MEET GRAD EX 2013 MEDAL WINNER, JESSICA TAI (PHOTOGRAPHY)

Jessica Tai at Grad Ex 2013. Photo by Christina Gapic.

Jessica Tai’s medal award-winning project To Shadow a Failure is a series of photographs that explores the pioneering salt print process. Here’s how she describes it:

Stemming from William Henry Fox Talbot’s initial paradox “to fix a shadow,” my thesis work To Shadow a Failure challenges the foundational desire to fix the ephemeral through the creation of impermanent images. Although Talbot was successful in creating the first photographic images on paper, it was several years before he found a method that removed all light sensitivity from his prints. Through a contemporary adoption of the first “failed” methodologies of the salt print process, material anomalies are embraced, subverting the historical conventions around the permanence of the art object, and calling into question the role preservation holds in the maintenance of those traditions.

What inspired you and motivated you to do this project?

When I started creating this body of work I was looking at the very first photographs made on paper over 170 years ago. Thinking about how those original images no longer exist, or are embalmed in the dark storage boxes of museums prompted my revival of this historical process, and inspired my exploration into the value of a “failed” way of making imagery. 

What part of the process of creating this project did you learn the most from?

With such specific historical connotations, I thought a lot about how my work would be read by a contemporary audience. What I learned the most throughout creating this work was how important the relationship was between image and medium, and how in order for that relationship not to be arbitrary, process must conceptually parallel content. 

What part of the process of creating this project are you the most proud of?

Photography always lies at the root of my process, but I am interested in how incorporating other mediums such as sculpture and installation can change the context in which the photograph is read. In To Shadow a Failure I felt that the use of institutional methods of display such as plinths and viewing shelves were successful in creating a museological context. Here one could consider the paradox of an ephemeral piece of art infiltrating a space of supposed preservation.   

How did you react to the news that you won a medal for your work?

Finding the grounds on which I stood behind my use of an antiquated photographic process was continually challenging, especially within a digitally dominated medium. When I received the medal it was a great validation of the relevance of the process within contemporary art. 

What’s your fondest memory from your studies at OCAD U, and what will you miss the most?

Most of my time at OCAD U was spent in the darkroom, working with historical processes. Even though they often fell outside the curriculum taught at the school, I was very fortunate to find staff and faculty that were encouraging and helpful in my learning endeavors. I greatly appreciated and will deeply miss the support and facilities that aided in the creation of my work. 

What are you planning to do next? 

I plan to further my education in photography, particularly in photographic preservation. I plan to continue making work, and have a show in the vitrines at Gallery 44 in June 2014. 
 

ALUMNUS CHRIS CURRERI SHORTLISTED FOR SOBEY ART AWARD

Medusa by Chris Curreri. Image courtesy Daniel Faria Gallery.
Untitled (Clay Portfolio) by Chris Curreri. Image courtesy Daniel Faria Gallery.

Photographer Chris Curreri (Foundation Studies, 1998) was shortlisted for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. The annual contemporary Canadian art award celebrates the work of artists under age 40 exhibiting in public or commercial galleries. Works by the shortlisted artists will be shown at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in November, and the winner of the $50,000 prize will be announced at a gala event on November 19. Finalists will each receive a $10,000 award.

Curreri, who is represented by the Daniel Faria Gallery, recently exhibited new works in Medusa (November, 2013 to February, 2014), a portfolio of photographs focusing on the materiality of clay as it shifts between states of form and formlessness. Curreri, who was taking weekly classes at the Gardiner Museum of ceramic art in Toronto, photographed students’ wet, discarded projects and the recycling of this clay.

The Sobey Art Award shortlist also includes Evan Lee (West Coast and the Yukon), Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier (Prairies and the North), Nadia Myre (Quebec) and Graeme Patterson (Atlantic). Curreri was selected for Ontario. The curatorial panel chose the five artists for practices emerging from personal experience and addressing social and cultural concerns, and for the lasting impact the panel believes each of the artists are leaving on Canadian art.

Earlier this year, Curreri, together with Reena Katz (Integrated Media Medal Winner, 2010) and Jean-Paul Kelly, an Integrated Media instructor, celebrated making it to the longlist for the award. Curreri and Kelly were also longlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize.

Find out more

Chris Curreri

Globe and Mail feature

Canadian Art magazine feature

Sobey Art Award 

Department: 

2014 MEDAL WINNER AARON MACDONALD, PHOTOGRAPHY

Aaron MacDonald at GradEx 2014. Photo by Christina Gapic.
Sunset photo from Fixing a Hole by Aaron MacDonald.

