Sorcières : de l'ombre à la lumière/
Witches: Out of the Shadows
Point-à-Callière

The augmented-reality work After the WItch of Malleghem by Edie Soleil, Emily Pelstring, and Jenn E Norton is featured in the expansive exhibition Witches: Our of the Shadows at Point-à-Callière.

“Witches: Out of the Shadows takes you on a captivating journey of discovery, exploring the mythical and multifaceted figure of the witch. The exhibition reveals the little-known history of witches—central figures in popular culture—, delving into their mysterious realm. An experience in which myth and reality intertwine, shining a spotlight on these women whose many representations and practices have spanned the centuries, inspiring modern culture and society.

Delve into the history of witches and their world

Immerse yourself in the bewitching exhibition design as you explore more than 400 objects from European and American collections. Ethnographic objects, manuscripts, paintings… authentic witnesses that recount the history of witches—including the dark “witch hunt” period, when tens of thousands of women were persecuted and condemned to tragic fates in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This historical immersion examines the beliefs, symbols, and fascinating practices of witchcraft, which have been passed down for generations. Pendulums, crystals, tarot cards, herbariums, and interactive elements will invite you to explore some of these practices, such as divination, spells, healing, and protection rituals.

Witches, from the past to the present

From the old hag in folk tales to the rebellious young witches in modern-day films and series, explore how the fascinating figure of the witch has evolved over time and in popular culture. Clothing, audiovisual archives, and iconic objects illustrate how these representations have changed down through the years.

Having become a symbol of modern feminism, today the witch embodies resilience and emancipation, reflecting the struggles and advances of contemporary feminist movements. An opportunity to get the perspective of modern witches asserting their know-how, their social skills, and their art.”

Purchase tickets here

PUBLIC 69
THE WITCH

EDITED BY
TAMARA DE SZEGHEO LANG, EMILY PELSTRING & DAN VENA
 

In August 2021, The Witch Institute came to life as a seven-day virtual symposium to address the figure of the witch in art and media. Initially planned as a four-day in-person conference, the event shifted online as the COVID-19 pandemic intensified. As if in poetic response, the virtual Institute generated a plethora of meaningful points of contact: dozens of roundtables and workshops, several screenings and featured talks, and performances from hundreds of artists, scholars, and practitioners. This special issue offers a glimpse into the rich discourse that took place over that week, presenting multiple perspectives from those grappling with the complicated histories and current instantiations of the witch, tied together by themes such as invisible forces, the more-than-human, and the magic of images. The works presented here consider discounted, discredited, and undermined paradigms for understanding our world, many of which have been strategically suppressed to preserve systems of domination.

—
19 x 24 cm. / 7.5 x 9.5 in. 
140 pages; Full-colour
Design by Associés Libres
Printed by Marquis in Canada

Reserve a copy here

Contributors

alea adigweme
Sarah Best
Lena Chen
Coven Intelligence Program (efrén cruz cortés & Margaretha Haughwout)
FASTWÜRMS
Edie Soleil
Elisa Ferrari
Brandon Hocura
Sandra Huber
Katherine Kline
Deirdre Logue
Shana MacDonald
Syrus Marcus Ware
Stéfy McKnight
Nat Mengist
Jessica Mensch
Allyson Mitchell
Jenn E Norton
Naomi Okabe
Alisi Telengut
Tracy Tidgwell
Icaro Vidal Ferraz Junior
Brianna I. Wiens
 
With Reviews By 
 
Erica N. Cardwell
Valérie Frappier
Yerang Park

Music Video Premiere at KCFF, 2024

The music video for Letter Lettre, by Les Chouettes (Krista Muir/Fran Ashcroft), will be featured at the The Slaight Music Video Showcase! Directed by Jenn E Norton with cinematography by Ryan A Randall, this video follows multiple Krista Muirs while she attempts to send a written letter out into a world that is folding in on itself. KCFF and Tourism Kingston first launched this showcase series in 2020 with the goal of connecting the local film and music scenes through the creation and exhibition of new music videos. With hundreds of applicants and numerous funded projects to date, the 2024 Showcase will unveil 10 brand-new music videos and celebrate the best of Kingston’s creative industries. All videos are automatically in contention for both an audience and juried prize, which will be announced at the Awards Show. Admission includes an afterparty in the Grand lobby with prizes and complimentary apps and snacks. 

Please note: tickets are only available through the Kingston Grand Theatre Box Office and not available as a selection on a Festival Pass. 

SLAIGHT MUSIC VIDEO SHOWCASE

Saturday, March 2

Kingston Grand Theatre / Regina Rosen Auditorium

8 pm

The Weeping Brook at The Centre for Culture and Technology

Bry Webb - Ask Me Everything

Music Video for Bry Webb's single, Ask Me Everything
fovea films
Directed by Jenn E Norton | Director of Photography: Ryan A. Randall | Slime Technician: Edie Soleil | Production Team: Cameron Miller & Sierrah Zawacki | Special thanks to Laura Watt. From the album, Run With Me (2023) https://ideefixe.ffm.to/runwithme

The Drey -THE FRONTIER INDEX

New Perspectives in Landscape | Curated by Drew Simpson

Brian Burnett, Jubal Brown, Pete Smith, Schem Bader, Jack Bride, Jenn E Norton, Romas Astrauskas, Ron Loranger, Rob Farmer & Charles Hackbarth

Toronto Oct 11 - Nov 11
Reception: Oct14, 1 pm to 8 pm

The Drey Toronto:
1229A, Woodbine Ave
Toronto CA
M4C 4E1

IRQ: 20th Anniversary

A special celebration, marking two decades of creative exploration. An extravaganza kicking off with an art and maker showcase followed by performances by:

<< ghettocyb.org >>
<< dj cerebral itch >>
<< pcktroot >>
<< gorf >>
<< rowbit >>
<< wolf glitter >>

The evening will feature artwork by:
Caroline Ross
Christy Langer
Jenn E Norton
Maggy Perry
Daeve Fellows
Mat Brown
Cynthia Chapman
Amber Thomas-Penchoff
Kevin Glitter
Suzanne Laserbeams

We’re thrilled to announce that the incredible Jenn E Norton has joined the Convergence lineup! On September 23, Jenn will mesmerize us with her mind-bending projections. Prepare to be transported to a world where imagination and technology collide, as Jenn's work comes to life in an explosion of colour and movement. You don’t want to miss this! - Oshawa Tourism

“Acclaimed multimedia artist Jenn E Norton has been added to the diverse and eclectic lineup of urban artists for the Convergence Music and Art Festival in downtown Oshawa September 23.

Renowned for her work in time-based media, Norton’s innovative approach to immersive, experiential installations pushes the boundaries of the virtual and physical realms, offering audiences an “unforgettable journey” through art and reality.

Norton has captivated audiences worldwide with her thought-provoking creations that seamlessly blend storytelling and cutting-edge technology. Her projection installations challenge conventional perceptions and give viewers a unique perspective on the intricate relationship between virtual and physical spaces.

Festival attendees will have the unique opportunity to be immersed in Norton’s artistic universe as she uses the iconic downtown Oshawa building, 70 King (formerly the Genosha), as her canvas. According to a release from Oshawa Tourism, she will also use time-based media to transport attendees to a realm “where the lines between what is real and imagined become indistinguishable.”

The Convergence Music and Art Festival is taking over downtown Oshawa from September 22 to 24 with a cross-section of culturally-rich music featuring headliners The Strumbellas as well as a variety of emerging local artists, a visual explosion of mind-bending art and light, and a culture jam of international cuisine in the form of an ultramodern street food alley. The event also includes Nerd Alley, a celebration of all things nerd culture, and a Punk Rock Flea Market. For more information, visit https://www.convergenceoshawa.com.”

-INDURHAM, By Glenn Hendry

The Centre for Culture and Technology

Following Jenn E Norton’s artist lecture and workshop for The Monday Night Seminars series on May 1st, 2023, Norton’s single-channel work, The Weeping Brook, will be on view for the remainder of the month at The Centre of Culture and Technology. The Monday Night Seminars carry on the tradition of the Centre for Culture and Technology's public seminars at the University of Toronto, first established by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

New Music Video for Cots, Devil Does

New Cots track “Devil Does” is out today with a video directed by Jenn E Norton, Produced by Olivier Fairfield, Video shot by Canadian Screen Award Winning Cinematographer Ryan Randall // Boiled Records

Radiant Flux: The Drey Gallery, Toronto, February 4, 2023

COTS: Video Premiere, January 25th, 2023

Tributaries: Nuit Blanche, October 1st, 2022

Curated by Janine Marchessault

Tributaries is an augmented reality app, animated video projection, and website site-specifically rooted on campus at York University, created by Jenn E Norton. Featured during Nuit Blanche, 2022, Tributaries endeavours to make the underground waterways of the surrounding area and, by extension, the watershed of the GTA visible via the viewer's mobile device, drawing awareness to the bio presence, history, and activity below our feet. Tributaries will use a water screen projection and augmented reality content of native and invasive species to mark and draw attention to the overbuilt watershed veins that coursed beneath the City of Toronto, particularly the watershed of the York University campus area, that were buried as a result of urban development. There will also be a website for viewers to learn more about the work via text, video and photographic documentation, and to experience components of the 3D animation as augmented reality.

Mnemonic Waters: Platforms, Athens, 2022

The School of Environmental Sciences Artist Residency Program, presents Mnemonic Waters by Jenn E Norton

Επιμέλεια: Julie René de Cotret

Το έργο παρουσιάζεται από το Artist Residency Program του School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph. 

Χρησιμοποιώντας το γεωεντοπισμό, αυτό το site-specific έργο εντοπίζει ηχητικά τον αρχαίο ποταμό Ιλισό, κάτω από την πόλη της Αθήνας. Η πρόσβαση στο έργο μπορεί να γίνει μέσω μιας εφαρμογής που ονομάζεται Echoes, από οποιονδήποτε έχει κινητή συσκευή σε μια συγκεκριμένη φυσική τοποθεσία, που βρίσκεται στους Χάρτες Google.

Mnemonic Waters will be featured at Platforms Project Art Fair, an international gathering of not-for-profit art organizations. The project is presented by the Artist Residency Program at The School of Environmental Sciences, the University of Guelph, curated by Julie René de Cotret.

Mnemonic Waters is a site-specific audio piece by Jenn E Norton that uses geolocation to sonically trace the ancient river of Ilissos, which lies beneath the city of Athens. Drawing upon two mythical rivers of the underworld, Hades, The River of Unmindfulness, known as Lethe, where the dead drink from its waters to forget their previous lives before rebirth, and The River Mnemosyne, which restores memory and spares the soul from transmigration.

The underground river, River Ilissos, was buried beneath post-WWII Athens in an effort to modernize the city. Running in a tunnel under Vasileos Konstantinou and Kallirois Avenues, emerging briefly behind the Temple of Olympia Zeus. The ancient banks of River Ilisos figured in Plato’s writing as the site where Socrates and the Cynics discussed their philosophies.

Using GPS in an application called Echoes, the buried river is traced, and the work can be accessed by anyone at a specific physical location found with Google Maps.

Cots: Our Breath

A music video by Jenn E Norton for Cots’ song Our Breath off of her new album, Disturbing Body, on Boiled Records, premieres today, October 5th, 2021 on New Commute.

Lava, Migs. "Cots Explores The Language Of Physics In “Our Breath” 3d Animation." Canadian Beats Media, October 7, 2021

Guimauve. ”[EXCLU] Vidéo: Cots - Our Breath.” SK - Soul Kitchen, October 5, 2021

Martin, Ryan. “First Look: Cots – Our Breath.” Jammerizine, October 5, 2021

InterAccess: Geofenced

Geofenced, Curated by Karie Liao

Augmented reality is often shared through a geofence, a virtual geographic boundary comprised of GPS co-ordinates. This invisible fence enables software to trigger a response when a device enters or leaves a real-world area. In this exhibition, the geofence becomes a metaphorical framework through which to consider how AR technologies alter the environment, either by making spaces more accessible or by creating new barriers.

At InterAccess, sculptural works trigger interactive and immersive AR experiences. Beyond the gallery’s walls, AR artworks adorn billboards, fences, and railway crossings. Enlivening Toronto’s Davenport neighbourhood with site-specific, virtually activated interventions, the artworks in Geofenced connect viewers to the forgotten histories, contemporary politics, and faraway futures of place.


LOCATIONS

InterAccess 
950 Dupont St. Unit 1, Toronto, ON M6H 1Z2
Front steps & indoors

Dupont/Dovercourt Billboard
950 Dupont St, Toronto, ON M6H 1Z2
Viewable from the parking pad outside InterAccess

Bartlett Parkette
160 Geary Ave, Toronto, ON M6H 2B9
Mounted on skating rink fence

Blood Brothers Brewery 
165 Geary Ave, Toronto, ON M6H 2B8
On the west side of the building, just north of the train tracks

 
EXHIBITION DATES

September 15 - October 9, 2021
Open Tuesdays - Saturdays, 11am-6pm
No appointment required (Please check our visitor guidelines prior to your visit. Our visitor policy remains responsive to the active COVID-19 situation and may change from time to time.)

RELATED EVENTS

Geofenced: Curator Tour with Karie Liao
Wednesday, September 15 | 5–6 PM
Online via Instagram Live
FREE (no registration required)

Witch Institute AR Publication: After the Witch of Malleghem

This augmented-reality pop-up print remediates The Witch of Malleghem, a 1559 image by Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicting a witch and her assistants removing “stones of madness” from villagers’ heads. Through dramatic re-enactments and re-animations of the figures in this work, we reflect on the visual rhetoric used to de-legitimize healing practices outside of the dominant patriarchal religious/medical establishment in Europe during the period.

