ESCAPE VELOCITY: Does this art come with tech support?
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"Melitzah"
Risa Horowitz, "Melitzah," 2000-2003.
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"Wish you were here..."
Shelley Ouellet, "Wish you were here...," an installation and web project by includes curtains of beads recreating three landscape paintings.
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"Wish you were here..."
Shelley Ouellet, "Wish you were here...," an installation and web project by includes curtains of beads recreating three landscape paintings.
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"Fire-Heart"
Paul Wong, "Fire-Heart," silkscreen print, 22" X 44", is part of "Chinese Cafe - The Five Energies," a 10-print series.
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"Carnevale 3.0"
Reva Stone, "Carnevale 3.0," 2000-2002.
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"Eardrum"
Reva Stone, "Eardrum," from Imaginal Expression, an interactive installation and website.
ESCAPE VELOCITY: Does this art come with tech support?
Located at the intersection of art and science, new media art escapes convention. Defying definition, it is where art, design, architecture, dance, performance, computers, engineering and science converge with research, humanities, education, health and culture. Artists drawn into the genre's magnetic pull are exploring ideas of convergence, testing concepts of interconnectedness, developing nanotechnology and pioneering the new frontier of haptics, the science of applying touch, sensation and control to interaction with computers. Here's a brief look at how some Western Canadian artists (Reva Stone, Paul Wong, Shelley Ouellet and Risa Horowitz) are escaping the traditional boundaries of conventional art.
REVA STONE
Reva Stone's exploration of new media will be featured in a one-woman exhibition at The Winnipeg Art Gallery starting in late December. Over her 18-year career, Stone has explored some of the most contemporary and challenging forms in the production of her art. These include video, sound, installation, interactive media, web art and more recently, digital imaging systems, robotics and three-dimensional computer environments. The WAG exhibition will allow Western Canadians to get more than just a glimpse of what this internationally acclaimed artist - whose studio is located in Winnipeg's historic Exchange District - has been up to.
Stone's explorations into new media have garnered her national and international recognition. She has shown her work at galleries and in festivals across the country and also exhibits in Europe and the United States. In December 2002, her robotic work, Carnevale 3.0 received an honourable mention in an international competition in Madrid, Spain, of new media artists who work with ideas of artificial intelligence. Such acclaim has led to an invitation to exhibit at the First American Biennale of Electronic Art, Columbus, Ohio, in 2004 and other honours such as a Major Arts Grant from the Manitoba Arts Council to pursue her work, Imaginal Expression.
Imaginal Expression is an interactive installation and website that utilizes scientific imaging technology. Stone re-purposes the imagery and the technology to investigate the virtual body and the lived body. Stone's work is based in part on investigations into three-dimensional protein molecules whose visual representations are used by medical science. Stone combines the scientific abstractions with, as she says, the "original human physical sources . . . flesh, hair, blood vessels, bruising, scarring and aging." The development of this work will have an interactive component for virtual and actual users that will be influenced by the bodily presence of the viewers.
Stone employs new technologies not for their own sake but as a natural progression into her enquiries about the body and the machine. Her place of investigation, unlike the purported disinterest and objectivity of science, has always been as an embodied female subject. Indeed, Stone has been a significant member and Board member of Winnipeg's Mentoring Artists for Women's Art (MAWA), filling in as Acting Director on occasion and working alongside other artists and writers to advance the discussions about identity and the body within the context of changing ideas about technology. She retains ties within the community, serving as a mentor with the Crossing Communities Art Project, working with girls and women in conflict with the law.
Imaging technologies are only one aspect of her new media focus. The upcoming Winnipeg exhibition will feature the latest version and upgrade of Carnevale. The work is a motorized, life-sized programmed robot in the shape of an aluminum silhouette and cut-out of a young girl. Carnevale, (which translates as "without flesh"), roams the gallery space, recognizes visitors, and responds on the basis of her encounters. Her responses, programmed by Stone, include movement, audio, image capture, image projection and image retention. Stone has programmed Carnevale so that these projections, like human memory will fade over time. It's fascinating stuff.
-By Amy Karlinsky
PAUL WONG
Vancouver new media artist Paul Wong works with video, performance, photography and installation art, using popular culture as a mirror of our times.
A self-taught artist who developed alongside the electronic revolution, Wong has created a unique sense of style with a socio-political edge. A prolific pioneer in the genre, he is at once a performance artist, video maker and photographer whose individual style draws from personal experiences while blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Recurrent themes in his work include death, sex and racial issues.
