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Feb
21
6:00 PM18:00
Filtering by: the (notso) short fest
Feb
14
4:00 PM16:00
Place, Pandemics, and the Suspension of Time
Aurora Del Rio
Linda Duvall
Leah Decter
Anne Sophie Lorange
Stephanie Reid
JoMichelle Piper
Shelia Lynch
Sheila Lynch (Chicago)
Leah Decter (Winnipeg)
Aurora Del Rio (Germany)
Linda Duvall (Saskatoon)
JoMichelle Piper (Sydney)
Anne Sophie Lorange (Norway)
and
Stephanie Reid (Austin)
Join us in this roundtable discussion as seven artists discuss their relationship to their surrounding landscape and how it has affected their art practice during this time of a global pandemic.
Ely Center of Contemporary Art is delighted to organize and host these artists and their event.
Sheila Lynch is an artist whose practice examines the body and natural landscapes as sources of knowing.
During the pandemic limits on movement and interaction with other offer a space to explore more subtle energies. Studies look at how connection is enhanced, deepened, contained, changed abruptly. Media include drawing, photography and video.Sheila is also working with Faith Arnold, the Community Writing Project and the SEIU (Service Workers International Union) in Chicago to examine members' individual and shared experiences of the past year. sheilalynch.com
Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist, educator and scholar based in Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Canada. Working from a critical white settler perspective her current artistic projects address social-spatial dynamics of settler colonial contexts and consider the ethics of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty. Decter has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India, and Australia, where she was a Visiting Research Fellow at University of New South Wales’ National Institute for Experimental Arts in 2017. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, Canadian Theatre Review, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and Fuse Magazine’s Decolonial Aesthetics Issue. Decter holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. From 2019-2020 she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University's Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and she currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies in the Media Arts Division at NSCAD University. leahdecter.com
Aurora Del Rio is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She incorporates painting, performance, writing and sound into her practice. She holds a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, and an MFA degree in Art Practice from Transart Institute Berlin/New York. Her artistic research investigates the idea of limit, explored through the impossible compresence of opposite movements. Her recent work on Rituals challenges established ritualistic forms, within the freedom of mistranslation.
Linda Duvall (she/her) is a visual artist based on Treaty 6 land near Saskatoon, Canada. Her hybrid practice addresses themes of connection to place, grief and loss, and the many meanings of exclusion and absence. Her work speaks to the nature of interpersonal relationships, particularly as they are enacted through conversation. Her usual artistic tools are photography, video, writing, and performative responses to situations.
Duvall has completed degrees in Sociology and English (Carleton University) and Visual Arts (OCAD University, University of Michigan, Transart Institute), and is currently a Professional Affiliate at University of Saskatchewan. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Guatemala, Ireland, Barcelona, Shanghai, Slovenia, London, Dubai and various kinds of places and spaces across Canada.
JoMichelle Piper / I approach drawing as a form of meditation on light, breath and air; a calm approach in the face of complex urgency.
I approach walking as a form of meditation, imprinting the landscape to memory that fall like shadows onto drawn spaces back at the studio.
This was a foreign time when we were free to walk on distant landscapes. The revolution is never quiet but the whispered solution will be almost silent.
Anne Sophie Lorange / Born in Boston, MA in 1977. Anne Sophie (MFA Transart) grew up in the U.S and moved to Scandinavia as a teenager. With a bilingual background, she explores different states of interpretation, in-betweeness, and identity through her paintings, drawings and outdoor installations.
The painting and drawing act is to see and be seen, and seeing has the aim of letting us explore what is in-visible to the eye; a language from within, and a human need to meet one another through space. Her work develops through a sudden balance between automatic and construed gestures, like a balance between everything and nothing, an inner necessity to a directness of space giving a sense of belonging. Along the stony coastal area of South Norway, her intimate dialogs appear, and meaning can exist, a simple marking is meaningful. The charcoal lines become visual fragments, drawing a poem of being here. Like a way of grasping the world, both visible and invisible, a deep connection to nature exists with all its complexities and endless potential; a living presence within it; breathing.
Stephanie Reid has been a photographer, short film maker, and montage artist for three decades. She added animation and video effects to her practice in the late 1990's. She regularly exhibits her work throughout the United States and Europe in group and solo shows. After moving to the green city of Austin, Texas early in her career, the focus of her work shifted to the great outdoors. Through art, she meditates on humanity's psychological connection to various aspects of nature. In 2016 she completed an MFA in Creative Practice, with a concentration in digital arts, through the Transart Institute. Her final thesis research and studio project illustrated the symbiotic relationship between geography and culture. Her work can be seen at haikuflash.com
Just before the Covid-19 pandemic, she started a not-for-profit arts organization, Diorama Room, LLC. They are currently offering an online micro shorts film series called, "Tune in to Green". A new compilation, featuring works by video makers and nature enthusiasts around the world, will be offered quarterly. The first exhibition is available through February 19, 2021 at Vimeo.