The image of the witch as a fraud leads us to the situation in which we find ourselves: those marginalized by the white-supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy continue to be excluded and doubted when it comes to specialized knowledge of healing. We take inspiration from Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English’s 1975 pamphlet, “Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers”, which describes a history in which lay healers in Europe, predominantly women, were barred from their practice, though their methods were likely more scientific, safe, and effective than those of the exclusively male healers sanctioned by the church. We insert our own imaginary sub-plots into The Witch of Malleghem, speculating on the alternative pathways through which healing traditions persisted in the face of this suppression. We lean into the surrealism, grotesqueries, and absurdities of the original image and reclaim it with a sense of humour. Laughter, after all, is also a form of medicine.

Viewing Instructions

To see this piece, download the “Malleghem” app from the App Store and obtain the 18"x24" printed poster at one of the pickup locations. Just go in and ask for one! The prints are free, but there are limited quantities. We'll update below when they run out.

New York: Hesse Flatow (after Sept 9)

Toronto: Mercer Union (after Sept 7)

Montreal: ELLEPHANT

Ottawa: Knot Project Space (by appointment by emailing access@digitalartsresourcecentre.ca)

Kingston, Ontario: Modern Fuel

Open the app on your mobile device and allow your camera to be used. When you aim your mobile device at the section of the print shown below, you will see animated content.

Malleghem AR Target

Malleghem AR Target

If you can’t get the print, you can download the image and aim your camera your screen, and see the content.

If you aren't located in one of the pickup locations listed above, contact us and we'll ship you a print. If your gallery/art space/venue would like to be a pickup location, get in touch with emily.pelstring@queensu.ca

Privacy Policy for Malleghem AR app

ARTISTS:

JENN E NORTON

EMILY PELSTRING

EDIE SOLEIL

Swimming Upstream, Skeleton Park Arts Festival

https://belleparkproject.com/projects/swimmingupstream

Swimming Upstream

An augmented reality installation for Next Door, Skeleton Park Arts Festival, June-August 2021

Jenn E Norton, Matt Rogalsky, Laura Murray, Dorit Naaman 

It may be hard to imagine it now, but in the past, fish were abundant in the Ka’tarohkwi river. In the 1750s, Pierre Pouchot reported that in the spring and early summer the creeks and rivers running into Lake Ontario teemed with spawning fish; “the quantities that go up on some days,” he wrote, “is inconceivable.” The Mississauga people (Mishi-zaagig – people of the large river mouths) depended on their fish relations for a large part of their livelihood. The construction of mills and dams and the destruction of wetlands by settlers, not to mention overfishing and pollution, have drastically reduced the number of fish. They are still here, though. The herons and ospreys know that, and some of you do too! We hope this audio and video piece will immerse you in the fish world of this river.

For more reflection on the fish among us, see our first blog post, by Laura Murray.

Viewing Instructions

To see this piece, download the “Swimming Upstream AR” app from the App Store or Google Play. Go down to Douglas Fluhrer Park, and head for the shore at the south end, just north of Metalcraft Marine. Look around until you see the sign of the fish. Open the app on your mobile device and allow your camera to be used. When you aim your mobile device at the sign, you will see animated content.

This app features animated photogrammetry of fish that once populated this area, including some textures of specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. The artists world like to thank DigitalLife3D for their generosity in making their models available for creative and non-profit use (Pumpkinseed Fish, American Eel, and Largemouth Bass).

About the Artists

Jenn E Norton is an interdisciplinary artist who often uses animation as a starting point in her studio practice. Norton's recent works are interactive as a means to explore physical and virtual forms of communication, as seen in her kinetic sculpture, augmented reality apps, and particularly in her multimedia installations. Her videos and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally and have won multiple awards. Norton is an adjunct lecturer and Post-Production Technician in Film and Media Studies at Queen's University.

For bios of Matt Rogalsky, Laura Murray, and Dorit Naaman, see here.

Related Links

Next Door 2021: A Skeleton Park Neighbourhood Art Project

Privacy Policy for Swimming Upstream App

Guelph Dance Festival, The Returned

Portal Dance has invited Jenn E Norton to create a video of choreographer Janet Johnson’s new piece The Returned.

Available for view until June 30th at https://guelphdance.ca/performance/portal-dance-projects/

The Returned is a new contemporary dance film that seeks to understand the time and place in which we currently live, as well as the time that came before. Portal Dance dancers uncover these “fossil memories” by exploring shades of memory, forms of recovery, cellular history, individual body maps and what haunts us as humans. The two rivers of Guelph foster, motivate and inform some of these meanderings. Recognizing the potency of the area where they intersect as a historically rich site for Indigenous and Settler folk alike, these rivers root the dance work to Guelph and also manifest the concepts of time passing, form changing and water potentially returning after circling the earth. Stellar, ‘locally-sourced’ dance artists Drew Berry, Lily Burpee, Julia Garlisi, Ben Harvey, Rowen Pilon-McBride, Megan Robinson and Kelly Steadman provide this abstract work with a depth of sensuous understanding, unveiling the timeless heart of humanity. Flanked by outstanding supporting artists: composers Jeff Bird & Ben Grossman, filmmaker Jenn Norton, sound artist Dawn Matheson, and costume designer Dakota Burpee. The Returned is a film about where we are as a collective species, where we might have been and where we could be going. It is about fiercely looking life in the eye while connecting to the footsteps of those that existed before.

“…sometime it’s enough To lie down here on earth Beside our long ancestral bones: To walk across the cobble fields Of our discarded skulls, Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis, Thinking: whatever left these husks Flew off on bright wings.” (Rebecca Elson)

Portal Dance, a contemporary dance company created in 2011, is comprised of professional dance artists from the greater Guelph area who bring a rich variety of experiences and integrity to the company. Portal Dance is interested in cultivating and stimulating community and collective expression through shared artistic experiences. Portal Dance’s work is invested in communication, collaboration and research into our journey as individuals in this time and place but as well as how we operate as a collective. Portal Dance is passionate about the development and enhancement of the arts scene in the Guelph area and nurturing both its artists as well as its community.

Performers

Drew Berry, Lily Burpee, Jason Doell, Julia Garlisi, Ben Harvey, Rowen Pilon-McBride, Megan Robinson, Kelly Steadman & Xuan Ye

Thank you to Jan Sherman, Lynette Segal, Laurence Lemieux and Citadel & Compagnie, Lynn Broughton, Andrew McCormac, Nicholas Rocha, Sara Starling, Rose & Doug Burpee, Edie McGovern, Nick Depencier, Gabe Thurow Smith & Emmett Bradshaw Dance, the Guelph Youth Dance Training Program, the Guelph Arts Council, the Royal City Mission Church and the SEED. The Returned was made possible in part by the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council & the City of Guelph Musagetes Foundation.

Photo by Lynn Broughton

ELLEPHANT Exhibition - Montréal

Sistership TV at Hesse Flatow, 2021

A screening of The Weeping Brook in Sistership TV

The Symbolists
Les Fleurs du mal
Dates: February 18 - March 20

THE SYMBOLISTS: LES FLEURS DU MAL, A GROUP SHOW FEATURING ALICIA ADAMEROVICH, JOSEPH SAMUEL BUCKLEY, MAHO DONOWAKI, HILARY DOYLE, CLARK FILIO, CAROLINE GARCIA, ELIOT GREENWALD, EXENE KARROS, NAT MEADE, TAMMY NGUYEN, LOUIS OSMOSIS, GEORGICA PETTUS, JOHANNA ROBINSON, SISTERSHIP TV (JESSICA MENSCH, EMILY PELSTRING, KATHERINE KLINE), ALICIA SMITH, AND ASTRID TERRAZAS.

In the interest of broadening accessibility at a moment when public gatherings may be dangerous to members of our public, HESSE FLATOW will present the exhibition and video program both in the gallery and in a curated viewing room online. Further, responding to the limitations to conversing around artwork that we love, we hope that the rigorous series of virtual conversations and events will reopen that space for dialogue and create opportunities for exchange between the artists and their audiences.

SCHEDULE:

Saturday, February 27 at 3 PM: Conversation with artists Georgica Pettus, Louis Osmosis, and Johanna Robinson

Thursday, March 4 at 6 PM: Conversation with artists Joseph Buckley, Clark Filio, Nat Meade, and Astrid Terrazas Saturday, March 6 at 3 PM: Poetry Reading by Edwin Torres Sunday,

March 14 at 3 PM: Conversation with artists Eliot Greenwald, Tammy Nguyen, and Sistership TV (Katherine Kline, Emily Pelstring, Jessica Mensch) Thursday,

March 18 at 6 PM: Conversation with artists Maho Donowaki, Hilary Doyle, Alicia Smith

The Witch Institute - Collaboration and Animation

“In the last few years, the witch has re-emerged as a powerful political symbol. Across cinemas and television, in books and podcasts, and via hashtag activism, the proliferation of the witch in media signals a critique of the existing world order and its reliance on the subjugation of marginalized peoples. In order to better understand the meaning and impact of current media representations of the witch, we will hold an expanded conversation among activists, artists, filmmakers, curators, historians, scholars, witches, feminists, healers, and more.

The Witch Institute is a collaborative meeting space for those who are interested in responding to contemporary imaginings of the witch in popular and visual culture. It is a place to share diverse understandings of witches and witchcraft, and to complicate, reframe, and remediate media representations that often continue to perpetuate colonial, misogynistic, and Eurocentric stereotypes of the archetypal figure.

The Witch Institute will present Spellbound, a short film program and Collective Spell Package curated by Geneviève Wallen, a lecture by Dr. Silvia Federici, and other soon-to-be-announced talks, discussions, film screenings, and workshops occurring August 16 to 22, 2021. All events will be free, open to the public, and accessible online.” www.witchinstitute.com

Registration opens January 25, 2021.

Organizers: Tamara de Szegheo Lang, Emily Pelstring, and Dan Vena
Curator: Geneviève Wallen
Collaborators: Allison Morehead, Sharday Mosourinjohn, Ali Na, and Jenn E Norton
Graduate Student Researchers: Brandon Hocura, Erik Ewing-Meyer, and Jhordan Layne

Animation for website by Jenn E Norton.

Distillery District Magazine, December 2020 Vol. 55
Text by Sophia De Francesca

Art Toronto 2020 - Eros’ Kiss

TORONTO, Oct. 6, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- On Oct. 28 - Nov. 8, 2020, for the first time in its 21 years, the fair will showcase virtual and in-person installations and programming across the country. Traditionally occupying a single location, Art Toronto will take place online and nationwide in art galleries across Canada. This unique model is the first of its kind in North America for international art fairs that have quickly adapted to online exhibitions. Another North American first, the fair commissions an Augmented Reality artwork named Eros' Kiss, which will be available for download to the public through Instagram and Facebook, launching on Oct. 15, 2020. Represented by ELLEPHANT (Montréal), and VTape (Toronto) Canadian artist Jenn E Norton was commissioned to create the social filter using time-based media that is immersive and experiential, reframing familiar objects, landscapes, and activities as dreamlike occurrences. Norton's work explores the blurring boundaries of virtual and physical realms, akin to the format the fair is taking this year.

Also on view is an exhibition at ELLEPHANT featuring for Art Toronto 2020, Samuel Arsenault-Brassard, Adam Basanta, Nathalie Bujold, Chloë Cheuk, Robbin Deyo, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Emmanuelle Léonard, JJ Levine, Jenn E Norton, Lorna Mills, Elisabeth Picard, Sabrina Ratté, George E. Russell, and Skawennati from October 28 to November 8, 2020. Book your tickets to the Art Toronto Virtual Preview

International Symposium on Electronic Art 2020

Featured artists: Allison Humphrey [CA], Dan Tapper [UK], David Han and Aidan WaIte [CA], Doug Van Nort [US/CA], Evan Light [CA], Freya Olafson [CA], Graham Wakefield and Haru Ji [UK/CA; KR/CA], Jenn E Norton [CA], Joel Ong [CA/SG], John Greyson [CA], Mark-David Hosale and Jim Madsen [CA], Michael Trommer [CA], Michaela Pnacekova [CA/DE/SK], Nicole Clouston [CA], Taien Ng-Chan [CA].

The exhibition unfolds at the nexus of art, science and technology through the works of artists affiliated with Sensorium, who collectively explore the entangled ecologies of the post-natural world. Through multi-sensory experiences that include installations, virtual and mixed reality, 360° videos, performances, expanded media and sculptural forms, these artists explore the different ways that contemporary sensorial relations―human/non-human, natural/ artificial―stage complex articulations and expansions of the real.

In this show, computer-generated organisms interact with viewing bodies. Site-specific installations, kinetic sculptures, virtual environments, and video games explore our interactions and collaborations with multi-species ecologies. The works in “Life, A Sensorium” range from shadow plays and optical illusions to VR wanderings through cosmic orchestral stagings. The blended physical and virtual nature of these aesthetic interactions and environments provide access into worlds not ordinarily perceptible.

In this virtual iteration of the exhibition, we present excerpts of documentation and interviews with the artists as “capsules” of their artistic practice. For these videos, artists were asked: “What does sentience mean to you with respect to your work?” and “Why sentience now?” as prompts to explore the situation of their work within the ISEA 2020 theme.

To register for the conference please visit the ISEA 2020 website here.

Slipstream at Dunlop Gallery:
Final Venue of Nationwide Tour

Curated by Linda Jansma and Crystal Mowry - Exhibition runs from August 7 - October 16, 2020.