Aaron MacDonald’s medal award-winning video installation Fixing a Hole uses sunset photographs as a theme to subvert the desire of photographers to fix images to something over which we have no control: the passing of time. Here’s how he describes it:

Fixing a Hole is a video installation work that uses the ubiquitously photographed sunset as a theme to rearrange our relationship with a sublime landscape and our expectation of photographs to fix time. Sunset photographs found online are continuously cross dissolved and projected onto a large ground glass focusing screen, creating a fictive unfolding of light, time and colour within the installation space.

What inspired you and motivated you to do this project?

There’s a sense of anxiety that comes along with specializing in photography as an artist, considering the volume of digital photographs currently being produced by everyone else in the world. I found inspiration in rejecting that anxiety by working with photographs instead of taking them. I wanted to find a way to open the sunset images’ dimensionality so the more sunsets I saw and collected the more I was driven to do so. I had this idea that the steady rate at which photos are being taken these days almost keeps pace with life.

What part of the process of creating this project did you learn the most from?

Balancing the immaterial elements of found digital photographs (light, time and colour) with carefully considered material choices (ground glass, wood, black suede) taught me a lot about working with photographs as formal entities that can exist beyond the surfaces of prints. Most of my previous work has been executed from behind a camera or in front of a computer, but to resolve this work I needed to spend a lot of time in the studios mulling over materials and configurations. Only then did I feel like I was getting anywhere, refracting the glaring beam of the sunset cliché by transforming it into something people might look at more closely.

What aspect of this project are you the most proud of?
I’m proud to be recognized for my multidisciplinary (and multidimensional) approach to photography using “mass produced” found photographs. I’m also proud of the looks of curiosity, wonder and smiles that appeared on people’s faces as they entered a room where warm “sunlight” emanated from my work. But more so I’m proud of the faces that twisted up and the arms that flung into the air as if to say, “This is nothing new!”

How did you react to the news that you won a medal for your work?

Startled, proud and grateful.

What’s your fondest memory from your studies at OCAD U, and what will you miss the most?

I will miss the long meditative hours spent making colour analog photo prints. I think it’s a very special thing that OCAD U is home to a traditional colour processing machine and technicians that keep it in great shape.

What are you planning to do next?

I’m doing a residency at a ceramics studio in the country for the summer. I’ll be doing a lot more work with my hands while thinking hard about and researching new photo-based projects.

Find out more about Aaron MacDonald

Video documentation of Fixing A Hole and previous works can be viewed at Cargo Collective.

Lisa Bonnici and Geneviève Caron Talk Photography and Representation

Photograph of an elderly man
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - 10:30pm

Lisa Bonnici is a former art buyer and current artist agent for photographer Geneviève Caron, among others. 

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University Central Hall, Room 230, 2nd Floor Toronto, ON M5T 1W1
Cost: 
Free

Marvin Luvualu Antonio among recipients of the inaugural Aimia | AGO Photography Prize Scholarship

Marvin Luvualu Antonio, Self Portrait #1, 2014
Thursday, May 22, 2014 - 4:00pm

Photography student Marvin Luvualu Antonio has won a prestigious scholarship toward his fourth year of studies at OCAD U. His work will also be featured in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

From a field of 110 candidates, a jury selected three to receive $7,000 CDN each toward tuition for their final year of undergraduate study. Antonio is joined by Kristiane Church from the University of Manitoba and Paige Lindsay of Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts.

Antonio was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is of Angolan descent. His interdisciplinary work explores the topics of identity politics and the artist as subject.

Of this year’s winners the jury wrote, “We’re thrilled to be offering these inaugural scholarships to Kristiane, Marvin and Paige. Each of them demonstrates a restless experimentation and a unique view on the ways images are made and operate in the world. They have embraced photography as an expanded practice — their work includes performance, installation and participatory sculpture, as well as still and moving images. We’re pleased to support their final year of undergraduate study.”

Valued at more than $20,000 CDN, the scholarship program is intended for full-time students — Canadian or international — who are entering their final year of study toward a bachelor’s degree of fine arts in photography at one of eight participating post-secondary institutions.

An exhibition of their work will be displayed inside the Weston Family Learning Centre Community Gallery at the AGO beginning in November 2014. Their schools will each receive a $1,000 honorarium.

The national scholarship program is part of the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, Canada's largest photography prize and one of the largest art and culture award programs in the world. The Aimia | AGO Award provides more than $85,000 CAD directly to artists working in photography each year. A short list will be announced on Aug. 13, 2014.

Established scholars and emerging thinkers converge in Toronto for Architecture is All Over

Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - 5:00am

(Toronto — February 8, 2011) OCAD University is proud to support the sold-out transdisciplinary symposium Architecture is All Over, examining the pathology, ubiquity and negentropic potential of architecture, to take place on Saturday, February 12 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.

