Spring 2018
For our 2018 Spring Education Program, Plug In ICA is offering a combined tour of two exhibitions: Przemek Pyszczek: Białystok and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe. The guided tour will be complimented by a workshop with local artist Hannah Doucet on the concept of play as radical practice. The combined tour and workshop gives students direct experience of how personal narrative and political strife can manifest as art in unexpected and sometimes surprising ways; the expression and exploration of memory; the role of psychological experience or states of mind and perception; as well as formal considerations such as how scale, colour and placement affects experience. Students will be encouraged to think about what the term diaspora means in a context where both artists have complex relationships with immigration and migration.
The tour will introduce students to Plug In ICA’s history and then discuss the individual exhibitions, accompanied by the workshop. The tour and workshop can vary in length to suit your schedules but is designed to last approximately two hours.
Przemek Pyszczek is a Polish-born, Canadian-raised artist who is currently based in Berlin. Through architecturally inspired sculptures, installations and paintings Pyszczek’s work traces Poland’s transition since the fall of the iron curtain and also serves as an ongoing journey to rediscover his own past. He obtained his Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Manitoba in 2007. Pyszczek’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently presenting a solo exhibition at Galerie Derouillon, Paris. His work has been included in Forever Never Comes, Museo Archeologico e d’Arte della Maremma, Grosseto, Italy; 1989 Belenius, Stockholm; Sandomir, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; Industrius, Window Gallery, Winnipeg; Building Systems, Berthold Pott, Cologne; and Corporalitas, Open Forum, Berlin.
Naufus Ramírez Figueroa is a Guatemalan and Canadian artist. Working in sculpture, performance, video, installation and printmaking, Figueroa’s work is grounded in mechanisms and conditions of colonialism worldwide, with specific investment in Guatemalan history. Receiving ongoing support from Corpus (2015-present), Figueroa has engaged in a series of performances that he describes as an “attempt to exhaust my interest into the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1990)”. The weight of his subjects is often tempered by a playful material sensibility, forays into childhood, dreams, fantasy and the complexity of embodiment. Figueroa holds a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver with a specialization in media art, and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has garnered international acclaim, with notable inclusions in Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale 2017; Incerteza viva, 32nd São Paulo Biennale, 2016; Burning Down the House, 10th Gwangju Biennale, 2014 and in 2016, he was a resident artist at DAAD, in Berlin. He also has strong ties to Canada, where his work was featured on the cover of FUSE Magazine in 2013 and in 2018-19 Figueroa will present three major solo exhibitions in Canada, at Grunt Gallery, Vancouver; the Audain Gallery, Vancouver; and Plug In ICA, Winnipeg.
File Download: