PARTICLE + WAVE: Exhibition

Borders v. 02

by Laura Anzola

Borders v.02 is an audiovisual installation based on the artist’s personal experience as a Colombian dealing with borders that are crossed when one moves from country to country. Borders are visible and invisible – existing as divisions between people in the form of geopolitical lines, languages, cultures and philosophies. Borders cause a restriction of movement, both physical and emotional, that can be hard or even impossible to overcome, depending on where you are from and how that place is viewed within the world. Borders may be easier for some to cross than for others. Borders are made by people, and therefore, people have the ability to transform them. This project is about manipulating those borders by abstracting, modulating, breaking down and reconstructing them. In doing so the artist asks us to rethink our understanding of borders, treating them as something that is malleable instead of rigid, and thus something that can be crossed freely regardless of where we are from.

Eight CRT televisions encircle the viewer, surrounding them with oscillating sound and light that is equally hypnotic and jarring. The content on each screen is created by ‘hacking’ the television – interrupting the electrical signal that normally creates the image, and replacing it with signals generated from an analog modular synthesizer and real-time computer program. By disrupting the normal flow of the signal and injecting her own electrical performance into the system, Anzola aims to subvert traditional concepts of borders, opening them to reinterpretation and alternative points of view.

About the artist:

Laura Anzola is a Colombian-born, permanent Canadian resident, based in Calgary. She works with animation, digital arts and design, and has always been fascinated with images: how they work, how they are captured and composed, and how people react to them. This fascination led her to work with visual arts where she conducts her work with attention to detail and focus on the process of image-making and visual composition. She explores many different animation and projection techniques, ranging from traditional animation styles to live interactive video. Throughout her practice, she has maintained an interest in how technology and arts can work together. This curiosity and enthusiasm have led her to produce many projects that explore the influence of technology and media on our daily lives, our bodies and recently, she is questioning their impact on physical and geographical borders.

Solastalgia

by Brad Necyk

Where nostalgia describes the pain of longing for home when away, Solastalgia names the melancholy experienced when home itself becomes new and uncanny. It identifies the feelings of loss and anxiety felt when our sense of place and identity are challenged, by events like floods or forest fires, new risks of contagious diseases like Lyme or Zika, or unfamiliar experiences like smoke-filled summer skies and too-early bird calls….

What guided this work were my children, Elliot and Mary. I see the world they are growing up in and growing into, and I made this with their futures, their children’s futures, and their children’s children’s futures in mind. I wondered how their mental health and psychological development would be affected by growing up in the Anthropocene: an epoch of global warming, extreme weather events, the sixth great mass extinction, acidification of the oceans, plastics in everything and everyone, and the loss of the natural world. What kind of new anxieties, traumas, disorganized attachments, storm fears, species-loss melancholia, or Solastalgia will emerge as their home, their world becomes unfamiliar?

About the artist:

Brad Necyk is a multimedia artist and writer in Canada whose practice engages with issues of medicine, mental health, and precarious populations and subjects. He recently completed an arts-based, research-creation Ph.D. in Psychiatry at the University of Alberta. His works include drawings and paintings, still and motion film, sculpture, 3D imaging and printing, virtual reality, performance, and narrative writing. He finished a residency with AHS Transplant Services in 2015-16, worked as an artist-researcher in a project on Head and Neck Cancer, and was a visiting artist-researcher at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto 2017-19 and had a studio residency at Workman Arts, Toronto. His current work focuses on patient experience, auto-ethnography, psychiatry, and, recently, the Anthropocene. His artistic work was included in the 2015 Alberta Biennial, and has been shown internationally, most recently in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Chicago, IL; he has presented academic work at conferences in Canada and internationally, most recently at the 2018 FLUX Symposium at the Internation Museum for Surgical Sciences in Chicago, IL. Brad sits on the boards of several professional bodies and is a Scholar at the Integrative Health Institute at the University of Alberta. He currently teaches senior-level courses in Drawing and Intermedia at the University of Alberta and MacEwan University.

Rainbow WaffleKat TV

by Aran Wilkinson-Blanc

Social media encourages us to dump everything online, a constant “unfiltered” stream of activities, shares and opinions. We spend our “down time” watching media, scrolling through social media feeds; we fill our quiet moments with the lives of others. We seek connections that are personal, exciting, informative, or just entertaining. Social media encourages every moment to be shared, shareable, desirable. It exploits our desire for connection, making us wanting more- keep watching this channel, keep scrolling along endless pages, keep interacting with sites, keep liking posts, keep sharing links, keep generating user data that can be used to sell advertisements, gain influence and influencers. The need to consolidate is diminished, the ability to do so while maintaining a constant “media presence” might not even be possible for most.

With this project I want explore our desire to share and connect, to focus on the quiet moments, the space between the excitement, to highlight dysfunctional outcast elements of social expression. How our relationship to media and the technological means of access to content has shifted. We are a society that watches people eat, open boxes, play with toys; we live vicariously through and becomes “friends” with people we have never met and who do not know us. Media creation, expression and consumption has never been so accessible; we have never had so much control over what content we can create and share. What attention and thought do we give it on either side of the media stream? How much time do we spend trying to please others, chase their likes, grow our followings. What are we contributing to this digital community?

Now please like, subscribe, share, and buy the T-shirt.

About the artist:

Aran Wilkinson-Blanc is a new media artist and filmmaker, who is continually exploring the systems and constructs that we have formed and live within. He is interested in the subtle and not-so subtle changes technology has made in our daily lives and the shape and impact of those changes, especially in the areas of communication and forms of expression. The high level of technological mediation inherent in his artistic endeavours has also led him to seek out collaborations with other artists, and work on projects that incorporate different ideas and perspectives.