Organized by The Robert McLaughlin Gallery

Dunlop Coordinator, Wendy Peart, Curator of Education and Community Outreach

Jenn E Norton re-examines the fin de siècle (end of the century) with Slipstream, an installation that combines an interest in Art Nouveau architecture and the innovative techniques of early 20th Century dancer Loie Fuller, resurrected by dancer Katie Ewald. Slipstream collapses time and space using old and new technologies, allowing viewers to become conscious of how their bodies exist in relation to the work. Inspired by a 2014 residency in Paris, Norton’s interest lies in making the invisible visible as one imagines the space between the monitors as the dancer moves between them. As she notes: “For me, Fuller’s movement through the monitors reflects her far-reaching influence, as though her gestures are in the air, yet she is a fleeting form, an apparition.”

Jenn E Norton was born in Oshawa and now resides in Guelph, Ontario. She is an interdisciplinary artist working closely with the technologies she employs within her studio practice, marrying formal and intuitive processes. She is currently pursuing a PhD at York University.

Katie Ewald, a dancer based in Guelph, Ontario, received her BFA from Concordia University and studied at P.A.R.T.S., Brussels.

Loie Fuller (1862-1928), who performed at the Folies Bergère in Paris, is credited as the founder of modern dance.

International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2020

Falling Still will be featured in VTape’s programme for the 2020 Online edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, May 13-18, 2020, with video works by Daniel Cockburn, Thirza Cuthand, soJin Chun, Zeesy Powers, and Hiba Ali.

SUPRALIMINAL SPACE - TUSSLE PROJECTS, MAY 1, 2020

TUSSLE PROJECTS is excited to present “Supraliminal Space”, an online exhibition exploring and documenting a realm that lies beyond the physical realm: the Metetherial World. Conceptualized by Frederic W. H. Myers in his collection of psychical essays entitled ​Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (​ 1903), the Metetherial World is posited as a wealth of images lying beyond the tangible environment we inhabit. Described as dream-like and as a holding space for apparitions which may not occupy our own system of physics, this world unfolds the malleable constructs of memory which adapt our identities and imaginations.

​

This adaptation is an important metamorphic process. New paths are created to dissect and reconfigure thought processes through the recording and reporting of new or rewritten myths. These myths are shared; they communicate a collective knowledge and experience.

​

The artists included in this exhibition use a diverse array of mediums to present supraliminal balancing points which may seem uncanny, magical, miraculous, superstitious, or even unreal at first, but like ancient stories, they are consumed to help foster a sense of the subliminal self. During this time of reflection and isolation imposed by the current COVID-19 pandemic, the varying perspectives collected in this exhibition remind of the necessity of diverging adaptations, and the prescience created by re-evaluation.

​curated by Laura Horne

Artists:

Janieta Eyre  https://www.janietaeyre.com/

Sherri Hay http://www.sherrihay.com/ 

Amanda Konishi   http://www.akonishi.com/

Christy Langer https://vimeo.com/51457047

Olivia Lori   http://www.olivialori.com/

Jenn E Norton https://www.jennenorton.com/

For additional images and pricing please email Laura Horne  tussleprojects@gmail.com

(Re)configuring Worlds with AR, Online Workshop, InterAccess

Augmented Reality has the interventive potential to reframe and reconfigure familiar objects, spaces, and structures, creating a mediated dynamic between the device and the observed. 

In two sessions participants will learn how to create augmented reality apps that use a fiducial marker to anchor 3D animated models, as well as explore different types of free technologies that allow object-based, markerless and site-specific augmented reality.  Participants will need to download and install Unity with the Vuforia Engine in order to follow along in a two-part workshop. In the second session, we will build to our mobile devices, and this will require Xcode. All downloads for this course are free but do take a couple of hours to download and significant space on your computer, so please do this well in advance of the workshop. Make sure to have a webcam ready to test your apps!

Dates: 

Part 1: Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Part 2: Thursday, April 30, 2020

Time: 5pm-7pm

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/reconfiguring-worlds-with-ar-online-workshop-tickets-101551200374

This workshop is PWYC ($20 suggested donation). Please note that the fee can be waived if it is a financial barrier to participation.

After registering you will receive an email with a Zoom event link. Contact education@interaccess.org for any questions.

Essential Materials:

• A laptop with a webcam

• Download the free version of Unity: https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download

• Download the free version of Vuforia: https://developer.vuforia.com/downloads/sdk

• Zoom account (register for the free account here: https://zoom.us/)

About the Instructor: 

Jenn E Norton is an artist using time-based media to create immersive, experiential installations that reframe familiar objects, landscapes, and activities as fantastical, dreamlike occurrences.  Using stereoscopic, interactive video, animation, augmented reality, sound, and kinetic sculpture, Norton’s work explores the blurring boundaries of virtual and physical realms. Often using video as a starting point within her process, Norton’s imaginative video compositions of disjunctive imagery are bound together in post-production, using a combination of pre-cinema and contemporary display technologies. Recent national and international exhibitions include Lorna Mills' 'Ways of Something' in DREAMLANDS: IMMERSIVE CINEMA AND ART, 1905–2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in/future, at Ontario Place, and Slipstream, a touring solo exhibition of new work premiering at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Arts at York University. https://www.jennenorton.com/

Questions? If you have any questions about the workshop or special requirements, please contact us at education@interaccess.org. 

Cancellation and Rescheduling Policy: We are unable to accommodate attendee cancellations or refunds less than 1 week prior to a workshop or event. InterAccess reserves the right to cancel or reschedule this workshop if necessary.

Interview at HYBRID Art Fair, Madrid 2020

Slipstream, Kelowna Art Gallery

Update: This exhibition is postponed due to temporary closure of the Kelowna Art Gallery in response to COVID-19

In an otherwise empty gallery space, this immersive video installation includes six reflective panels positioned in an inward-facing ring which create channels of infinite regress. A dancing figure in the form of a spiraling flurry of silk moves from one panel to another. As the dancer traverses the ring, it appears that the viewer and the figure share the same physical space.

Jenn E Norton is an interdisciplinary artist working closely with the technologies she employs within her studio practice, marrying formal and intuitive processes. She currently resides in Guelph, Ontario, and is pursuing a PhD at York University.

Organized and circulated by The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, in collaboration with the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Curated by Linda Jansma and Crystal Mowry.

Opening Reception
Friday, March 20, 6 to 8 pm
This event is held in conjunction with the opening for From Geisha to Diva: The Kimono of Ichimaru.

Artist Talk: Jenn E. Norton
Saturday, March 21, 1:30 to 2:30 pm
Join exhibiting artist Jenn E Norton for a talk about the creative process behind her immersive, experiential installation Slipstream, which combines an interest in Art Noveau architecture with the innovative dance techniques of Loïe Fuller, an American dancer who pioneered modern dance. This event is free and open to the public.

J E Norton wins prize for best exhibition at Hybrid Art Fair

Kooness selection committee has selected Vtape gallery to win the prize for the best exhibition project at Hybrid Art Fair.

This year Kooness had the honor to select the best three projects participating in Hybrid Art Fair. It’s been a tough choice because every single booth was breathtaking. It is so stimulating to see so many foreign participants and so many new exhibition formats of contemporary art. Read more here.

Hybrid Art Fair, Madrid

https://hybridart.es/fair/en/ 

28 February – 1 March 2020

Petit Palace Santa Bárbara Hotel  Plaza Santa Bárbara, 10 (Madrid)

VTape will be presenting augmented reality, animations, and projections by Jenn E Norton at Hybrid Art Fair. The hotel room will be furnished with black and white symbols designed by the artist that are reminiscent of art nouveau design motifs. These symbols serve as targets that allow visitors to experience augmented reality content that animate the room upon the visitors' mobile devices and iPads provided. The animated content reveals anthropomorphic botanical characters that are a hybrid of the organic forms of the art nouveau movement and existing plant life. Referencing current research in the study of communicative methods of plants and fungi through sound and enzymes, the augmented reality content explores themes of animism and the flow of information via phenomena that operate outside of human perception.

Working Papers Series: Jenn E Norton | Imaging the Past

February 4th, 2020 at 4:30 PM
Free Times Cafe
320 College St
Toronto ON M5T 1S3

The Working Papers Series:

Join us for the third iteration of the Archive/Counter-Archive Working Papers Series, which brings together PhD students from different Universities to hear about exciting doctoral research in the area of archival studies. To kick off the new year, our speaker is Jenn E Norton, a PhD candidate in the Visual Arts program at York University.  Jenn E Norton’s talk will be followed by a Q&A with the audience, moderated by our student curators, Michael Marlatt and Axelle Demus.

“Individually and collectively we live simultaneously in the bitsphere and the biosphere, sometimes more profoundly in one, sometimes more profoundly in the other […] All we can do is try to understand, as well as possible, the current and potential dynamics of these interacting spheres of influence and try to monitor and mitigate their impacts, remembering Kant’s insight that time and space are ordering devices of the human mind.” Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology, 1999.

Jenn E Norton’s video, installation and augmented reality work have often addressed time-based media from a position of hindsight, using an anachronistic toolset combining both antiquated cinematic and digital technologies. Norton likens this rear-view mirror approach to understanding contemporary media as it was described by McLuhan: “You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly, but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking in the mirror at Medusa. It has to be done indirectly. [..] You cannot tell what it is until you have seen it do things to the old one.” 

Jenn E Norton’s talk will present documentation of four recent exhibitions that utilize this methodology and that address the technologies employed as well as the visionary figures that pushed them forward. The methods in which these technologies evolve, are maintained, archived, or abandoned are contemplated in each exhibition. The uncanny juxtaposition of time and space that augmented reality and installation affords will be explored as a locative gathering of disparate historical, geographical, and contextual points, forming a temporary constellation where digital and physical realms merge, forming a furtive territory for meaning, perspective, and poetics.  

Jenn E Norton is an artist using time-based media to create immersive, experiential installations that reframe familiar objects, landscapes, and activities as fantastical, dreamlike occurrences. Using stereoscopic, interactive video, animation, augmented reality, sound, and kinetic sculpture, Norton’s installation work explores the blurring boundaries of virtual and physical realms.  Often using video as a starting point within her process, Norton’s imaginative video compositions of disjunctive imagery are bound together in post-production, using a combination of pre-cinema and contemporary display technologies. Norton's recent multimedia installations and augmented reality apps have drawn upon the works of inventive women whose scientific and cultural contributions were overlooked or misattributed to their male colleagues. Current areas of research within Norton's practice explores the use of metaphor in physics as both a conceptual genesis, communicative device, poetic practice, and demonstrative application of technological and natural phenomena. Recent national and international exhibitions include Lorna Mills' 'Ways of Something' in DREAMLANDS: IMMERSIVE CINEMA AND ART, 1905–2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in/future, at Ontario Place, and Slipstream, and a nationwide touring solo exhibition that premiered at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. She is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at York University. https://www.jennenorton.com

Archive/Counter-Archive is a SSHRC project dedicated to researching and remediating audiovisual archives created by women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBTQ2+ community, and immigrant communities. With 65+ researchers and 25+ partners, Archive/Counter-Archive looks to address how political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories. www.counterarchive.ca 

Venue Accessibility Info:

There is at least one step at the entrance of Free Times Café. Everything is located on the ground floor, but the aisles and the bathroom are narrow.

Not present on the year, Solo Exhibition at ELLEPHANT

Reception, Multichannel Animation, ELLEPHANT

Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery

Turret: Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art

2019 Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film

The Weeping Brook will premiere at the 2019 Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film. Please see details below:

2019 Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film
Thursday, July 18 to Saturday, July 20 in Hanover and Durham
Saturday, July 27 in Saugeen First Nation

“We invite you to participate in a small-town, big-impact festival of films and conversation – the 2019 Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film. The adage that artists highlight new perspectives for the rest of us is something we can all embrace. Artists spark conversations around the pressing issues of our time – Reconciliation, environmental and climate crises, political and social strife, belonging and resilience – amongst a host of other concerns. This festival highlights all of these issues, and also purely aesthetic ones. These are the questions we’re thinking about: What new perspectives can each of us offer as shared possibilities in a non-dystopian future? What actions proceed out of these conversations?

Front and centre of our programming is an incubator workshop for emerging Indigenous filmmakers called Saugeen Takes on Film, now in its second year. In partnership with Saugeen First Nation, the Film Farm and Archive/Counter Archive, the Festival is proud to premiere three poetic and critical films that reach backwards and forwards in time to consider the present. Each film comes from a deeply personal place, sensitively navigating past trauma, ancestral presence and overcoming challenges. Phil Hoffman lead the workshop on hand-processing techniques that use flowers to replace chemicals. Flowers produce an aesthetic effect and also hold the potential of carrying through teachings and healing properties of the plants into the material and subject matter of the fill. Process, materials, aesthetic, imagining, and healing meld together in storytelling through film. The Saugeen Filmmakers featured this year are: Sharon Isaac, Kelsey Diamond, Tiffany Kewageshig, Keyanna Kimewon, Natalka Pucan, and Cassidy Ritchie.

Rec Centres and Pow Wow grounds, Hockey Arenas (Accessible), Small town cafes (Partially Accessible), farms (Partially Accessible) and Rec Centres (Accessible), are all vital locations where people in rural Ontario gather and build community. We don’t have a theatre, nor do we need or want one. We strive to make each location accessible– please get in touch if you have questions or concerns!

