OCAD University

Join Canadian artist-photographer Stan Douglas for a thought-provoking lecture. Internationally acclaimed, Douglas’s engaging work explores social histories played out through a complex, cinematic televisual language.

About Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work.

His interest in the social implementation of western ideas of progress, particularly utopian philosophies, is located in their often divisive political and economic effects. His interrogation of the structural possibilities of film and video, in concert with intricately developed narratives, has resulted in a number of groundbreaking contemporary art works.

In 2013, a major survey of his recent work, Stan Douglas: Photographs 2008–2013, was presented at Carré d’Art — Musée d’art contemporain in Nîmes, France. It traveled as Stan Douglas: Mise en scène through 2015 to Haus der Kunst, Munich, followed by Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

In 2014, Douglas created Helen Lawrence, a multimedia theatre work that merges theatre, visual art, live-action filming, and computer-generated imagery. Since its inaugural presentation at the Arts Club Theatre Company, Vancouver in March 2014, Helen Lawrence has been hosted by the Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich; Edinburgh International Festival; Canadian Stage, Toronto; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; and deSingel, Antwerp.

Most recently, Douglas received the 2016 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. He is a recipient of other notable awards, including the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013) and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012).

Over the past decade, Douglas’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including the The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); Centre culturel canadien, Paris (2013); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2012); The Power Plant, Toronto (2011); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2004); and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2002).

Presented by the President's Speaker Series.

Artist's statement used with permission by Reid Shier.
From: Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Contemporary Art Gallery, Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings, 2002

Photo by Michael Courtney

Linda Coates, Reba Forbes, Christy Kunitzky and Patrick Phillips present installations that challenge and discuss notions of the frame. This construct is re-evaluated through material and spatial explorations of permanence and transition in relation to painting, architecture and institutions.

Clara in the Pines is an installation of five life-size dummies that strongly resemble the artist within constructed domestic and forest settings. Benivolski’s work questions ideas of identity, displacement, family and community. This installation is inspired by The Sandman, a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, about a man who falls in love with an automaton. The tale climaxes with the terrifying revelation of the woman’s real identity, resulting in the man losing his mind.

XPACE
XPACE is a non-profit artist- and student-run centre committed to the exposure of multi-disciplinary emerging artists in a professional context that is recognized within the local and international contemporary art and design community. Their goal is to build a bridge between art and design students and their professional counterparts by offering a platform in which they may exhibit their works and be externally recognized, which in turn promotes relevant programming that instigates public discourse and propels the development of contemporary art and design.

All OCAD students are members of XPACE Cultural Centre, which is a membership driven organization governed by The OCAD Student Union Board of Directors.

Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by OCAD alumna Dawn Stafrace, Scott Ireland and Catherine Telford-Keogh entitled labouriously_.

Dawn Stafrace's site-specific installations reflect her interest in line, the hand, the maker and learning through touch and making. Using hand-worked sticks, sometimes whittled from wood, other times formed of clay or paper pieces, she creates three-dimensional linear textures that respond to the architecture of the gallery and reflect her intuitive responses to the structure of the work as it develops. The works are literal experiences of line in space. There is a definite focus on labour in the handmade quality of the works; Stafrace chooses not to mechanise the process so that there is physical evidence of presence left on the work. This is done partly out of the desire for the lines to be organic, showing evidence of the hand, but also as an exercise in labour reminiscent of the production potter in which the marks of the hand visually leaves time instilled within its parts. The fragility of the material highlights the fleetingness of Stafrace's efforts and time.

The idea for the works in Scott Ireland's exhibition initially came from urban telephone poles postered with ads. Ireland's process involves the deconstruction and reconfiguration of the Bible, pulling pages from antique books and stapling them to plywood in the pattern of Renaissance wallpaper. The patterns allude to past Renaissance artists who embedded Christianity into their neo-pagan art. By combining the wealthy Renaissance wallpaper pattern, with the message and physicality of the biblical text, Ireland's work comments on current changes and differences in culture and society. By 'posting' the Bible, Ireland aims to interweave the sacred into the fabric of life and society.

Employing habitual repetition of symbolic and bodily processes, the orifice-like sculptural works in Catherine Telford-Keogh's exhibition are constructed using materials laden with cultural and religious myths of the feminine, such as hair, fur, textiles and natural materials. Through sewing, braiding, weaving and wrapping - actions traditionally ascribed to the realm of femininity - as well as repetitive additive and subtractive methods, each sculpture references the bodily construction of the gendered self. Drawing upon a drag and camp aesthetic, she uses over-the-top materials to reveal the performative nature of femininity. The work focuses on revealing and disrupting the repetitive and idealized acts that intelligibly feminize the body. The blatant visibility of these obsessively repeated acts, the oddity of the objects as well as the overt feminine material reveal gender as a pariodic performance rather than something innate and abiding.

Dawn Stafrace is a graduate of OCAD and Sheridan College, and completed her Master's degree in the University of Waterloo's Fine Arts Studio program in 2007. She is currently a resident artist at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga. Scott Ireland and Catherine Telford-Keogh are 2008 graduates of the Bachelor of Arts, Fine Arts Studio program at University of Waterloo.

This exhibit features installations by students in Associate Professor Jack Cassady’s Contemporary Media and Digital Printmaking. The work is representative of a diverse group of individuals whose only stipulation for this show is that their installation work contains a digitally printed element.

First-Year Faculty of Design students invite you to participate in their experimental installations from their course "Introduction to Experience Design." This colourful and creative event takes place in the OCAD Great Hall, Auditorium, Main Lobby, Elizabeth and Goulding Lambert Lounge and the Peter Caldwell/Stephen Mader Passage Way.

Come by to applaud our students and support the Introduction to Experience Design Faculty whose inspiration and creative leadership contributed to such an exciting event.