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Exhibition Dates: January 15 – 28, 2021 in the Artlab Gallery and virtually
Every few years, the Artlab Gallery at Western University hosts a Faculty and Staff exhibition. These exhibitions are important opportunities for fostering a sense of community in the Visual Arts Department: students are able to see their instructors and mentors at work, and colleagues have a chance to share in each other's research. 2020 was a year like no other, and so the Artlab is leaning into the present with a collective address to this moment of separate togetherness. "Distance makes the heart grow weak" invites faculty, staff and graduate students to speak to how they've been experiencing the last year. It prompts participants to explore and express how isolation has shifted our focus, our research and art practices, as well as our forms of connecting with one another. The exhibition is also an opportunity for participating artists and researchers to show flexibility (and inherently, optimism) despite the high strangeness we’re all currently experiencing. In this time of shared solitude—unable to walk down halls, knock on studio or office doors, and enjoy quick hellos and impromptu conversations—we'll quote Chris Kraus (quoting Søren Kierkegaard): "art involves reaching through some distance."
Organized by Dickson Bou and Ruth Skinner.
Participants: Cody Barteet; Sarah Bassnett; Dickson Bou with Charlie Egleston & Peter Lebel; Matt W. Brown; Andreas Buchwaldt; Brianne Casey; Jérôme Conquy with Kevin Heslop, Sachiko Murakami, Sile Englert & Ruth Douthwright; Ioana Dragomir; Meghan Edmiston; Soheila Esfahani; Sky Glabush; Anahí González; Philip Gurrey; John Hatch; Tricia Johnson; Iraboty Kazi; Shelley Kopp; Anna Madelska; Patrick Mahon; Jennifer Martin; Linda Meloche; David Merritt; Ana Moyer; Dong-Kyoon Nam; Kim Neudorf; Katie Oates; Sasha Opeiko with Martin Stevens; Michelle Paterok; Kirsty Robertson; Geordie Shepherd; Andrew Silk; Ashley Snook; Christine Sprengler; Michelle Wilson with Bridget Koza,Sophie Wu, & Azadeh Odlins; Jessica Woodward
The promotional graphic for "Distance makes the heart grow weak" cites the short film, "Extraordinary Measures," by Sasha Opeiko and Martin Stevens, featured in the exhibition.
Given Ontario's recent stay-at-home order, the exhibition will be released in a virtual format on Friday, January 15th. Throughout the course of the exhibition, Artlab will publish short video features from participating artists and researchers.
Visit the Artlab Gallery: www.uwo.ca/visarts/artlab/
Due to COVID-19 safety measures, the Artlab Gallery and Cohen Commons will be operating virtually. In-person visits are not permitted at this time. We will be posting exhibition documentation, videos, and virtual walk-throughs on the Artlab’s website.
www.uwo.ca/visarts/artlab/exhibition_archive/20202021.htm...
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2021; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
The Artlab Gallery is pleased to reopen with MFA candidate George Kubresliís thesis exhibition, The Hell of a Boiling Red.
Artist George Kubresli addresses the tragedy of war - specifically the ongoing Syrian war - as his subject. Through painting, George expresses the calamity that Syrians experience, and he explores the depths of the soul to understand the enormous traumas that humans suffer in their various encounters with war. For George, the act of war shows its true form through facial expressions, which mix the inner imperfections of humans with the distortions that have formed on and in their bodies. In the view of the artist, we cannot fully see tragedy through physical form alone. To be able to witness tragedy at all, and to access a true experience of horror, we must understand what humans suffer so deeply, and link those personal sufferings with what is externalized.
The role of nature in the magnitude of this human tragedy is an underexplored aspect of the shadow of war. For George, nature plays a major role in augmenting the tragic effects that war has on those beings who live in the swamps of disaster. Outside of a war scenario, nature is perceived to interact with humans in a role that is supportive of beautifying life. In times of war, nature takes on a completely different character of extremes, so the winter and summer seasons increase the suffering of war-torn human beings. Winter does not take into account the impact on persons who have lost shelter or who are trying to seek refuge across the sea or in neighbouring countries to save their lives. Winter does not perceive those who are swallowed by marine storms and buried on beaches or at the bottom of the sea. When summer hits, high temperatures inflict sunstroke, skin diseases, meningitis and many more afflictions on refugees who are stripped of the most basic needs for living. In an encounter with war, nature often becomes the enemy as well. George has worked to reveal these aspects through colour - through divergences between cool and warm colours, through alterations and variances between hot and cold colours - and through the reactive qualities of condensed and rapid brushstrokes. His portraiture and landscape works attempt to reveal what is typically hidden.
This exhibition runs from August 13 - August 27, by appointment only. Contact artlab@uwo.ca to schedule your visit. Please note non-medical face coverings are required and you will be asked to complete a questionnaire before entering the gallery.
Artlab Gallery
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
London, ON, Canada
Twitter: @westernuVisArts
Instagram: @westernuVisArts
artlab@uwo.ca
© 2020; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
The Artlab Gallery is pleased to present An Exhibition in Black and White, a first-ever collaborative event featuring artworks by seventy-five students from five local Secondary Schools.
Taking inspiration from the prestigious Beaux Arts Ball, which took place annually in France during the early decades of the seventeenth century, this historic springtime event received international acclaim.
With a nod to Beaux Arts and all things that inspire us, we would like to celebrate the imaginative thinking and creative energy of our local youth with an exhibition thematically linked by the colours black and white.