Co-organized by Esther Choi, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Criticism & Curatorial Practices and Photography at OCAD U, and Marrikka Trotter, co-founder and editor of Work Books, Architecture is All Over is an international symposium featuring provocative papers from emerging thinkers and challenging conversations between established scholars both within and outside the discipline of architecture. In addition to presentations from Choi and Trotter, the symposium features an impressive panel of experts from around the world, including:

  • Dr. D. Graham Burnett, Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University and an editor at Cabinet magazine;
  • Dr. Jill H. Casid, Associate Professor of Visual Culture Studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison;
  • Dr. Sara Diamond, President, OCAD University;
  • Dr. David Gissen, Associate Professor of Architecture and Visual Studies and the Coordinator of the history/theory curriculum for architecture at the California College of the Arts;
  • Dr. K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at Harvard University Graduate School of Design;
  • Patty Heyda, Assistant Professor in Urban Design & Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis;
  • Dr. Sanford Kwinter, Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and co-director of the Master in Design Studies program;
  • Jennifer W. Leung, Critic at the Yale School of Architecture and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP;
  • Trevor Patt, Researcher and Instructor at the Media X Design Lab in the School of Computer and Communications Science and School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland;
  • Dr. Andrew Payne, Senior Lecturer in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches in the Literary Studies Program;
  • Richard Sommer, Dean, John H. Daniels School of Architecture Landscape and Design, University of Toronto;
  • Olga Touloumi, an architectural historian in training, studying the disciplining of architecture in its marginal engagements with the arts and the sciences, and a PhD Candidate at Harvard University;
  • Mason White, Assistant Professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto;
  • Alexander Hilton Wood, a graduate student in the S.M.Arch.S. Program in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

All contributions will offer new ways to analyze, re-imagine and foment architecture’s paradoxical contraction and expansion as it both affects and is affected by a larger milieu, and is situated within a range of spatial practices.

The first of three sessions, The Pathology of Architecture will explore architecture’s (in)ability to cope with the challenges and contradictions inherent in its own indeterminate identity. Mason White (University of Toronto) will discuss how other practices have poached terms and territory from architecture as a disciplinary agent. Jennifer Leung (Yale) will examine the architectural responses to existential external threats and internal weaknesses, focusing on the strategies of heraldry, camouflage and risk. A psychoanalytic conversation between the architectural theorists, K. Michael Hays (Harvard) and Andrew Payne (University of Toronto) will close the session.

The Nebulous and the Infinitesimal will survey architecture’s simultaneous tendencies to both expand and evaporate. Alexander Hilton-Wood (MIT) will present the case for smallness in architecture. Olga Touloumi (Harvard) will take on the surprising power of architecture as electronic media. To conclude this session, the historian of science, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton), and architectural theorist, David Gissen (California College of the Arts), will discuss alternative architectural approaches to environmental modification that recognize our dawning apperception of our agential extension.

Finally, Negentropic Machines will feature speculative proposals for architecture as it could become. It will include a presentation by Patty Heyda (Washington University in St. Louis) arguing for architecture’s emergence in the waste zones created by large-scale urban infrastructural development, and a provocation by Trevor Patt (EPFL) about the agonistic potential of a forgetful, generic architectural interface. A conversation between the architectural theorist, Sanford Kwinter (Harvard), and the historian and theorist of visual culture, Jill Casid (University of Wisconsin-Madison), will explore how architectural discourse might formulate new, critical and interpretive vantages capable of reimagining the monstrous actions we release into the world as possibilities rather than pathogens.

Architecture is All Over is made possible through the financial support of OCAD University, Office of the President; University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design; in conjunction with the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada and Bohart.

Architecture is All Over
Saturday, February 12, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

TIFF Bell Lightbox
Reitman Square, 350 King Street West, Toronto

Organizer Biographies
Esther Choi is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Criticism & Curatorial Practices and Photography at OCAD University, an artist, and the co-founder and editor of Work Books. She is the co-editor of Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (Work Books / MIT Press, 2010). Her current work explores the collision between empiricism and biopolitics in a range of postwar spatial practices within architecture and the visual arts.

Marrikka Trotter is a PhD student in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the co-founder and editor of Work Books, and the founder of the Boston-based art and design initiative, The Department of Micro-Urbanism. She is the co-editor of Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (Work Books / MIT Press, 2010). Her current work examines the problematic yet productive intersection between aesthetic and geological notions of form and formation in topographical and architectural discourse at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Presenter biographies and a complete schedule of events.

About OCAD University (OCAD U)
OCAD University (www.ocad.ca) is Canada’s “University of the Imagination.” The University, founded in 1876, is dedicated to art and design education, practice and research and to knowledge and invention across a wide range of disciplines. OCAD University is building on its traditional, studio-based strengths, adding new approaches to learning that champion cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and the integration of emerging technologies. In the Age of Imagination, OCAD University community members will be uniquely qualified to act as catalysts for the next advances in culture, technology and quality of life for all Canadians.

