SK (June 5-July 30, 2009) exploring technique, collaboration, and innovation in audiovisual performance art and new media.  All of the art at Z-Axis are collaborations of some kind, and many of these collaborations feature artists from Saskatchewan paired with artists from places such as Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto, Singapore, Providence, and Detroit. The five sections of this project are: gallery installations, video screenings, a free audiovisual performance workshop series, a concert, and a panel presentation. 

The new black box-style upstairs event space at Paved Arts (Saskatoon, SK) is the perfect venue for viewing the video program, which features seven videos from VJs and sound artists which will be screened at Z-Axis on a loop for come and go viewing (just under an hour long programme). There will also be two interactive video installations that gallery attendants will assist visitors with (one runs for all of June and July, one runs only in July). Four free audiovisual performance workshops take place throughout the exhibition, with sign up on a first come first serve basis. Towards the end of Z-Axis, a concert will bring together the workshop participants with four other live video and sound art acts…and a little bit of live puppetry! The following day, there will be a panel discussion at Paved about topics in new media collaboration in Saskatchewan and beyond.

Z-Axis Background

Collaboration between skilled artists from diverse technical, aesthetic, and cultural backgrounds can help catalyze the production of innovative artworks that are only made possible by the artists’ meaningful, synergistic connections. Z-Axis presents a showcase of collaborative audiovisual artwork that brings together many different kinds of people and perspectives, while it investigates the nature of collaborative practice in audiovisual performance art and new media, highlighting the work of many Saskatchewan artists practicing in this field, as well as other artists from Canada and around the world.

It is important to consider Saskatchewan new media artists as parts of various translocal networks within international discourse. New media projects often require a diverse range of expertise that need to be sourced from different places in order to develop innovative multimedia projects, especially when interactivity is prioritized. The divergent nature of emerging media practices also suggests that creators can benefit if they are aware of new developments and people within and outside of their immediate communities, in order to best cross-pollinate ideas and technical methods, while opening possibilities. By working together, sharing skills and resources, and developing critical discourse, the environment for new media practice is strengthened and greater opportunities can arise for creators. Z-Axis was created to help link people and provide inspiration, enhance local media skill development, and provide a site where dialogue and inspiration can lead to new experiences.
-Carrie Gates

Z-Axis Participant list:
Andrew O’Malley (Ottawa, ON) <workshop>
Carrie Gates (Saskatoon, SK) <installation>
Constantine Katsiris (Vancouver, BC) <video>
Darsha Hewitt (Montréal, QC) <video>
David LaRiviere (Saskatoon. SK) <panel>
disassembly (East Lansing, MI, USA) <video>
DJ Submit (Regina, SK) <concert>
Domenico Sciajno (Italy) <video
Ellen Moffat (Saskatoon, SK) <panel>
Erin Gee (Regina, SK) <video> <concert>
Francis Theberge (Montréal, QC) <video> <concert>
Freida Abtan (Providence, RI, USA) <video> <concert>
Gary Young (Saskatoon, SK) <panel>
Garnet Hertz (Irvine, CA, USA) <panel>
Jake Hardy (Vancouver, BC) <concert>
Jeff Morton (Regina, SK) <installation> <video> <workshop> <concert><panel>
kelleY boleN (Edmonton, AB) <concert>
KERO (Detroit, MI, USA) <video>
Leeane Berger (Saskatoon, SK) <installation> <video> <workshop> <concert>
Mo Selle (Singapore) <video>
Red Smarteez (Saskatoon, SK) <concert>
Regan Mandryk (Saskatoon, SK) <panel>
Ryan Davidson (Saskatoon, SK) <concert>
Victortronic (Montréal, QC) <video> <concert>
VJzoo (Perth, Australia) <video>

The Z-Axis exhibition was made possible with the generous support of a Saskatchewan Arts Board’s New Media Initiatives Grant. Carrie Gates’ installation (July only) was made possible by a Production Support Grant from Soil Digital Media Suite and a Production Grant from the Canada Council.

