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Sometimes in the night, the fox slips by - PhD Exhibition | Artlab Gallery by Western Visual Arts

Sometimes in the night, the fox slips by

January 7-21, 2022

Artlab Gallery

Anahí González, Philip Gurrey, Dong-Kyoon Nam, Sasha Opeiko

Studio PhD candidates from the Department of Visual Arts present Sometimes in the night, the fox slips by, a group exhibition of recent work by Anahí González, Philip Gurrey, Dong-Kyoon Nam and Sasha Opeiko. The show gathers a broad spectrum of investigations sharing a common interest in the relationship between poetic and theoretical potential in making. Some orient themselves toward the political, looking at labour issues both in Canada and abroad. Others probe the language of modernism with strategies centered on improvisation and decay. Others still, use a posthumanist perspective to deconstruct notions of the readymade or to renegotiate representations of melancholy. In concert they are the fox of John Burnside’s poem, deftly weaving a path through fence and thicket.

Anahí González

Bueno, Bonito y Barato, is deeply involved in exploring the Mexican cues portrayed in visual culture, evoking quiet tensions of nationalism and labour representation. By bringing this approach of Mexican labour visual representation on a mobile wood billboard together and allowing them to interact within the gallery, the work engages with concepts of temporality, mobility, the USMCA and institutionalism.

Dong-Kyoon Nam

Praxis of New Assemblage

My work focuses on reconstructing ordinary objects encountered in daily life into ‘animate things’: things understood as dynamic, temporal, yet precarious assemblages animated in a relational field that encompasses humans/nonhumans and organic/inorganic matter.

The method of assemblage I use is not based on the sculptural representation of an assumed and pre-existing whole, rather it refers to a process wherein a visualization of the potential movement of things, and the relationships between their parts, rhythms, affects, and intensities are privileged.

My studio process is semi-impromptu, a horizontal attunement with things, entangled in chance and necessity. My bodily sensibility starts from meticulous attention to fleeting, small occurrences that would otherwise remain unacknowledged.

re | cycling

On a mechanical level, these works reclaim parts of digital home appliances that usually remain invisible, and in so doing, momentarily stabilize the rapid cycle of production, consumption, and disposal. Installed on the wall by adhering them at right angles on a canvas panel, each singular assemblage stands alone and simultaneously exists in relation, signaling both continuity and discontinuity in turn. The works are abstract, like drawings of fluid lines and fragmented outlines, yet still concrete and sensorial. They take the form of artificial assemblages made of e-waste that paradoxically imply ecological precarity and complexity. On a mechanical level, these works reclaim parts of digital home appliances that usually remain invisible, and in so doing, momentarily stabilize the rapid cycle of production, consumption, and disposal. Installed on the wall by adhering them at right angles on a canvas panel, each singular assemblage stands alone and simultaneously exists in relation, signaling both continuity and discontinuity in turn. The works are abstract, like drawings of fluid lines and fragmented outlines, yet still concrete and sensorial. They take the form of artificial assemblages made of e-waste that paradoxically imply ecological precarity and complexity.

Sasha Opeiko

In Something like Fan Object Objects the banal object of study is a used domestic desk fan with a missing safety grill. It was found as a discarded, unwanted item sold in a thrift store. Damaged and disentangled from its previous function, the object is melancholically symptomatic and its image is mediated into multiple manifestations of loss and disintegration. The fan was visualized through faulty 3D scanning, rendered into a rotating 360° animation, and exported as 1400 individual frames, which were fed into a machine learning algorithm that produces new images based on the data it received. The fan itself is rendered useless, its melancholic image diffracted into 10,000 iterations of manufactured glitch. They are presented in video not so much as an animation, but a kind of factual flickering of machine-produced visual data. The nonhuman gaze of image data processing unravels a gapped 3-D representation into a myriad of fractured views, flatly glitching in a dark melancholic refusal to be coherent.

#melancholy began with a collection of screenshots of Instagram posts that were coming up under #melancholy. The screenshots are samples of the prevalence of sublime, mostly Nordic landscapes that the general population locates as representative of melancholy, branding it into named images for dissemination. Working with 460 screenshots, an AI algorithm on Runway ML was used to produce new images based on what it learned from the collection of screenshots. The AI model generates "#melancholy" Instagram landscape images and has the capacity to produce a video of these generated images morphing into one another. The images are disintegrated but new reintegrated versions of what a nonhuman gaze recognizes to be a #melancholy landscape image.