An activist for artistic expression and against censorship and racism, he is a curator and mentor to younger artists, and an influential figure in the Vancouver arts community. In 1973, Wong co-founded the Satellite Video Exchange Society (Video In), an artist-run centre for the production and distribution of independent video projects. In 1985 he became artistic director of On Edge, a non-profit organization that initiates challenging art projects. Both organizations import and export international programs, host visiting artists, curate exhibitions and publish books on popular culture.
In 1992, Wong received the Canada Council's Bell Canada Award in Video Art, in recognition of his contribution to the development of video practices and a video language in Canada. In 1995, a mid-career retrospective of his work was held at the National Gallery of Canada.
Born in 1955 in Prince Rupert, B.C., Wongâ's family owned a classic Chinese cafe. He returned to these roots for the 1998 - 2000 Canadian tour of THEM=US, an exhibition featuring the work of 20 photographers for which Wong was commissioned to photograph Chinese cafes in Western Canada.
Hungry Ghosts, a recent exhibition exploring ways in which we see the dead and methods in which the dead continue to live in the present, showed at the artist-run Neutral Ground gallery in Regina May 31 to July 5, and in June at Nuova Icona as part of the Venice Bienniale in Italy. Hungry Ghosts may be viewed on the web at www.hungryghosts.net.
Wong was a featured artist in Vancouver's third annual New Forms Festival 2003, Inter[sec/ac]tion: A convergence of music, media and art, and this fall he has a solo exhibition, Paul Wong - Collected, at the new Vox Gallery in Vancouver. Running September 6 to October 4, 2003 and aimed primarily at collectors, the exhibit contains video art, prints, photos and neon objects including a number of digital pieces never before shown in Vancouver. In Spring 2004 he will co-host INTRANATION at the Banff Centre, a new media program in which 44 artists from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas have been selected to participate in two six-week sessions.
-By Rod Chapman
SHELLEY OUELLET
Calgary-based artist Shelley Ouellet digitally designs and physically constructs large, two- and three-dimensional pixilated images. She dates her interest in digital art to the Opening Ceremonies of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, when she and her brother "donned the white hooded capes that were taped to our seats.... We became two pixels and, with hundreds of other cape wearers, we were giant Olympic rings for all the world to see." An incredible sense of magic was evoked, she says, seeing a stadium of images created by the audience.
Creating images or forms out of multitudes of tiny elements remains "magical, visual and metaphorical" for Ouellet. She acquired her first Macintosh in 1996, and the computer was integral to such projects as a 20 ft x 14 ft portrait of Rita Hayworth made of one-inch sequins pinned to a wall, and an eight-cubic-foot 3D bug made of little rubber bugs connected by fine nylon line. Ouellet continues to use databases, web camera performances, web-based publishing and animation in her art. She teaches web authoring at the Alberta College of Art & Design, is an avid advocate for the visual art community and serves as a mentor to young artists. "I'm really interested in how other artists, and now my students, see the internet as a medium for art. It is an exciting time," she says.
Ouellet's Wish you were here... exhibition, last shown at the Nickle Arts Museum in 2002, was a combined installation and web project that included three 8 ft x 15 ft beaded curtains, reducing binoculars, and a database of postcards collected as the work evolved in exhibitions across Canada. The curtains recreated three 19th century Canadian landscape paintings. Blank postcards were made available at each exhibition venue and on the project website and patrons were asked to contribute their own vision of a "Wish you were here..." image. Hundreds of people responded electronically and by mail and their contributions are available for viewing at www.wishyouwerehere-canada.net.
Implementing her projects has relied on multitudes of friends and volunteers. "The dime store or craft objects come together to make a larger whole, much like people do to ensure each project is completed in time for the exhibition. I like the potential of many," says Ouellet.
Ouellet has an exhibition this fall at Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary involving photo-active beads. Another show at Calgary's New Gallery opens February 14, 2004, and will be a multimedia installation.
-By Jennifer MacLeod
RISA HOROWITZ
Winnipeg-based artist Risa Horowitz is interested in language, communication and interactive media. She has a background in photography and writing, and is also the newest member of the team at aceartinc, where she co-hosts a New Media art group. In her art practice she collects and analyzes data - everything from a web archive of self-portraits, made over seven years, to digital images of corners. Her recent work, Melitzah, comprises waveforms and sounds of her voice reading all the words in the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary. Melitzah, a word in Hebrew that means utterance, was recently installed at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art as part of the Young Winnipeg Artists exhibition. It's interactive, with a 138-volume visual dictionary and a computerized database. Viewers and players can enter their own words or word combinations and receive the playback in audio and waveform.
Horowitz' work will be featured in the exhibition, Daring Confessions: Romance and the Modern Day Woman at the Mendel Art Gallery in September, 2003. Later in the year she will be in England at COSIGN, a conference on computational semiotics for gaming and new media.
-By Amy Karlinsky