The post Z-Axis: Technique, Collaboration, Innovation first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Clive Robertson – Kingston, Ontario.

June 26th to July 31st, 2009

Then + Then Again – Practices within an artist-run culture, 1969-2006 is an archival retrospective exhibition curated by media artist and artist-run centre pioneer and theorist, Clive Robertson. The show consists of 5 DVDs, 6 CDs and a series of 24 photo-texts that mix a history of Robertson’s performance, video and audiowork practices alongside his community-building curatorial and publishing collaborations.

Then + Then Again provides a unique opportunity to revisit the “how’s” and “why’s” of artist collectives networking within an ever-changing alternative culture and the productivity of intergenerational exchanges. Robertson himself worked as an artist and emerging curator with various members of the 1960s Fluxus movement including Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, and Joseph Beuys.

Highlights of this exhibition that successfully toured Ontario and Québec in 2007 include genealogies of the 1970’s Calgary-based performance and publishing collective, W.O.R.K.S.; the cultural journalism activisms of Centerfold/Fuse magazine; curatorial contributions to the start up of Canadian performance and independent video festivals; and new re-editioned CDs from the indie cassette and vinyl Voicespondence label including albums from De Dub Poets, The Government, the Gayap Rhythm Drummers, Clive Robertson, and Nerve Theory. Also featured are historic music rap and spoken word videos.

Then + Then Again has been compiled from an archive of some 600 images, 40 hours of videotape and 60 hours of audio materials. The exhibition includes a collectibles display of rubber stamps, artists books, and other ephemera.

Clive Robertson is a media artist, cultural critic and publisher who first emigrated to Traynor, Saskatchewan in 1957. Completing an art college education in Plymouth, Liverpool and Cardiff and at the University of Reading (UK), Robertson re-emigrated to Calgary in 1971 and has subsequently lived and worked in Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal and Kingston. His recent book, Policy Matters – Administrations of Art and Culture was published by YYZBooks, Toronto in 2006. He is the co-editor with Alain-Martin Richard of Performance art in/au Canada 1970-1990, Éditions Intervention, 1991. Clive Robertson currently teaches contemporary art history, cultural policy and performance studies at Queen’s University.

The post Then + Then Again first appeared on PAVED Arts.

May 8th – June 13th, 2009

The Book of Knowledge is John Shelling’s first solo exhibition since graduating from the University of Saskatchewan’s Fine Art program, and the artist’s first solo show in an artist-run centre. Like his graduating exhibition, entitled Kinesthetika, Shelling continues to investigate notions of reception as they come to play out in the art gallery setting. Both past and current projects involve calling upon the gallery-goer to “discover” the work on view, or to leave without having uncovered aspects of the exhibition, which in turn generates many different experiences and recollections. In speaking to his line of inquiry the artist wrote;

The exhibition The Book of Knowledge takes its name from a renowned series of books first published in 1908. The Children’s Encyclopedia, as it was subtitled, was designed to “awaken in the child’s mind a lively interest in the great world around” him or her. It is in this spirit that I have attempted to evoke a similar case for wonder when creating this exhibition.

I created this exhibition thinking first of how to set up a mystery that requires unpacking within the terms of a gallery going experience and then how the spectator might endeavor to penetrate barriers and discover the work within the gallery. Taking cues from adventure movies like Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Goonies, Zardoz and others of the same ilk, the exhibition leaves clues for the gallery-goer and sets up a situation that allows the curious to uncover the content of the work for themselves. It is my hope that the exhibition will act as a portal away from the everyday perspective, and in favor of an experience that projects the viewer/participant into the role of the explorer and time traveler.

Although born and educated in Saskatoon, John Shelling was only recently repatriated to our city when offered the Editor position at BlackFlash magazine. (www.blackflash.ca) Entirely by coincidence, the present exhibition at PAVED Arts was planned from before the time that Shelling took up his position with BlackFlash, although both activities are testament to his commitment to this community as a cultural worker and producer. Please join us for “The Book of Knowledge,” and prepare to delve into a mystery. Your first clue: “Book 4, p.1355. Follow the picture.”