The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film gratefully acknowledges the support of Saugeen First Nation, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Summer Jobs and all of our generous sponsors.

web: fabfilmfest.ca
twitter: @FabfilmfestCa
instagram: @fabfilmfest.ca”

FUTURE PERFECT PERFORMANCE NIGHT

Performances by Raquel Meyers, Jenn Norton, Tasman Richardson

8:00 PM - 10:00 PM EST Small World Music Centre

JULY 12
8-10PM
$15 (Sold Out)

An international line-up of performance artists working with experimental visualization tools, archaic home computing, and immersive sound welcome you to an evening of otherworldly, post-calamity, ‘future perfect’ entertainment. Works look at scale and time from macro and micro perspectives, while contemplating how the world is adapting to us.

The Perennials: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

June 21, 2019 to October 6, 2019

Curated by Crystal Mowry

Opening Reception: Thursday 27 June, 8:00 pm

Featuring the work of Robert Bourdeau, Edward Burtynsky, Jane Buyers, Annie Dunning, Melissa General, Isabelle Hayeur, Ernest Lindner, Jo Manning, Scott McFarland, Meryl McMaster, Ray Mead, Mary Catherine Newcomb, Jenn E Norton, Reinhard Reitzenstein, and Joyce Wieland

Each plant can be seen as a living register of change within its environment. Whether one’s aim is to provide sustenance for a community or to partake in the intimate pleasure of watching a flower from bud to bloom, gardeners know a thing or two about causal relationships. In their ability to thrive, gardens educate their caregivers on the virtues that can’t be rushed into realization. The attentive gardener trusts that if they are patient, all things will inevitably return.

The Perennials features works from the Permanent Collection that expand on notions of continuity and cultivation. Often relying on a visual language that incorporates botanical life and allusions to what it may mean to be “rooted”, the works in this exhibition also provide insight into an artist’s perpetual engagement with a singular subject – and the cycles of renewal that can animate an individual practice over time.

This exhibition will mark the KWAG premiere of new acquisitions by artists such as Meryl McMaster, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Robert Bourdeau and Jane Buyers, in addition to an Augmented Reality response by Jenn E Norton, commissioned specifically for this occasion.

Slipstream: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

Jenn E Norton: Slipstream

June 26, 2019 to September 22, 2019

Curated by Linda Jansma and Crystal Mowry. Organized by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

Reception and Artist Talk: Thursday 27 June, 7 pm

Artist Talk: Jenn E Norton | Thursday 27 June

Slipstream, MSVU Art Gallery

https://www.msvuart.ca/

About This Exhibition

In an otherwise empty gallery space, six reflective panels positioned in an inward-facing ring create channels of infinite regress. A dancing figure in the form of a spiraling flurry of silk moves from one panel to another. As the dancer traverses the ring, it appears that the viewer and the figure share the same physical space. Inspired during a residency in Paris, Norton looks to 19th century inventor and modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller’s choreography and costume design as a performative sculptural object.

Slipstream was curated by Linda Jansma and Crystal Mowry and organized and circulated by The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in collaboration with Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.

Please note: The exhibition space is very dark due to the nature of this installation. A Gallery Attendant is present during open hours to provide any assistance needed.

Opening Reception

Saturday 12 January at 2-4pm

Please join artist Jenn E Norton for a relaxed reception with refreshments.

American Sign Language interpretation is available for all public programs.

Please contact the Art Gallery (art.gallery@msvu.ca) for more information.

Doldrums, Beton7, Athens

άββατο 19 Μαΐου 2018, 20:00 μ.μ./ Saturday 19th of May 2018, 8 pm

Beton7 
(Πύδνας 7, Βοτανικός, Αθήνα (σταθμός μετρό Κεραμεικός) / Pydnas 7 Votanikos-Athens 11855 (metro station Kerameikos), Τ: + 30 210 7512625, www.beton7.com) 

An exhibition of the two-channel stereoscopic video installation, Doldrums, will take place at Beton7 in Athens, with an opening reception on May 18th, 2018.  Animated projections on reflective surfaces send light refractions across the gallery and onto the viewer’s body. These refractions cast caustic imagery across the gallery floor and walls, merging the two signals in the centre of the space, undulating like the watery imagery of the video. An animation of the moon above a calm ocean contrasts with its wire-frame mirror image projected on the opposing wall. This wire-frame animation is stereoscopic and is viewable with active shutter glasses provided by the gallery. The moon rips as though it was made of a cloth material, shredding into pieces, its tatters carried off by a gentle breeze, revealing a light bulb at its core.  The camera zooms into the filament of the light bulb and travels through imagined conduits into fantastical abstractions of waves and particles that imaginatively visualize the flow of information.

Doldrums contemplates the transmission of information through light, and makes reference to Marshal McLuhan’s use of the light bulb to explain his concept, the medium is the message. The light bulb’s emanations are devoid of content (‘unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or a name’) in comparison to other media such as television or the printed word, yet creates environments otherwise obscured by darkness, altering the social sphere.  Content is made legible by all that is touched by the illumination of the electric light, and in this, “The electric light is pure information.”

Slipstream, Touring Exhibition

April 14, 2018 - September 16, 2018 at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery

In an otherwise empty gallery space, six reflective panels are positioned in a ring, facing inward, catching one another in their reflection, creating channels of infinite regress. A dancing figure in the form of a spiraling flurry of silk appears within a reflective frame, disrupting the mirrored image, and moves from one panel to another, seemingly crossing the space that spans between each. As the figure traverses the circumference of the ring it appears infinitely in the cross reflection, where viewers and the dancer appear to share the same physical space.

The movement of the dancer is reminiscent of Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance of the 19th century. Fuller was a choreographer, costume designer, dancer, and an inventive stage designer published in Scientific American. Credited as a pioneer of modern dance, she used her voluminous robes as a performative sculptural object, radically positioning dance within a conceptual realm. The choreographed movement of the dancer’s robes in this installation, create metamorphic and ephemeral sculptural structures that pass through shifting tones and colours. A trail of mercurial forms emerge from the silk robes, tracing its movements, vivid, and fleeting, the structures grow as tendrils that delineate her path and diminish in her wake. Viewers are invited to explore these structures as augmented reality, using viewing devices provided by the gallery.

Performed by Katie Ewald, Silk Garment Design and Build by Juliann Wilding

Slipstream will also be exhibited at:
Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery: January 12 – March 3, 2019
Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery: June 20 – September 15, 2019
Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery: October 4 – January 5, 2020
Kelowna Art Gallery: Spring 2020
Dunlop Art Gallery: Fall 2020

Curated by Linda Jansma and Crystal Mowry

INTERACTION is an exhibition that explores how Canadian artists and designers are engaging the public through interactivity. The presented works are both material art objects as well as interactive systems that are designed to be realized by an active viewer, one that co-creates, participates, and engages versus passively consuming media. The works in this show invite critical reflection by engaging the body and the mind, with playful and open-ended encounters, sensorially rich experiences, and immersive environments. The selected works use old and new technologies in order to imagine the future, explore the context of our technological present, critically reflect on digital culture, and engage the body on a sensorial and experiential.

INTERACTION is a multi-modal art exhibition that will take place at THEMUSEUM in downtown Kitchener (ON), and will also extend into the sister cities of Kitchener and Waterloo (ON) at Communitech and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The exhibition and related programming will run through January 26 to May 13, 2018.

This exhibition is co-curated by Jane Tingley and Alain Thibault. The Curatorial Assistant is Žana Kozomora.

Participating artists include:

Adam Basanta
Andrew John Milne
Daniel Iregui
David Rokeby
François Quévillon
Jenn E Norton
Jessica Thompson
kokoromi
Matthew Biederman and Pierce Warnecke
Myriam Bleau
Projet EVA
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Steve Daniels
Ying Gao

reposted from themuseum.ca 

Near Fields - Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

Jenn E Norton & Steph Yates have been invited to transform the Main Gallery of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery for the event The Big Bang!, an evening in support of education programs at KWAG. Custom cocktails, music, interactive, live art installation and much more.

Near Fields is an amorphous environment that belies the solid materiality of the building's architecture is positioned in the heights of the gallery space above the viewers, where the illusion of pooling luminous, liquid and gaseous substances is created. Projecting video onto the surface of inflated plastic forms simultaneously call to mind the weightlessness of clouds, and the weighted pull of stalactites. The projected video content is a combination of shot footage, hand drawn and 3D animation, to create a mercurial substance that draws upon celestial, molecular, oceanic, synaptic and neural imagery. The inflated forms are modular, positioned at different vertical levels. The structures are formed with a lightweight plastic, inflated by 12V DC computer fans. The fans are controlled by an inaudible audio signal that is embedded within the video content. The fans turn on and off throughout the duration of the video, causing a gentle undulation that allows the environment to change shape throughout the event, as though breathing. The synchronization of the multi channel video signals and fans create the appearance of the substance filling a cloud like form, overflowing and spilling into another form at a lower height, as a tiered structure.

Guelph based, Jenn E Norton and Steph Yates are internationally exhibiting multi-disciplinary artists, with respective practices rooted in interactivity, sound, video installation, kinetic sculpture, and animation. Recently, Norton and Yates have joined to work collaboratively, creating performative sculptural work that encompasses kinetic and electro-mechanical components, video, sonic and organic materials. Recent works use invisible forces to transmit a signal through a circuit of transformative devices, everyday objects that emit light, heat, produce air currents, and transmit radio waves to playfully delineate paths of causality. Often using repurposed materials and digital media technologies in a bricolage process that playfully oscillates between absurdity and ingenuity, their assembled circuital structures aim to channel the everyday as a source of energy, inventiveness, and the creative potential of alternative decisions within familiar contexts.

THE BIG BANG!Friday, 7 April
8 pm-12 midnight
$20 + HST

In production interview with the CBC

The New Flesh 

The Music Gallery presents

The New Flesh 
Curated by Tasman Richardson

Saturday, January 21, 2017
Doors: 7pm | Concert: 8pm
The Music Gallery, 197 John St.
Tickets: $15 Regular | $10 Members/Students |$13 Advance at musicgallery.org

A circuit-bending, generative audio-visual presentation The New Flesh by Tasman Richardson. Here is his curatorial statement:

“Disembodied time, as online existence, has rendered us fragments in an age that connects anonymity and spectacle. The parallel evolution of media absorption has transitioned old forms of video from broadcast antennas to VHS to YouTube. As a transport medium, the signal migrates freely, format to format (body to body), yet always retaining its title as video. This fluidity of form was expressed in Abstract Expressionism’s non-representational pigment on canvas replete with a range of personas—Rothko, Pollock, Bush.

What does this soul without a body mean for performance?

In the established practices of performance, the body is the medium: its endurance, marks, memories, and the trappings of the host identity. What if the body were reduced to catalyst and operator? Media might dip into the pool of universality. Invoking the vocabulary of abstract expression, forms could separate and coalesce free of gender, race, and age. However, performance includes the risk of live action, generative signals, images generated by sounds, and vice versa.

I’ve brought together seven performances that touch on the possibilities of souls without bodies. Mobiles of circuit bent signals cast on textile, radio waves echoing the birth of the universe, decaying surveillance reflections, melting matter, confronting all senses, the colour of sound, electron radiation rhythms, composition improvised by neural networks. This evening, artists gather to surrender their bodies, project their signals, and serve you The New Flesh.”

Founder of the JAWA manifesto in 1996 and co-founder of the Videodrome festival, Tasman Richardson has turned his attention to full audience immersion like the critically acclaimed Necropolis installation (MOCCA 2012, Karsh-Masson 2015) and live, generative a/v collaborations with the ghost in the machine.

Featuring:
Sherri Hay
Nohista
Jeremy Bailey
Jenn E Norton/Steph Yates
Robin Kobrynski
Tasman Richardson
Katie Switzer/Paul Moleiro

RSVP: Facebook

Reposted from the Music Gallery

DREAMLANDS: IMMERSIVE CINEMA AND ART, 1905–2016

OCT 28, 2016–FEB 5, 2017
Whitney Museum of American Art

Ways of Something by Lorna Mills will be included within the exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905 - 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  

'Ways of Something', is a contemporary remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, “Ways of Seeing” (1972). Compiled by Lorna Mills, the project consists of one-minute videos by 113 web-based artists who commonly work with 3D rendering, gifs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of artmaking after the internet.

Based on the episodes of four-part of thirty-minute films created by art theorist John Berger and produced by Mike Dibb. In the original episode one, voice-of-God narration over iconic European paintings offer a careful dissection of traditional “fine art” media and the way society has come to understand them as art. The second episode is a contentious andsometimes maddening look at the female nude in the western tradition. The combined work is, in effect, art about art about television about the internet.Featuring formal, figural and kitsch practices to videomaking, “Ways of Something” is constituted by aesthetically diverse interpretations of Berger’s ideas on looking at art after the introduction of digital media and the internet. Ultimately, it turns the highbrow nature of the original documentary film into an exuberant and disjointed series on how artists understand art today.

