Plug In is again presenting the Summer Institute — an opportunity for artists and creative practitioners from a variety of fields and creative practices. (Application Deadline: April 6).

This year, the Institute will have two sessions with different visiting artist and curator faculty during each session. Plug In invites applications for participants who will work collaboratively in a peer-to-peer environment based upon their own interests and projects, as well as by exploring and aligning their work with collaborative or group activities which will be planned during the session.

Plug In is pleased to announce that the faculty for Session 1 will be Postcommodity. Postcommodity is a contemporary American Indian artist collective comprised of Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee), Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee) and Steven Yazzie (Laguna/Navajo) that was founded in 2007. Postcommodity combines their intertribal Indigenous worldview with interdisciplinary actions and conceptual art practice as a means to engage in Indigenous human rights advocacy and decolonize the geographies and discourse of the Western Hemisphere. Postcommodity is a proud descendent of the American Indian self-determination movement that seeks to contribute to the larger postcolonial Indigenous narrative of social, cultural, political and economic perseverance.

Session 1 will run from May 25 to June 11 (inclusive) and will be structured around the participation of visiting artists/faculty Postcommodity, visiting curator Candice Hopkins (Ottawa), curator-in-residence Jenny Western and Institute Director Anthony Kiendl. Visiting guest curators will also include Lee-Ann Martin (Ottawa)and Steve Loft (Toronto).

Both sessions will feature these artists and curators playing a leadership role in an open studio environment with approximately 8 other participants who have submitted applications. Selection will be made by a committee based upon artistic merit.

Deadline for applications for both sessions is April 6, 2010 (postmarked). You may download applications by following the link at: www.plugin.org.

Synopsis and Curriculum

Operating on the basis of a centre for artistic research, Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute: Session 1 will offer a program for self-directed individual research, undertaken in a collegial group context. Visiting artists Postcommodity will be undertaking research towards the production of a new artwork to be presented by Plug In in 2011. Curator Candice Hopkins and Jenny Western will be resident for most of the Session, with visits and a presentation by visiting curators Lee-Ann Martin, Steve Loft rounding out the session. Opportunities for reflection, creation and social interaction will highlight the Session.

The Summer Institute will take place at 286 McDermot Avenue as well as artist studios, cinemas, parks, libraries, bars and cafes and will be composed of three weeks of combined practice and seminar/workshop based sessions that will explore a wide variety of creative practices.

The Summer Institute is aimed at emerging and mid career practitioners — and university/college Masters level or post-graduate participants — or equivalent — who will come together to form a cultural mass of experimentation in creative learning and practice. Everyone is welcome to apply.

Participants from the fields of art, art history, fashion, dance, literature, architecture, curating, theatre, science & visual arts are encouraged to submit one page proposal for their own work to be undertaken during this session, bearing in mind the opportunity to also collaborate with others within the context of being a co-participant among up to eight other applicants and faculty.

Fees, Accommodations, facilties

A tuition of $295 + taxes is due upon the first day of each session for all accepted participants. There is no application fee. Up to eight participants will be accepted in each session.

Participants will be provided with space to work at Plug In’s facilities. Facilities will be accessible generally from 9 am to 10 pm Monday to Friday, with variable hours on weekends. Participants may attend according to their own schedules, however, to ensure genuinely collaborative opportunities, participants will be expected to make Plug In their primary site of work during the Session. While attendance is not compulsory, those applicants who do not expect to be available most of the time should consider not applying until they can contribute most of their time to this opportunity.

Accommodations are available for the Summer Institute this year at the University of Winnipeg campus.

Conveniently located several blocks west of Plug In ICA, McFeetors Hall offers artists individual rooms for only $585 for one month.
Built on the north-east side of the University of Winnipeg’s Furby/Langside Campus, McFeetors Hall offers new, modern dorm-style units with individual washrooms. The units are close to transit, shopping, restaurants and entertainment.

McFeetors hall models a range of leading edge environmental technologies to foster sustainability and energy efficiency, including:

• Fully air-conditioned units
  Wireless internet in student lounges
  Electronic, monitored security systems.
  On site SmartCard technology, energyStar laundry facilities.
  Communal kitchens on each floor with stove, dishwasher, microwave and fridge
  Well equiped communal space with television, vending machines and gaming entertainment
  Diversity Meal Services are also available for an additional fee

Foreign residents are responsible for their own health and travel insurance. All material, travel and other costs will be the responsibility of the participants.

Program and details are subject to change without notice.

