Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art was pleased to present the 2015 Summer Institute featuring Nat Chard and Perry Kulper as faculty.

Under the theme Archive Shadows, Chard and Perry acted as mentors, leading a select group of thirteen participants for Plug In ICA’s 2015 Summer Institute. In both concept and materials, they worked collaboratively across disciplines to guide an international group of artists in explorations that constructed spatial assemblies within considered situational relationships.  The Summer Institute included a dense roster of daily discussions and formal assignments as well as internal and public critiques and presentations. These included the list below:

– Artist Talk with Nat Chard and Perry Kulper
– Workshop with Eduardo Aquino
– Artist Talk with Eleanor Bond
– Open Studios 2015 

Faculty:

Nat Chard is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Bartlett, University College London, following professorships at the Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, the University of Manitoba and the University of Brighton. He taught at the Bartlett throughout the nineties and has also taught at North and East London Universities. He is an architect registered in the UK and has practiced in London. His work has been published and exhibited internationally. His research practice develops means of discussing uncertain conditions in architecture and the recent work has been acted out through a series of nine types of drawing instrument.

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.

Participants:

Chantal Auger  To Chantal, being inventive has always been important, even when she was growing up in the francophone community here in Winnipeg, where she attended College Louis-Riel while working on a small clothing line, adorning clothes with intricate beadwork.  More recently, she has graduated from Environmental Design in the department of architecture, under the tutoring of Nat Chard and Colin Herperger.  After her undergrad studies, she decided to take a break from formal education and spend time furthering her own thoughts and ideas about design and art in the hopes to set the terms of engagement for her Masters of Architecture.  While dedicating her time to literature in her field of interest, she has also taken upon herself to learn as many skills pertinent to installation art, including welding, woodworking, pottery, and stained glass window making.  Currently, she is working for Sotirios Kotoulas helping with the design of his projects, which includes a mixed-use housing project at 267 Sherbrook.

Nathan Bishop holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Toronto (2014), and an undergraduate degree in architectural science from the British Columbia Institute of Technology (2009).  He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards for his academic work.  Since graduating, Nathan has been invited as a guest critic for design studios at the University of Toronto, and has acted as a peer reviewer for student publications.  In addition to his academic pursuits, Nathan has more than three years of experience working for innovative and provocative architectural practices, both in Canada and internationally.  He is interested in built works, and architecture of great conceptual and affective richness with a (preferably) deep architectural historical bent.

Natalie Willow Boterman is a full time dreamer. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1983, Boterman currently lives and works between Sierre, Switzerland and various Canadian cities. Boterman graduated from NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2011 with a BFA majoring in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts and was a participant in the 2012 Visual Arts Nova Scotia Mentorship Program. She has exhibited her work in Halifax at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Khyber Centre for the Arts and Eyelevel Gallery, where she also curated the 2011 Y-Level emerging artists’ exhibition Come From Away. She has participated in several residencies in Canada and Europe. In the spring of 2014, Boterman partnered with Matthew Carswell to found GOOD WORK, an international project centered on the promotion and dissemination of art. Currently Boterman is studying her Masters of Fine Arts at Ecole Cantonale d’art du Valais, in Sierre, Switzerland and will be graduating in the summer of 2015

Michael Butterworth was born and has lived in Winnipeg his entire life.  He says the need for self-differentiation is likely what initially seduced him into pursuing the study of architecture at the University of Manitoba.  Architecture appealed to him because of how it is uniquely situated in touching a wide range of both theoretical and practical territories.  Michael graduated with a Bachelors of Environmental Design from the University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture in April of 2014.  That year he received the Kasian Scholarship for Architecture and Design Excellence as well as was named to the Dean’s Honours List. His studio work has been exhibited at the University of Manitoba’s GOSA Gallery and has been published in the University of Manitoba Faulty of Architecture’s annual publication, Warehouse, from 2010-2013.  He has had professional work published in Canadian Architect Magazine and has exhibited at the 2014 RAIC/MAA festival of Architecture.  During his time away from school he has concentrated on learning and practicing new mediums such as welding, joinery, 3D printing and cnc milling.  He currently works at a local Winnipeg architecture office and intends to begin a Masters of Architecture program in the fall of 2015

Teresa Carlesimo is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sculptural installation.  Through the use of typical construction materials she explores the social and political dimensions of the built environment, often creating life size architectural installations and more recently socially engaged project-based work.  She holds and MFA from York University where her work explored the themes of placelessness, and socially and environmentally responsible urbanization.  From 2010 to 2013 she participated in Windsor’s Mayworks Festival of International Workers’ Solidarity as an artist and organizer.  She has recently exhibited at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington, Eyelevel in Halifax, and Art Mür in Montreal and has an upcoming exhibition at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto.  Her work has been exhibited throughout Canada and the US.