Participating Artists

Episode 1
Daniel Temkin, Rollin Leonard, Sara Ludy, Rhett Jones, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Dafna Ganani, Jennifer Chan, Rea McNamara, Theodore Darst, Matthew Williamson, Hector Llanquin, Christina Entcheva, V5MT, Marisa Olson, Joe McKay, Carla Gannis, Nicholas O'Brien, Eva Papamargariti, Rosa Menkman, Kristin Lucas, Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer, Giselle Zatonyl, Paul Wong, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Sally McKay, RM Vaughan & Keith Cole & Jared Mitchell, Andrew Benson, Christian Petersen, Faith Holland, Jennifer McMackon

Episode 2
Kevin Heckart, Geraldine Juárez, Gaby Cepeda, Angela Washko, Emilie Gervais, LaTurbo Avedon, Lyla Rye, Mattie Hillock, Antonio Roberts, Georges Jacotey, Daniel Rourke, Sandra Rechico & Annie Onyi Cheung, Yoshi Sodeoka, Alma Alloro, LoVid, Andrea Crespo, Ad Minoliti, Arjun Ram Srivatsa, Carrie Gates, Isabella Streffen, Esteban Ottaso, Silke Zil Kuhar ZIL & ZOY, Hyo Myoung Kim, Jesse Darling, Tristan Stevens, Erica Lapadat-Janzen, Claudia Hart, Anthony Antonellis

Episode 3
Carine Santi-Weil, Nicolas Sassoon, Tom Sherman, Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, Rafaela Kino, Alex McLeod, Kate Wilson & Lynne Slater, Aleksandra Domanović, Systaime, Erik Zepka, Adam Ferriss, Rodell Warner and Arnaldo James, Debora Delmar Corp., Brenna Murphy, Nick Briz, Carlos Sáez, Jenn E Norton, Juliette Bonneviot, Luis Nava, Vince McKelvie, Claudia Maté, Evan Roth, Shana Moulton, Sabrina Ratté, Jordan Tannahill, Vasily Zaitsev feat. MON3Y.us, Ann Hirsch

Episode 4

Mert Keskin a.k.a Haydiroket, A. Bill Miller, Alix Desaubiaux, Krystal South, Rachael Archibald, Will Pappenheimer, Dave Greber, Chiara Passa, John Boyle-Singfield, Gunilla Josephson, Melanie Clemmons, Curt Cloninger, Terrell Davis, Morehshin Allahyari, Amy Lockhart, John Marriott, Lilly Handley, Emily Vey Duke, Kate Armstrong, Myfanwy Ashmore, Luke Painter, Aram Bartholl, Elena Garnelo, Lorna Mills, Ellectra Radikal, Nicole Killian, Jacob Chiocci, and Rick Silva.

Excited to take part in this ten day festival of art and music at Ontario Place this September, where I will be showing a new animation based on the architecture of the iconic Cinesphere, built in 1971, presented within the building itself. The Cinesphere, designed by Eberhard Zeidler, is the world's first permanent IMAX theatre, housed in a triodectic-domed structure.  in/future is presented by Art Spin.  Art Spin activates decommissioned venues and unique public spaces to produce large scale group exhibitions along with curated bicycle-led art tours to showcase a wide range of newly commissioned art programming in unique site-specific settings. Led by Layne Hinton and Rui Pimenta, artists and independent curators, driven by a strong sense of commitment and passion for presenting contemporary artworks in alternative, everyday spaces in order to make its audience’s experiences with art more engaging and exciting.

in/future:
A transformative
art experience

A Festival of Art &
Music at Ontario Place

Sept 15 – 25
Ontario Place
West Island, Toronto

A Festival of Art & Music at Ontario Place

Presented by Art Spin in partnership with Small World Music

What you can expect:

SITE-SPECIFIC ART PROJECTS
Presented by Art Spin & Creative Partners

Wander the West Island to explore over 50 multidisciplinary art projects created and curated specially for in/future. Enter the majestic and haunting silos where you’ll encounter immersive artworks, explore the South Shore, the Temple Bell Plaza and the winding picturesque paths to find a wide array of outdoor installations. Visit the Arcade and Atom Blaster Pavilions to see group exhibitions from an impressive range of artists from various disciplines.

MUSICAL PERFORMANCES ON THE SMALL WORLD MUSIC STAGE
Presented by Exodus Travels

For its 15th edition, the Small World Music Festival is proud to be part of in/future. Showcasing the best sounds from around the world and around the corner, Small World celebrates the cultural diversity of Ontario with artists who combine tradition with a view to the future. And they bring the party to a venue with a rich musical history! Check the schedule for the amazing roster of musicians playing daily.

FILM & VIDEO IN CINESPHERE
Presented by Air France

Opened in 1971 as the first permanent IMAX theatre in the world, the iconic Cinesphere will come to life once again to showcase a daily changing schedule of 44 contemporary film & video works, and live audiovisual performances. Don’t miss a rare opportunity to see six original IMAX films from the 70s and 8 0's ­ such as the renowned North of Superior ­ most of which haven't been screened for the public in over 30 years.

PERFORMANCES

Scattered across the West Island, including the Atom Blaster performance space, The Silos, Breaker Point, and the Beach, there are a wide variety of special performances scheduled daily. Inclusive of contemporary dance, performance art, roving musicians, and live audiovisual experiences– be sure to check schedule so you don’t miss out. Keep one eye out for the Swan Boat Residency, with a changing roster of artists and performers in residence.

WORKSHOPS / TALKS / TOURS

Enjoy engaging lecture series presented by Waterfront Toronto and Onsite Gallery at OCADU, interactive and educational programming for kids & school groups presented by George Brown College Institute Without Boundaries, The Power Plant's Power Kids and Blank Canvases, as well as guided tours and artist talks.

in/fo & in/store PAVILION

Visit the in/fo Pavilion at in/future to find daily schedules and get answers to your questions, be they about Ontario Place, the artists and musicians involved, or to find our lost and found. Learn about the history of the site with our timeline and find out where Ontario Place all began. Browse the in/store and the Art Metropole pop­up to take home a little piece of the festival with a limited edition item made by local artists inspired by in/future, whether it’s a tote bag, sculpture or print – there is something for everyone.

FOOD & DRINK

in/future will host a diverse selection of local food vendors with delicious fare. With changing options every day there will be something for everyone! We’re excited to share that the entire 14 acres of the West Island will be licensed for drink service, enjoy your drink as you explore the park and take in all of the sights and sounds.

Mondes bricolés

Date/Time
Date - Thursday, September 15, 2016
7:00 pm-9:00 pm

The Art Gallery of Guelph (AGG) is pleased to announce the presentation of three exhibitions: Mondes bricolés(August 23 – October 30, 2016); Blood, Sweat and Tears(September 15 – December 18, 2016); and Greg Denton:Hours (September 15 – December 18, 2016).

The opening reception for Mondes bricolés, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Hours will take place on Thursday, September 15 at 7 pm.

Mondes bricolés features the work of Donatella Bernardi(Zurich, SE), Heather Benning (Nipawin, SK), Philippe Blanchard (Toronto), Julien Boily (Chicoutimi, QC), Léopold L. Foulem (Montreal, QC/Caraquet, NB), Julie Hall and Jacob Irish (Halifax, NS), Jenn E Norton(Guelph),Artemis Potamianou (Athens, GR), Jeffrey Poirier(Quebec City), and Yannick Pouliot (Saint-Casimir-de-Portneuf, QC).

Mondes bricolés is co-curated by Julie René de Cotret and Mathieu Valade and presented by AGG in collaboration withCentre Bang (Chicoutimi), Ed Video Media Arts Centre(Guelph), and Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax) and is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, published by AGG.

The Art Foundation/Metamatic : TAF

The Art Foundation (aka Metamatic:TAF)
Normanou 5, 10555 – Athens, Greece
June 2-25, 2016
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 2 at 8:30pm

Tomorrow is another day, Tomorrow is not another today features work by Greek and Canadian artists that suggests ways to think of the past, present, and future. The Art Foundation’s historic rooms are transformed by the artists using sculpture, printmaking, textiles, site-specific installations, and immersive audio/video environments.

The curators Vivi Perysinaki (Greece) and Scott McGovern (Canada) have invited artists from their respective countries to participate, creating a cross-cultural dialogue, presented for the international audience visiting The Art Foundation in Monastiraki. 

Films@Art-Athina 2016

Sunday 29/05, 16:00

Ways of Something, Episode 3 & 4

Art Video Mega-Mixtape, 2014/2015, 27 + 28 min
Curator and Producer: Lorna Mills, Canada

The film project is a remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary “Ways of Seeing” (1972). It consists of one-minute videos created by web-based artists and presented in four episodes. A description of artmaking after the growth of the internet. “‘Ways of Something’ is constituted by aesthetically diverse interpretations of Berger’s ideas, creating a new perspective on the act of looking.”

Guests: Jenn E Norton, Artist, Scott McGovern, Program Director ‘ed video’, and Edie McGovern

Philip Hoffman, filmmaker and 2016 Canada Council laureate - a film by Jenn E Norton

I was honoured to make a video portrait of experimental filmmaker Philip Hoffman and winner of the 2016 Governor General's Awards to Visual and Media Arts This portrait was facilitated by the Canada Council for the Arts, Independent Media Arts Alliance, and sponsored by Ed Video Media Arts Centre.

The full list of the 2016 Governor General Awards to Visual and Media Arts are Edward Burtynsky, Marnie Fleming, Philip Hoffman, Jane Kidd, Wanda Koop, Suzy Lake, Mark Lewis, and William (Bill) Vazan.

Philip Hoffmanfilmmaker

Philip Hoffman is one of the most influential experimental film artists working in Canada today. He has created a remarkable and sustained body of media art over nearly four decades in that has had an immense impact on several generations of Canadian experimental filmmakers and digital moving image artists.

His enduring impact is seen in the development of personal filmmaking, techniques of hand-processing and artisanal production, and the method of process cinema. His work combines sensitively observational documentary aesthetics, attentive to small gestures and humanist themes, with innovative forms of cinematic experimentation. Hoffman’s inquiry is tied to a deep sense of social responsibility and a profound commitment to pedagogy and to community.

– Michael Zryd, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema & Media Arts, York University

Arms Reach at the Art Gallery of Burlington

January 6 - January 31, 2016

Location: RBC Community Gallery
Artist: Jenn E Norton

The Exhibition:
Arms Reach is a video installation by Jenn E Norton that depicts a haptic labyrinth. Pain, tactility, and thermoception are guides in this maze that can only be solved through touch. Score by musician Bry Webb.

The Gardiner Museum

Reception, a new animation by Jenn E Norton, will be at the Gardiner Museum.

The Gardiner Museum, November 23 – December 15, 2013

Over the last 26 years, The Gardiner Museum has celebrated the festive season by displaying Christmas trees decorated by renowned designers, sponsored by companies and individuals supportive of the arts.

This year, 12 Trees looks to the future. Encompassing diverse mediums and highlighting creativity’s audacious nature, Canada’s leading designers and artists re-imagine Christmas trees. The result is showcase of vibrant creativity – with creations that are elegant, wild, highly personal, or just outrageously beautiful – inventing trees with a fresh vitality.

Installations will be exhibited at the Museum during the holiday period and celebrated at the exhibition’s signature gala party on December 1st, 2015. Funds raised enable the Gardiner to continue engaging the community with the creativity of clay, and the beauty ceramics bring into our lives in so many ways.

The designer and artists for 12 Trees 2015 are Michael Adamson, Bruno Billio, Justin Broadbent, Sophie DeFrancesca, Trevor Godinho, Hermès, Hunter Lewis Lake, Jenn E Norton, The Stratford Festival, Susanne Shaw for Holt Renfrew, The Ukrainian Museum of Canada, and Jane Waterous.

Globe and Mail
A Day in the Life of a Torontonian 

The Whole Shebang 2015: Taken By Night

The Whole Shebang 2015: Taken By Night

We invite audiences to experience the enchanted, mysterious hours of the night through light, sound, dance, theatre, media arts, shadow puppetry, storytelling and music.Slip into night time, slow down and come on a journey. Co-created by Andrea Nann and Helen Yung and featuring artists Sarah Chase, Brendan Wyatt, Kate Holden, Marie-Josée Chartier, Tom Kuo, Elysha Poirier, Clea Minaker, Lauren Gilles, Helen Yung, Andrea Nann, Michael Ondaatje, Jenn E. Norton, Peter Mettler, Oh Susanna, Andy Maize, Joshua Van Tassel, Jaime Waese, John Gzowski, Anne Bourne, Veronica Tennant

November 26-28, 2015
7:30pm Doors open for gallery experiences
8:30pm Performance

Saturday Matinee November 28th
1:30pm Doors open for gallery experiences
2:30pm Performance

Location
918 Bathurst St, Toronto, ON M5R 3G5

Buy tickets here

Nuit Blanche:
Out of Site: Contemporary Art Works on Queen Street West

Kaleiderratic, Julie René de Cotret and Jenn E Norton, 2015

Julie René de Cotret and Jenn E Norton collaborated on a work for Nuit Blanche in Toronto Ontario on October 3rd, 2015. Located at Queen West and Denison Avenue, the collaborative work offered a vantage of infinite regress through reflections made of mirrors and video that was altered by a sound. Playfully drawing upon representations of the sublime in romanticism and its reconstruction in public spaces such as amusement parks, the artists invite viewers to peer into an artificial geode, manipulating their image within an kaleidoscopic reflection and video feedback loop using their voice.

Out of Site: Contemporary Art Works on Queen Street West is curated by Earl Miller featuring works by Matt Crookshank, Julie René de Cotret & Jenn E Norton, Catherine Heard (featuring multiples by Moira Clark, Andy Fabo, Jennifer Linton, David Poolman & Matthew Williamson, and Penelope Stewart), Risa Horowitz, Paula John, and Marc Losier.

The River Run Centre Artist in Residency Program

This Saturday at the River Run Centre in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, Dreamwalker Dance Company presents The Whole Shebang.  September 26, 2015 marks the culmination of The Whole Shebang Guelph, River Run’s first artist in residence program. Beginning at 3 p.m., the event showcases the collaborative results of the participating artists who have been working together over a 3-year period. More information about the event and participating arts is available here, or visit The Whole Shebang Guelph page on River Run’s website for event details.