Applications:

All applications must consist of the following:

• Application form
• One-page proposal of work or research to be undertaken during the session
• Curriculum vitae
• Support material (up to 20 JPEG images, DVDs, printer matter, etc.)
• Self-addressed, stamped envelope for return of materials.

(Materials from successful applicants will be kept for our files). Sorry, e-mail applications are not accepted. For more information please contact: info@plugin.org.

Faculty bios

Raven Chacon (born Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, United States, 1977) is an American composer and artist. He is known for being a composer of chamber music as well as being a solo performer of experimental noise music. As an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, he is also one of the few American Indian classical composers and educators of “New Native Art.”

Chacon has recorded many works for classical and electronic instruments and ensembles and has had many performances and exhibits of his work across the U.S. as well as Europe and New Zealand. He has received commissions from the University of Mary Washington and the ERGO Ensemble of Toronto.

He has a MFA in Music Composition from the California Institute of the Arts where he studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, and Wadada Leo Smith.

He has served as Composer-in-Residence with the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project and is a founding member of the First Nations Composers Initiative (FNCI).

Nathan Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) is a multidisciplinary artist working in the mediums of film, documentary, animation, multi-media installation and experimental and improvised music. Nathan’s filmmaking focuses primarily on Health and Social issues in American Indian communities. He recently produced and directed the documentary film, Creating Space: Culture and History in Indian Healthcare, a case study of American Indian healthcare delivery. His feature length screenplay Heavy Metal Indians was selected as a project for the 2007 Sundance Institute’s Native Initiative and received the Honorable Mention prize in the 2008 Tribeca All Access Screenwriting Competition. Nathan’s films have screened in international film festivals as well as having been featured in the National Geographic All Roads Film Festival and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Film + Video Festival. Nathan is a recipient of the 2005 National Video Resource Media Arts Fellowship. Nathan also composes and performs experimental and improvised music as a solo artist as well as in the band Ajilvsga. His music utilizes the techniques of minimalism and early electronic music to create meditative and focused trance rituals. Nathan’s recordings with Ajilvsga have received critical acclaim from international music publications such as The Wire and The Fader. Nathan received his Bachelors Degree in Art History from the University of Oklahoma. Nathan is of Pawnee, Kiowa and Delaware decent.

Steven Yazzie (b. 1970 Newport Beach, California; lives and works in Phoenix Arizona) received and education with the United States Marine Corps, Phoenix College and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Heard Museum in Phoenix Arizona and the Phoenix Art Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art and the Tucson Museum of Art in Tucson, Arizona. Yazzie has also exhibited in New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Kansas City, Toronto, Spain and the Czech Republic.

Yazzie has been a part numerous exhibitions, and is in many private collections throughout the United States. He has received a number of regional and national grants; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, to name a few. He currently is working with commercial galleries in Phoenix, Arizona and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Yazzie is active with two collectives/projects, Postcommodity and YRGproject. He is one of the founding members of Postcommodity, a contemporary American Indian arts collective. Postcommodity is an on going project who’s mission is to utilize collaborative, intertribal, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to experimenting with conceptual and aesthetic forms of contemporary American Indian expression.

He is one of the founding members of YRGproject, a photography based collaboration project designed to utilize a variety of collaborative, engaging, and relational methods as point of exploration in an improvised and sometimes staged environments. YRGproject is scheduled to exhibit in Los Angeles in the spring of 2010.

While most of Yazzie’s work is painting, he also works in sculpture, video, installation and mixed media. His recent work addresses concerns of urbanism in the Twenty-first century, particularly in the southwestern United States.

Kade L. Twist is a multi-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, sound, text and two-dimensional media. Twist’s work combines re-imagined tribal stories with geopolitical narratives to examine the unresolved tensions between market-driven systems, consumerism and American Indian cultural self-determination that dominate the postcolonial landscape.

Twist uses a variety of media to examine postcolonial signifiers that define contemporary geographies, economic markets, political bodies and intercultural intercourse throughout North America. Twist has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, National Museum of the American Indian, Gustav Heye Center, Smithsonian Institution, New York, Heard Museum, Phoenix, and the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe.

