Artist Talk: Lorna Bauer and Mia Donovan

Please join us for a conversation with Department of Studio Arts Artists in Residence Lorna Bauer (Sculpture) and Mia Donovan (Photography), moderated by faculty member and colleague, Juan Ortiz-Apuy.

This event will be held in-person only. Seating is first-come, first-served and everyone is welcome. For those who cannot attend, video documentation will be uploaded to our Youtube channel after the event. 

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Lorna Bauer utilises photography and sculpture to examine human’s relationships to their surroundings. Bauer’s projects are characterised as site related, leading to a final result that has responded to a specific place and context, and speaks to a material and visual investigation into ideas and experiences generated from ecologies of lived environments.

Bauer lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal and her work has been featured in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Canada and abroad: The National Gallery of Canada, The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, The Darling Foundry (Montreal), Franz Kaka (Toronto), Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery, (Athens). She has been artist-in-residence at Glenfiddich (Scotland), Despina (Rio de Janeiro), The Récollets (Paris), the Quebec-New York Residency, Banff Centre and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her works are present in public and private collections, notably the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. In 2019 Bauer was awarded the Barbara Sphor Memorial Award and in 2021 she was a shortlisted finalist for the Sobey Art Award.

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Mia Donovan is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photographer and digital storyteller based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She documents the human experience from a social justice perspective. Her work often recontextualizes historical archives as a means of better understanding and representing the mental landscape of those participating in her projects. She is best known for her films: Inside Lara Roxx, Deprogrammed, and Dope Is Death. She is a Don Haig Award recipient for outstanding achievement in documentary filmmaking. Donovan’s films have screened at over 60 film festivals around the world, on digital platforms (including Netflix and VICE), theatrically and in community spaces. She is also known for her ongoing photography series Stripped. Her MFA thesis explored the concept of virtual reality as the ultimate ‘empathy machine’ and her thesis project, Deprogrammed VR, won the coveted IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling. She has been featured in publications including POV Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, VICE, InsideHook, CBC Arts, Le Devoir and many more. She is working on her photography series Stripped, her first documentary TV series and her first narrative film.

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Juan Ortiz-Apuy is a Canadian-Costa Rican artist who has been living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal since 2003. His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in venues such as Les Abattoirs Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (France), IKEA Museum (Sweden), Pamflett (Norway), DHC/ART Fondation Phi pour l’art contemporain (Montreal), Owens Art Gallery (Sackville), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau), MOMENTA Biennale de l’image (Montreal), Quebec City Biennial: Manif d'art 7 (Québec), Truck Contemporary Art (Calgary), Museum London (London), Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography (Toronto), VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine (Montreal), Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), and the Esker Foundation (Calgary).

Ortiz-Apuy's work has been awarded numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His work has also been reviewed in various publications such as Canadian Art, MOMUS, esse arts + opinions, The Gazette (Montreal), Le Devoir (Montreal), and Public Parking. Most recently, he was the recipient of Best International Representation Award by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA, Costa Rican Chapter). He has completed several artist-in-residence programs, most notably at MASS MoCA (USA), The Vermont Studio Center (USA), The Frans Masereel Centre (Belgium), and the Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center (Denmark).