Friday, September 16, 2016 to Thursday, October 20, 2016
Forest City Gallery is proud to present 'Interested in others', a group show with new-media works by Michelle Bunton, Lucas Cabral, Jamie Campbell, Christopher Lacroix & afallenhorse, and Anna Eyler. This exhibition will be presented concurrently with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery that also considers contemporary portraiture.
Opening receptions: Thursday, September 22nd, 2016 McIntosh Gallery Opening Reception: 7 - 9 PM (Free shuttle leaving from the McIntosh at 8:30 PM to go to FCG) FCG Opening Reception: 8 – 10 PM Duration of Exhibition: September 16th – October 20th 2016 Workshop/Artist Talk: TBA
Read the Exhibition Review by FCG Intern, Jill Smith here.
About the exhibition:
If identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead becomes participation.
-Hito Steyerl
At its simplest, portraiture might be understood as a representation of one's likeness, whereby the artist attempts to discern and distill the essence of their sitter. Embedded in this definition of portraiture is the notion that authenticity is certain. Interested in others acknowledges the futility of attempting to portray identity through static figurative representations. Instead, the works investigate constitutions of identity outside of external representations.
Further to expanding and complicating traditional notions of portraiture, exhibiting artists focused on how these representations can often be disingenuous. Interested in others endeavors to reveal how external pressures shape identities (the performing of gender roles) and how social media has facilitated the fetishization of these images and promoted misrepresentations and embellishments (online dating profiles, cvs, etc.). In these instances, portraiture can be understood as an embodiment of self, of one's actions over a duration of time—a participatory enactment. Accordingly, this exhibition is new-media centric.
This exhibition will be presented concurrently with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery that also considers contemporary portraiture. Both exhibitions are opening Thursday, September 22nd with the McIntosh Gallery’s reception from 7-9 PM and Forest City Gallery’s reception from 8-10 PM.
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About the artists:
Michelle Bunton is an emerging artist currently based in Prince Edward County, ON. She holds a BFA from Western University, and is a Curatorial Assistant at Oeno Gallery. She has exhibited work in London and Belleville ON, and is the recipient of the Benjamin Noble Scholarship, as well as the Satellite Exhibition Award from Western University. Her future projects include an upcoming group exhibition at Satellite Project Space in London ON.
Rooted in a space of paradox, Bunton attempts to question the mnemonic capacity of technology as an archival medium, dismantling the notion of the video record as an absolute or concrete preservation of the body or psyche. Creating multi-media, sculptural installations from materials such as soap, sports equipment, tape-recorders and tube T.V.s, Bunton’s work aims to mirror a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another while persevering towards preservation. She views the hyper-athletic body as analogous with the recorded image: both engage in the futile attempt to maintain a past and temporary state, and subsequently project the living body beyond its inherent deterioration.
Focused primarily in contemporary media and installation, her practice is further influenced by a critical interest in neutrality, passivity and Quantum Theory’s concept of “potentia,” an intermediary layer of reality that exists halfway between the physical reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the image. For Bunton, technology-based archives occupy this intermediate reality.
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Lucas Cabral is an emerging artist independent curator, and arts administrator based out of Toronto. Using language objects, puns, metaphor, and queering in sculpture and video, Lucas examines the body as a site and object of digestion, nourishment, and sustenance through intimate and sexual acts. Lucas Cabral is a recent graduate of the BFA program at the University of Western Ontario.
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Jamie Campbell was born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario. In 2006, he received a BFA from Ryerson University in Toronto, and in 2012 he graduated with an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. His work has been exhibited and published in both Canada and abroad. Campbell currently lives and works in Toronto.
FEVER COAT is an open-ended collection of images that investigates a rare condition particular to the feline species. A diagnosis of Fever Coat is made when, after a feline’s immune system has fended off a major fever or illness, a substantial colour-shift in the animal’s hair follicles occurs, turning the darkest fur into a smoky grey or even pure white. This transformation of the animal’s coat, an outward sign of inner trauma that might otherwise have gone undetected, only becomes visible once the fever has passed. This visual evidence of bygone sickness, much like a photograph, offers insight into the past—but only, by definition, after the condition to which it testifies is gone.
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Christopher Lacroix & afallenhorse’s practice consists of video, performance, and script works that straddle performance art and acting to explore how an individual can construct, assume and perform their identity. Central to this is his own gay, white male identity—an identity simultaneously oppressed and privileged—and the ways it interacts with others. Often adopting ubiquitous cultural phenomena as source materials, Lacroix explores the cult of celebrity, the pain of aspiration, otherness, and desires of belonging in contemporary society.
Christopher Lacroix & afallenhorse (b. 1986, Edmonton) has a diploma in Theatre Production from MacEwan University (2006), a BFA in Photography from Ryerson University (2012) and is an MFA Candidate in Visual Arts at the University of British Columbia. He has exhibited at Artspace Contemporary Art Projects (Peterborough), window (Winnipeg), and Georgia Scherman Projects (Toronto), and has performed at YTB Gallery, VideoFag, OCADU, and Ryerson Artspace (Toronto). He contributes to the quarterly arts magazine "Carbon Paper", and currently lives and works in Vancouver.
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Anna Eyler is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal, Québec. Working in performance, new media, and installation, Eyler investigates new forms of subjecthood emerging in our increasingly technologized world. Her practice is both an inquiry into collective memory and an archeology of imagined futures. In her recent work, organic and inorganic coexist with and inform one another, calling into question each other’s stable identities.
For Eyler, surface and interior are placed in opposition: the object is stripped bare and skinned anew. Raw materials and geometric forms close the gap between the physical and the virtual while allowing delicate fissures to remain. Unexpected subjects are animated through digital means, allowing the work to veer into the uncanny, and in so doing, straddle the line between reality and fiction, humour and tragedy, beauty and sublimity. Eyler holds a BA in Religious Studies and Art History from Carleton University (2010) and a BFA from the University of Ottawa (2015). Recent awards include the Governor General’s Academic Medal (2010), the Jacqueline Fry Scholarship (2014), and the Artengine New Media Award for her graduate exhibition (2015). Upcoming shows include the two-person exhibition beyond différance, and now at Ace Art Inc. in Winnipeg, Manitoba (August 2016) and the Member’s Exhibition at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, Ontario (July 2016).