Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is now accepting applications for our 2015 Summer Institute featuring faculty: Nat Chard and Perry Kulper.

July 2 to July 29, 2015
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Deadline for applications: December 8^th, 2014

The Summer Institute is an international post-graduate artist residency for professional artists working in all disciplines and media. The faculty for 2015 will be Nat Chard and Perry Kulper. Both artists are concerned with constructing spatial assemblies where the relationships are palpable but are established more by situational relationships than by formal means. An ephemeral example of such a space would be the territory brought together through the assembly of clues in the examination of a crime. In their separate work they had both been proposing such realms through drawings and by working together found a way of operating in such a space. At first their conversations started to infect each other’s work and at some point this evolved into a collaboration that maintains the particularity of each person’s work while locating that content in relation to projects by the other. The nature of their collaboration is constructed partly in sympathy with the content that drives our work but also out of circumstances. While their interests resonate, their modes of operation and working methods are quite separate. The pair works thousands of miles apart, with Kulper working in his basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Chard in his attic in Winnipeg, Manitoba and more recently in Brighton, East Sussex.

This critical discursive opportunity will take place in Plug In ICA’s new purpose-built facilities, with an adjoining workshop, art research library, gallery, bookshop and café. Plug In ICA is located at the perimeter of the University of Winnipeg campus, adjacent to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and in the heart of an urban environment.

There is no application fee for this program and everyone is welcome to apply. Accepted participants must pay a tuition fee of $300.00 CDN + taxes on or prior to July 2. All other costs associated with participating in this program must be borne by the artist: meals, accommodation, travel, travel insurance, materials and related production costs. Participants must also be Plug In ICA members in good standing, for an additional fee of $25 CDN (artist members).

Access to the facilities will generally be available 24/7. A shared server and wi-fi network is available to all participants, who will need to supply their own computers. Some technical support is available to participants on a case-by-case basis. Because this is a shared studio environment of approximately 1300 feet squared in two adjoining spaces, participants may not use toxic materials in the studio.

For more information, please see: http://plugin.org/summer-institute

Nat Chard is an architect (registered in the UK) and is the Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Bartlett, University College London following professorships at the Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, University of Manitoba and  the University of Brighton. He taught at the Bartlett throughout the ’90s along with studios at East and North London Universities. He has also practiced in the UK. His work is widely published – Pamphlet Architecture 34 (with Perry Kulper of U. Michigan) gives an overview of recent work.

Perry Kulper is an architect and associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning. Prior to his arrival at the University of Michigan he was a SCI-Arc faculty member for 17 years. During that period he also held visiting teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Arizona State University. Subsequent to his studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (BS Arch) and Columbia University (M Arch) he worked in the offices of Eisenman/ Robertson, Robert A.M. Stern and Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown before moving to Los Angeles. His design practices include working on the generative roles of representation, on the capacities of varied design methods in the production of architecture and in broadening the conceptual range by which architecture contributes to our cultural imagination.

Plug In would like to acknowledge the ongoing support of the Manitoba Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Winnipeg Arts Council, The Province of Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism, The Winnipeg Foundation, our donors, members, and volunteers.