Led by celebrated Toronto-based dance artist Andrea Nann, artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company, Guelph artists Ishra Blanco, Jenn E Norton, Megan O-Donnell, Claire Tacon, Amadeo Ventura and Bry Webb worked together over three years to develop a collaborative and multi-disciplinary creation practice. Andrea specializes in facilitating movement-based creative strategies to cultivate a group-based artistic practice. The Guelph Shebang model, developed by Nann, focuses on a collaborative approach to creative practice.

Peripheral Fixation: Technologies of Perception

I will be showing new work at Trinity Square Video in a group exhibition entitled Peripheral Fixation. My new work, Weighting Light, is a stereoscopic projection of a figure that seemingly carries the weight of its own existence above its shoulders. Inspired in part by the art nouveau designer François-Rupert Carabin’s motif of women providing structural support in decorative furnishings, Weighting Light creates the illusion of the video's content supporting the actual weight of the emitting technology. A CGI animation of a woman, standing as a mercurial caryatid, holds a shelf above her head, which supports the very source of her likeness, the projector itself. The projection aims outwards, towards a mirror that reflects the image back to the wall, producing the figure’s image. 

Peripheral Fixation

New work from the 2015 Themed Commission: Technologies of Perception

August 19 – September 26, 2015

Opening Reception: Wednesday, August 19, 7–9 PM

Artists:

John Boyle Singfield (Montreal), Serena Lee (Toronto), Jenn E Norton (Guelph), Zeesy Powers (Toronto), Soft Turns (Sarah Jane Gorlitz and Wojciech Olejnik (Toronto)), Jessica Vallentin (Toronto), Daniel Waldman (Maple, ON), Tobias Williams (Toronto)

Trinity Square Video is excited to announce Peripheral Fixation, an exhibition of work from its most ambitious themed commission yet. This year, Trinity Square Video has commissioned eight artists to produce new work that investigates the entanglement of perception, materiality, and technology. The selected projects engage with the mechanics and philosophy of perception using both emerging and historical technologies. The commissioned works incorporate virtual reality, 3d scanning, optical illusion, offset printing techniques, ofactory installation, audio, colour theory, interactive video, and marketing tactics to present diverse approaches to the material conditions of perception and its interelation with technology

Scary Movies!!!!!!

Chimera (2008) will be screened at the Hanover Drive In at the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film in a program curated by Lorri Millan and Shawna Dempsey, entitled Scary Movies!!!!!! 

Thursday, July 23rd, 9pm

"[...]Scary Movies realizes our complex relationship with our fears through the work of 
contemporary media artists, providing scream therapy that is experimental, timely and 
thoughtful. It also reflects a feminist application of the “scare genre”, to reveal on-going 
cultural anxieties with respect to female sexuality, power and the body. Writ large on the 
drive-in movie screen, these collective horrors with respect to normativity and gender are 
revealed as what they are: camp, laughable.

This program of single channel videos plays with the tropes of mainstream suspense, 
gore, ghost and monster features, and twists them in conceptual ways to terrify and 
illuminate. They explore the tension between the physical and the technological, the 
natural and the supernatural, the beautiful and the strange. An uneasy humour is often 
present, as is the grotesque. They remind us of the joy in being scared silly, revelling in 
the mysterious while examining the social construction of our fears."

-Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan

Artists featured in this program, which runs approximately 76 minutes, are Cheryl Rondeau, Freya Borg Olafson, Helen Haig-Brown, Leslie Peters and Dara Gellman, Deirdre Logue, Marina Roy, Aleesa Cohene, Jenn E Norton, Diane Nerwen, and Jillian MacDonald.  

The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film is organized by Corinna Ghaznavi.  

Mondes Bricolés, Centre Bang

Arms Reach (2015) will be featured at Centre Bang in the exhibition Mondes Bricolés, co-curated by Julie René de Cotretand Mathieu Valade from May 13th to July 24th, 2015.  

Opening Reception is May 13th, at 5pm, at Espace Séquence, 132 rue Racine Est, Chicoutimi.

Arms Reach is a video installation by Jenn E Norton that depicts a haptic labyrinth, specifically created for a custom configuration displayed on Christie Digital MicroTiles. Pain, tactility, and thermoception are guides in this maze that can only be solved through touch. Sound by Bry Webb.

Ways of Something

Ways of Something, Episode 3: Jenn E Norton: Minute 17, 2014

I was invited to be a part of Ways of Something, Episode 3, which will be screened at The Photographers Gallery, London UK (episodes 1, 2 and premiere of episode 3), Western Front, Vancouver (episodes 1, 2 and 3) and Vivid Projects, Birmingham, UK (episodes 1, 2 and 3).

"Commissioned by The One Minutes at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the project consists of one-minute videos by 58 web-based artists. The resultant collage of 3D renderings, animated GIFs, film remixes and webcam performances encapsulate the cacophonous conditions of art making since the advent of digital media and the Internet. Ways of Something is constituted by aesthetically diverse interpretations of Berger’s ideas, creating a new perspective on the act of looking."

Kazoo! Fest 2015

Thrilled to be a part of Kazoo! Fest once again, which is also featuring artists Shary Boyle, Amy Lockhart and Justin Gordon.   47 musical performances have been announced, including Deerhoof, Homeshake, Last Ex, Phèdre, Absolutely Free, Jeffrey Lewis & The Jrams, Scott Merritt, Black Spirituals, Lido Pimienta, Darlene Shrugg, Doomsquad, Fist City, Spencer Burton, Tyvek, New Fries, The Famines, with more to be announced in the coming weeks.  See the line up here.

Arms Reach by Jenn E Norton

Dredging a Wake Preview

Re-Imaged: Imaginable Spaces

The Secret Ingredient • January 22, 2014

I joined The Secret Ingredient this morning to chat with Alissa Firth-Eagland and Danica Evering about  my 3D renderings of Guelphites' suggestions about what would make St. George's Square better. We also be spoke about culture's role as a critical aspect of being a person. 

If you won't be able to get to a radio or computer in time, check out the archive online at The Secret Ingredient, January 22nd, 2014.

The Secret Ingredient

This morning I spoke with Alissa Firth-Eagland and Danica Evering at cfru.93.3fm for The Secret Ingredient.   We spoke about my upcoming project, Site Lines, previous installations and sculptures, musical works and collaborations.  If you would like to hear it, today's show can be found in the cfru.93.9fm archives, September 18th, 2013, 9am.

La cité Internationale des Arts in Paris

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced the 2014 winners of the International Residencies program located in Paris, London, New York, Berlin, Sydney and Santa Fe.   I am thrilled to be one of the fourteen artist selected and will be at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in September - December 2014.  For the full list of artists and residencies please see this Canadian Art article, by Leah Sandals.

Site Lines

Musagetes will present new site specific work by myself and Paul Chartrand this fall in St George's Square, the downtown centre of Guelph, Ontario.  

Here is a sneak peak of what to watch out for in the square:

"For the first phase of Jenn E Norton’s project, Site Lines, she will gather a wide range of ideas for physical changes to St. George’s Square using a traditional Suggestion Box. Rather than practical improvements, however, patrons of the Square are asked to dream big and propose their pie-in-the-sky concepts for the future use of this shared public environment. (Think the Square could use a giant 24-karat gold pyramid? Write up a description and put it in the Suggestion Box!)

For the second phase of this project, Norton will select 6 ideas and render them into 3D designs using Cinema 4D technology. These will be printed on posters and displayed in the Square so that the wildest imaginings of Guelphites can be shared with everyone who passes through. By drawing deeply upon residents’ imaginations this project expresses feedback and desires felt in our community about our built spaces. Your outlandish musings, ingenious considerations, architectural alterations and amenities are welcome! Keep an eye out for the Suggestion Box."

-Musagetes

For more information visit the Musagetes site or read this feature in the Guelph Tribune.

K-Town at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art

Come sign your heart out at K-Town at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art this Saturday, June 8th, 2013.  I am contributing a video set to Patsy Cline's I Fall to Pieces:

"Cline’s classic of hurt and longing, lovingly transformed into a curious and surprising narrative. Guelph-based Norton plays with our expectations of the genre, first by creating a familiar story of heartbreak and then turning it on its head through a series of unusual events. Norton’s character sits in her house, lamenting a lost love, while construction vehicles demolish the street outside. Cups and plates fall off the table, duplicate and hover within the kitchen space in a surreal manner. Using video and animation compositing techniques, Norton deftly explores the reality of a heightened emotional state, ending it all with disturbing playfulness."     

-Luke Painter

"K-TOWN is a unique karaoke event of performance art and partying. The main exhibition space will be transformed into a private karaoke lounge, but fret not, guests will be surrounded by art. K-TOWN curators Meera Margaret Singh and Luke Painter have commissioned artists to create unique videos inspired by their favourite karaoke jams. Guests are invited to serenade the crowd with their favorite karaoke numbers, while simultaneously interacting with the video works being projected on the walls behind them."

VIDEO Portrait: Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts

It was an honour to be commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts to create a video portrait of Gordon Monahan, a 2013 recipient of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

From the Canada Council for the Arts website:

Of Gordon’s piano performances [John] Cage once commented “At the piano, Gordon Monahan produces sounds we haven’t heard before.” – Robert Tombs, Graphic designer (nominator)

In Gordon Monahan’s hands, everyday objects become instruments, conventional instruments create surprising new sounds, and elements in nature take on the role of the musician. Over his 34-year career, this music and sound art innovator has used his science, music and contemporary art background to create installations and performances that redefine sounds in ways we may never have never heard before – long piano wires resonated using unconventional techniques, speakers reconstructed to become instruments, and the piano redefined as a mechanical machine that can emulate synthetic sound to name a few.

Each summer, hundreds of experimental musicians, sound artists and like-minded enthusiasts arrive at his farm in Meaford, Ontario to take part in the renowned Electric Eclectics sound art festival. 

Here is the video created that offers only a brief tour of Gordon Monahan's practice.  Congratulations to Gordon and to all of the GGAVMA recipients.  

ISIS: On the Precipice

Happy to announce that Wee Requiem (2010) will be screen in an incredible inflatable venue, The Big M, that will tour to Alnwick, Berwick upon Tweed,Gateshead, Newcastle, North Tyneside and Middlesbrough. The programme will be suitable for all ages but will be specifically aimed at engaging more young people from the touring areas with exciting international artworks, innovative digital technologies and examining their relationship to the environment.  

On the Precipice was curated during an ISIS Arts research residency by critically renowned digital artist, Kelly Richardson and features works by Kelly Richardson(Canada/UK), Gordon Cheung(UK), Alexandra Crouwers (Belgium), Jenn E Norton (Canada), Jillian Mcdonald(Canada/USA),Emily Richardson (UK) and Brigitte Zieger (Germany/France).

Cassettestival

On Friday, June 8th, Cassettestival will release the second compilation of songs by musicians living in Guelph.  I have contributed a song, "The Five of Cups". 

The second edition of Guelph's cassette periodical is happening/launching on June 8th at the ANAF (right by the Farmer's Market). Come on out to pick up new tapes by Bleet, Dutch Toko, Captain Wonderful, M.Mucci, and Sax Tape. Solid gold, every one of them. In addition, a brand new cassette compilation of women currently making music in Guelph will be released at the show.

Performances by Bleet, Dutch Toko, and M.Mucci, along with some people who are releasing music on the compilation (more details on that soon).
MAP

AGO Massive Party

Les Soeurs Fox du 21e ciècle // The 21st Century Fox Sisters, an installation I created in 2010, will be featured at the AGO's Massive Party. "The 2012 theme, conceived by Toronto artist and Massive Party artistic director Bruno Billio, centres on the elements "LIGHT SOUND OBJECT PAST PRESENT FUTURE." Massive Party 2012 will feature innovative, custom-designed works of art throughout the Gallery and offer guests equally inspired food, beverages and entertainment at this see-and-be-seen highlight of Toronto's social and cultural calendars. [...]  The AGO also selected an eclectic roster of artists who will create works to dazzle guests at Massive Party 2012. The lineup includes Justin Broadbent, Cesar Forero, Renée Lear, An Te Liu, Jenn E. Norton, Jade Rude, Walter Willems and Camilla Singh."

Trinity Square Video and Pleasure Dome are pleased to present No Place, an installation by artist Jenn E Norton. Using video and photography, Norton's new body of work, is a playful reflection on real estate development and consumption through fantastical animated compositions.
 Through her depictions of fragile and unlikely structures, Norton explores the tenuous relationship we share with residence, ownership, and the idea of home.

The new and recent works featured in No Place depict onscreen worlds where intricate architectural forms and delicate organic elements coexist: plush moss on a forest floor forms a city square as luxurious condo towers appear in boreal fungi; a tightly framed image of the cracks in a rock reveals an interior of a bustling metropolis replete with cars, suspended gondolas, and stylized skyscrapers. Using motion graphics and 3D animation, Norton's digital tableaus articulate an anxiety that traverses the meeting of natural worlds and our built, electronically mechanized reality. The irony of the work corresponds to these concerns: instead of building from the 'ground up', Norton's neighbourhoods are perfectly integrated into an existing natural landscape, appearing inviting and desirable, yet obviously impossible. These miniature civilizations are propositional vignettes, not unlike the concept renderings of architectural firms; often impossible to achieve, but sought after nonetheless–a utopia.

International Film Festival Rotterdam

Wee Requiem was included in the 2012 International Rotterdam Film Festival.

"DINAMO (Distribution Network of Artists’ Moving image Organizations) is a network of independent distributors of video art and experimental film from the USA, Canada and Europe. The IFFR presents four Press & Industry programme slots in which 12 of the DINAMO distributors will show recently acquired work. These titles can also be seen in the festival video library."

