Studio Practices: Commissioned Artist Videos for the Online Screen Space

Jim Miller, Jason Baerg, Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, Jorge Lozano, MORTIFIED (Jenn Goodwin and Camilla Singh), Winnie Truong, Shaheer Zazai

Virtual

January 3 – December 17, 2022

Curated by: Vicky Moufawad-Paul

A Space gallery has commissioned a small program of short videos specifically for the online screen space during the pandemic by artists who have recently shown in our space. We hope that sharing works from our community will help us feel more connected. While we cannot gather now, we look forward to sharing experiences in the gallery again.

Biographies

An artist and cultural producer with a focus on community engagement, Jim Miller is recognized for award-winning work in a range of media. As a visual artist and curator his works in the 1980s and 90s toured across Canada and internationally. These include his installation, Poison Pen: A Story of Wrongful Dismissal (1986); and the group exhibition and publication, Issues of Censorship (1985), the national touring project co-curated by members of the A Space exhibition committee. In the mid-1990s he began working in film and video with his longstanding collaborative partner, writer-director Roz Owen. Their recent feature drama, Trouble in The Garden had its national broadcast premiere on CBC in November 2020 and is now freely available to stream online at GEM. Their first feature was the 2012 documentary, Portrait of Resistance: The Art & Activism of Carole Conde & Karl Beveridge. Jims work and friendship with Carole and Karl stretches back to the mid 1980s and their involvements with A Space and the Independent Artists Union. In 2016 he curated and co-organized Public Exposures, a community-based Conde and Beveridge retrospective that was presented at A Space and four other galleries at 401 Richmond. This was the citys first major reckoning with the pioneering work of these Toronto-based artist-activists since their 1976 show Its Still Privileged Art at the AGO. In the Fall of 2020, Carole and Karl invited Jim to join them in a collaboration seeded by one of their own recent photo works. The result is Virulence (2020), their new short video that was made during and grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Jason Baerg is an Indigenous curator, educator, and visual artist. Recent curatorial projects include exhibitions with Toronto’s Nuit Blanche and the University of Toronto. Baerg graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University. He currently is teaching as the Assistant Professor in Indigenous Practices in Contemporary Painting and Media Art at OCAD University. Dedicated to community development, he founded and incorporated the Metis Artist Collective and has served as volunteer Chair for such organizations as the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition. Creatively, as a visual artist, he pushes new boundaries in digital interventions in drawing, painting and new media installation. Recent international solo exhibitions include the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Canada, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and the Digital Dome at the Institute of the American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jason Baerg has adjudicated numerous art juries and won awards through such facilitators as the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and The Toronto Arts Council. For more information about his work, please visit Jasonbaerg.info.

Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge live and work in Toronto. They have collaborated with various trade union and community organizations in the production of their staged photographic work over the past 40 years. Their work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. Recently their work has been included in exhibitions: Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Noorderlicht Photofestival, Groningen, Holland; Toronto: Tributes and Tributaries, Art Gallery of Ontario; Public Exposures, jointly held at A Space Gallery, Trinity Square Video, YYZ Artists Outlet, Prefix ICA, and Urban Space, Toronto; and Bienal do Mercusol, Porto Alegre, Brasil. Carole and Karl have been active in several labour arts initiatives including the founding of the Mayworks Festival in Toronto and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. They received an Honourary Doctorate from OCAD University in 2010, and NSCAD University in 2015; the Cesar Chavez Black Eagle Cultural Award from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Canada, in 2011; and the Prix de mérite artistique from the Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM) in 2013.

Jorge Lozano has been working as a film and video artist for the last 20 years and has achieved national and international recognition. His fiction films have been exhibited at the Toronto Film Festival and at the Sundance Film Festival amongst others. His experimental work has been exhibited at many international festivals and galleries. Lozano has expanded his practice to the organization of many cultural and art events, the creation of aluCine, Toronto Latin Media Festival and facilitating self-representations video workshops for marginalized Latin and non- Latin youth in Canada since 1991 Colombia 2005-2009 and Venezuela 2005. Unquestionably new technologies for the production and exhibition of film and video are more accessible to artist, creating a visual explosion in the use of image and sound in the arts. The emergence of multiple screens and interactive works has changed the way we perceive film and how we perceive linear and non-linear narrative in film and video. In his work he sees the use of multiple screens as a device to speed up the narrative flow to conceptually give sequences momentary independence while serving the practical needs of the whole film. This enactive approach of using dynamic fragmentation impiies the mental ability to grasp something as an invariant under a diversity of aspects and perspectives. His latest works have been using multiple screens in order to achieve larger-scale patterns of meaning to create works that interconnect the brain, the body and the environment (art works) at multiple phenomelogical levels.

MORTIFIED is an experimental collaboration between Jenn Goodwin and Camilla Singh. MORTIFIED is a band that uses tap dancing, drumming and cheerleading as its instruments. With references such as heavy metal music, military drumming, choreographic approaches to the drum kits and the sonic possibilities of pom poms, we create shows with location in mind, and sonic experiences using movement and mayhem, with an emphasis on rhythm and percussion.

Winnie Truong is a Toronto artist working with drawing and animation to explore ideas of identity, feminism, and fantasy and finding its connections and transgressions in the natural world. She has exhibited her work across Canada, the US and Europe with solo presentations at Volta New York Art Fair, Pulse Miami Art Fair and Art Toronto. She is the recipient of visual arts grants from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Arts Council for the Arts, and is a 2017 recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship. She has been the artist in residence of the Brucebo Scholarship in Sweden, and at the Doris McCarthy Artist in residence at Fool’s Paradise. Her cut-paper drawings have been included in the CBC program The Exhibitionists and The Sunshine Eaters curated by Lisa Deanne Smith. Her work is in the collection of The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas, Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, Bank of Denmark, and EQ Bank.

Shaheer Zazai is a Toronto based Afghan-Canadian artist with a current studio practice both in painting and digital media. Zazai received a BFA from OCAD University in 2011 and was artist in residence at OCAD University as part of the Digital Painting Atelier in 2015. Zazais practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora. The digital works revolve around Microsoft Word and imagery drawn from traditional Afghan carpets. Through mimicking carpet-making methods, Zazai creates his own designs in Microsoft Word, where every knot of a carpet is translated into a typed character. While the digital is a process based exploration, the paintings have been an internal investigation into vulnerability and fear. Zazai is a recipient of Ontario Arts Council grants and he was a finalist for EQ Banks Emerging Digital Artist Award in 2018. Since graduating, Zazai has had several solo and group exhibitions such as those at the Capacity 3 Gallery, CAFKA Biennial 2019, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant., Double Happiness Projects and Patel Brown Gallery. His digital works have been covered by CBC Arts in 2018, Ajam Media Collective in 2019 and Globe and Mail in 2020.

Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a Toronto based curator and writer. She is the Director/Curator at A Space Gallery. She has curated exhibitions at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Carlton University Art Gallery, Gallery 101, MAI: Montreal arts interculturels, Latitude 53, Museum London, McIntosh Gallery, Contact Photography Festival, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, A Space Gallery, and 16 Beaver. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario and an MFA in Film and Video from York University. Moufawad-Paul has published texts on several artists including Harun Farocki, James Luna, Emily Jacir, Wafaa Bilal, Paul Dennis Miller, Deirdre Logue, Mohammed Mohsen, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, Juan Ortiz-Apuy, Basil AlZeri, Erica Lord, John Halak, Rehab Nazzal, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Akram Zaatari, and Yto Barrada.