Twist’s installation work was featured in the historic contemporary Indigenous art exhibition “Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World,” curated by Gerald McMaster and Joe Baker. His installation “Just As I Am”has been accessioned into the Arizona State University Art Museum’s permanent collection. Mr. Twist is one of the co-founders of Postcommodity, a contemporary Indigenous artist collective working to advance postcolonial Indigenous discourse through collaborative, interdisciplinary actions. In addition to his visual art, Mr. Twist received the 2007 Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award for his poetry manuscript, Amazing Grace, and co-authored the screenplay Heavy Metal Indians with Nathan Young, which received runner-up honors at the Tribeca Film Festival’s All Access program. Twist graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a BA in American Indian studies, with an emphasis on tribal policy and economic development. Twist served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission Advisory Committee on Diversity for Communications in the Digital Age. Twist is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Candice Hopkins is the Sobey Curatorial Resident, Indigenous Art, at the National Gallery of Canada and is the former director and curator of the exhibitions program at the Western Front, Vancouver. She has a MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College, New York, where she was awarded the Ramapo Curatorial Prize for the exhibition “Every Stone Tells a Story: The Performance Work of David Hammons and Jimmie Durham” (2004). Her writing has been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, New York University, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, and Banff Centre Press, National Museum of the American Indian among others. She has lectured at venues including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, the Dakar Biennale, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Recent curatorial projects include exhibitions on architecture and disaster, fictional identities, feminism and video, and the revolutionary potential of slowness in relation to new technologies. She is co-editor, with Marisa Jahn and Berin Golonu, of the forthcoming book Recipes for an Encounter, published by the Western Front.

Jenny Western holds an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Winnipeg and a Masters in Art History and Curatorial Practice from York University in Toronto. While completing her graduate studies, she was offered a position at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba where she worked as the Curator of Contemporary/Aboriginal Art for two years. Jenny has served as an independent curator for the Label Gallery, a venue for the emerging artist in Winnipeg, and as a curatorial assistant at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. She is currently curator-in-residence at Urban Shaman Contemporary Art Gallery and Plug In ICA.

Lee-Ann Martin is the Curator of Contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Quebec.  She was guest curator for the nationally touring retrospective exhibition, “Bob Boyer: His Life’s Work,” organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2008).  She was guest curator for the exhibition, “Au fil de mes Jours (In My Lifetime)” presented at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (2007 – 2008) and organized for the Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec in Quebec City, Quebec (2005). Martin was Curatorial Fellow with the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta (2001-2004) where she curated the exhibition, “Mapping Our Territories,” in 2002.  In 2003 at Banff, Martin co-organized the thematic residency for international Indigenous artists on Christianity and Colonialism and the Aboriginal Curatorial Symposium, “Making a Noise,” whose publication she also edited (2004).

Martin was Head Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan (1998-2000) and Adjunct Curator, First Nations Art (2000-2004). There, she co-curated two national touring exhibitions, “The Powwow: An Art History,” with Bob Boyer (2000) and “EXPOSED: The Aesthetics of Aboriginal Art,” with Morgan Wood(1999).Martin participated in the curatorial collective that organized “The Post-Colonial Landscape” project (1990-1994) at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  She curated the travelling exhibition, “Alex Janvier: His First Thirty Years, 1960-1990” (1993) for the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay.  Martin was interim curator, Contemporary Indian Art, Canadian Museum of Civilization (1992-1994) where she co-curated, with Gerald McMaster, the internationally traveling exhibition, “INDIGENA: Perspectives of Indigenous Peoples on 500 Years” (1992). She has written and presented extensively on contemporary Aboriginal art both nationally and internationally.

Steven Loft is a Mohawk of the Six Nations. He is a curator, writer and media artist. In 2008, he became the first Curator-In-Residence, Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada. He was formerly the Director/Curator of the Urban Shaman Gallery (Winnipeg), Aboriginal Curator at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and Artistic Director of the Native Indian/Inuit Photographers’ Association. He has written extensively on Indigenous art and aesthetics for various magazines, catalogues and arts publications. Loft co-edited Transference, Technology, Tradition: Aboriginal Media and New Media Art, published by the Banff Centre Press in 2005. His video works, which include AHistory in Two Parts, 2510037901, TAX THIS! And Out of the Darkness have been screened at festivals and galleries across Canada and internationally.

He promises to be as pompous and self important in person as this bio makes him out to be.

Anthony Kiendl is Director of Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, and winner of the 2009 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.  In 2007 he was Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Middlesex University, London. He was the Director of Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery and the Banff International Curatorial Institute at The Banff Centre in Alberta from 2002 until 2006. In 2002, he served as Acting Director of the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library in Saskatchewan where he was Curator since 1997.
He has lectured internationally and has been instrumental in the delivery of several symposia including those for Tate Modern, the Banff International Curatorial Institute and Plug In ICA. His most recent curatorial project was the creation and direction of the Summer Institute (Plug In ICA), an inter-disciplinary alternative art school/residency program for professional artists and curators. 

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