This diverse outreach extravaganza features curated selections from high schools situated within the Thames Valley District School Board including; Clarke Road Secondary School, H.B. Beal Secondary School, London Central Secondary School, Oakridge Secondary School, and Sir Fredrick Banting Secondary School.
May 29 --‐ June 10, 2015
Artlab Gallery
Department of Visual Arts
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
By installing your artwork in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, you agree to have it photographed and release all rights in and consent to the use of this photo for all legal purposes. Would you like to see your work properly captioned? vrlibrary@uwo.ca
© 2015; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Join us in the Artlab Gallery this Thursday, June 20 from 5-7pm for the opening reception of MFA candidate Johnathan Onyschuk's thesis show, "Bone Meal."
The exhibition runs from June 20 - July 4, and consists of monumental avatars, WWI junk and wooden sculpture.
In 75 A.C.E Greek biographer Plutarch wrote on the aftermath of the defeat of Tuton and Ambrones tribes in Rome, different accounts report the inhabitants of Massilia made fences round their vineyards with the bones, and that the ground, enriched by the moisture of the putrefied bodies yielded at the season a prodigious crop. Bone Meal is a multimedia installation that explores the relationships between escapist fantasy violence and real world conflicts. Virtual avatars become the calloused husk from which we enjoy the exploited violence and heroism of the past; first as tragedy, second as farce and third as larp. The exhibited works examine the entertainment value of historical trauma and it’s hyper-mobility in the virtual space.
Warrior culture is the insufferable masculine hangover everyone else has to nurse and entertain. Every year a new video game or Netflix show comes out based on the “true events” of war and conflict and every year we lazily consume it like a dog eating the same food for it’s whole life. I find myself trapped in this reoccurring pattern of violent consumption, this work is generated from the bits of flesh consumed while trying to gnaw myself free.
Artlab Gallery
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
London, ON
© 2019; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Join us in the Artlab Gallery this Thursday, June 20 from 5-7pm for the opening reception of MFA candidate Johnathan Onyschuk's thesis show, "Bone Meal."
The exhibition runs from June 20 - July 4, and consists of monumental avatars, WWI junk and wooden sculpture.
In 75 A.C.E Greek biographer Plutarch wrote on the aftermath of the defeat of Tuton and Ambrones tribes in Rome, different accounts report the inhabitants of Massilia made fences round their vineyards with the bones, and that the ground, enriched by the moisture of the putrefied bodies yielded at the season a prodigious crop. Bone Meal is a multimedia installation that explores the relationships between escapist fantasy violence and real world conflicts. Virtual avatars become the calloused husk from which we enjoy the exploited violence and heroism of the past; first as tragedy, second as farce and third as larp. The exhibited works examine the entertainment value of historical trauma and it’s hyper-mobility in the virtual space.
Warrior culture is the insufferable masculine hangover everyone else has to nurse and entertain. Every year a new video game or Netflix show comes out based on the “true events” of war and conflict and every year we lazily consume it like a dog eating the same food for it’s whole life. I find myself trapped in this reoccurring pattern of violent consumption, this work is generated from the bits of flesh consumed while trying to gnaw myself free.
Artlab Gallery
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
London, ON
© 2019; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Artlab Gallery, Western University, London, ON
Over thirty works of art and scholarly publications by Faculty and Staff members from Western’s Department of Visual Arts.
Oct. 27- November 10, 2016
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 3rd, 5-7PM
Remarks:6pm
Performance by Christof Migone 6:15pm
The Faculty & Staff exhibition, a line has two sides borrows its name from the Oblique Strategies project (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975. The project produced a boxed set of 100 playing cards each containing a one-line phrase intended to assist artists and musicians break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. 1
Framed within the context of this exhibition, a line has two sides provides audiences with a glimpse into the research, writing and artworks of over 30 individuals who embody the teaching and technical practices fostered within the Department of Visual Arts, Western
Participating Faculty & Staff
Cody Barteet
Sarah Bassnett
Ron Benner
Dickson Bou
Parker Branch
Kathy Brush
Colin Carney
Jessica Desparois
Micheal Farnan
Wyn Gelenyse
Sky Glabush
John Hatch
Patrick Howlett
Kelly Jazvac
Tricia Johnson
Neil Klassen
Madeline Lennon
Patrick Mahon
David Merritt
Christof Migone
Kim Moodie
Kim Neudorf
Kirsty Robertson
Judith Rodger
Andrew Silk
Geordie Shepherd
Daniela Sneppova
Christine Sprengler
Gabriella Solti
Kelly Wood
Curated by Susan Edelstein
1. Taylor, Gregory. “Introduction.” A Primer On Oblique Strategizing.1997. Accessed August 20, 2016. www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/OSintro.html
By installing your artwork in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, you agree to have it photographed and release all rights in and consent to the use of this photo for all legal purposes. Would you like to see your work properly captioned? vrlibrary@uwo.ca
© 2016; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
THRESHOLDS AND INVENTORIES
MFA SEMINAR
October 6 - 20, 2022
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7 / 5-7PM
Thresholds and Inventories immerses viewers into the intersection of diverse practices by second-year MFA candidates Masha Kouznetsova, Rylee Rumble, Alyssa Sweeney, and Sam Wagter. Comprised of various mediums, this exhibition acts as a threshold for discussion, inviting viewers to investigate their own personal inventories?—bodily phenomena, memories, experiences, environments, and identities.
