Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present:

Summer Institute 2023: Slow Wonderings

led by faculties Maggie Groat and Crystal Mowry

August 7 – 19, 2023

This year’s iteration of Summer Institute will be lead by artist Maggie Groat and curator, Crystal Mowry. This year the faculty leaders will work together through their respective cultural practices to guide participants through a collaborative inquiry-based learning and sharing program. On the final day of the program, there will be an open studio.

During a discussion in preparation for Summer Institute 2023, there was a moment where we shared a mutual longing for more of two rarities in our late-capitalist lives: slowness and curiosity. There is, of course, the colloquial wisdom that “many hands make light work” but what might we learn from decelerated labour? What common wisdom might we apply to work with objectives that aren’t clear from the outset, work with value that might only come about through a slow reveal? What kinds of spaces allow for strange encounters? How are discoveries that have the ability to surprise us facilitated by slowness, deep looking, and moving into unexpected spaces?

During this time we hope to embrace radical/critical pedagogies and prompts that share a kinship with the Black Mountain College ethos of self-directed and collaborative learning: What is the kind of life you want to live? What tools do you need to live it? And how can responses to these kinds of questions model world-building and visions for collective futures?

Summer Institute 2023 will be a focus on practice, not product; It will be two weeks of meandering journeys, circuitous field trips, exchange, reading, listening, still, and moving water, a diary, a lesson, questions, few answers, making, and living new knowledge. Together, we want to understand how our commitment to heterotopic spaces assumes a different shape when we acknowledge its impermanence.

PUBLIC EVENTS:

Tuesday, August 15 | 6 – 8 pm | Catalogue for the Gravitron Collection A talk by Nic Wilson

Thursday, August 17 | 6- 8 pm | Faculty Artist Talks

Saturday, August 19 | 6 – 9 pm | Open Studios

All public events will take place at Plug In ICA.

FACULTY: 

Maggie Groat
Maggie Groat is a visual artist who makes images and objects from found and salvaged materials. Her work considers the utility of images, possibilities of alternative archives, and the transformative, ritual potential of reuse, while living in times of climate emergency. Her methodologies are informed by states of being in-between, intuition, acts of care, responsiveness, decolonization, Indigenous Futurism, strategies of collage, and hopeful speculation. Many of Groat’s recent projects, including STSTS (Western Front, Vancouver), Deep time, portals, particles & pulls (Armory Street, Toronto), flowers also gardens, gardens also seeds (AKA, Saskatoon) and The Future is Dark…I think (La Datcha, Project Space Festival, Berlin), engage with public space through considering researched based, deep time approaches to working site-specifically. She has taught at Emily Carr University, Algoma University, and in the role of Lecturer and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto.

Crystal Mowry
Crystal Mowry (she/her) is a curator and collaborator based in Treaty 4 (Regina). Her work often explores the tension between perceived authenticity and troubled forms of representation. As a curator operating primarily within the context of a public art museum, she treats her role as equal parts co-conspirator and translator, often seeking ways to support artists in the development of new, site-responsive projects. Her curatorial work includes group exhibitions such as The Brain is wider than the Sky, I’ll be your Mirror, The Perennials, What the Bat Knows, and Romancing the Anthropocene, one of the three zones commissioned by the City of Toronto for its annual Nuit Blanche event. Her solo projects with artists Maggie Groat, Ernest Daetwyler, and Deanna Bowen have received Exhibition of the Year Awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (now Galleries Ontario Galeries). Her writing has appeared in various artist-focused publications on the work of internationally active artists Shary Boyle, Brendan Fernandes, and August Clintberg. Mowry held the position of Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, collections, and publishing activities for over a decade. She currently holds the position of Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

Guests

Nic Wilson (they/he) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory known as Fredericton, NB in 1988. He graduated with a BFA from Mount Allison University, Mi’kmaq territory, in 2012, and an MFA from the University of Regina, Treaty Four Territory, in 2019 where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow. In 2021 they were long listed for the Sobey Art Award as a representative of the Prairies and the North. Fluent across media, Wilson creates videos, performances and artist books, and writes essays and art criticism. Their work often engages time, queer lineage, decay, and the distance between art practice and literature. They were the 2022 writer in residence for G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography. Their writing has appeared in publications such as BlackFlash Magazine, Peripheral Review, NORK, C Magazine, and Border Crossings.

Bev Pike is a Winnipeg artist known for gigantic immersive paintings of architectural utopias. Amid climate and pandemic catastrophes, she bases her research on three-hundred year-old subterranean shell grottos.

Pike shows her work in public art galleries across Canada, most recently at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Museum London (London), and St. Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax).

In addition, she is the recipient of major grants from the Canada Council, Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. Pike has volunteered for artist groups in Alberta and Manitoba.

Pike also creates humorous, provocative and feminist Agony Aunt columns in artist books that are in international special collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Modern, University of Bristol and others in England, Canada, Iceland and the USA.  She has been a guest speaker from coast to coast.  Finally, as a long-time community activist, Pike writes evidence-based satire for the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC, MSN etc.

Participants

Tomas Jonsson
Tomas Jonsson is a curator, writer and visual artist whose diverse practice focuses on the socially engaged, collaborative nature of the artmaking process. He received a BFA in 2000 at the University of Calgary, and an MFA at the University of British Columbia Okanogan in 2018. He has curated, presented, and performed work in Canada and internationally, including Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto), Suvilahti Cultural Centre (Helsinki, Finland), and MoKS Artist run space (Mooste, Estonia). He currently resides in Treaty 4 Territory (Regina), where he is Curator of Moving Image and Performance at the Dunlop Art Gallery.