Art Metropole

01 May - 11 Jun. 2009

REPLYall

Collaborative, Web-based Artists' Exchange

Time

2PM

Live collaboration:
May 1 – June 11, 2009

Daniel Barrow, Divya Mehra, Lorna Mills, Peter Morin, and Shaan Syed

Co-organised by SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and Art Metropole

Please visit: www.replyall.ca

PUBLIC TALK:
Ephemeral Art in the Digital Age with speakers Janine Marchessault and Gunalan Nadarajan
Time: June 13, 2009, 2 PM
Location: Art Metropole

Art Metropole and SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) are pleased to present REPLYall, a collaborative online exhibition with Daniel Barrow (Winnipeg), Divya Mehra (Winnipeg/New York), Lorna Mills (Toronto), Peter Morin (Victoria) and Shaan Syed (Toronto/London, UK). REPLYall is available online at www.replyall.ca – the live online collaboration will take place from May 1, 2009 to June 11, 2009. The results will continue to be available for viewing at the REPLYall site. To cap the exhibition, there will be an art talk with Janine Marchessault and Gunalan Nadarajan at Art Metropole on June 13, 2009 at 2 PM.

REPLYall brings together five Canadian artists living and working in different corners of the world, who will use the medium of the internet to engage in visual dialogues. For six weeks, the artists are creating images, audio, video and animations in response to their fellow artists’ work. Five conversational threads are developing, each with its own shifting theme and character, in an emergent cross-cultural visual dialogue.

Biographies

Daniel Barrow is a Winnipeg-based artist who uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Barrow is the 2007 winner of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival’s Images Prize. Barrow is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

Divya Mehra is a multimedia artist who recently earned an MFA from Columbia University, New York. She is the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships including the Dean’s Fellowship, Columbia University (2007) and the National Film Board of Canada’s Reel Diversity Film Grant (2005).

Lorna Mills* has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s. A founding member of the Red Head Gallery, and Persona Volare, her practice has included obsessive Cibachrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film, and recently, obsessive digital video animations incorporated into restrained installation work. She has also been a Director and Flash game programmer since 1994. Mills recently taught a studio course in Web-based Art Practices, at the University of Guelph, in Guelph ON.

Peter Morin As a practicing artist and educator, Peter’s work looks deeply into issues of First Nation’s identity, de-colonizing through relationship building and speaking one Indigenous language. His most recent visual and performance work includes Team Diversity Bannock and the World’s Largest Bannock attempt, 7 Suits for 7 Days of Colonialism, and A return to the place where God outstretched his hand, which took place at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007. From 2005 to 2007, Peter spent time working in Lower Post BC and Watson Lake YT, organizing community art projects, a digital video camp, and a skate competition for some totally awesome youth. Peter Morin is of the Crow clan of the Tahltan Nation of Telegraph Creek, BC, and currently is living and working in Victoria BC.

Shaan Syed completed his MFA at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2006). Syed has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at Birch Libralato Gallery and Mercer Union (Toronto), Plugin ICA (Winnipeg), Brown Gallery (London, UK), Galerie Michael Janssen (Berlin), and Galerie Brigitte Weiss, (Zurich).

Janine Marchessault is the director of the Visible City Project + Archive which is examining new practices of media art in a variety of urban contexts. As Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, Marchessault is investigating how the information society is redefining the artist’s role and shaping urban contexts. She is also a co-investigator on the Future Cinema Lab, a joint research project with Film Professors John Greyson and Caitlin Fisher, based in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University. Marchessault is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications, 2005) and co-editor of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2007); Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (Routledge, 2000); and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 1999). She is a founding editor of the arts journal Public: Art/Ideas/Culture and a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada. Marchessault has two book projects in progress. Ecstatic Worlds: 20th Century Utopian Film Projects examines collective experiments with film and media that have been driven by aspirations for universality. Urban Mediations: Art, Ethnography and Material Culture, an interdisciplinary collection that she is co-editing, situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies.

Gunalan Nadarajan, an art theorist and curator from Singapore, is Vice Provost for Research at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Arts). Prior to joining MICA, Gunalan was Professor of Art and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at the College of Arts and Architecture, Penn State University. His publications include Ambulations (2000), Construction Site (edited; 2004) and Contemporary Art in Singapore (co-authored; 2007), Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology: Historical Investigations on the Sites and Migration of Knowledge (co-edited; forthcoming, 2009) and Handbook of Visual Culture (co-edited; forthcoming, 2009) and numerous catalogue essays and academic articles. His writings have been translated into Mandarin, Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Serbian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. Gunalan has curated twenty international exhibitions including Ambulations (Singapore), 180KG (Jogjakarta), Negotiating Spaces (Auckland) and media_city 2002 (Seoul). He was contributing curator for Documenta XI (Kassel, Germany), the Singapore Biennale (2006) and served on the jury of a number of international exhibitions, like ISEA2004 (Helsinki / Talinn), transmediale 05 (Berlin) and ISEA2006 (San Jose). He was Artistic Co-Director of the Ogaki Biennale (2006), an international exhibition of media arts in Japan and most recently, Artistic Director of ISEA2008 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Singapore. Gunalan’s current research interests include contemporary painting, art and biology, human-machine interfaces, robotic arts and toys.

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