Masha Kouznetsova records her immediate environment and transitions between places using pinhole photography, mark-making, found and handmade objects, and audio tapes. Through these recording processes, she explores her relationship to migration, time, place and no-placeness, distance, and wayfinding. The Fall MFA Exhibition features Masha’s studies for an installation that meditates on palindromes, continuity, silence, and search.
Rylee Rumble is a painter specializing in abstract expressionism, focusing on exploring and archiving her experiences with mental health through colour. Working closely with personal items she sees and uses in her daily life, the work shown in this exhibition is a physical archive for these items, as one day, they will no longer exist.
Alyssa Sweeney’s work focuses on night photography looking at themes of psychogeography. Engaging with the experiences within the city, thinking about the forgotten, discarded, and marginalized aspects of the urban environment.
Sam Wagter is a multimedia artist working in video, animation, digital renders/ images, and glitch. Her practice navigates the undefined space between binaries, rooted in ‘glitch’ as defined by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism. She invites others to explore queerness and identity in the unexpected errors and glitches through computers, body, and virtual spaces.
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2022; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
The Artlab Gallery is pleased to reopen with MFA candidate George Kubresliís thesis exhibition, The Hell of a Boiling Red.
Artist George Kubresli addresses the tragedy of war - specifically the ongoing Syrian war - as his subject. Through painting, George expresses the calamity that Syrians experience, and he explores the depths of the soul to understand the enormous traumas that humans suffer in their various encounters with war. For George, the act of war shows its true form through facial expressions, which mix the inner imperfections of humans with the distortions that have formed on and in their bodies. In the view of the artist, we cannot fully see tragedy through physical form alone. To be able to witness tragedy at all, and to access a true experience of horror, we must understand what humans suffer so deeply, and link those personal sufferings with what is externalized.
The role of nature in the magnitude of this human tragedy is an underexplored aspect of the shadow of war. For George, nature plays a major role in augmenting the tragic effects that war has on those beings who live in the swamps of disaster. Outside of a war scenario, nature is perceived to interact with humans in a role that is supportive of beautifying life. In times of war, nature takes on a completely different character of extremes, so the winter and summer seasons increase the suffering of war-torn human beings. Winter does not take into account the impact on persons who have lost shelter or who are trying to seek refuge across the sea or in neighbouring countries to save their lives. Winter does not perceive those who are swallowed by marine storms and buried on beaches or at the bottom of the sea. When summer hits, high temperatures inflict sunstroke, skin diseases, meningitis and many more afflictions on refugees who are stripped of the most basic needs for living. In an encounter with war, nature often becomes the enemy as well. George has worked to reveal these aspects through colour - through divergences between cool and warm colours, through alterations and variances between hot and cold colours - and through the reactive qualities of condensed and rapid brushstrokes. His portraiture and landscape works attempt to reveal what is typically hidden.
This exhibition runs from August 13 - August 27, by appointment only. Contact artlab@uwo.ca to schedule your visit. Please note non-medical face coverings are required and you will be asked to complete a questionnaire before entering the gallery.
Artlab Gallery
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
London, ON, Canada
Twitter: @westernuVisArts
Instagram: @westernuVisArts
artlab@uwo.ca
© 2020; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Gwen from the Embroiderers' Guild of SA Museum gently removes the embroidered textile (woollen cushion cover) from the simulated flood water using a piece of Reemay fabric as support. We discover later that her mother made the textile and Gwen had donated the item to Artlab some years ago to use in workshops such as this one. It has been soaked in water on many occasions over the years and used as a demonstration piece - it is still going strong!
artLAB
Exhibition: April 15 -21, 2023
Reception: Thursday, April 20 from 5-7PM
Buchwaldt writes: In February of 1949 workers from the Quebec Asbestos industry went on strike for higher pay and safer working conditions. The event, which lasted nearly 5 months, pitting the provincial government and Johns-Manville Company mining company against over 5000 unionized workers, is considered a precursor to the Quiet Revolution and a vital moment in Canadian labour history. Soft Cinema Asbestos takes on the task of translating the event and its impact for a present day audience. One that reflects notions of digital content creation and consumption, disorienting precarity and a decline in traditional workplace organizing.
In the early 2000’s media theorist and artist Lev Manovich developed an algorithmic approach to video editing that used code to piece together moving image collage. He termed the operation Soft Cinema. Collected clips were put into a database from which a program would randomly select, compositing them into open-ended multi-shot sequences over a gridded layout. The method set up a symbiotic relationship between the author-as-cinematographer and the computer-as-editor.
Soft Cinema Asbestos takes Manovich’s technique and adds to it historical consciousness and the digital archive. Excerpts from news reel footage, documentary films, biomedical simulations and a video game reenactment created by the artist have been tagged with keywords based on their content. A sorting algorithm uses these keywords to assemble clips with shared context. The work is set up in a two channel synchronized format, where one screen visualizes the program’s logic and the other its final output. It is an anachronistic experience of history that privileges pattern and chance over the fixed linear sequence.
artLAB Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2023; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
THRESHOLDS AND INVENTORIES
MFA SEMINAR
October 6 - 20, 2022
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7 / 5-7PM
Thresholds and Inventories immerses viewers into the intersection of diverse practices by second-year MFA candidates Masha Kouznetsova, Rylee Rumble, Alyssa Sweeney, and Sam Wagter. Comprised of various mediums, this exhibition acts as a threshold for discussion, inviting viewers to investigate their own personal inventories?—bodily phenomena, memories, experiences, environments, and identities.