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Download this release as a PDF file.

For more information contact:

While the symposium is sold out, members of the media interested in interviews or attendance may contact conference organizer Esther Choi.

Sarah Mulholland, Media & Communications Officer
416-977-6000 Ext. 327 (mobile Ext. 1327)

Fever Dreams: New Photographic Works by Laura-Lynn Petrick

Fever Dreams: New Photographic Works by Laura-Lynn Petrick
Thursday, August 22, 2013 - 4:00am to Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - 4:00am

Opening Reception:
August 22, 8 p.m. to midnight

Curated by Shauna Jean Doherty

Fever Dreams is an exhibition of new works by photographer Laura-Lynn Petrick. A collection of unedited 35mm photographs that document this summer; a kaleidoscope of sun-soaked crystal visions, abstract landscapes and intimate portraits.

Wrought with deceptive light sources, Laura-Lynn's images are as mystical as they are sublime. This artists work seems to occupy a space between photography and painting, creating optical impossibilities through the developing process. This collection captures coincidental moments of transcendence, expressed through a blurred spectrum of colour. Its vibrant hues and washed out yellows seem to imply the possibility of another world.

Fever Dreams is an intimate investigation into the personal and chance encounters of this young photographer, seen through the lens of an analogue camera.

Curated by Criticism & Curatorial Practice graduate student Shauna Jean Doherty.

 

Free

 

Venue & Address: 
2186 Gallery 2186 Dundas St. W. Toronto, Ontario

Exposé 2

Friday, December 6, 2013 - 10:15pm

Faculty of Design Student and Faculty Exhibition

The first Exposé was run as a photoshow and contest. This exhibition will feature work by students and instructors as part of the new Faculty of Design photographic initiative.

 

Free

 

Venue & Address: 
Great Hall 100 McCaul St. Toronto, Ontario
Expose 2 poster with event info, OCAD U logo and warped photograph of woman's head

Piercing Time: Paris After Marville and Atget 1865-2012

Thursday, November 28, 2013 - 10:00pm

Book launch of photographs by Peter Sramek, Chair of Cross-Disciplinary Art Practices

Join the author, see the exhibition, pick-up the book. Get it signed.

The book Piercing Time presents a rephotographic project which has examined the archive of topographic photographs of Paris made by Charles Marville between 1865 and 1877, first under Georges Haussmann and then under the Third Republic. The book addresses photographic representation of urban history from a number of angles through essays by three authors and contains over 450 reproductions of photographs and maps.

During the month of November, the Paris photographs by Peter Sramek are on display in the Anniversary Gallery – which is off the Great Hall (pass through under Gord Peteran's entrance sculpture). If the room is locked, please ask at Security to be let in to see the work.

416 977 6000 x206

www.sramek.ca/marville

psramek@ocadu.ca

 

Free

Venue & Address: 
Anniversary Gallery, Room 265 100 McCaul St. Toronto, Ontario
Piercing Time: Paris After Marville and Atget 1865-2012 by Peter Sramek book cover with photo of a street in Paris

Vanishing Into Thin Hair

Happy Together, 2013
Saturday, September 21, 2013 - 4:00am to Sunday, December 29, 2013 - 5:00am

Opening Reception Friday, September 20, 6-10pm
curated by Patrick Macaulay

Work by OCAD alumnus Alex Kisilevich

Photography can often be illusion aspiring to the level of the mythical. Alex Kisilevich attempts to dissemble those notions, not by belittling the illusory, but by using the falseness of the studio to play on the tropes of studio photography. Kisilevich’s photographs divulge the constituent parts and backdrops of the photograph. The image consists of both the illusion and also the construction of the trickery. Much like a magician who shows how the trick is done while showing us the trick, Kisilevich let’s the cat out of the bag or – to stay metaphorically consistent – the rabbit out of the hat. That sounds risky for an artist, but Kisilevich is a consummate creator and showing the secret is not all he has up his sleeve. The imagery grows more expansive and evocative with the inclusion of the composites. He is safe in showing us the tricks, because that’s the fun bit. Not to hide behind the illusion, but to unveil the whole reason we love magic and these photographs are magic.

Alex Kisilevich is an artist living and working in Toronto. His work has been featured in publications such as Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward, BlackFlash Magazine and Canadian Art. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including a recent exhibition at the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan. Kisilevich is represented by Angell Gallery.

Image Credit: Happy Together, 2013

www.alexkisilevich.com

Free

Venue & Address: 
Harbourfront Centre, Photography Gallery 235 Queens Quay West Toronto, Ontario

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