The post The Book of Knowledge first appeared on PAVED Arts.

March 13 – April 18, 2009

Curated for PAVED Arts by David LaRiviere

Martin Beauregard investigates the possible overlap between factual and fictional stories. The formal propositions that he develops – videographic and photographic – explore the terrain where biographical fiction and documentary become confused. For example, Soapoperation (2005) is taken from a stay in a hospital in Bordeaux, where he had surgery in March 2004. It presents a scene shot on the operating table and a conversation with his lover when he awoke from anaesthesia in a romantic “soap opera” style; life is released through an image, a snapshot, a fictional plot traced almost on reality. The video Playing with Deady Daddy also presents “truth and play-acting,” shot during his father’s funeral – August 13, 2003 – where relatives gathered, paid tribute to the deceased, and saw and touched him for the last time. Beauregard rehearsed this contact with his deceased father lying in his coffin for the camera, as if he were performing repeated takes for a scene in a movie.

DRIVE END
“It sometimes happens that by seeing a place, maybe even briefly, one feels swept away, in the ambiance of past cinematographic experiences; as if the souvenir of a film echoes in our environment, and that the real allows traces of the scenes or landscapes seen in movies. DRIVE END confronts the cowboy legend, as produced by the cinema industry, with the modest life of my grandfather, an eighty-seven year old man. I asked him to play on a cinematographic setting. I tried to grasp on film the gaze of this old man, his life slowly fading, as if it was the end of a road movie. He gave me the face of a man who had never given in to despondency, like the characters of Nobody (Clint Eastwood) or a Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda), in the films by Sergio Leone and other spaghetti western movies. Drive end is a Vanitas of an American dream, a Momento mori, as in the picture we can see: an abandoned Drive-In and a car cemetery.”

For his project DRIVE END, Beauregard will produce a series of 10 photographs that contrast the mythic figure of the cowboy – produced by the movie industry – with the modest life of an 88-year-old man (his grandfather). The old man is photographed in a car junkyard and an abandoned drive-in.

Martin Beauregard lives and works in Montréal. He is a graduate of the École des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux in France (2004). His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including at L’œil de poisson (Quebec City), Location One (New York), and Tin Box (Bordeaux), and in group shows, including CAPC Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (Bordeaux), Luxe Gallery (New York), and Asahi Art Square (Tokyo). He is currently studying for his doctorate at the Université du Québec à Montréal and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris.

————————————————————————————————————————

Drive-End As A Point Of Departure by David LaRiviere

The “finality of death” is a casual, everyday concept that is nevertheless bound up in a nihilistic perspective, one that presupposes a “meaning” for life that inscribes an essential human ego or “soul” at the centre of existence. Such garden variety metaphysics depreciate existence insofar as it becomes necessary to generate a spate of transcendental truth claims to sustain this totemic “meaning” in the face of a universe that is in a constant state of becoming. Nietzsche challenges this central notion to pop-psychology by first suggesting that we humans actually live many deaths, and further that death itself is a festival which produces a multiplicity of new directions.

