sidewalkscreening.mov Guest curated by Mohammad Rezaei, Jonathan Carroll, Iain Soder and Joshua Vettivelu

Part of Winter 2015

Last year WhipperSnapper Gallery started Sidewalk Screening with the aim of exhibiting emerging Canadian video artists, across a variety of backgrounds and video art practices. The videos, from 27 artists, were projected daily from December to February – sunrise to sunset – onto the WhipperSnapper Gallery windows.

For the second edition WhipperSnapper Gallery has collaborated with Pleasure Dome to present sidewalkscreening.mov, a selection of dynamic video works, complex both in style and execution. In between music, beers and dancing, Vjs/curators will introduce works featuring multiple screens and simultaneous projections. Comedies and narrative works enter into dialogue with alternative histories of video art and self-presentation practices, all grounded in the program’s emphasis on projection as a medium.

Works by Julia Kansas, Lisa Folkerson, Austin Taylor, Fake Injury Party, Cindy (Ji Hye) Kim, Karen Hawes, Blessie Maturan, Vincent Chevalier, Steven Cutler, Jose Andres Mora, Neal Moignard, Aiden Holmans, Chris Heller, Taylor Doyle, Rosalie Mahuex, Kailey Bryan, Sean Grounds, Brianna Lowe, Virakone Sonethasack, Claire Wright, Hannah Epstein, Nabeela Vega.

Sidewalk Screening will run from January 9th – February 15th, 2015 at WhipperSnapper Gallery, 594b Dundas Street West:
http://sidewalkscreening.com/

.mov dates at WhipperSnapper: January 9th – February 4th, 5 – 11 PM Daily
.gif dates at WhipperSnapper: February 5th – 15th, 6 PM – 2 AM Daily
sidewalkscreening.gif: February 4th at the Drake Underground, 1150 Queen Street West, projected gifs and live music.

An Essay Commissioned by Whippersnapper Gallery

Written by Natasha Chaykowski

ARTISTS/ WORKS/ BIOS:

Julia Kansas
Scarry Stories
Lies and Such
Julia Kansas is a multidisciplinary artist who holds a BFA in Drawing from Alberta College of Art + Design. Humor, self-obsession and pop culture are the principal themes that occur in her work. Using video, photography and drawing as mediums she aims to make her viewers simultaneously awkward and amused. Every piece she releases into the world makes her feel slightly embarrassed and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Lisa Folkerson:
9 Notes from my Bed
Lisa Folkerson is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist working in video, audio and printed matter. Her work explores relationships and politics of the banal and lowbrow with romance and humour.

Austin Taylor
35.7
Austin Taylor (born and lives in Calgary) graduated from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2012. His practice focuses on optical acrylic painting on shaped panel as well as curatorial projects. Taylor has exhibited in solo and groups shows in Calgary, Vancouver, and Portland.

Fake Injury Party
Big Birthday
Fake Injury Party is a three-man artist collective based in Toronto Ontario. Our work focuses on comedy through a variety of visual media including illustration, painting, print-making, comic books, performance art, and sketch comedy videos. The driving force behind our work is to execute skillfully, remain humble and avoid the serious stigma associated with the art community by dedicating our work
wholly to comedy. Fake Injury Party is made up of Paul Tjepkema, Scott Leeming and Derrick Guerin.

Cindy Jihye Kim
Whipsaw Buddy
Cindy (Ji Hye) Kim is a painter and a video artist whose work explores cultural identity and theatre; how familiar visual symbols, aesthetics, and ultimately stereotypes, become performative and manipulated in their modes of representation.

Karen Hawes
Bad Girl Eating
Karen Hawes is a Toronto based artist and NSCAD graduate who makes videos, writes stories and performs in public and private. Her work focuses on personal experience, elaborate lies and creating bizarre situations in everyday circumstances. She has exhibited work in Halifax at Eyelevel Gallery, the Khyber Arts Centre and the Anna Leonowens Gallery. BAD GIRL EATING was created through the Centre For Art Tapes Mentorship Program in 2011 with Liz MacDougall as her Mentor. In Toronto, Karen exhibited a series of D.I.Y vagazzel kits at the Gladstone Hotel and participated in Theatre Passe Muraille’s Elephants In the Room theatre group. In 2014 she has begun work with the casual collective Animal Places.

