Electric Fields: Electric Pow Wow

November 25th, 2011

Tonight, from 10pm to midnight, A Tribe Called Red will be performing in the Grand Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC) in Gatineau.The three DJs that make up A Tribe Called Red are Bear Witness, Ian Campeau (a.k.a. DJ NDN) and Dan General (a.k.a. DJ Shub). MTV has dubbed them originators of their […]

Electric Fields: Church Music

November 24th, 2011

Roger Tellier-Craig will be one of the three performers showcased tomorrow night at 9pm at St Brigid’s Center for the Arts a part of Electric Fields. Two other performances will be Martin Bédard and Jean François Laporte. The line-up has been orchestrated through collaboration between Artengine and Montréal based electro-acoustic festival Akousma. Le Révélateur – […]

Electric Fields: Swimming in Sound

November 9th, 2011

Champagne Baths. Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons Bring your swim suit to this one-of-a-kind sound performance at Ottawa’s first municipal swimming pool. Composer and percussionist Jesse Stewart and new media artist Rob Cruickshank will perform at 10pm on Friday 25 November at the Champagne Baths, 321 King Edward Drive. Capacity is limited; advance tickets can be […]

BioArt in Ottawa: An interview with Andrew Pelling

October 25th, 2011

Jaenine Parkinson talks to Andrew Pelling about two collaborative art works that bridge art and science, which he was involved in presenting at the Open Ottawa Libra conference held at Arts Court on Wednesday September 28, 2011. Andrew Pelling is Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physics and Biology at University […]

A Premonition of Artificial Hells

September 26th, 2011

“In a world where everyone can air their views to everyone, we are faced, I think, not with mass empowerment but with an endless stream of banal egos.” – Claire Bishop Claire Bishop is on a mission to re-scribe readings of participatory/collaborative/socially engaged/relational/dialogic art beyond moral interpretations. Her agenda hasn’t changed since her 2004 October […]

Moving among moving images: Philomène Longpré’s Xia

August 5th, 2011

Xia, a video installation by Montreal based artist Philomène Longpré, caught my eye recently at the Gallery 101 show Body Tracks | Traces de corps (10 June – 9 July) in Ottawa. It was given prominence, taking over the entire back half of the exhibition space with the rest of the, mainly video, works all reduced to monitor size. It certainly needed and warranted the space.

Elektra 12: The dubious liveness of laptop performance

June 11th, 2011

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” – Walter Benjamin Frank Bretschneider EXP (Raster-notion) Photo courtesy of Elektra The majority of Elektra 12 performances were characterised by pulsing, glitching, looping, […]

Elektra 12: Playing with your senses

May 18th, 2011

The Elektra 12 festival, presented in Montreal from 4 to 8 May 2011, followed a similar pattern to previous years. During the day was the “international marketplace”: a series of short presentations by artists and administrative types talking about their work. In the late afternoon were openings of exhibitions dotted around town. Then from 9pm […]

Objet Indirect Object

April 20th, 2011

My recommendation (so far) from the Objet Indirect Object series is Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon’s Free-Fall of Possibilities. If you want to see it for yourself you only have until 23 April to get to Axené07 / Daïmön. Whilst enthusiastically trying to describe this work to friends, I have discovered that Free-Fall of Possibilities is actually quite […]

Cliff Notes: Free School 2 / Ecole libre 2

March 30th, 2011

Galerie SAW Gallery’s Free School was touted as continuing education for professional artists with “a curriculum few learning institutions deliver…speaking to artists in practical terms on a wide-range of subjects.” These subjects included: Working with Larger Institutions: Jonathan Shaughnessy; Running a Successful Studio: Daniel Barrow; Community and Socially Engaged Art: Harrell Fletcher; Public Relations for Artists: Nadja Sayej; Qui a peur de l’art contemporain?: Marie-France Beaudoing; La creation d’oeuvres d’art public: Jean-Robert Drouillard.