The Summer Institute is an international post-graduate artist residency for professional artists working in all disciplines and media. The 2013 edition of Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute invites participants interested in collaborating in works related to art and alternative media. The Summer Institute core faculty, art historian Oliver Botar, and artist Ken Gregory, will lead the Institute along multiple parallel trajectories. Artists, as always are invited to pursue their own practices and interests. Faculty and participants may also undertake research towards a multi-faceted project, including an exploration of works in alternative and new media, particularly as it relates to Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s work and ideas.

Faculty: 

Oliver Botar is an art historian. He completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in urban geography at the University of Alberta in Edmonton; and a Master of Science in urban and regional planning, a Master of Arts in art history, and a Ph.D. in art history, all at the University of Toronto. He has taught art and architectural history at several Canadian universities. Since 1996 he has been professor of modern art history at the University of Manitoba, where he teaches a world survey of art and architecture, modern and contemporary art, post-war Canadian art, and art in new media. He has been Professor since 2011. His research, writing and exhibition curating have focussed on early to mid 20th century art, architecture, photography and media art. This work has been international in scope, with concentrations on Weimar Germany, Hungary, Canada and the United States. The art and ideas of László Moholy-Nagy have been a focus throughout his career. He has lectured, published, and has curated exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe. He lives and works in Winnipeg.

Ken Gregory has been working with DIY interface designs, hardware hacking, audio, video, and computer programming for over 15 years. His creative performance and installation work has shown publicly in Winnipeg, other parts of Canada and many international media and sound arts festivals. Anything is part of Gregory’s palette, and by using cut-and-paste techniques, random juxtapositions, and careful manipulations, he crafts unique art works. These works are presented in the form of gallery installations, live performances, live radio broadcasts, and audio compact discs. A recent career highlight amongst others is the exhibition of wind coil sound flow, a large sound installation at San Jose’s City Hall Rotunda as part of the 2010 01SJ Biennial.

Participants:

Mitchell Wiebe received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr College of Art and Design and an MFA from Nova Scotia College of Fine Art and Design. He is currently in a group exhibition titled Oh, Canada at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where his installation echoes a studio environment within museum walls. Wiebe lives and works in Nova Scotia, where he splits his time between Halifax and Debert. In Debert, he paints inside the so-called “Diefenbunker”, a massive cold-war era bomb shelter.

Aaron Weldon: From Nova Scotia, Weldon studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Select exhibitions include collaborations with Arteles Cultural Centre, Finland; the Casa de la Cultura, Remedios; The Confederation Centre, PEI; Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax; Struts Gallery, Sackville; The Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse; and SUGS X gallery, Chicago. Weldon lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Ray Fenwick: To give language the floor: this is the drive of Fenwick’s art practice and the origin of his studio explorations in video, sound, performance and painting. His work is an attempt to initiate alternative relationships with language and with voice; relationships in which the emphasis is language itself, not just its role as a tool of signification and communication. In 2011, he attended a residency at Struts Gallery, and in the fall began an MFA degree at the University of Manitoba, to be completed in 2013. He is the author of two experimental typographic novels published by Fantagraphics, and has worked as a typographer and illustrator for The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Drawn & Quarterly and others. He is represented by the Katharine Mulherin Art Projects in Toronto. Fenwick lives and work in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Freya Bjorg Olafson is an interdisciplinary/dance artist who works with video, audio, painting and performance. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally including the SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), OchoYmedio/Alas de la Danza (Ecuador), InterAcess Electronic Media Arts Center (Toronto) and the Sequences Real Time Media Arts Festival (Iceland). Her solo performance AVATAR received the Buddies In Bad Times Vanguard Award at the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto. She recently developed new work during a residency at the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Centre in Troy, New York and will soon undertake a residency with master artist, Coco Fuco. She is a member of the curatorial committee for the nuna(now) Festival, Canada and Iceland.

Thea Jones is a video, textile, and sound artist. She received her BFA from Concordia University in Montreal Quebec where she worked at Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies. Jones also completed her MFA at York University. She has exhibited in galleries and artist-run centres across Canada and has been an artist in residence at Broken City Lab’s Storefront Residency for Social Innovation in Windsor, and Oboro in Montreal. Jones’ research focuses on uncovering gestures of memorialization; her video work reinvents demarcations of the past in the landscape and explores the activation of ritual in repetition. Her videos feature a stuttering landscape collapsing between a semblance of synchronicity and chaos.

