In-digestion

A showcase of work by students in the Intermedia program, which combines performance, video and new media arts.

Opening hours: April 16 from 5 p.m. to midnight, April 17 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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In-digestion will include a wide range of artistic practices such as performance, video art, installation, sound, electronics, programming, and robotics. While individual processes gave rise to each work, we feel they share fluid, overlapping language and concerns. The works also explore dynamics between the artist and the viewer and create links between art and other disciplines, and explore personal, socio-political and environmental situations that we all face.

Four of the artists explore different approaches to immersion. Sarah Da Silva Marques’ Were-Oyster is a macabre, yet playful, fabric-based stop-motion animation exploring the gender dynamics of monsters, projected in an intimate, blanket fort. Avi’Eve, a piece by Laurie Eve Laroche, creates riddles of sound and images within an atmospheric space conceived in order to convey the type of emotional turmoil that manifests out of fright and fascination. Elise Apap’s sensorial video-sound installation When the Earth Trembles includes haptic feedback related to her experience of violent earthquakes. It investigates the tangibility of presence - sharing and challenging embodied memory. Lysanne Côté’s interactive installation Ray draws the viewer into a world of mirrors and reflections in order to create an overwhelming experience of light.

Another theme in the exhibition is from the biological to the biodegradable. In this section Lea-Ann McNally and Sean Gallagher explore the potentially transformative qualities of emergent media. McNally’s large sculptural light installation, built from colorful, organic pieces of bio-plastic that she produces, aims to raise awareness of alternative, eco-sensitive manufacturing processes and possibilities. Gallagher’s installation, BLART!, is an artistic experiment using live bacteria (SCOBYs) as its medium. It focuses attention on the interaction occurring between our intestinal microbiota and nervous system.

The third section of the show focuses on challenging social, environmental and cultural relationships. Ayam Yaldo’s mix-media installation Dolma with Nana revolves around the ancient Ottoman recipe for Dolma, and takes the viewer on a cultural, social, and geographical tour of her Chaldean and Iraqi heritage. Adrian Harper’s video projection Visual Vomit conveys the fractured identity of pop-culture’s spawn through the use of fragmentation. Finally, André Frenette-Nolin, in his project Street Intervention, creates custom protective covers for street furniture in order to highlight the aesthetic of authority embedded in apparently simple, utilitarian, shared urban structures.