Summer Institute I: Chris Kraus

For this session of Summer Institute, Kraus will lead a group of participants in a conversation grounded in writing that will range from everyone’s ongoing work to the city of Winnipeg. Activities will likely include the production of a short video, a dance/movement class, city walks and guest screenings and lectures.

As a gathering of relative strangers, the participants will produce individual work influenced by each other’s proximity. The workshop is open to visual artists of all kinds as well as writers, critics and scholars.

Faculty

Writers Natasha Stagg and Robert Dewhurst will join the session. Natasha Stagg was the editor for V Magazine and has most notably published Surveysa novel with Semiotext(e) in March of 2016. She has written for Texte Zur Kunst, Dis Magazine and Kaleidoscope. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Robert Dewhurst is currently based in Los Angles, having received his PHd from SUNY Buffalo in English. He is a poet and the publisher of the chapbook imprint Scary Topiary Press and was the publisher of Wild Orchids Journal.

Chris Kraus’ publications, praised for their intelligence, vulnerability and voracity, include: I Love Dick, Torpor, Aliens and Anorexia, Summer of Hate, Where Art Belongs, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, and Kelly Lake Store. Her monograph, “Lost Properties,” was written as part of Semiotexte’s pamphlet series for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Kraus is the co-director of the acclaimed press Semiotext(e), where in 1990 she launched the imprint Native Agents, which introduced radical forms of writing by women writers. Native Agents has published the work of influential writers such as Penny Arcade, Fanny Howe, Ann Rower and Eileen Myles. She teaches in the Media Studies program at the European Graduate School.

Participants

Kristina Banera is an emerging interdisciplinary artist from Lockport, Manitoba now living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her work often integrates sculpture and digital media to explore psychology of space, the home, and the interrelations that constitute it. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art honours degree at the University of Manitoba, with a concentration in studio art. Banera has been exhibited nationally in galleries, artist run centres and alternative spaces. Most recently she participated in I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone (2015) // Anticipating Distance (2015), a curatorial exchange project based on correspondence between two groups of artists in Vancouver and Winnipeg. In Anticipating Distance at Avenue Gallery in Vancouver, BC, Banera presented the work Where do we go from here? (2015) in which a video takes the viewer through a virtual landscape, while probing dialogue plays through head­phones. Banera has been featured in group shows including: Exposition (Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Ats, Winnipeg), NO VACANCY (One Night Stand/Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge), JUNKHAUS 1: Sublime Consumer Minimalists (Junkhaus) (Media Hub, Winnipeg), BACKYARD (C Space, Winnipeg).

Fabiola Carranza 
b.1983) is a Costa Rican/Canadian visual artist living in Southern California. Carranza holds a MFA from University of British Columbia and a BFA from Emily Carr University. Noteworthy solo exhibitions include: Aedes Hallucinates in the Jungle (Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver, 2016) and El hábito de estrofas (Despacio, San José, 2011). Carranza has participated in group exhibitions at The National Gallery of Costa Rica, 221A, Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak Gallery and Access Gallery in Vancouver. Her first public art commission, Seven Signs, was on view at Waterfront Park in Seattle last summer.

Megan Hill-Carroll is an artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles and a BFA from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where she grew up building houses. She was the 2010 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award winner. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles and across Canada and appeared in the latest issue of the photographic publication Capricious. She has given talks in Detroit and Birmingham, Alabama. Her writing has been published in the contemporary art magazine Fillip. She is represented by Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver where her solo exhibition MunimentMonument was mounted in the summer of 2015. Her second solo exhibition Green Puce was recently on view in Winnipeg at the Platform Centre for Digital and Photographic Art; Jan. 7 through Feb.18, 2017.

Daniel Colussi is a writer/musician from the West Coast relocated to the geographic centre of North America. His writing is focused on contemporary music and musicians. His music ploughs the fields that lay at the negative end of the emotional spectrum. Daniel completes his M.A. in cultural studies from the University of Winnipeg in summer 2017.