In Forged Afterimage Compression six rotating 3D scans are presented as a result of a remediation process that started with 3D scans of provisiona, transitory physical constructions of found objects and images. This first set of 3D scans, already full of gaps and distorted by the nature of the scanning app Trnio, was made into rotating animations that were then 3D scanned again off of a laptop screen. The outcome is a kind of forged afterimage, compressed into a digital skin or something like a distorted geological compound, resulting from the app’s inability to fully comprehend a 3D representation on a flat screen. These are remnants forged from remnants.

Artlab Gallery

JL Visual Arts Centre

Western University

London, Ontario, Canada

Chinese Flower and Bird Paintings: Shujuan Liu by Western Visual Arts

The Artlab gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by visiting professor Shujuan Liu.

Shujuan Liu is an associate professor of the School of Fine Arts and Design of Pan Tianshou, Ningbo University, China. She is now a visiting professor of Department of Visual Arts, Western University, Canada. Shujuan started to learn painting when she was 10 years old. She graduated from the Department of Fine Arts of Northeast Normal University, China and she has been teaching paintings in many years. She was also a visiting scholar in Capital Normal University, China in 2007. Her works of traditional Chinese paintings have been published in professional art journals for many times. Her works of fine brushwork characters have won honorary prizes in the International Chinese Grand Prix at Beijing. Her painting works were also exhibited in China and in Japan as well. Recently, her painting work Shuoguo Piaoxiang, won the first prize of London Chinese Community painting competition in London, Ontario, Canada 2019.

Artlab Gallery

John Labatt Visual Arts Centre

Department of Visual Arts

Western University

London, ON

Continuing Accountability: Kelly Greene | Artlab Gallery by Western Visual Arts

Continuing Accountability

Kelly Greene

April 21 - May 17, 2022

Artlab Gallery

The Artlab Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition titled “Continuing Accountability” by current Indigenous Artist-In-Residence Kelly Greene. Presented in partnership with the Office of Indigenous Initiatives and the Department of Arts and Humanities, this exhibit brings together work completed by Greene over the course of her nearly thirty year artistic career.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

This exhibit is a continuation of my exhibit “Accountability” that was briefly on display at McIntosh Gallery for a week in March, 2020 before everything shut down. But “Accountability” has another meaning besides referring to the previous exhibit, as this word was and is the premise for both shows, since it encompasses the concepts of the artworks.

Some topics include alternative viewpoints of historic occurrences once viewed as celebratory by most, though now wondering when history books will be changed. And since recent revelations have been made of resulting conditions from enforced ownership, we may question how reparation can be made.

Yet despite it all, somehow Indigenous cultures, traditions, and languages are still alive. Although they’ve struggled to remain alive, the onus to pass knowledge from one generation to the next is imperative so nothing more will be lost.

Moreover, it is the responsibility all humans must now offer to care for our Earth, our Mother, who has endured much devastation especially during the past century after the industrial revolution and the rise of technological advancements. We are now in a position to make drastic changes to ensure that the future may somehow be free from the current conditions we’re experiencing, resulting from us making strides without heed of repercussions.

My hope is we’ll be able to outrun the machine we’ve created.

Kelly Greene is a multi-media artist whose work includes painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. She is of Mohawk-Oneida-Sicilian ancestry, a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve, and a descendant of the Turtle Clan.

Greene has lived in London, Ontario since 1989 where she obtained a BFA from the University of Western Ontario. She began her visual art studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she moved with her family when she was a child.

She has exhibited in Canada and the United States for over thirty years in solo and group exhibits, primarily at the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ontario but also Banff, Alberta; Vancouver, B.C.; Montreal, Quebec; Ottawa, Thunder Bay, Toronto, and London, Ontario; Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Howes Cave, New York. Her work is in numerous public and private collections, and in 2012 and 2015 she was commissioned to complete two permanent outdoor installations at the Woodland Cultural Centre. She has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and was most recently awarded the first Indigenous Artist in Residence at Western University in 2021.

Her art focuses primarily on environmental and political topics, as well as revealing stereotypes that are still prevalent towards Indigenous cultures, using ironic humour when possible. Recognizing the impact colonization has had on our Earth and the First People who have always lived on the land now known as Canada, Greene specifically refers to the Haldimand Treaty granted to the people of Six Nations, as well as the Mohawk Institute Residential School, or “Mush Hole”, where her beautiful Grandma attended in the 1920’s. Another concern is Colony Collapse Disorder, or the current plight of bees vanishing due to pesticides and monoculture. The ever-alarming condition of our planet has inspired Greene to create works that represent our Mother Earth as human, appealing to our species’ egocentricity, hoping empathy will be instilled and respect given so future generations will continue to be revived and thrive.