On Saturday, October 1, 2011, Plug In ICA will have its doors open to the public until 6am for exciting Nuit Blanche | Culture Days Winnipeg activities including an installation by artist Sandee Moore: It’s Hard to Have an Original Idea and Not Just Endlessly Regurgitate Other People’s Art.

This work, newly commissioned by Plug In especially for Nuit Blanche and Culture Days, is inspired by the situation of Nuit Blanche festivities proliferating internationally. At such monumental marathon art celebrations there is both a parodic excess of art on display, and arguably art-viewing is (eventually) supplanted with drunken revelry. This installation takes the form of the eventual result of excessive drinking while embracing the need to make a grand gesture in an arts festival — a joke shop rubber barf has taken on heroic proportions, filling— and acutally exceeding— the space, as if to underscore its own importance. It’s Hard to Have an Original Idea… entices with its mock heroic scale and rewards with fanciful and even charming details within its visceral “landscape.”

Sandee Moore proposes to animate social relationships through personal exchange via artwork in media such as performance, video, installation, and interactive electronic sculpture. Since graduating from the MFA program at the University of Regina in 2003, Moore has screened and exhibited across Canada at venues including The Edmonton Art Gallery (now The Art Gallery of Alberta), The Winnipeg Art Gallery, Images Film and Video Festival, The Blackwood Gallery, The Dalhousie Art Gallery, and The Mendel Art Gallery. Her practice has also taken her to Japan, where she was the 2004 Mukojima/Rice+ artist-in-residence. In 2006, she was commissioned to create a video for The Winnipeg Art Gallery, stills of which were featured in the art pages of issue 100 of Border Crossings magazine. Her work has been exhibited at Eastern Edge (St. John’s), Nuit Blanche (Montreal), The Gendai Gallery (Toronto), PLATFORM Centre for Photographic and Digital Art (Winnipeg) and The 2010 Cultural Olympiad (Vancouver). She recently stepped down after four years as Director of Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg in order to pursue her art practice on a full-time basis.

Stella’s Cafe @ Plug In will also be open all night for Nuit Blanche with special menu items. Don’t forget valid Plug In memberships reward with special offers at Stella’s. Memberships are available in the Plug In ICA Art Book Shop which will also be open all night: Artists/student memeberships $25, Regular $50.

Plug In’s other exhibitions will also be available all night: Jayce Salloum and Khadim Ali, featured in galleries 1&2, as well as Farandole in galleries 3&4.

Plug In ICA admission is free and all are welcome.