Masha Kouznetsova records her immediate environment and transitions between places using pinhole photography, mark-making, found and handmade objects, and audio tapes. Through these recording processes, she explores her relationship to migration, time, place and no-placeness, distance, and wayfinding. The Fall MFA Exhibition features Masha’s studies for an installation that meditates on palindromes, continuity, silence, and search.
Rylee Rumble is a painter specializing in abstract expressionism, focusing on exploring and archiving her experiences with mental health through colour. Working closely with personal items she sees and uses in her daily life, the work shown in this exhibition is a physical archive for these items, as one day, they will no longer exist.
Alyssa Sweeney’s work focuses on night photography looking at themes of psychogeography. Engaging with the experiences within the city, thinking about the forgotten, discarded, and marginalized aspects of the urban environment.
Sam Wagter is a multimedia artist working in video, animation, digital renders/ images, and glitch. Her practice navigates the undefined space between binaries, rooted in ‘glitch’ as defined by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism. She invites others to explore queerness and identity in the unexpected errors and glitches through computers, body, and virtual spaces.
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2022; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Artlab Gallery
November 25 - December 9, 2021
I left parts of myself everywhere* transforms the gallery into a moving image environment. The interconnected installations speak to the experience of dislocation and fractured relationship to body, language, and place. They trace the deep yet precarious connections that emerge between human and nonhuman bodies and ecosystems; connections that are constantly both found and severed. The exhibition maps an experiential space that is both permeated with vitality and haunted by personal and ecological loss.
Eeva Siivonen’s experimental moving image practice engages with strategies of documentary, essay, and found footage film practices. She employs these strategies to construct affective and immersive moving image installations and single-channel works. Her practice describes subjective experience in ways that resist separation between self and other, interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, and living and nonliving. The ethos of her practice is to create space for empathy by embracing the impossibility of gaining knowledge of ourselves and others, and our place in the world.
Eeva Siivonen is originally from Helsinki, Finland. She has received MFA degrees in Video Art from Syracuse University and Documentary Film from Aalto University in Helsinki. She exhibits her work internationally at film festivals and gallery exhibitions. Most recently, her work has been screened at San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads festival, DOBRA International Festival of Experimental Cinema in Rio de Janeiro, and Transient Visions Festival of Moving Image in Johnson City, NY. She has also received multiple international residency fellowships and recently spent two months in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as an artist-in-residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.
*The exhibition title is borrowed from the poem “St. Thomas Aquinas” by Serbian American poet Charles Simic.
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2021; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Museum and Curatorial Studies exhibition
Organized by Sophie Quick, TA, Kirsty Robertson, Professor
Student curators:
Victoria Delledonne, Claire Finlan, Ellen Groh, Tegan Avene Hadisi, Amy Harrington, Amelia Harris, Sohyun Kang, Sydney Kimber-Johnson, Keely McCavitt, Janeen Mills, Emily Peltier, Sam Roberts, Mackenzie Sinclair, Erik Skouris, Margaret Squires, Jocelyn Tobin.
February 26-March 12, 2015
London, ON, Canada, Western University, John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, ArtLab
By installing your artwork in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, you agree to have it photographed and release all rights in and consent to the use of this photo for all legal purposes. Would you like to see your work properly captioned? vrlibrary@uwo.ca
© 2015; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
November 18 - December 9, 2016
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre (VAC)
Artlab Gallery
Mountains & Rivers Without End (MRWE) is an interdisciplinary group project involving artists and scholars from Canada and Ecuador. The initial segment of MRWE consisted of a residency in the Ecuadorean towns of Portovelo and Zaruma during the summer of 2015; its goal was to give members of our group of collaborating artists and researchers first-hand experience of the history and lingering effects of gold mining on the social, economic, and environmental fabric of the region surrounding these two towns. During their stay in Ecuador, members of MRWE had the opportunity to meet with residents of Portovelo and Zaruma, including the mayor of Portovelo and members of the town council, local historians, artists, writers, teachers, and many others, to engage in brief interactions involving day-to-day experience. The participants in MRWE, in turn, presented talks, free and open to the public, in several different venues in Portovelo and Zaruma, about their particular artworks or areas of expertise. The outcome of this process was a series of artworks and texts that were exhibited in Ecuador (in Cuenca in February 2016, and in Quito in June 2016) and that are being brought together once again for this exhibition.
Participating artists: Esteban Ayala, Gautam Garoo, Jenny Jaramillo, Patrick Mahon, Ulises Unda, Gu Xiong
Alongside this exhibition, a conference, Art Beyond Itself: Mountains & Rivers without End, on Saturday, November 19 from 10AM - 5PM in room 100, JLVAC, will seek to extend the discussions around the exhibition’s focus by including another scholar from Ecuador, Andrea Carrión, and scholars from Western University: Cody Barteet, Amanda Grzyb, and Kelly Jazvac, as well as Dianne Pearce from Oakville Galleries.
The exhibition and conference are co organized by Ulises Unda, Andrés Villar and Patrick Mahon.
By installing your artwork in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, you agree to have it photographed and release all rights in and consent to the use of this photo for all legal purposes. Would you like to see your work properly captioned? vrlibrary@uwo.ca
© 2016; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
The Artlab Gallery is pleased to reopen with MFA candidate George Kubresliís thesis exhibition, The Hell of a Boiling Red.