Blessie Maturan
Get It Together
This is Blessie’s first performance piece in a work in progress series about self- improvement started in early of 201. Through self-discipline, endurance, and positive affirmations you can attempt to direct your emotions in order to reach a higher functioning state.
Regimented purging of these emotions helps your stability and focus. The power to manipulate your thinking and habits lies within your hands and perception of it.

Vincent Chevalier
Breeden
Vincent Chevalier hails from Montreal, Quebec where he completed a BFA in Intermedia/Cyberarts at Concordia University. Using disclosure as the conceptual basis for his artistic practice, he examines the ethical and political stakes of public sexuality. His video, installation, and performances range from the concrete to the virtual and take place in a variety of settings including the street, in galleries, and on the web. He has exhibited across Canada, the USA, and Europe. Currently, he lives in Peterborough, Ontario where he works as the Media Arts Coordinator at ARTSPACE.

Steven Cutler
Digital Sweet
Steve Cutler makes things like music videos, shorts, and 3D fantasy universes. He is currently writing a short film inspired by Shonen Jump manga, the Wu Xing cycle of 5 phases, and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos which he hopes to shoot this Spring/Summer for the festival circuit. He has produced a music video for Flying Lotus, exhibited several videos in “NYC Makers” at the NYC Museum of Art and Design Biennial, and made friends with cool video people and artists from all over the place, and maybe you.

Jose Andres Mora
Mouthpiece
After graduating from Capilano University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, José Andrés Mora received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Presently, Mora maintains an interdisciplinary practice with a focus on multimedia installation and video-based work; he resides in Toronto, Ontario where he works as an artist, and as multimedia technician to artists. While living in Halifax, Mora worked as a museum technician at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and was a member of the Centre for Art Tapes, where he contributed as a member of its programming committee, as well as a workshop instructor.

Neal Moignard
Les Autres
Neal Moignard is an animator born in Australia and raised in Alberta, where he now resides. He creates ecstatic and vibrant videos, interactive installations, and performances that facilitate interaction with colour, texture, pattern, touch, movement, sound, and story. He extends and mixes conventional mediums in order to unearth strange thoughts, feelings, and ideas, while remaining in dialogue with each form’s unique vocabulary.

Aiden Holmans
Form Rendition/Cryptids
Aiden Holmans is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He works primarily with video and digital media to explore conventions of contemporary digital and cyber cultures. He attended NSCAD University where he studied Fine Arts

Chris Heller
.99 .39
Chris Heller is a video-based performance artist using body, endurance and gesture-based sculpture to create ongoing negotiations of the mind/body fusion and vision. A graduate of the INTM program at OCAD u with short films screed at the Parkdale Film Festival, AGO X Ten and live performance at the Greenbelt Gallery.

Taylor Doyle
Grease
Taylor Doyle is a video artist whose focus lies in the relationship between (and obsession with) modern fitness regimes and public sexuality and how the two narrate one another. Her current project involves studying the history of instructional exercise videos and the iconic aerobics instructor, Jane Fonda. She is currently completing her BFA at Western University. Taylor is currently an intern at Forest City Gallery, an artist-run centre in London.

Rosalie Mahuex
Please God
My works are made with recognizable symbols, images and icons that I alter and hybridize in order for new meanings to emerge. My artistic focus is the exploration of death and the social conventions associated with it; the consideration of the sacred and the profane and a special emphasis on human sexuality. I treat these themes by confronting the diametric oppositions of, death/life, sacred/profane, beautiful/grotesque and pleasure/pain.

Kailey Bryan
Rug Hooker
Kailey Bryan is a multi-media artist currently living and working in St. John’s, NL. Bryan has a BFA with Honours from York University and was the recipient of the VANL-CARFAC Emerging Artist of the Year Award (2014), the E. J. Lightman Sculpture Award, and the Louis Odette Award for Sculpture. They are a founding member of Toronto based collective Tongue & Groove, who create participatory installations with reclaimed materials. Bryan’s practice centers on organic materials and the body, exploring ways in which bodies and environments – physical, social, and psychological – mutually construct one another.

