A Public Art Spaceeek Opens 24 hours, 7 days a week
WINDOW PROJECT nnn1407 Government St., Downtown Victoria BC, Canada
Ho Tam
"Go For the Gold!"
September 4 to October 26, 2008
Window Project re-opens with Victoria artist Ho Tam's "Go For The Gold!" - an installation that continues the Olympic spirit and explores the ambition of the Asian men. The installation will coincide with his solo exhibition "Confessions of A Salesman" at the Yukon Arts Centre (Whitehorse) this Fall. Both exhibitions runs from September 4 to October 26, 2008.
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WINDOW PROJECT ARCHIVE:
August 1, 2006 to July 31, 2007 ~ One Year of Visual Art Exhibitions by Artists/Writers Across Canada
June 29 to July 3, 2007: Barb Hunt "Fallen"
May 5 to June 3, 2007: Kim Huynh "Top Hat"
March 14 to April 15, 2007: Libby Hague "Paradise Apartment - Waiting for Skylark"
January 20 to February 28, 2007: Mark Prior "Continental Drift"
December 6, 2006 to January 14, 2007: Jon Baturin "Tama Triptych"
September 8 to October 8, 2006: Laura U. Marks "Letters from Beirut"
August 1 to September 4, 2006: Alan Kollins "Before/After"
(Please scroll down for images and desctiptions)
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Barb Hunt
"Fallen"
June 29 to July 31, 2007
Artist's Bio/Statement
Barb Hunt’s art practice is based in textiles, with focus on the rituals of mourning, particularly those of Newfoundland. Her current work is about the devastation of war: knitting anti-personnel land mines in pink wool, and working with camouflage army uniforms. The repetitive nature of textile work is often a way of coping with grief and loss, since fabric has many associations with bodily protection, particularly in the important role for camouflage uniforms. Working with army fatigues, Hunt's sewing give rise to a new purpose: to mourn the loss of life during war. It also references the fragility and beauty of the human body, and the visible traces of the specific individuals who wore the fatigues. Fallen is therefore Hunt's attempt to balance her abhorrence for the cruelty of war and her empathy for the soldiers.
Barb Hunt studied art at the University of Manitoba and completed her MFA at Concordia University, Montreal in 1994. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. She lives in Corner Brook, Newfoundland where she teaches at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University. She has been the recipient of: grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the President’s Award for Outstanding Research from Memorial University, and research residencies in Canada, France and Ireland.
The artist wishes to gratefully acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts.
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Kim Huynh
"Top Hat "
May 5 to June 3, 2007
Artist's Bio/Statement
Calgary-based artist Kim Huynh was born and raised in Sai Gon, Vietnam and immigrated to Canada in 1980. She studied art history, philosophy, painting and drawing before going on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in 1990 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta in 1992. She has exhibited widely with solo exhibitions across Canada and in group exhibitions world-wide. Her works are held in many public collections including the Shanghai Art Museum, China, the University of Jaipur, India and the Graphic Art Museum in Poland.
For the Window Project, Huynh is presenting her work from the Top Hat series. Using camouflage prints and crushed top hats, Huynh investigates power relation and cultural identity under our post-colonial condition.
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PAST EXHIBITIONS
Libby Hague
"Paradise Apartment - Waiting for Skylark"
March 14 to April 15, 2007
Artist's Bio/Statement
Toronto based artist Libby Hague was born in St. Thomas, Ontario but grew up in the suburbs of Montreal. Using combinations of print, video and installation she looks at the risks of living in a precarious world. Her point of view is secular, and she uses narrative to puzzle out how, without an external code to direct us, we can determine humane social relationships.
Skylarks and flowers are signs of spring in Victoria. In this case, a group of kids on the rooftop of their apartment building are waiting with their spray paint for Skylark so they can all go out "hitting their names”. To paraphrase the artist Claes Oldenberg, everything is grey and gloomy and all of a sudden up pops a graffiti roofline like a big bouquet. It must be spring. Paradise Apartments is an ongoing series of time sensitive installations taking place in window galleries across the country.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/libbylibby/
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Mark Prier
"Continental Drift "
January 20 to February 28, 2007
Artist's Bio & Statement
Mark Prier's eclectic practice ranges from installation and performance to audio art and electronic music, often exploring themes of mapping, wilderness, and survival. He has presented exhibitions at Redhead Gallery, Toronto Free Gallery (Toronto, Ontario), White Water Gallery (North Bay, Ontario), City Without Walls (Newark, New Jersey), and Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA). As a curator, Prier runs 312, putting together video art screenings and exhibitions both offline in alternative spaces and online at www.312.ca. As half of the electronica duo hellothisisalex, Prier has played the MUTEK Festival in Montreal, done commissions for CBC Radio’s Brave New Waves, and taken part in the National Film Board of Canada’s Minus 40 project.