Feb
7
3:00 PM15:00
The Body and Collaborative Movement in Quarantine
Freya Bjorg Olafson
Claire Elizabeth Barratt
Louis Laberge-Côté
Freya Björg Olafson (Winnipeg)
Claire Elizabeth Barratt (Asheville)
and
Louis Laberge-Côté (Toronto)
The discussion will include concepts of the body as medium, the body in motion and the body in collaboration—yet also the body as transient and ephemeral. Exploring work in which the body seems to shed its solidity and concreteness to shift in time and space as though vacillating between alternative times and spaces to the one being witnessed. Transmutations of the body in relationship with technology, nature, sound, concepts and imagery.
Ely Center of Contemporary Art is delighted to organize and host these artists and their event.
Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, animation, motion capture, XR, painting, and performance. Her praxis engages with identity and the body, as informed by technology and the Internet. Olafson’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally at the Bauhaus Archiv (Berlin), SECCA – SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), LUDWIG museum (Budapest), and The National Arts Center (Ottawa). Olafson has benefitted from residencies, most notably through EMPAC – Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (New York), Oboro (Montreal), and Counterpulse (San Francisco). Olafson holds an MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute / Donau Universität and joined the Department of Dance at York University as an Assistant Professor in July 2017. This past spring Olafson was one of the recipients of the 2020 ‘Sobey Art Award’. freyaolafson.com
Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of Cilla Vee Life Arts—an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration. Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art.
Claire has presented her work in venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow, the New York Botanical Gardens, Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and Art Basel Miami. She has performed and taught throughout the USA and in Canada, Europe, Japan, Israel and Pakistan.
Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts. Her pre-professional training includes the Royal Academy of Dance and the Royal Schools of Music Examinations. She also served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation in New York and holds an MFA in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute with Plymouth University, UK.
On moving to the USA in 1992, Claire held the positions of Dancer for Unto These Hills drama on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and for Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater in North Carolina, as well as serving as a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance and as Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company in Tennessee. Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded Cilla Vee Life Arts and, with the support of arts advocates such as Chashama, Bronx Council on the Arts and Arts for Art, began to develop and present her signature modes of work—including Motion Sculpture Movement Installations and The Sound Of Movement projects. She is the creator of the Living Art pedagogy for performance art. Claire now uses Asheville, NC as her home base and tours frequently to connect and collaborate with a variety of international artists.
Louis Laberge-Côté is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Ryerson University, School of Performance (Toronto, Canada), since July 2018. He is an active Toronto-based dancer, choreographer, teacher, and rehearsal director. An acclaimed performer, he has danced nationally and internationally with over thirty companies and has been a full-time member of Toronto Dance Theatre (1999-2007) and the Kevin O’Day Ballett Nationaltheater Mannheim (2009-2011). He has created over eighty choreographic works, which have been presented and commissioned in Canada and abroad. His research and creative work examines how engagement in thoughtful exchange with the bodily self allows for greater expressiveness, sustainable working practices, and empathic connection. It is rooted in the belief that, by transcending cerebral understanding, dance and somatic knowledge have the power to profoundly transform who we are, reshape our perceptions, and bring us all closer together. His writings have been published by the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Choreographic Practices, The Dance Current, and the International Dance Council Online Library.
Jan
31
1:00 PM13:00
Art over the Border during a Pandemic
Mikkel Niemann, Le piratage de l’espace public, 2020
Mikkel Niemann, G60, 2020
Mikkel Niemann, Bethlehemland, 2020
Christian Gerstheimer, Thursday’s Performance 1, 2019
Christian Gerstheimer, Thursday’s Performance 2, 2019
Christian Christian Gerstheimer, Thursday’s Performance 3, 2019
Christian Gerstheimer, Thursday’s Performance 4 aftermath, 2019
A Q&A with Mikkel Niemann (Denmark)
and Christian Gerstheimer (Michigan)
Mikkel and Christian will present their (notso) Short Fest video works and discuss their personal process of making artworks over a geographic border during a pandemic. This will be followed by a conversation between the two about ongoing challenges and strategies that they continue to confront. Their visit will be followed by a Q&A open to the public.
Ely Center of Contemporary Art is delighted to organize and host these artists and their event.
