Please join Plug In ICA on Thursday, December 1^st, at 8pm for BEACONS, a live sound performance by Andrea Roberts (aka VOR) with visuals by Doreen Girard. Roberts is known for her unconventional merging of sound, image and sculptural forms. Her research driven multi-media practice distils complex systems and experiences into works that often address the ways in which private moments are mediated by larger systems such as religious orders, capitalism or neoliberalism.

Winnipeg-based artist, Doreen Girard will accompany Roberts during this one night performance. Working in the realm of expanded cinema, like Roberts, Girard pushes the mediums she works with to their limits. Materially, she incorporates a variety of elements and approaches, often drawing from archives and using experimental methods, including analog technologies, and performance.

For BEACONS, Roberts and Girard will animate one of Plug In’s gallery spaces where Roberts is currently exhibiting a series of new work called The Stridents,part the group exhibition Superimposition: Sculpture and Image. Roberts’s work in the exhibition including The Stridents 1,2 & 3, and Mirror for Reclusesincorporate her ongoing investment in representing the layered complexity of collective and individual social perceptions in the distilled forms of sound, image and sculpture. Looking at a medieval order of nuns, whose only contact with the outside world is mediated by screens and sound, the strident references the noisy parts of speech.

For this performance, Roberts will continue her interest in drawing attention to the ways sound mediates life. Through forms of navigation and emergency communication like sonar blips, foghorns, and crosswalk signals, BEACONS harnesses the acoustic phenomenon of phase and oscillation to play with the ways we find, and lose, each other through sound.

Andrea Roberts is a Winnipeg based multimedia artist whose research-based art practice incorporates sound, sculpture, text and installation. Roberts’s work combines materials in unexpected ways, experiments with frequency as socio-political material, and often takes up large-scale texts that are printed, laser cut or otherwise applied to a range of materials. A recent recipient of San Francisco’s Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, Roberts holds an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts, San Francisco and a BFA Honours in sculpture from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art, Winnipeg. Roberts’ work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions including recent shows at Oakland University Art Gallery (Detroit), CT International Print Bienalle. (Santiago de Cuba), Send & Receive Festival of Sound Art (Winnipeg) and aceartinc (Winnipeg). A founding member of the feminist artist collective ngtvspc, Roberts also performs as VOR, a solo noise project and was a summer 2016 artist in residence at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation. Roberts is a recipient of a Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Arts Fellowship, Manitoba Arts Council Creation Production Grants, and Winnipeg Arts Council Individual Art Grants.

Doreen Girard is a musician and filmmaker living in Winnipeg, MB. A founding member of the Bent Light and Negative Space artist’s collectives, she performs with the electro-acoustic piano trio, Burden, as well as performing expanded cinema, operating hand-built and repurposed projectors. She has collaborated with many artists and performed at various festivals, such as Vancouver Swarm 15, WNDX, Suoni Per Il Popolo, send+receive, Sounds Like, the Winnipeg New Music Festival and Pop Montreal.

Plug In ICA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of our 2016 and 2017 program, as well as Investors Group and Wawanesa Insurance for the direct support of our youth programs. We extend gratitude to our generous donors, valued members and dedicated volunteers.

For media inquiries please contact: Sarah Nesbitt at sarah@plugin.org or by phone at (204) 942-1043