Artist George Kubresli addresses the tragedy of war - specifically the ongoing Syrian war - as his subject. Through painting, George expresses the calamity that Syrians experience, and he explores the depths of the soul to understand the enormous traumas that humans suffer in their various encounters with war. For George, the act of war shows its true form through facial expressions, which mix the inner imperfections of humans with the distortions that have formed on and in their bodies. In the view of the artist, we cannot fully see tragedy through physical form alone. To be able to witness tragedy at all, and to access a true experience of horror, we must understand what humans suffer so deeply, and link those personal sufferings with what is externalized.
The role of nature in the magnitude of this human tragedy is an underexplored aspect of the shadow of war. For George, nature plays a major role in augmenting the tragic effects that war has on those beings who live in the swamps of disaster. Outside of a war scenario, nature is perceived to interact with humans in a role that is supportive of beautifying life. In times of war, nature takes on a completely different character of extremes, so the winter and summer seasons increase the suffering of war-torn human beings. Winter does not take into account the impact on persons who have lost shelter or who are trying to seek refuge across the sea or in neighbouring countries to save their lives. Winter does not perceive those who are swallowed by marine storms and buried on beaches or at the bottom of the sea. When summer hits, high temperatures inflict sunstroke, skin diseases, meningitis and many more afflictions on refugees who are stripped of the most basic needs for living. In an encounter with war, nature often becomes the enemy as well. George has worked to reveal these aspects through colour - through divergences between cool and warm colours, through alterations and variances between hot and cold colours - and through the reactive qualities of condensed and rapid brushstrokes. His portraiture and landscape works attempt to reveal what is typically hidden.
This exhibition runs from August 13 - August 27, by appointment only. Contact artlab@uwo.ca to schedule your visit. Please note non-medical face coverings are required and you will be asked to complete a questionnaire before entering the gallery.
Artlab Gallery
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
London, ON, Canada
Twitter: @westernuVisArts
Instagram: @westernuVisArts
artlab@uwo.ca
© 2020; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
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
© 2022; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
No Thanks, Just the Cheque - Practicum Exhibition
March 29 - April 8, 2021
“Did you save any room for dessert over here?”
We’re confronted by the question that imposes the end of our four-year feast. A question that acknowledges the end of four years of development, four years of discovery, four years of community. We’ve come this far knowing with certainty that we would end up here, confronted with this decision. It’s now that we know with absolute certainty, that we can answer this question confidently.
“No Thanks, Just the Cheque.”
This year’s Practicum Class exhibition, No Thanks, Just the Cheque, accumulates recent works of 21 artists created during the 2020/2021 term. This exhibition also serves as the cumulation of the work that these artists have put into developing their individual practices over the course of their experiences in the Bachelor of Fine Art’s program. No Thanks, Just the Cheque signifies the end of a journey taken into the BFA program.
Tia Bates, Laura Butler, Natalie Chevalier, Peter Dickson, Rachel Elias, Sam Erdelyi, Skye Gibson, Hualei Gu, Aisha Hassen, Kaitlyn Hwang, Jimin Lee, Mackenzie Smith, Ashley Staines, Lili Thornton-Nickerson, Helia Trinh, Felicia Vosberg, Sam Wagter, Jade Williamson, Janelle Wilson, Courtney Wong, Joy Zheng
View a digital version of the exhibition's complementary catalogue, No Thanks, Just the Cheque.
Due to COVID-19 safety measures, the Artlab Gallery and Cohen Commons will be operating virtually. In-person visits are not permitted at this time. We will be posting exhibition documentation, videos, and virtual walk-throughs on the Artlab's website.
Artlab Gallery & Cohen Commons
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2021; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Most learning games focus on teaching educational standards, but games and game development can also help players build empathy and challenge stereotypes. This two part mini-talk discussed current research into social emotional learning through games, why games that promote social emotional learning are important, and how the Smithsonian and other museums are addressing critical issues related to emotional intelligence. With James Collins (Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access), Bradford Lewis (Corporation for National and Community Service), and Cody Coltharp (Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garder ARTLAB+).
Photo Credit: Michelle Auyoung
Vernissage: 26. September 2014, 20 Uhr
Laufzeit: 27. September – 30. November 2014
Öffnungszeiten: Fr-So, 14-18 Uhr (und nach Vereinbarung), 31.10. bis 21 Uhr geöffnet.
Sonntag, 28. September, 15 Uhr - Künstleringespräch
Sonntag, 30. November, 15 Uhr - Workshop mit Anna Dumitriu
Die dritte Ausstellung der Reihe [macro]biologies & [micro]biologies wird in Form einer Soloausstellung die britische Künstlerin Anna Dumitriu vorstellen, die sich in ihren Arbeiten im Bereich Kunst und Naturwissenschaft sowohl historischen Narrativen und avantgardistischen biomedizinischen Forschungsfragen widmet als auch mit großem Interesse ethische Aspekte thematisiert.
Dumitriu ist sehr bekannt geworden durch ihre Arbeiten The VRSA Dress und The MRSA Quilt , die beide aus dem sogenannten 'Superbazillus' gemacht wurden. Für diese Arbeiten hat Dumitriu Bakterien auf Textilien wachsen lassen und benutzte dann natürliche und klinische Antibiotika, um mit diesen Muster entstehen zu lassen (vor der Ausstellung selbstverständlich sterilisiert).
„Normal Flora“ ist eine Untersuchung allgegenwärtiger Bakterien, Schimmel und Pilze, die einen wesentlichen Teil unseres komplexen Ökosystems um uns herum ausmachen – unserer Körper, unserer Heimstätten sowie unseres Planeten. Bed and Chair Flora umfasst einen bearbeiteten Stuhl, in welchen Abbildungen von Bakterien geschnitzt wurden, die sich ursprünglich bei ihm angesiedelt haben. Die gemeinschaftlich entstandene Häkelarbeit geht auf elektronenmikroskopische Bilder jener Bakterien zurück, die im Bett der Künstlerin gefunden wurden.