Juan Ortiz-Apuy, born in Costa Rica, currently lives and works in Montreal. Ortiz-Apuy has a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2008), a post-graduate diploma from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland (2009) and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (2011).Recent solo exhibitions include Gallery PUSH in Montreal, Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, The MacLaren Arts Centre in Barrie, Ontario, Whippersnapper Gallery in Toronto, and Sporobole Art Centre in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Recent awards include winner of the 2011 Halifax Regional Municipality Contenporary Visual Art Award, and Dazibao’s Jeune Tete d’Affice Concours in 2010. His work has also been included Brave New Avant Garde by Mark James Leger.

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Victoria Scott graduated from the New Media/Photo Electric Arts Dept., at the Ontario College of Art. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago within the Art and Technology Department and completed her MFA in 2005. She has exhibited widely at galleries and museums throughout North America and Europe, including the Centro Nacional de la Artes (Mexico City), San Jose Museum of Art (California), the University of Toronto Art Centre (Canada), Kasia Kay Art Projects (Chicago), Galleri Enkehuset (Stockholm) and the 2010 01SJ Biennial (San Jose). Project commissions include the San Jose Museum of Art (2010), Zer01 Art and Technology Network (2010) and Turbulence.org (2007). Victoria has taught at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, The California College of the Arts, and San Francisco State University. She lives and works in San Francisco.

As a material and process based sculptor, Candice Davies earned a BFA Spec Honours in Visual Arts from York University. Currently she is completing her MFA in Sculpture at Concordia University where she was a recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s J.A. Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships for Master’s and The Dale and Nick Tedeschi Studio Fellowship from Concordia University. She was recently a selected participant in O’Born Contemporary’s Emerging Artist Exhibition in Toronto. Currently she was selected by Jeanie Riddle to be a part of the annual Collision 9 exhibition at Parisian Laundry in Montreal and a recipient of Spark Box Studio’s Emerging Artist Award. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at FOFA Gallery and Nowhere Gallery in 2013 in Montreal.

Jean Klimack is a practicing artist from Winnipeg and currently resides in Beijing. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from the University of Manitoba. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally in Canada, United States, England and China. Klimack’s work is informed by aspects of the everyday through the materials she chooses and through simple activities that feed her interest in the passing of time. She is interested in small, daily activities and experiences – or seemingly, the banal moments of life. Through various mediums that include drawing, text, sculpture, and digital imagery, she reorganizes the mundane into artistic significance.

Erika Lincoln is a Winnipeg based artist. Her work has shown in Media Arts festivals and events across Europe including Artbots (Dublin), Filmwinter (Germany), Pixxelpoint (Slovenia), and Love the Robots (Zurich). In Canada she has shown extensively including Manifestation International d’art de Quebec, Biennale Nationale de Sculpture Contemporaine Quebec, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, Plug In ICA, Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, Musee National des Beaux-arts du Quebec, send+receive audio festival, and the Vancouver Undergound Film Festival. She has participated in residencies at the Banff New Media Institute in Canada and Medialab Prado in Spain.

Nikki Forrest is a visual and media artist based in Montreal. Her practice includes video, drawing, installation and sound projects. She is best known for her short experimental videos which have been shown at festivals, galleries and museums throughout Europe and North America including: The Mix Festival (New York), The Glasgow Film and Video Workshop, Dundee Contemporary Arts, The Oberhausen Short Film and Video Festival (Germany), Ausland (Berlin), Le Centre d’Art Santa Monica (Barcelona), Signal and Noise (Vancouver) Mount Saints Vincents University Gallery, Halifax, The Images Festival, Toronto, and the Festival Internationale du Films sur l’Art, Montreal. Nikki has also participated in several international artists residencies including: le conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec studio exchange residency in Buenos Aires, Argentina and the Canad Council studio at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Matt Walker lives and works from Hamilton, Ontario. He received his BA from McMaster University before moving to Calgary to Complete his MFA in 2004. Walker spent the following 8 years working and studying at The Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta. His work has been shown Nationally and Internationally, and is included in Alberta’s Provincial Collection. Most recently Walker’s work has been shown at Pith Gallery in Calgary and at Supercrawl in Hamilton, Ontario.