Roewan Crow
Multidisciplinary artist and writer Roewan Crowe is energized by acts of disruption, radical transformation and the tactical deployment of self-reflexivity. Born under the big skies of Saskatchewan and raised in scofflaw Alberta, Crowe left the prairies to deepen her engagements with art and feminism, and to do graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. A return to the prairies inspired art and writing centered on queer feminist reclamation practices. Crowe’s paid gig: Associate Professor and Chair in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Erica Eryes 
Originally from Winnipeg, Erica Eyres lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. She holds an MFA from Glasgow School of Art. Through videos, drawings and sculptures, she explores narrative fallacies that complicate the viewer’s understanding of the author’s subjective truth, and problematizes the notion of the autobiographical. Frequently borrowing from the aesthetics of low-budget television, her videos centre around personal narratives and her own performance in her videos is revealed through a disembodied voice or pair of hands. This detached approach to performance is reflected in her recent series Conference Drawings (2016) and Life Drawings (2016).

Esmé Hogeveen is a reader, writer, and editor based in Toronto. In fall 2017, she will be a PhD candidate at York University’s Art History and Visual Culture program focusing on issues of judgment and phenomenological intuition relative to gendered (female) visuality and studying with Jennifer Fischer, Allyson Mitchell, and Dan Adler. She holds an MA in Critical Theory andCreative Research from the Hallie Ford Graduate School at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR), where she received a Merit Scholarship and the Best Research Thesis Award. She also holds a BA in English and Contemporary Studies from the University of King’s College (Halifax, NS) and recently participated in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) and the Gonzago Institute at the Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax,NS).  She is a past recipient of two SSHRC CGS Master’s Scholarship offers. In 2016, Esmé was an Editorial Intern at C Magazine, for whom she has gone on to regularly write, including a recent feature interview with Lucca Fraser, “Feminisms of the Future, Now: Rethinking Technofeminism and the Manifesto Form,” for the Winter 2017 FORCE issue of C dedicated to contemporary feminisms. Esmé has also written for GUTS: Canadian Feminist Magazine, CRIT, PUBLIC, and Franz Kaka Gallery, and is a Collective Member at M,I,C,E. Magazine. She has done two residencies at the Caldera Arts Center (Sisters, OR) and her public reading series Default Design and Designation, conducted as part of the Robotics Residency and Exhibition at the Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax, NS), was named a Canadian Art “Must See.” Esmé’s writing practice frequently involves collaborations with artists and thinkers from diverse disciplines, with resulting projects with Hannah Levin McGraw, Luke Mohan, Matthew Green, and Sophie Kujiper Dickson. She is also a co-founder of the interdisciplinary research platform Reading With ______, which featured a public reading series on lyric metaphor in Toronto during 2016 and is currently developing its 2017 program.

Letch Kinloch  is a Winnipeg-based writer, artist, and arts administrator whose work looks at metaphors of body, disease, and death as a way of thinking through societal ritual and expectation, and “the way things have always been done”. Letch is the founder of Also As Well Too Artist Book Library, a free and accessible space that celebrates, expands ideas around, and gives opportunities to people working with the artist book genre.

Soyoung Kwon is currently enrolled as PhD student at the European Graduate School, in the Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought program. Her research focuses on multi-cultural subjectivity through the lens of psychoanalysis and feminism. She has a Masters in Art, Culture, and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Informed by her identity as a Korean female immigrant, her thesis, miss translation: from fact to feeling to form, documented themes of migration, memory, monument, and image as experienced by Kwon during her time at MIT. She is currently enrolled in an acting workshop based on the Sanford Meisner and Michael Chekhov technique that emphasizes, “the reality of doing” and the psychological gesture.

During the Plug In workshop Kwon will begin work on her new project, The Retirement House for the Roomba. Considering the functional degradation of our machines over time (“smart” electronics being only a recent iteration), Kwon questions what kind of life can be had by these inventions after they’ve passed their prime. Then she asks, “What kind of planned housing does the planned obsolete deserve?”

Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau have participated in many group exhibitions throughout Canada, the United-States, and in Europe, including the University of Texas, Austin (2015); the Center for Books and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago (2015); the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2011); the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2010); the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England (2009); and at Whitechapel Project Space, London (2007). Their recent solo exhibitions include Khiele Gallery, St. Cloud State University, Minnesota (2016); the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown (2014); YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto(2013); and Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto (2012). Their performances have been presented at the Darling Foundry (2015), and as part of the OFFTA festival (2016). Lum and Desranleau are also known on the international music scene as co-founders of the avant-rock group AIDS Wolf, for whom they also produced award-winning concert posters under the name Séripop.