Bakterien tragen aufwendige Kommunikationsfähigkeiten in sich, die heutzutage als eine Form sozialer Intelligenz untersucht werden. Dies wird in der Arbeit The Communicating Bacteria Dress erforscht. Dumitriu verbindet in diesem Zusammenhang die Bereiche Bio Art, historische textile Techniken, wie zum Bespiel die sogen. Weißstickerei, und 3D Video Mapping. Dabei haben sich die verwendeten Stoffe verfärbt, indem pigmentierte Bakterien ihre Farbe änderten, sobald sie Kommunikationssignale ausgesendet oder empfangen haben.
Die Ausstellung wird auch Arbeiten ihrer Serie Romantic Disease zeigen, welche die Geschichte der Krankheit Tuberkulose (TB) aus künstlerischer, sozialer sowie wissenschaftlicher Perspektive untersucht. Dabei werden literarische Bezüge zu TB und Aspekte des Aberglaubens hinsichtlich der Krankheit beleuchtet, aber auch die Entwicklung der Antibiotika und jüngste Forschungsergebnisse über die Erbgut-Entschlüsselung von Mykobakterien zur Debatte gestellt. Dumitriu hat mit ForscherInnen des “Modernising Medical Microbiology Project“ zusammen gearbeitet, um neue Arbeiten in Verbindung mit dieser medizinisch sowie kulturell signifikanten Krankheit entstehen zu lassen.
Anna Dumitriu ist derzeit Artist in Residence im Kontext des Projekts „Modernising Medical Microbiology Project“ an der University of Oxford und Visiting Research Fellow: Artist in Residence an der University of Hertfordshire.
THRESHOLDS AND INVENTORIES
MFA SEMINAR
October 6 - 20, 2022
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7 / 5-7PM
Thresholds and Inventories immerses viewers into the intersection of diverse practices by second-year MFA candidates Masha Kouznetsova, Rylee Rumble, Alyssa Sweeney, and Sam Wagter. Comprised of various mediums, this exhibition acts as a threshold for discussion, inviting viewers to investigate their own personal inventories?—bodily phenomena, memories, experiences, environments, and identities.
Masha Kouznetsova records her immediate environment and transitions between places using pinhole photography, mark-making, found and handmade objects, and audio tapes. Through these recording processes, she explores her relationship to migration, time, place and no-placeness, distance, and wayfinding. The Fall MFA Exhibition features Masha’s studies for an installation that meditates on palindromes, continuity, silence, and search.
Rylee Rumble is a painter specializing in abstract expressionism, focusing on exploring and archiving her experiences with mental health through colour. Working closely with personal items she sees and uses in her daily life, the work shown in this exhibition is a physical archive for these items, as one day, they will no longer exist.
Alyssa Sweeney’s work focuses on night photography looking at themes of psychogeography. Engaging with the experiences within the city, thinking about the forgotten, discarded, and marginalized aspects of the urban environment.
Sam Wagter is a multimedia artist working in video, animation, digital renders/ images, and glitch. Her practice navigates the undefined space between binaries, rooted in ‘glitch’ as defined by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism. She invites others to explore queerness and identity in the unexpected errors and glitches through computers, body, and virtual spaces.
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2022; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
April 19-May 7, 2021, 2021
This series of paintings began as an effort to locate myself during a period of profound grief over the loss of my son, Ellis. Up until that time, I had been making drawings on the wall, but then loss tore through my life and suddenly the floor became my new workspace. I no longer stood erect to work on a vertical plane, but instead from my knees working horizontally. I folded paper into trays to contain coloured water and would wait for days to see what kind of patterns the evaporating water would leave behind on the paper’s surface. I would often spend time watching the suspended pigments mix in the water or sit and stare at tinted reflections of myself and my surroundings in the chromatic pools. I was becoming more of an observer as I distanced myself from the work. I allowed the materials I was using to act more autonomously under the laws of nature.
As the application of paint to paper was now mediated by evaporation over time, I realized that my hand was no longer directly involved in manipulating paint strokes but was rather most present in the folds I pressed into the papers’ surface.
A fold is a weakness, a wound running along the entire length of the substrate. A fold is a doubling over, a bend that leaves a scar. A fold is a condition that forces one thing to become something else. A fold is an awakening, showing an object in the second dimension that there is perhaps a third.
Through evaporation, these paintings are what remains of an imminent departure, something akin to empty containers, wrappers or envelopes. The water responsible for the markings left behind on the paper surface is removed, its invisible presence as vapour now called to mind through trace.
While these paintings were unquestionably born out of the numbness of grief after loss, they are also manifestations of a long-standing interest in process-based actions and outcomes. These paintings are a way of poking and prodding the environment around me in order to locate myself in a world in flux.
About the Artist
London artist Matt W. Brown explores incidence, colour, and implications of transition through works on paper. He has exhibited in Halifax at the Nova Scotia Archives, Anna Leonowens Gallery, RBC Waterside Centre, Eyelevel Gallery, and the Visual Arts Nova Scotia Corridor Gallery. In London, his work has been featured at Fringe Gallery, Forest City Gallery, Artlab Gallery, and McIntosh Gallery.
Brown received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design with a major in painting. He is now completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Department of Visual Art, Western University.
