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Pixelware, a sublime forgery Opening Thursday, January 6 at 5 p.m. |
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Trade-in your traditional notions of the darkroom for Pixelware, a sublime forgery, a group exhibition that offers an intriguing examination on how the use of new technology impacts the content of photo based work. Now that the digital medium has become ubiquitous in the process of creating images, an emergence of work being molded and informed by these new conventions have inevitably surfaced. This exhibition aims to confront the changes that has taken place in contemporary photography resulting from these digital processes by exploring the work of Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Sylvia Grace Borda, Sze Lin Pang and Penelope Umbrico. The vast ephemeral landscapes of Mathieu Bernard-Reymond emit an overwhelming sense of temporality that deliberately resembles the ever-changing digital world. A multifold of characters enter the landscape, even though they appear to remain visitors to these eerily harmonious scenes. It is this virtual perfection apparent in the images, that triggers questions about the validity of the environments, making them that much more tenuous. In Sylvia Grace Borda's video piece titled Minimalist Portraits, the artist creates her own digital rendition of minimalist diptychs by plotting the birth and death dates of well known minimalist artists against a CMYK scale. The artist's birth day represents the amount of cyan in the colour tone, the month correlates to the magenta, and the year is plotted against yellow and black values. The video ceaselessly iterates these digital monochromatic paintings like a computer sorting through an endless myriad of data. Sze Lin Pang, takes a more personal approach to digital photography in her series Coffee, Tea or Me?, by creating large scale self-portraits depicting herself as a Singapore airline flight attendant. She repeats the figure three times and subtly manipulates her identity in each version, to reinforce the portraits' unwillingness to become identical, irregardless of the medium's capabilities. Penelope Umbrico's work is informed by popular culture and marketing media by appropriating imagery straight from mail-order catalogues. The artist isolates mirrors and TV screens appearing in photographs taken for magazines. The image or reflection portrayed on the surface of these mirrors and TVs, once a superfluous detail in an idealized showroom, are digitally adjusted and enlarged to become an autonomous image that stands on its own. In fact, extended throughout the exhibition, there is a sense of interchangeable or fleeting time, space and identity that emerges in Pixelware, a sublime forgery. An invitational brochure including a fictional text by J.R. Carpenter
accompanies the exhibition. Forgoing the traditional essay form, the images and
ideas in each artist's work became the starting point for four very short stories,
each with a distinct style and narrative voice. |
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Dazibao thanks the author and the artists for their generous
contribution, the Consulat général de France à Québec
and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts
and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement
des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec. Mathieu Bernard-Reymond Born in France, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond is a photographer currently working and residing in Switzerland. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Grenoble and has studied in Literature and Art History. He has also completed a diploma from the Formation Supérieure de l'École des Arts Appliqués de Vevey. In 2003, he received the Prix de la Fondation CCF pour la Photographie (France). Sylvia Grace Borda Sylvia Grace Borda is a Vancouver-based artist working in photography and new technology. Borda received a BFA in Photography from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and an MFA at University of British Columbia. She is also currently pursuying a PhD at South Bank University of London, UK. She is an Associate Researcher and Lecturer in Digital Arts at University of British Columbia and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Sze Lin Pang Originally from Singapore, Sze Lin Pang received a B.A. at Brown University in Modern Culture and Media. She has recently moved to Chicago to continue her artistic studies (M.F.A.) at University of Illinois at Chicago. Pang works in photography, digital arts, video, as well as in sculpture. She has exhibited in New York, Chicago, London and Barcelona. Penelope Umbrico Penelope Umbrico, currently living and working in New York, has exhibited internationally for twenty years. Formally trained as a painter at Ontario College of Art, Umbrico received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design and is currently the Chair of the Photography at Bard College. J.R. Carpenter J. R. Carpenter is a writer and visual artist living in Montreal.
She holds a BFA from Concordia University. She has received several grants and
fellowships to attend residencies and training programs within Canada and the
U.S.A. She won the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition in 2003 for her story
Precipice.
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