Dagmara Genda From architectural installation to drawing and collage, Dagmara Genda’s work recombines forms to propose new ways of seeing the old. She is interested in dichotomies, such as nature and culture, and chaos and order, which she subsequently attempts to dislodge by rearranging found images into new constructions. In each of her works, she questions how we come to identify something as what it is, and explores its many potential permutations.

Genda graduated with an MA from the London Consortium, Birkbeck College in 2010, and with an MFA from Western University in 2007. She has published with Border Crossings, Esse and Revue ETC in addition to being a member of the BlackFlash editorial committee between 2008-2011 inclusive. She has had solo exhibitions at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff and the Esker Foundation, Calgary with group shows nationally including the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area 2014 biennial, and various public galleries such as the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. Her work is in the collection of the Saskatchewan Arts Board and numerous private collections.

JNZNBRK is the Winnipeg-based collaborative effort of Kyle Janzen (Winnipeg) and Chris Burke (Calgary).  In 2011, the pair met in Winnipeg while attending the University of Manitoba where both artists hold undergraduate degrees in environmental design and master’s degrees in architecture.  During their education, both artists began experimenting with light and light-based optical phenomena.  These architecturally driven experiments, heavily influence by travel to Germany and Japan, led both to develop an obsession with light as a tangible medium to work with and the physical environment as a register for these works.

Since 2011, JNZNBRK has executed a range of work including digital installations, moving image, live performance, projection mapping, sculpture, and collaborative projects with other artists nationally and internationally. In 2014, JNZNBRK was awarded an Architizer A+ award (Art + Architecture category) for their 2013-2014 Behaviors of Light installation at the Winnipeg Art Gallery

Julie Kusyk received a Master’s of Architecture from the University of Manitoba, where she had also previously accomplished her Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree.  Her Masters thesis, Converging on Churchill, is described as an architectural discourse on artic research.  Through the design of an Arctic research facility, the thesis strived to develop an architecture that aimed to reconcile converging and at ties contradictory perspectives in the town of Churchill, Manitoba.  Operating within the rigid confines of a scientific research facility and the changing climate, its ambition was to implicate both physical and psychological realms though the content of program and site to inform more meaningful ways of engaging architecturally within the arctic region.

In the summer of 2014, Julie received the Bill Allen Travel Scholarship, which allowed her to travel throughout the Arctic and Scandinavia to explore the potential of architectural discourse within the field of arctic research and its evolving relationship to the changing arctic region. By meeting with scientists and residents in Greenland, Svalbard, Iceland, Norway and Denmark, she conducted a series of interviews to help inform her understandings of the pragmatic and psychological perspectives influencing this architectural discourse.

Tony Neustaedter graduated with his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Manitoba in 2014.

James Rubio was born and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  He received his Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Philosophy from the University of Manitoba in 2001; as well as a Bachelor of Nursing in 2004, and a Bachelor of Environmental Design in 2010.  He received his Masters of Architecture from the University of Manitoba in 2012.  James was nominated for Canadian Architect’s 2012 Student Award of Excellence for his thesis entitled: Rhizomic Thresholds.  The thesis questioned the standard role of an architect, re-appropriating the architects’ necessity within a collectively owned courtyard in Istanbul with no over-lording authority.  The explored design methodology emphasized the architect’s responsibility as an educator, creating a constantly open dialogue between the space and its residents.  James currently lives and works full time in Winnipeg as an Architectural Intern at MCM Architects Ltd. And casually as a Registered Nurse in the Children’s Operating Room at Health Sciences Centre.

Janelle Tougas holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Manitoba, which she received in 2013.  She is a Franco-Manitoban designer and artists whose interests are rooted in architecture; cultural history; philosophy; native, edible, medicinal, practical plants; and the uncanny.  Her recent explorations include shoemaking, furniture-like object making, Métis beadwork, and traditional plant use.  These elements find common ground in a fascination for the properties of specific materials, as well as the contrast and the polarity of sensations.  She also has a keen interest for the ways in which we come to make sense of information and circumstances, as well as the ways in which we appropriated interests and preferences.   Janelle is interested in cultivating an environment in which she can play with what roots us, what elates us, and the balance of those two states.  She is also interested in exploring the relationship of utility and femininity.  The subjective aesthetics of toughness and the influence this has on how we perceive objects and people is something she finds comical, at times a hindrance, and also very malleable. In addition, she is moving towards a personal reconciliation of older traditional techniques and current behaviours.