---Following Ontario's provincewide lockdown (beginning on April 3), the Artlab will be closed to in-person appointments. For ongoing coverage of COVID-19 protocol and operations at Western University, visit www.uwo.ca/coronavirus/
Artlab Gallery & Cohen Commons
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2021; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Paint as Material Contingency
Exhibition in the Artlab by the Third Year Advanced Painting class (VAS 3310).
October 31 - November 14, 2014
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 6, 2014,
Participating student artists from VAS 3310
Sophie Bisnaire
Danielle Brideau
Michelle Bunton
Tabitha Chan
Christie Constantine
Cayley Cowan
Emilie Currie
Yara El Safi
Corry Faulkner
Angela Ferreira
Jacob Freeman
Brenda Fuhrman
Ella Gonzales
Karissa Hill
Alexandra Kalifer
Sophia Lloyd-Jones
Rowan McCormick
Jasmine Park
Faith Patrick
Andrea Polzer
Robin Scott
Abby Vincent
Daniel Welsh
Carina Wharton
By installing your artwork in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, you agree to have it photographed and release all rights in and consent to the use of this photo for all legal purposes. Would you like to see your work properly captioned? vrlibrary@uwo.ca
© 2014; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Artlab Gallery, Western University, London, ON
Over thirty works of art and scholarly publications by Faculty and Staff members from Western’s Department of Visual Arts.
Oct. 27- November 10, 2016
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 3rd, 5-7PM
Remarks:6pm
Performance by Christof Migone 6:15pm
The Faculty & Staff exhibition, a line has two sides borrows its name from the Oblique Strategies project (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975. The project produced a boxed set of 100 playing cards each containing a one-line phrase intended to assist artists and musicians break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. 1
Framed within the context of this exhibition, a line has two sides provides audiences with a glimpse into the research, writing and artworks of over 30 individuals who embody the teaching and technical practices fostered within the Department of Visual Arts, Western
Participating Faculty & Staff
Cody Barteet
Sarah Bassnett
Ron Benner
Dickson Bou
Parker Branch
Kathy Brush
Colin Carney
Jessica Desparois
Micheal Farnan
Wyn Gelenyse
Sky Glabush
John Hatch
Patrick Howlett
Kelly Jazvac
Tricia Johnson
Neil Klassen
Madeline Lennon
Patrick Mahon
David Merritt
Christof Migone
Kim Moodie
Kim Neudorf
Kirsty Robertson
Judith Rodger
Andrew Silk
Geordie Shepherd
Daniela Sneppova
Christine Sprengler
Gabriella Solti
Kelly Wood
Curated by Susan Edelstein
1. Taylor, Gregory. “Introduction.” A Primer On Oblique Strategizing.1997. Accessed August 20, 2016. www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/OSintro.html
By installing your artwork in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, you agree to have it photographed and release all rights in and consent to the use of this photo for all legal purposes. Would you like to see your work properly captioned? vrlibrary@uwo.ca
© 2016; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
The Waterside Workers' Association Wallaroo banner dating from 1909, was restored and conserved by Artlab Australia over 3 years between 2004 and 2006 with funding from the History Trust of South Australia.
This magnificent banner represents the important presence of the Waterside Workers' union in what was a major South Australian port from the 1860s when the mining of copper began on the Yorke Peninsula. Copper smelters were built close to the port and there were many unionists on the wharves. Wallaroo Waterside Workers Hall in Wildman Street was officially opened on 24 January 1908.
The banner was designed and completed in 1909 by artist and signwriter Chris McLennan of Port Adelaide ready for use for the local Eight Hours demonstration on 1 September that year. It is made of turkey twill with silk trimmings and measures 11 by 10 feet. (3.3m x 3 m)
This is the upper part of the obverse side with the union's name and the clasped hands symbolising union. Below this was originally an image of the Wallaroo Jetty but this was severely damaged.
The reverse side is allegorical in design with three female figures representing Liberty, Justice and Prosperity, and Labor, Rest and Recreation on the columns while there is the Commonwealth Coat of Arms in the centre beneath a sunset sky. Three medallions beneath depict the discharge of a collier at the Wallaroo jetty with shunting horses at work (centre); and an ocean going steamer and a sailing vessel on each side.
Most learning games focus on teaching educational standards, but games and game development can also help players build empathy and challenge stereotypes. This two part mini-talk discussed current research into social emotional learning through games, why games that promote social emotional learning are important, and how the Smithsonian and other museums are addressing critical issues related to emotional intelligence. With James Collins (Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access), Bradford Lewis (Corporation for National and Community Service), and Cody Coltharp (Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garder ARTLAB+).
Photo Credit: Michelle Auyoung
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
© 2022; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
The Other Neighbour of El Otro Lado
Anahí González
August 3 - 20, 2021
The Other Neighbour of El Otro Lado explores themes of Mexican migration in Canada, engaging with ideas of human labour and various indexes of Mexican culture, trade, and economic exchange. With two simultaneous exhibitions in two locations: the Artlab (London, ON, Canada) and El NODO (Saltillo, COAH, Mexico), the show echoes the importance of creating a visual narrative between both countries to decenter the United States narrative concerning Mexican migration.
Working with cardboard boxes from Latin Markets in Ontario as a sign and cipher of an absent subject of labour, González brings attention and critiques to how the system of powers perceives Mexican labour as mobile, multi-purpose, temporary, and disposable.