SUPERMARKET

This February Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins, Stan Krzyzanowski and I will be featured artists of Ed Video Media Arts Centre at the Stockholm Independent Art Fair, SUPERMARKET. 

"SUPERMARKET has been arranged since 2007 by a small group most of whom are artists themselves. Supermarket is a development of Minimarket, which was held at Konstnärshuset in February 2006 in reaction to the new commercial art fair Market.

Initiated and organised by artists, this project has rapidly evolved from a modest group of local initiatives to a full-fledged international art exhibition that has made its mark and helped firmly establish Stockholm on the art world map.

SUPERMARKET started in small scale as MINIMARKET in 2006 in an art nouveau palace, the following year it became SUPERMARKET, with international presence in the same site, 2008 it moved to a run-down industrial space, then to a newly built first-class designer hotel (Clarion Hotel Stockholm) and 2010 to the very heart of Stockholm - Kulturhuset (House of Culture)."

Rendezvous with Madness: Artist Talk, Screening, Panel Discussion

Rendezvous with Madness has invited me to speak at this year's festival. I will give an artist talk tonight at 7pm at the Workman Theatre. This precedes a screening "Wee Requiems" at 8pm and I will also be participating in a panel discussion afterwards. Here are the details.

"Please join us for two events at Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival (651 Dufferin Street) on Sunday November 6. At 7pm there will be an Illustrated Artist Talk by Jenn E Norton, to be followed with a program of experimental video curated by Deirdre Logue and Erik Martinson titled Wee Requiems at 8pm (title list below).

7pm

Artist Talk by Jenn E Norton:

The imaginative work of Jenn E Norton is not quite a surrealist dreamscape, but an actively dreamed scape, a place built with architecture of wonder and rumination. Ordinary objects and activities become strange through the bending of their longstanding expectations, often achieved through disjunctive content realistically glued together with composite editing. This uncanniness constructed through digital intervention invites new approaches and consideration to the familiar. Her cast may be her cats, inanimate objects or multiple versions of herself in situations that derive from her immediate experience, yet the formal considerations allude to greater ontological questions.

Jenn will discuss how working intimately with the technology used in the production of her practice in a DIY capacity marries intuitive and formal approaches to her creative process. Working in near isolation, honing her technical skill as an editor, animator, compositor and sound designer via online tutorials and trial and error, Jenn creates moving images outside of a rubric of traditional cinematic roles of director and producer.

Norton will also discuss the melancholy present beneath the visual glitter. Curator and artist Ufuk Gueray recalled a quote by Francis Bacon in an essay to describe Nortonʼs work, “Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.” There is no overt violence in Nortonʼs practice, but darkness lurks beneath the glittery surface [...].

8pm

Wee Requiems

Curated by Deirdre Logue and Erik Martinson:

Wee Requiems is a program of short experimental videos in lament. Mourning for the increasingly complex worlds of animals, plants and people, these works wander in and around both the real and alien, animated, mutated, recorded and illustrated. Fables of savagery and shame, death in the everyday, dilapidated interiors and microscopic utopias sit side by each, calling out for our sympathy, asking for our forgiveness, needing our attention.

Program:

How to Care for Introverts, Leslie Supnet, 2010, 1:48

An animated instructional video on how one should deal with people whose personalities are characterized by extreme shyness and reserve.

Exercises in Faith: Bird, Julieta Maria, 2010, 1:52

“Bird is a close up of my hand holding a canary, while it moves, trying to free itself from the grip…The video reflects on fragility, beauty and violence, questioning the limits of our ethical relationship to one another and to the world.” - Julieta Maria

Wee Requiem, Jenn E Norton, 2010, 7:03

Through recontextualized imagery, video can provide its viewer with the opportunity to remember an event differently. Wee Requiem explores the ability of the mediated moving image to articulate a propositional reality, or prosthetic memory. For seven minutes we observe a “wee requiem” for the passing of a fallen nuisance—a pest—who has been recast as a beloved protagonist.

Beauty Plus Pity, Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, 2009, 14:19

The contemporary fables of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby propose that existence is abject, farcical, and messy. In their richly textured videos, Duke and Battersby employ live action footage, scavenged images, and simple animations to create episodic structures that evince a simultaneously utopian and dystopian worldview. Beauty Plus Pity is presented in seven parts, the video considers the potential for goodness amidst the troubled relations between God, humanity, animals, parents and children.

The Fire Theft, Isabelle Hayeur, 2010, 9:00

This video explores the themes of dispossession and repression. It was produced using sequences broadcast on the Web and scenes filmed in an abandoned house. It includes shots of the Olympic flame relay (Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics) and the Keith Sadler Foreclosure Resistance. The degraded video signal mirrors the difficult social conditions evoked in the work, especially in the shots of dilapidated interiors. The Fire Theft reminds us that major sports events benefit a handful of corporations, and often are used as a pretext for real estate speculation and gentrification.

Thalé, Barry Doupé, 2009, 5:07

Thalé is a series of alien flowers modeled after decorative fiber optics ornaments.

Golden Room, Michael Stecky, 2008, 5:11

Beginning with images of flowers and insects, and ending with fantastic visions of microscopic utopias, Golden Room burrows itself deeper inward using disintegration as a metaphor for loss and the passage of time.

Cartoon For Those Who Have A Certain Fondness For Ideas But Are Tired Of Thinking, Steve Reinke, 2010, 2:15

Simple line drawings form and wriggle against a solid background, each linked to a verbal proposal. In the end, everybody's happy as the possibilities proliferate. Nobody gets hurt.

Total Runtime: 46:35

Q&A with panel to follow screening."

The Message: Gallery 1313

"Gallery 1313 is pleased to present The Message, an exhibition of new media artists who explore the effects of technology on popular culture and society. The exhibition is also a celebration of the legacy of Marshall McLuhan.

Including installation, video and photo based works by artists Zeesy Powers, Jenn E . Norton, Myfanwy Ashmore, Robert Lendrum, Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman, Matthew Williamson and Nicholas Stedman.

There will also be panel discussion Wed Nov. 9 at 7pm which will address the future and effects of technology in artistic practice and society in general. Panelists to include Ed Slopek, Program Director for the New Media Option (Ryerson University), School of Image Works, Johanna Householder, Chair of Criticism and Curitorial Practice (Ontario College of Art and Design) and Judith Doyle, Chair of Integrated Media (The Ontario College of Art and Design) . The panel will be moderated by writer and cultural commentor, Russell Smith.

Main & Process Galleries

Nov. 2-13

Opening Reception: Nov. 3 at 7pm

Panel Discussion: Nov. 9 at 7pm

Gallery 1313

1313 Queen St. West

416-536-6778 www.g1313.org

The exhibition is sponsored by Highland Park Single Malt Scotch Whiskey. We would like to thank Highland Park Single Malt Scotch Whiskey for their generous support."

From the Gallery 1313 site.

Magenta Magazine: K-TOWN: Five karaoke videos by artists

Wrik Mead, Johanna Householder, Kotama Bouabane, Edward Birnbaum and Michael Jacobs, and I were reviewed by K-TOWN curators Luke Painter and Meera Margaret Singh for Magenta Magazine. Originally shown at Angell Gallery in Toronto, then at XPACE for Toronto Nuit Blanche, this show is coming to Guelph's Ed Video Media Arts Centre this December. Here is the post with a playlist of artists and the songs they contributed to the exhibition.

Tesseract has been extended at Communitech

I have been invited to extend the exhibition of my 3D interactive installation, Tesseract, at The Communitech HUB. The installation will be available to the general public throughout October, on Thursdays and Fridays at 4-7pm and on Saturdays and Sundays, from 12-5pm.

There will also be a closing reception on October 28, from 5pm to 7pm. This work was part of CAFKA.11, SURVIVE. RESIST. The Communitech HUB is located on the first floor of the Tannery Building on 151 Charles Street West, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

Here is the Facebook invite.

K-Town

"K-Town is a video and performance based event by Luke Painter and Meera Margaret Singh that transforms the east area of Angell Gallery into a karaoke lounge. Inspired by karaoke culture and the often disparate and melodramatic video content that accompanies singing in karaoke bars, artists have been invited to create video and animation content to musical hits of their choosing. With a catalogue of over 30 songs, the public can visit Angell Gallery September 21st-24th and sing along to their favourite tunes while enjoying the visual treatment of these songs by selected artists and designers. Echoing the current and pervasive adaptation and transformation of on-line content, K-Town irreverently takes pre-existing popular songs and asks artists to remix and respond to them using a variety of visual means."

Rewinder - 35 Years of Ed Video

September 10 to 30, 2011

Reception on Saturday, September 10 from 8pm to midnight for Nuit Blanche

1976: the still-youthful medium of video was spreading fast among a new generation of artists. In Guelph, Ontario, a small group of video enthusiasts decided to create a place where practitioners of this new medium could share resources and exchange ideas. The Educational Video Creative Community Television Project, commonly and affectionately known as Ed Video, was born.

For 35 years, Ed Video has hosted hundreds of exhibitions, screenings, concerts and workshops, while helping to create thousands of videos. "A Friendly Rewinder”, curated by Ufuk Gueray, features vintage and recent works made by members.Eric

curated by Ufuk Gueray

SURVIVE.RESIST: CAFKA.11

This year I have focused on an interactive installation that investigates the formal and metaphorical qualities of the tesseract. This work exists in two manifestations: one is a 3D interactive space (advanced visualization) exhibited at Communitech's HUB upon the completion of my residency at Christie Digital and CAFKA and the other is a public projection on Kitchener's City Hall. The site of projection is on an architectural feature of the city hall building affectionately referred to as the Cube. This was the perfect canvas for a tesseract to emerge, as Christie Digital has provided two high-end projector that envelopes two surfaces of the Cube in video.

The CAVE is a 3D video environment in which the viewer wears stereoscopic glasses, and their movement is tracked by sensors, triangulating reflective surfaces on the glasses, generating a unique perspective for the individual viewer. This enables the viewer to look around animated objects, to see around corners, and to engage with a virtual reality that physically surrounds them by simply moving their head. The CAVE consists of four surfaces (the floor and three walls) that receive twelve video projections that work interactively with the stereoscopic glasses. Viewers who are not wearing the glasses will see a shifting anamorphosis, as the point of view and movement is dictated by the primary viewer.

This installation is technically facilitated by the Research and Development department of the video display company Christie Digital, via Communitech's HUB, located in Kitchener, Ontario. Christie Digital, renowned for creating the best video projectors in the world, has a history of innovative sponsorships to media arts festivals (such as CAFKA) and galleries through the donation of their cutting edge HD display technologies.

Tesseract imaginatively translates phenomena that exists beyond our visual perception, yet is possible to glean through cognition. A cube in the fourth dimension is a hypercube, which has an aesthetic beauty that is easily appreciated for its hypnotic proportions. The concept is best explained by analogous illustrations presented in the 3rd dimension. According to hyperspace theory, objects in the 4th dimension remain elusive to the perception of humans, but can be conceptualized. Carl Sagan explained that we can see or imagine a hypercube in the 3rd dimension as a shadow of itself, but it loses its accuracy in the shadow's projection. The installation offers the viewer a translation of what cannot be perceived with our physical senses, but is present, in abstraction. My representation is not a defined illustration for the equation of a tesseract, but is where the imagination wonders in its attempt to see what it could be.

Les Poupées Russes at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery

Les Poupées Russes will be exhibited at the Kitchener|Waterloo Art Gallery for its 5th Biennial curated by Robert Enright. Les Poupées Russes (Russian Dolls) is a two-channel video installation that creates a space of infinite regress using a mise en abyme structure. A self-reflexive space invites the viewer into its center, which is a continuous camera zoom through a set where the artist plays both roles of subject and director. The camera's movement travels infinitely into a mirror that is reflecting a video set in mid production. The set includes a field monitor that displays a camera's live feed, which is focused on the mirror. This creates a feedback loop, a Möbius strip that moves in and away in a continuous shot.

The Biennial, entitled, Black and White: An Allegory of Colour, also features the work of Ashleigh Bartlett, Hyang Cho, Susan Dobson, Maura Doyle, Brad Emsley, Will Gorlitz, Sarah Kernohan, Shane Krepakevich, Maha Mustafa, Martin Pearce and Ibrahim Rashid.

June 13th - September 5th 2011

Opening Reception June 17th at 7pm

Curator's Talk: June 16th at 7pm

CFC World Wide Short Film Festival Screens Wee Requiem

Wee Requiem will be screening at The Canadian Film Centre's World Wide Short Film Festival on June 1st at Cineplex Odeon Varsity Cinema and again at this venue on June 3rd. The programme entitled 'Golden Girls' features films and videos produced by women from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, the United States, Denmark and South Korea.

Wee Requiem at Rooftop Films, Brooklyn, NY

Wee Requiem will be screening at Rooftop Films: Underground Movies Outdoors on June 23rd, 2011, at Crown Vic. The doors open at 8pm, followed by live music at 8:30. The screening begins at 9pm and stick around for the after party. Rooftop Films takes place at multiple outdoor venues across New York City and has a reputation for screening smart, dynamic, creative films and videos. Here is a link for the 2011 schedule.

Tickets cost $10.00 at the door.

Very Good Advice in Montreal

Very Good Advice will be screening in Montreal, Québec, this Thursday, May 5th, at Groupe Intervention Vidéo, located at 4001 Berri #105. Chante-la ta chanson/This Song Is You, curated by Anne Golden, is this edition of The Vault series. Admission is free - so there are so many reasons to go. Free Advice and Montreal.

