Olivia McGilchrist
Olivia McGilchrist (she / her) is a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist and doctoral candidate exploring how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. She has exhibited in Canada, Jamaica, USA, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Austria, France, Switzerland, UK. Building on her experience as a white Euro-Caribbean and research in the portrayal of her hybrid identity within contemporary Jamaican culture, Olivia explores how this can be represented in VR. Working with Professors MJ Thompson, Lynn Hughes and Alice Ming Wai Jim at Concordia University, her Individualized PhD thesis project is entitled "Virtual ISLANDs, postcolonial hybrid identities in Virtual Reality."
from many sides
Davidoff Limited Art Edition 2016 commissioned single channel video with sound (10min.) Davidoff Art Initiative, Switzerland
The elemental, cyclical ebb and flow of Caribbean waters sifts through layers of inherited histories, painting the physicality of time through light, colors, textures and sounds from nature. This ephemeral audio-visual blend offers an immersive experience in the liquid and fantasy space of the screen. A staged sequence of a contemporary River Mother (or Mermaid) evokes profound connections across the region by referring to the presence of this shared mythical figure embedded within the region’s cultural space.
MYRa: a gift for Rym,
[a part of the “Virtual ISLANDs” project]
Virtual Reality artwork with spatialized sound, 4:00 min, 2020
“MYRa” combines digital underwater worlds with performance art, where viewers remain still amidst a virtual tidal wave, represented through 360 videos and 3d animations which moves around them. This virtual wave evokes the Caribbean’s complex relationships with water: from geographical dependency to environmental precarity. It is also inspired by the loss of a close friend, suggesting the feeling of being submerged by grief. Production support from Hexagram and Milieux Institute, Canada.
Anna Eyler + Nicolas Lapointe
Working in sculpture and new media, Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe maintain independent and collaborative artistic practices. The duo have participated in residencies with Espace Projet (Montréal, 2015), Verticale (Laval, 2018), and the Bòlit: Centre d'Art Contemporani (Catalonia, 2019). Recent two-person exhibitions include void loop () at the City Hall Art Gallery (Ottawa, 2018) and of the mountain and the ravine at White Water Gallery (North Bay, 2020). Recent group exhibitions include the Place Publique festival at the Fonderie Darling (Montréal, 2020), the Athens Digital Art Festival (Athens, 2020), and Sight & Sound at Eastern Bloc (2021).
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La Fable d’OxA 21965 considers material culture within the context of geological (or deep) time. Evoking at once an architectural frieze and an archaeological timeline, this looping video work surveys a computer-generated virtual landscape comprised of 3D scanned artifacts and architecture from the Girona province.
Featuring sites with a rich, cultural significance---from the Coves Prehistòriques de Serinyà to the archway of the Cathedral of Saint Mary of Girona---the video stitches together these 3D models into a palimpsest of human-geological relations. At the same time, the environment is populated with some of the less romantic signifiers of our geological legacy: trash. Fossilized water bottles, cell phones, and selfie sticks pepper the landscape, complicating our relationship to the earth and its resources. Reflecting on the immense ecological (and geological) pressures of tourism specifically (and contemporary life, more broadly), La Fable d’OxA 21965 imagines future fossils of the digital age, and places them on equal footing with the architectural wonders of civilizations past. In this distant future, the artists themselves masquerade in Hazmat suits, scouring the landscape in vain for some unknown (or perhaps, unattainable) material.
This work was produced during a two-month residency in Girona, Catalonia, supported by the Bòlit centre d'art contemporani and the Québec-based artist-run centre, La Chambre Blanche.
We acknowledge the generous support of the Bòlit Centre d'Art Contemporani, La Chambre Blanche, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Claire Scherzinger
Campfire, .mp4 loop, Edition of 3, 2021
Claire Scherzinger depicts the uncanny as a way of resisting systems of power and considering better ways to live within western civilization. Scherzinger is an interdisciplinary artist working with digital and analogue mediums to develop the core of her practice, which is the process of building new worlds. Campfire is a forty-minute single-channel audio/video installation featuring otherworldly landscapes through the viewpoint of a meandering camera. Made in Unreal Engine and Final Cut, Campfire examines the flora and fauna of tropical biomes, the sparse desert of a fallen civilization, and the remnants of extraterrestrial communities frozen in time. The layout of imagery is formatted to replicate a console; a timer counts the passing minutes suggesting to the viewer that this display may be occurring in real-time, much like the fictional ‘ansible’ invented by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Sabrina Ratté
Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist living between Montreal and Marseille. Her practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances and prints. Mixing analog technologies, photography and 3D animation, she investigates the influence of digital and physical spaces and the interplay between these surroundings and subjectivity. She was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award (CAN) in 2019 and 2020 and she is represented by Charlot Gallery in Paris and Ellephant Gallery in Montreal. Her work has been presented internationally by various institutions including Laforet Museum (Tokyo), Center Pompidou (Paris), Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec City), Thoma Foundation (Santa Fe), PHI Center (Montreal), Whitney Museum of Art (New York), Chronus Art Center, (Shanghai), Museum of the Moving Image (New York).
