January 15-February 20, 2016.
Laura Taler (Ottawa, ON)
Sebastian + The Boxer
Opening reception: Friday, January 15th @ 8pm.
Laura Taler will be presenting an artist talk on Friday, January 15 @ 7pm in the second floor event space.
The questioning of linear progress is at the centre of Sebastian and The Boxer. For both works Laura Taler re-considers performed actions from a cinematic perspective, collaborating with the creators who originated these actions. Taler adapted Sebastian from musician/composer Charles Quevillon’s live performance in Room with Sticks, (created with choreographers Tedd Robinson and Ame Henderson), and The Boxer from dancer/choreographer Bill Coleman’s live performance Heartland. By looping repetitive actions, Taler confuses the separation between ending and beginning while suggesting that temporal variations paired with repetitive gestures can create openings for transformation.
Laura Taler is a Romanian-born Canadian artist working across a range of media including performance, film, sound, sculpture and installation. Her work explores how memory and history are linked to movement and how the body is able to carry the past without being oppressed by it. Taler began her career as a contemporary dance choreographer before turning her attention to filmmaking and visual art. She has been a resident at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires), Carleton Immersive Media Studio, and a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin). Her work has been screened in festivals, special screenings and broadcast internationally. Awards include a Gold Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival, the Best Experimental Documentary award from Hot Docs!, and Best of the Festival from New York’s Dance on Camera Festival. Publications include Tension/Spannung (Turia+Kant, 2010), Revisiting Ephemera (Blue Medium Press, 2011) and Embodied Fantasies (Peter Lang Publishing, 2013). Taler holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa.