The current exhibition at PAVED Arts embodies a heterogeneous invocation of various and intertwined endings related to the cinema, pop-cultural phenomena and, last but not least, social relationships (including family). There are at least three pronounced endings that occur within Martin Beauregard’s “Drive-End” project. The first blatant ending that is invoked relates to our aforementioned mortality, the end of life, which is embodied by the casting selection of the artist’s own grandfather to play the protagonist. Death comes to be reflected in the face of our grandparents. If our parents represent authority, the first application of the law, then surely our grandparents represent mortality insofar as the aging body and genetic resemblance forecast our own twilight years. Of course, this ending moves from the specific to the general, or the personal to the cultural, just as the representation of the grandparent operates in the codes that are circulated through the mass media, quite independent of the multitude of variations that apply to any given individual experience. The second ending applies to the genre that is identified in Beauregard’s images: the spaghetti western. Clint Eastwood’s most recent film “Grand Torino” develops a parallel, if overly sentimental meta-text– namely that with the passing of this character there also passes a certain construction of the old west, and of a period of film-making. The “western” will return of course, but as with the eternal return it will always return as difference, never to be the same again. Beauregard excavates the spaghetti western both in terms of the formal, panoramic properties of his series, and for the ambiguity that Sergio Leone introduced to the genre. As with the Good, Bad and Ugly in Leone’s cinema, there is little to pick between the three in Beauregard’s own gray-hat construction. The third ending is perhaps the ending that causes the highest degree of anxiety: the end of the oil age. The abandoned, derelict automobile is an artifact of the American dream as it relates to suburbia, and to some extent the urban sprawl that grips our cities. For example, the Drive-End image that currently graces the PAVED Arts billboard space actually operates on all three levels in quite a profound way. Here in Saskatoon who would deny that driving culture is rampant, and in a belligerent state of denial about the looming end of the oil age. As with many western cities that occupy the very same frontier, and where much of the urban planning was undertaken well into the age of the automobile, Saskatoon is spread out with a butter knife, rife with rectangular front lawns and two-car garages that reflect an over-blown and short-sighted sense of prosperity. Drive-End confronts such disparate notions of ending and produces from them aesthetic and ethical possibilities that can only erupt from departure.

The post Drive-End (Part 1) first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Jillian Mcdonald – Brooklyn, New York.

Curated by David LaRiviere

January 16 to February 21, 2009

(scream) is a two-person video installation and collaborative billboard presentation. While Jo-Anne Balcaen studies the scream from the perspective of ecstasy, Jillian Mcdonald approaches the same subject as a device in horror films. This exhibition project arises from an affinity that both artists recognize in each other’s strategies, and is thus culminated from a long-distance creative dialog. The 3-D “scream” prominently featured on the exhibition invitation, as well as the billboard gracing the PAVED Arts’ facade, was arrived at as a moniker for the exhibition through their ongoing correspondence. It is most appropriate that this lower- case “scream” should appear in parenthesis, given that both artists hold up for scrutiny and investigation what is ordinarily a flash point of alarm. In this way the existential angst inherent to traditional artistic depictions of the scream is forsaken in favor of a more sociological, even pop-cultural level of inquiry.

Jillian Mcdonald’s video work entitled The Screaming challenges the horror movie genre’s damsel in distress by inverting the power dynamics and charging the scream with a potency that overcomes any would-be menace. In the artist’s words, “I insert myself into scenes from well-known horror films from the 1970s onward. My presence serves not as a self-portrait but as a zone of fantasy – my protagonist screams at the horror not out of helpless fear but with a powerful, sometimes destructive force that scares or even blows the monsters away.” (http://jillianmcdonald.net/projects/thescreaming.html)

Jo-Anne Balcaen’s Screaming Girls appropriates famous film images of teen-aged girls enraptured by rock ‘n’ roll performance. Stripped of sound, Balcaen’s subtle manipulation of this familiar pop adulation becomes a study of mass hysteria, oddly foreign to any kind of rationale that Beatlemania may have once produced. As the severity of the expression mounts, her video work draws on a still-contemporary phenomenon that in turn reflects upon a kind of fervor that the popular media is complicit in cultivating– and so the scream becomes an object of fascination. (http://www.joannebalcaen.ca/screaminggirls/)

The video work will be presented in the PAVED Arts gallery space concurrent to the mounting of a collaborative project for the street-side billboard– a text based work that will utilize old-school 3-D technologies. Both artists approach the scream as an extremity of popular media, and in the collaborative work the scale of the billboard retains their mutual flare for the cinematic.

The post Scream first appeared on PAVED Arts.