Undream, Video HD, 7:00, 2018
Soundtrack by Roger Tellier Craig
Undream depicts an imagined future where utopia and dystopia collapse, inspired by the photomontages of Superstudio – a major force in the Radical architecture and design movement of the late 1960s. Undream leads the viewer through an isolated landscape, overhung by a monumental structure. The architecture morphs between impossible surfaces and underlying order, interfering with the landscape as it undulates in and out of existence. Swept up in this movement, we are suspended in an impossible abandoned territory between the built environment and the natural world.
Amanda Amour Lynx
Amanda Amour Lynx (she/they) is a queer, Two Spirit, mixed Mi’kmaw interdisciplinary artist, social worker and curator currently living in Guelph, Ontario. Lynx was born and grew up in Tiotia:ke (Montreal) and is a member of Wagmatcook FN. Lynx received a BFA from OCAD University in Drawing and Painting, minoring in Indigenous Visual Culture. Indigenous storywork and socially engaged practices that explore healing and re-narrating trauma are a focus in Lynx’s practice.
Their art making is a hybridity of traditional approaches with new media and digital arts. Lynx engages with an experimental process involving beadwork, textiles, and regalia-making combined with contemporary digital practices, sculpture, installation, performance, sound art, painting, zine-making, and alternative mediums. Guided by the Mi’kmaq principles netukulimk (reciprocity) and etuaptmumk (two-eyed seeing), Lynx’s artistic practice discusses land and relationality, environmental issues, navigating systems and societal structures, sexuality, cultural and gender identity, Indigenous (l’nui’smk) language resurgence, quantum and spiritual multiplicities.
Amour-Lynx’s most recent project (2021) includes developing, launching and facilitating a 13 week program for Indigiqueer, two spirit and LGBT+ youth with their organization, Canadian Roots Exchange. Intended to build virtual community during the pandemic and reduce feelings of social isolation, Virtual Beginner Two Spirit Regalia Making Program allows youth 18-29 across Turtle Island to receive access to genderfluid ceremonial teachings, pow wow culture and beginner skills in developing and ideating their own dance and spiritual regalia items through a closed zoom group targeted towards cultural safety and strengthening their relationship to identity, community and culture.
Their most recent curatorial work includes Shapeshifters at Beaver Hall Gallery (Toronto) as part of the annual Bi+ Arts Festival, showcasing and centering the experiences of bisexual and queer artists, their 2019 iteration highlighting two spirit identity and unique epistemology. Their writing was published as part of grunt gallery’s Together Apart anthology (2020), and revue esse (2020). Lynx also worked as program assistant at Xpace Cultural Centre, a cultural programming hub and art gallery serving emerging artists (Toronto) from 2016-2018. Their artwork has been featured in gallery spaces and publications nationally.
Diana Lynn VanderMeulen
Diana Lynn VanderMeulen investigates mysterious elements of our natural world through the selective vision of magical realism. Remixing techniques and textures, VanderMeulen uses collage, painting, and digital 3D modelling tools to provoke the subconscious and challenge perceptions of reality. Ethereal landscapes are created as effervescent entrances; lifting the viewer into a deeper inner state of mind and prompting a sifting-through of the longings we feel in our day-to-day lives.
Diana is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and holds a BFA from York University. She navigates new digital tools creating both moving and still imagery with highly detailed resolutions. Her most recent work is an Augmented-Reality experience titled Swampy GoGo, which extends from a series of 2D mixed media landscapes. Utilizing new media technology, Diana expands the lifespan and audience of durational immersive installations and location specific artworks. Alongside a collaborative representation with Sky Fine Foods, VanderMeulen has been involved in many public and DIY ventures. She has shown at The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Canadian Embassy (Tokyo, Japan), the Gardiner Museum, and Idea Exchange.
The Gate and The Gate (Journey), HD Video, .mp4, 2021
A 360° meditative exploration, The Gate (Journey) reveals an immersive virtual environment. Extended from a series of 2D mixed-media landscapes, the visuals offer a journey which transcends our sense of presence while exploring reckonings of imagined inner landscapes.
Chris Dorland
Chris Dorland (Canada/USA) works at the intersection of painting and digital media. With an emphasis on examining the ways in which surveillance technologies perceive, record and reproduce reality, Dorland uses a variety of screens, drones and other optical devices to explore the increasingly tenuous boundaries between physical and digital environments, actual and virtual realities.
Dorland has been developing and refining a unique compression of both analog and digital languages into a singular and dense aesthetic rife with both unexpected beauty and extreme chaos. Neither fully abstract nor functionally representational, Dorland's work allows us to apprehend the force of intrusive technologies as they increasingly distort and glitch our understanding of reality. Dorland’s paintings and videos are a haunting meditation on contemporary life that evokes a dystopian vision of the human-built world through the sublimated violence of abstraction, consumerism and technology.
untitled (cloudflare), 2021
06 sec single channel looping animation
H.264
1920 x 1080
Edition 3 + 2AP