Mikkel Niemann is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His practice revolves around the relationships between the human body, architecture, memory and history, with an underlying current relating to decay and transformation. He is both fascinated and deeply disturbed at the fact that decaying and transformation are fundamental conditions for all things. Despite scientific evidence, he cannot stop himself from seeing decay and transformation as mystique, especially in relation to the body, memory and history. All his works reflect these notions of organic life, dead materials and human culture degrading crystalized through full color videos, sound recordings, photographs, performances and installations.
After he received his diploma from University of East London, department of Architecture Niemann worked as an architect at several offices in Europe, later he received his MFA from Transart Institute, Plymouth University. He have received the Grand Prix Prize for his work at The Baltic States Biennial of Graphic Arts Kaliningrad and the first prize for a project proposal for reestabilizing the harbour in Reykjavik, Iceland.
His works have been shown at Compound Yellow in Chicago (2020), SUNY Potsdam (2019), North Willow in New Jersey (2017), Powerstation of Art in Shanghai (2014), The One Minutes video series at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam (2014), The Baltic States Biennial of Graphic Arts Kaliningrad (2013), FOKUS Video Festival (2015 and 2012), Danske Grafikere (2011), Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (2008).
Christian Gerstheimer is an artist, curator, and educator based in Michigan. He lived in El Paso from 2003 to 2019 and was a curator at the El Paso Museum of Art for fourteen years. He has taught drawing and art history classes at the University of Texas at El Paso, and currently teaches art history at the University of Michigan-Flint.
His artwork has been exhibited in Berlin, New York, Chicago, Flint, Detroit and El Paso, TX, and is often presented as public interventions because site, context and social engagement are important factors. His practice seeks to raise awareness about the struggle of immigrants and immigration laws through interventions; performances and sculptural installations. His on-going November Project has become more oriented toward social justice and precarity since 2012 as well as increasingly utilizing new, digital media. Whether kinetic, video or assemblage Gerstheimer’s practice speaks the truth to power for the exploited in the US, Mexico and beyond. In addition, Gerstheimer’s Discrete Interventions have been installed in cities throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe.
Gerstheimer earned a B.A. degree in Humanities Interdisciplinary, and an M.A. degree in Art History from Michigan State University, a B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.F.A. in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute with Plymouth University.
Jan
24
1:00 PM13:00
On Art and Friendship
Image credit: Anna Recasens
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, Anna Recasens, and Laia Solé
Nicolás (The Bronx), Anna (Jerez de la Frontera), and Laia (Barcelona) have been communicating since February 2020 between the U.S. and Europe through WhatsApp, making visible some of the aspects of art praxis that do not usually translate as art within the exhibition space: friendship and camaraderie. All three friends share common denominators: they met in Catalonia; have worked with communities; and are interested in art that thrives within the day-to-day. Similarly, they have focused on shaping experiences and situations that defy art as a competitive field, and instead have labored within a context of partnership and familial relationships, where the artistic and the personal mingle and nurture one another.
On Sunday, January 24, 1 pm, Nicolás, Anna, and Laia will convene online, hosted by Ely Center of Contemporary Art, to discuss how On Art and Friendship has evolved through the current pandemic(s), and to engage those who attend in a conversation on relationships, creativity and the now.
Ely Center of Contemporary Art is delighted to organize and host these artists and their event.
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively, through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. He has exhibited and performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Estévez Raful Espejo has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Estévez Raful Espejo holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, where he studied with Coco Fusco; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, in 2011 Estévez Raful Espejo was baptized as a Bronxite; a citizen of the Bronx. elmuseo.org/office-hours and interiorbeautysalon.com @interiorbeautysalon
Anna Recasens is a visual artist, researcher and cultural manager who combines her personal and collective artistic proposals with research and cultural revitalization intiatives. Her projects center around art, nature, urban issues, and social space. She also teaches workshops, publishes articles, and participates in forums related to these subjects. Recasens’ individual and collaborative work has been presented internationally in residencies and exhibitions. Between 2012 and 2017, she founded and directed the Laboratori Social Metropolità, based in the NauEstruch, Sabadell, Catalonia. Recasens is part of and collaborates with art programs and platforms such as Idensitat and Plataforma Vértices. annarecasens.org
Laia Solé’s work explores the social and physical dimensions of space. She intervenes in spaces by actions that communicate and/or transform the dynamics of each site, using resources that are immediate and interactive. Her work often develops as a cooperative practice, working with other artists and local communities. In her recent works, she blends her passion for the early cinema’s visual tricks and site-specific actions. She was an Artist-in-Residence at LABMIS at Museu da Imagem e do Som (Sao Paulo), 2012 and has exhibited her work extensively including at MAC (Santiago de Chile); Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona); The Drawing Center (New York); and the Fundación Chirivella-Soriano (València). laiasole.net