New Toronto Works Show

Wee Requiem, my most recent single channel work, will be screened at Pleasure Dome's New Toronto Works Show. This year's programme, entitled 'Bind Together', is curated by Laura Paolini and Guillermina Buzio. It will be held at The Poor Alex Theater at 7pm on Saturday, March 19th. There will also be installations exhibited at InterAccess from March 5th to March 20th, featuring Julieta Maria, Istvan Kantor, Tamara Palstisa and Sasa Rajsic and Sean Procyk.

Now in its 18th year, this member-curated program features the cutting edge of experimental film, video and installation produced in Toronto today.

Cinematheque: Winnipeg

Very Good Advice will be screened at the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque on Friday March 25th, 2011 at 7pm. 'Scenes From The Floating World' is a group screening, curated by Chris Gehman, that will also feature the works of Jude Norris, Alexandre Larose, Barry Doupé and John Price.

The cinema allows artists to construct spaces that cannot be experienced in any other way, to work with figures and images detached from their ordinary context and returned to life in an imagined cinematic space. With one partial exception, each of these works centres on the body as it inhabits the floating world of the cinematic screen.

- Chris Gehman

"sudden frost" Reviewed in Border Crossings

The group exhibition of Southern Ontario artists, "sudden frost", curated by Pete Smith at Vancouver's Elissa Cristall Gallery has been reviewed in the current issue of Border Crossings (issue no.116) by Lee Henderson.

The show was thematically rooted in T S Elliot's "The Waste Land" and featured artists Will Gorlitz, Kevin Rodgers, Nicole Vogelzang, Sky Glabush, Patrick Mahon, David Merritt, Michel Daigneault and myself. My contribution to the show was a single channel video entitled "Very Good Advice". Please check out the review on pages 82-83.

"Open Season" at The Yukon Arts Centre

Open Season

On January 13, 2011, I will be exhibiting a new two-channel video installation in a group show at theYukon Arts Centre. The installation, entitled Mirador, is an aerial voyage across a pastiche landscape, borrowed from the rural southern Ontario countryside and the route from Whitehorse to Dawson City, stitching these disparate vistas together with the composite glue of post-production. Architectural structures of leisure displaced from Western culture creep up on the horizon, strangely at home in this hybrid lieu, blending in with the manmade scars of mining and agriculture. Proposition or foreboding vision, the view is simultaneously eerie and whimsical in its disjunctive state. Open Season also features artists Douglas Drake, Elinor Whidden and Scott Price.

This exhibition is curated by the Trousseau Society. The Trousseau Society is a Toronto based collective, consisting of three women with a background of art, history and curatorial studies.

Open Season runs from January 13th, 2010 to March 12, 2010.

Jean-Paul Kelly (a short parenthesis in a long period)

Jean-Paul Kelly is a Toronto-based artist. He creates drawings, photographs and videos, often displayed together as installations. These exhibition projects engage with issues of representation and subjectivity through Kelly's exploration of contiguity, allegory, and replacement. He has had solo exhibitions at Gallery TPW, Toronto (2008) and at Ed Video Media Arts Centre, on November 13, to December 16, 2010. His work has been included in group shows in North America, Japan, and Europe, most recently in "Showcase.09", *Cambridge Galleries (2009). Under the collective moniker Fennel Plunger Corporation, Kelly has collaborated with artists Steve Reinke and Anne Walk on exhibitions at Gallery TPW (2005) and Mercer Union, Toronto (2010).

www.jeanpaulkelly.com

Videophagy/Videofagia: Inconsumable

Tomorrow night, Friday October 8th, 2010, at Hot Shot Gallery Excess (2002) will be screening in a programme curated by Victoria Moufawad-Paul entitled, 'Inconsumable', at 8pm.

'Inconsumable' is part of Videophagy/Videofagia, a three part project from the e-fagia collective.

Artists (some of my favourites) showing work include Allyson Mitchell, Alissa Firth-Eagland, Elisha Lim and Jen Aveeno, Farrah Khan, Heather Keung, Brenda Goldstein, Sarah Maple and Jesika Joy. Hot shot Gallery is located at 181 Augusta Avenue, Toronto.

Antimatter Film Festival & I Heart Video Art III

Very Good Advice will be screening at the 13th Annual Antimatter Film Festival in Victoria, British Columbia, on October 10th, 2010. The program, entitled Losing Ground, is described as 'Strategies and warnings confront imminent loss of social and vernacular landscapes.' Antimatter is an awesome film festival for film and video art and I am thrilled to be apart of it. Losing Ground is screening at Open Space Arts Centre, 510 Fort St at 9pm.

From West to Central Canada, Very Good Advice will also be screening at I Heart Video Art III in Kitchener, Ontario. This instalment of CAFKA's I Heart Video Art includes the video work of Almerinda Travassos & Margaret Moores, Steve Reinke & Jesse Mott, Geoffrey Pugen, John Greyson, Zak Tatham, Terril Calder, Christiana Latham, Ariel Smith, Bear Witness & A Tribe Called Red. I Heart Video Art is curated by Rob Ring, Artistic Director of CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener & Area). For more details click here.

Teetering on the Void at the Art Gallery of Hamilton

Teetering on the Void (2007) will be projected from the Sheraton Hotel and onto the face of the Art Gallery of Hamilton for the Art Gallery of Hamilton's World Film Festival on September 30th, 2010. Teetering on the Void references Yves Klein's 1960 photograph, Leap into the Void, in which the grand gesture of Klein leaping from a second story window and into the unknown is executed without hesitation. Teetering on the Void abandons the gusto helmed by the painter of space, as hesitation and the weight of self-consious awareness delicately anchors my toes to the ledge, precariously teetering between the safety of familiarity and the risk of oblivion. Other installations include Monokeros Fantastica, by Scott McGovern, Time Piece, by Adam David Brown, Water's Edge, by Jim Riley and STILLNESS; There is a way between Voice and Presence by Tony Vieria. For a full list of artists click here.

cmagazine #106

FASTWÜRMS DJ set and Skry-pod This Friday at The Power Plant

Sudden Frost

The Elissa Cristall Gallery will be presenting Sudden Frost, a group show curated by Pete Smith. The show is described as, "drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and video Incorporating a broad range of artistic mediums, the works share a whimsical yet somber lyricism that gives meaningful glimpses into the frenzied nature of now."

Featuring the work or Michel Daigneault, Sky Glabush, Will Gorlitz, Patrick Mahon, David Merritt, Kevin Rogers, Nicole Vogelzang and I. The exhibition begins July 2nd and will run to August 14th, 2010.

Subtle Technologies

This Saturday I will be showing work at the Subtle Technologies Festival. Subtle Technologies presents an annual festival/symposium in Toronto Canada that provides a platform for research, art, workshops and discourse that engages the cross disciplinary practices of art and science. This year's theme is sustainability, and the show that I am is entitled Art and Science Cruise: in Water Colours, curated by Willy LeMaitre.

It is a first for me, as I have never shown my work on a boat before! I do have a tendency to turn green on the open seas, but maybe Lake Ontario will be more forgiving than the toss of salty water bodies. Gordon Monahan will be performing (I am a fan, can't wait to see it!) and Zev Asher, Dr Helen Cyr, Vera Frenkel, Gail Maurice and Paul Wong are the artist and filmmakers included in the program.

TRIENNALE Montmartin Sur Mer 2010

This week I will be exhibiting work in the TRIENNALE Montmartin Sur Mer 2010 , which is a show featuring French and Canadian visual artists, musicians and writers. The Triennial(e) will take place over two days on May 30th and 31st, 2010, in Montmartin Sur Mer, Normandy, France. I stayed in the area last year and was blown away by its beauty. The exhibit will inhabit private and public spaces (people's homes and city museums) in the aim to meet all artists.

Some of the amazing artists, musicians, writers and curators involved in the Triennial(e) are Gunilla Josephson, Aleesa Cohene, Eve Egoyan, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsy, Luc Benazet, Patrice Grente, Jaques Jouet, Deborah Lennie-Bisson, Jane Motin, Axelle Rioult and Doris Ung.

For more information about, times and locations, the Trienniale Montmartin Sure Mer 2010, please visit the website.

CAFKA - Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area

CAFKA will be screening Forced, 2006, at the Critical Media Lab next Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 7pm. Other artists featured in this program, a love letter to video art, entitled 'I Heart Video Art: Take II' are Liliana Velez Jaramillio, Manuel Saiz, Heath Faschina, Chris & Keir, Gabriel Graham, John Greyson, Ehren BEARwitness Thomas, Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby and (I quote) much, much more. Sounds exciting!

Also, tomorrow is the last day to see Les soeurs Fox du 21e ciècle/21st Century Fox Sisters and Substitution Frame at the Elora Centre for the Arts. Thanks to the Elora Centre for the Arts, everyone who visited the exhibit and especially to Julie René de Cotret, who curated the show, for such a wonderful exhperience.

Skry-Pod - Nuit Blanche, 2009, Art In General, 2010

Nuit Blanche

This year at Nuit Blanche, 2009, the FASTWURMS invited eight artists to read Tarot for twelve hours for a commissioned project in Zone A, called Skry-Pod, curated by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick. We used Skry-Pod to read, which is a new iPhone and iPod Touch app by Lukas Blakk. We used also used the Crowley-Thoth and Rider-Waite decks. I read beside the wonderful Nicole Vogelzang and luckily she documented it. It was an amazing night, which surprisingly felt like a very short dusk to dawn.

Art in General

Skry-Pod, masterminded by the unstoppable FASTWÜRMS, is the reading of tarot cards and an app for the iPod Touch by Lukas Blakk, mixing traditional and conceptual intuitive practices. For those who braved the cold busy streets of Nuit Blanche, Toronto 2009, may have seen the FASTWÜRMS with their coven of artist tarot card and Skry-Pod readers at the Sheraton Centre from dusk till dawn. I was honoured to participate as a Skry-Pod reader, and will join the FASTWÜRMS again in Brooklyn at the former Williamsburg Bank (Hanson Place), deep in the vault. The event is the spring benefit for Art in General.

"The 5th annual spring benefit will feature the Canadian artist collaborative, FASTWÜRMS’ U.S. debut of Skry-Pod, an intimate social exchange performance with a team of artist card readers using traditional Tarot cards and custom Skry-Pod iTouch and iPhone Tarot applications. “Skry” is a traditional term used to describe divination or clairvoyance by gazing into water, candle flames, and unique to Skry-Pod, touch LCD screens. Drawing on the artists’ exploration of the subversive “otherness” of Witch culture and its relationship to acts of resistance, Skry-Pod engages the public in a contained spectacle and tableaux of mediated and direct intimacy as participants take part in Skry-Pod Tarot readings and divination scenarios."

My readings that night were strangely optimistic, which is possibly why I am grinning ear to ear throughout the documentation. Nothing like getting the Ten of Cups for your final outcome. Later, we were treated to dinner before we read again in the main area. It was great to work with the Art In General crew.

Le Labo: Les Soeurs Fox du 21e siècle/21st Century Fox Sisters

The installation the 21st Century Fox Sisters is an interactive space where the Fox sisters, famous mediums of the 19th Century, are re-imagined as producers and directors of a multi-media spectacle. The Fox Sisters were influential mediums that arguably spearheaded the Spiritualist movement. Margaret and Kate Fox were young girls when they began performing séances under the guidance of their sister Leah. They wielded a power over their audiences with their phantasmagoric skills that earned them international celebrity, a place amongst Victorian socialites of Europe and North America. The girls were subject to the consequences of fame. Upon pressure from her Catholic fiancé, Margaret publicly decried their practice as fraudulent, and the sisters fell from favour. Margaret and Katy died penniless.

The installation 'Les Soeurs Fox du 21e siècle' re-imagines the sisters as producers of multimedia productions. Characters representing the sisters tell their story to a small audience within the installation space, through a pre-cinema illusion called Pepper's Ghost. A two-way mirror separates the video projection and the viewer, creating two rooms: one that the viewer occupies and a hidden room that provides the illusion. In the reflection, it appears that the viewer is in a shared space with the Fox sisters. This illusion is pushed further by a second mirror that is positioned behind the viewer, creating a mise en abyme. This is a disorienting aspect that causes a visceral experience when in the room. The lighting of the viewer and the lighting in the video are similar, blending the characters and the viewers in silhouette, making everyone a character upon a cinematic stage.

The video triggers a device that bangs on the walls of the installation when the sisters describe the technique to create convincing ‘rappings’. By imposing the past upon the present with women who lend their bodies to spirits in order to hold a captive audience, parallels are drawn between covert feminism of the Victorian era and 3rd Wave Feminism. Pairing pre-cinema technologies used in phantasmagoric displays with contemporary interactive video, viewers find themselves within a mise en abyme structure where the virtual and actual appear to share a single space.

La nouvelle installation de l'artiste médiatique Jenn E. Norton, sera bientôt présentée au laboratoire d'Art de Toronto, à la suite de sa résidence d'un mois. Avec « 21st Century Fox », Jenn E. Norton joue sur les anachronismes en créant un espace intime et interactif où les soeurs Fox, peut-être les médiums les plus reconnues du XIXe siècle, renaissent sous la forme de réalisatrices d'un dispositif multimédia. Jenn E. Norton explore le fragile équilibre des pouvoirs dans la lutte de ces femmes, qui en feignant d'incarner des esprits d'outre-tombe libérait leur propre parole et captivait l'auditoire. En fusionnant technologies vidéo contemporaines et techniques pré-cinématographique du spiritisme victorien et de leur images fantastiques, Jenn E. Norton fait le parallèle entre le féminisme caché du passé et celui d'aujourd'hui. Vernissage de 18h à 22h le 7 janvier au Labo.

Very Good Advice in Rotterdam

Very Good Advice, is playing at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.