Sean Grounds
Hot Dog Machine
Sean Grounds is a Toronto based filmmaker and animator, a graduate of York University’s film program. In his work he exploits and subverts tropes of mainstream entertainment with both humour and criticism as the goal. His animations are made using varied techniques, including classic hand drawn, 3D animation and old school video game programming.

Brianna Lowe
Neon Land
Extreme living. Moderate success.

Virakone Sonethasack
Side Effects May include
Virakone Sonethasack is a visual artist based in the Greater Toronto Area (G.T.A.) working primarily in printmaking, specializing in screen-printing and lithography. He also works with photography and video.

Claire Wright
Eggs for Dinner
Claire Wright is a Toronto based artist working in printmaking, video and 3D.

Hannah Epstein
Cast of Characters
Hannah Epstein (AKA hanski etc.) is a Toronto based folk-media artist working in video, experimental games and textiles. Her work focuses on buffoon-theosophy, chaos and the LCD. She will be starting an MFA at Carnegie-Mellon in the fall.

Nabeela Vega
Constructing Cabbah
Nabeela Vega is a Boston-based Artist and Springborn Fellow at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts University. Their work focuses on the relationship between symbol and archetype. In exploration of their own experience as a Muslim Refusenik, their works speak to the relationship of Islam to both herself as well as to contemporary social politics. Within this frame, they seek to create a semiotic discourse between the specificity of Islamic Culture and its position in today’s society using their own experience as a vehicle for the work.

CURATOR BIOS:

Mohammad Rezaei is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and art administrator. His artistic practice is informed by his experiences coordinating and collaborating to make exhibitions happen. Rezaei revels in experimental approaches to making, digital and IRL display strategies, bad tattoos and leather jackets. He has contributed to the establishment of several exhibition spaces and festivals, while maintaining an independent curatorial practice, and extensive involvement with artist-run centers and galleries across Canada. His recent curatorial projects have been funded through successful grants from Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council. He is currently the Programming Coordinator at WhipperSnapper Gallery.

Joshua Vettivelu is an artist, curator and educator working within sculpture, video and performance with a BFA from York University. Exhibitions of note include The Past (Im)Perfect at the British Film Institute, Regina’s Performatorium Festival, MIX NYC, 011+91|011+92 at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Eastern Edge’s Art Marathon Festival, SuperNova in Washington DC, Khush a Show of Love at the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives Gallery and The Young Canadian Artists show at the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, RU. Vettivelu is currently an instructor at OCAD University.

Iain Soder is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Tough Guy Mountain, a Toronto based arts collective, since 2012. He’s a writer, installation artist, curator and arts administrator. He has participated in over 20 theatre productions as a director, writer, choreographer, actor or manager. He studied Intermedia at NSCAD University, vocal performance at Mount Allison and apprenticed at the Bread and Puppet Theatre.

Jonathan Carroll makes software that facilitates performances, composes music in collaboration with computers, and organizes groups of people around installations. As a musician he has performed at the NXNE, Pop Montreal, and Halifax Pop Explosion music festivals, as well as in venues across Canada. Jonathan is a co-founder of Tough Guy Mountain, and has produced shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and Narwhal Art Projects, as well as managing the company web page. Jonathan has performed lead roles in in six theatrical productions. He is currently mostly interested in managing the art practices of others within a business context.

WhipperSnapper Gallery is an artist-run centre committed to the cultivation of inclusive spaces for emerging visual and media arts, community arts, and experimental forms of exhibition making. We provide artists and cultural producers with a flexible platform and exhibition space to expand the parameters of their professional practice. WhipperSnapper is structured to encourage peer-to-peer mentorship and promote success by the artists’ own standards. Through critical and diverse programming, WhipperSnapper initiates new relationships and unexpected conversations. We facilitate exchange between artists and local communities, and between a spectrum of emerging and established art communities throughout Toronto and Canada.