Kegan McFadden As a writer, curator, and artist, Kegan McFadden’s projects blur the line between cultural research and storytelling. McFadden has organized exhibitions for artist-run, university, and public galleries throughout Canada over the last decade, employing a curatorial method that is purposely subjective, in order to reposition received narratives and highlight alternative approaches to discourse. McFadden’s projects, which take the shape of publications, exhibitions, performances, and artworks, embody a theory of thinking through history. He animates his archival research with an emphasis on the anecdotal, and is particularly interested in locating networks of activity that have gone unacknowledged.

Ralph Pritchard is a moving image artist making work about desire, power and boundaries. They are currently writing a dystopian short film about emotional labour and technology. Ralph’s previous experience includes commissioning video content about politics and culture for Novara Media, curating screenings and group shows in London and co-directing a feature-length experimental film. Ralph co-hosts the podcast Gone Clear and is currently a member of the School of the Damned, an alternative fine art MA organised by and for its students.

Jasmine Reimer received a BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver in 2009 and a MFA from The University of Guelph in 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Coherent Disorder and Confused Arousal’ at Georgia Scherman Projects, ‘Two Kinds of Anything’ at G Gallery Projects and ‘the harder softer side’ at The Dunlop Art Gallery. She is the recipient of many awards and grants including Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant, Ontario Arts Council Project Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Award, The Vancouver Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and the Canadian Millennium Achievement Award. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions internationally and included in private collections across Canada. In February 2017, she hosted a solo exhibition of new sculptures and released her first book of poetry both titled, Small Obstructions.

Jacquelyn Ross
is a writer and critic based in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Mousse, C Magazine, The Capilano Review, artforum.com, and elsewhere, and her recent chapbooks include Mayonnaise and Drawings on Yellow Paper. She publishes books by emerging artists and writers under the small press Blank Cheque, and is currently at work on a collection of stories.

Faith Wilson is an artist and writer from Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand), currently residing in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington), Aotearoa. She is of both Samoan and Pakeha (New Zealand European) descent, and is part of the third generation of Pacific Island immigrants, growing up only in Aotearoa with minimal connection to Samoa. Completing a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Canterbury and the University of Waikato, she then completed her Honours in English Literature at the University of Victoria and was then accepted into the

International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria where she completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing focusing on Poetry. She has been published in many literary publications in New Zealand. Growing up within the contemporary art world, she shunned it for many years, but then found it to have an urgency of expression she found the Aotearoa literary scene lacked. She began performing with her mother in a series of performances at Offstage, Common Ground and Enjoy Art

Gallery, and then began performing solo, incorporating video and text-based installation into her practice. She exhibited in New Perspectives, an exhibition co-curated by Simon Denny at Artspace, 2016 and is often involved in collaborative text-based artwork with Fresh n Fruity Gallery online. From then, she has had solo shows OLGA, Window Online, and Blue Oyster Artspace, and curated an exhibition Dark Objects at the Dowse Art Museum, Wellington in March 2017.

Faith Wilson is an artist and writer from Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand), currently residing in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington), Aotearoa. She is of both Samoan and Pakeha (New Zealand European) descent, and is part of the third generation of Pacific Island immigrants, growing up only in Aotearoa with minimal connection to Samoa. Completing a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Canterbury and the University of Waikato, she then completed her Honours in English Literature at the University of Victoria and was then accepted into the

International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria where she completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing focusing on Poetry. She has been published in many literary publications in New Zealand. Growing up within the contemporary art world, she shunned it for many years, but then found it to have an urgency of expression she found the Aotearoa literary scene lacked. She began performing with her mother in a series of performances at Offstage, Common Ground and Enjoy Art

Gallery, and then began performing solo, incorporating video and text-based installation into her practice. She exhibited in New Perspectives, an exhibition co-curated by Simon Denny at Artspace, 2016 and is often involved in collaborative text-based artwork with Fresh n Fruity Gallery online. From then, she has had solo shows OLGA, Window Online, and Blue Oyster Artspace, and curated an exhibition Dark Objects at the Dowse Art Museum, Wellington in March 2017.