To see both exhibitions virtually, visit www.theotherneighbour.com
Anahí González is a Mexican photographer based in London, Ontario, where she is completing her MFA in Visual Arts at Western University. She explores alternative visual narratives related to Mexican migrants and labour in Canada.
González received her BA in Communication Studies from the Universidad del Valle de México in 2016. In 2017, she worked as a cinematographer with the Mexican director Busi Cortés for a research documentary funded by the CEIICH-UNAM. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and screenings in Mexico, Norway, Canada, Spain, and France. The Other Neighbour of El Otro Lado is her graduate thesis exhibition. Visit the artist's website.
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2021; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Artlab Gallery at Western University is pleased to present "not bad, considering" the second year MFA fall exhibition. Through material engagements with the digital and handmade, mundane and precious, they have discovered that they are driven by a need to ask increasingly difficult questions for which there may not be definitive answers.
What role do garments play in identity politics? How does one navigate the violent spaces constructed by toxic masculinity? What happens when social aspirations are materialized in veneer? How can we see, and be seen if our vision is mediated by screens? In this exhibition the artists consider how it feels to rummage through basements and unpack closets, peer through thresholds, and step into imagined vistas. not bad, considering what awaits.
With work by MFA candidates:
Kate Carder-Thompson, Johnathan Onyschuk, Lydia Santia & Zhizi Wang
Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 27, 2018, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Exhibition Dates:
September 27 - October 11, 2018
About the Artlab Gallery:
Located in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, Western University, the Artlab Gallery is a vital component of the Department of Visual Arts. Established in 1994 the gallery focuses on exhibitions, events, and projects that respond to social and cultural issues, supporting the research, and practice of students, faculty and artists from the region and beyond. The work presented in the gallery explores conceptual and experimental production incorporating a diverse range of mediums and methods.
Artlab Gallery
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
London, ON
© 2018; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
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
© 2022; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre (VAC)
Artlab Gallery
Room: 128
The Artlab Gallery is pleased to announce Canadian Poet and essayist, Lisa Robertson will be joining us Wednesday October 12th when she will be reading from her soon to be launched book, "3 Summers".
In "3 Summers", Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The ten poem-sequences in "3 Summers" inflect a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time – embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences – can tell.
By installing your artwork in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, you agree to have it photographed and release all rights in and consent to the use of this photo for all legal purposes. Would you like to see your work properly captioned? vrlibrary@uwo.ca
© 2016; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Symphony of Lights: An Exploration of Stained-Glass Windows in St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, London, ON
Exhibition dates: February 8th - 19th, 2021
Artist: Anahí González
Curators: Iraboty Kazi and Anahí González
Editor: Dr. C. Cody Barteet
“Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.” - Desiderius Erasmus
This exhibition explores the visual and aural sensations of being inside St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church in London, Ontario. The parish community was founded in 1864. The present Gothic-inspired church (at the corners of Wellington and St. James Streets) was begun in 1888 and has remained an important feature in London’s Old North community for well over a century. Now part of the Bishop Helmuth Heritage District the church and its facilities are a hub of activity for the community.
The videos and photographs taken by artist Anahí González during visits to the church inspired our explorations of the stained-glass windows in relation to art and local history. Stained-glass windows that adorn the neo-Gothic building connect the church’s ambiance to medieval practices, reinforcing a line of contact from ancient history to our own. At the same time, the dynamic shifting of light based on the hour of the day is a reminder of the ephemeral beauty of our daily lives. We also explore the play between light, sound, and their effects on the visitor with recordings of bells and organ music played in St. John the Evangelist church.
Symphony of Lights focuses primarily on four fascinating ecclesiastical windows created by London- and Toronto-based artists and workshops: Meikle Stained Glass Studio, Sunrise Studios, Yvonne Williams, and Robert McCausland Limited. Combining modern technology with historical windows allows for exploration of the varying styles, techniques, colours, artist signatures, and details that would otherwise be overlooked.
This exhibition is a part of Dr. Cody Barteet’s research program: Preserving the Cultural and Artistic Heritage of St. John the Evangelist, London, Ontario as a Model for the Anglican Diocese of Huron, a project funded by the University of Western Ontario.
Due to COVID-19 safety measures, the Artlab Gallery and Cohen Commons will be operating virtually. In-person visits are not permitted at this time. We will be posting exhibition documentation, videos, and virtual walk-throughs on the Artlab’s website.
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2021; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
June 7-20, 2018
The ArtLab Gallery is pleased to present the MFA thesis exhibition and where is the body? by Tyler Durbano. Durbano’s practice employs hair and silicone as primary materials, using juxtaposition, and assemblage as tools to produce sculptural works that evoke a bodily feeling. Many of the sculptures are created by inserting single strands of hair, one at a time, into corresponding silicone forms, to begin a conversation about labour and queer identity. Referencing modes of drag, and their associated props, the work explores ideas of vulnerability, maintenance of the body, and performance. With this new work, Durbano creates a conceptual entry point through which the deeply personal, yet global, relationship people have to their identities, their bodies, and to one another can be explored.
Opening Reception: Friday, June 8 from 6-8pm
About the Artlab Gallery
Located in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, Western University, the Artlab Gallery is a vital component of the Department of Visual Arts. Established in 1994 the gallery focuses on exhibitions, events, and projects that respond to social and cultural issues, supporting the research, and practice of students, faculty and artists from the region and beyond. The work presented in the gallery explores conceptual and experimental production incorporating a diverse range of mediums and methods.
Artlab Gallery
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
London, ON
© 2018; Department of Visual Arts; Western University