Continental Drift tells the story of a fictional Newfoundland family with found diagrams of plate tectonics. The narrative, presented as a series of figures, mixes Canadian history with North American geology to relate the family's gradual migration from Newfoundland's south coast to Canada's west.
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Jon Baturin
"Tama Triptych"
December 6, 2006 to January 14, 2007
Artist's Bio / Statement
Jon Baturin is an Associate Professor at York University in Toronto. He has spent much of the last decade investigating ideological constructs and the formation of dogmatic systems as they relate to notions of Truth. British Cultural Historian, John Calcutt, has located those concerns as “…Truth, Justice, Power, and Identity.” To be entirely accurate these investigations should be seen as sub-sets of the notion of “Hope” which has been the locus, whether the projects appear as mediated critiques of political systems or as collaborative works, which envision social change. The phrase “ideology of care” best defines this broad philosophic position. Baturin is presently working on a series of new collaborative projects which deal with gender, identity, and the visual manifestations of his collaborator’s notions of wellness and loss. His research projects can be found in the following websitse:
http://www.vtapedigital.org/baturin_tama_site
http://www.digibodies.org/works/baturin
http://www.criticalmedia.ca
The work Jon_Tama Triptych is an excerpt from The Tama “Tapestry” / Tama “Trees” cycle. Each Tama in the series has eulogistic overtones. Each portrays a friend - in contemplation, grief (or death). Each image-based structure continues investigations into personal memory – not from an “impossible objectivity” but from a more “realistic truth” - the confluence of the many subjective activities, events, images, thoughts and perceptions that arise from a specific point in time. Aspects of chaos confusion and visual manifestations of ‘noise” are part of that truth.
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Laura U. Marks
"Letters from Beirut"
September 8 to October 8, 2006
Curator's Statement
Letters from Beirut is a collection of email letters sent to friends (later forwarded by her friends to others and hence reached the hands of the curator). Documenting the time period from the Israeli first strike in Lebanon to the eventual exodus of the Canadians in July 2006, Marks's letters illustrate her personal experience in the war-torn city, written with urgency from an intimate and humanistic perspective and encapsulating a recent past. The fifteen installments of the letters will be on display, in sequence, during the month long exhibition. To accompany her writing, a series of snapshots by Marks is also included in the exhibit. (Ho Tam)
Artist's Biography
Laura U. Marks is a theorist, critic and curator of independent and experimental media arts. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002). Her current research includes: formal commonalities and historical connections between Islamic art and contemporary computer art (a book project), contemporary Arab media arts; and audiovisual forms for intellectual work; and non-Western approaches to new media. Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
To download the entire collection of Letters from Beirut (Word document), please click here.
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Inaugural Show
ALAN KOLLINS
"Before/After"
August 1 to September 4, 2006
Artist's Bio/Statement
b. 1968, Toronto, Ont.
Gallery Administrator
Alan Kollins defines himself less as an artist than he does an arts administrator, former academic and generic misfit still pursuing the rock and roll lifestyle. Alan serves on the board of directors at Victoria’s FiftyFifty Arts Collective and has had a hand in its programming and administration since its inception in 2002. Producing few works for exhibition, Alan’s installations are influenced by post-structuralism, film theory, particularly the work of Christian Metz, and postmodern anxieties in image based culture.
Before/After seeks to engage critically with the context of the self portrait. Its cultural associations to self representation and the potential power of highlighting a self defined gaze is mocked by the text as well as the portrait’s bracketing of the hair-dos. Moreover, the possibility for a narcissistic gaze inherent to the self portrait is problematized by the before/after concept which is closely associated with hair replacement, body trimming and other cheap attempts at improving one’s image of self. The portrait’s symbolic passing of time and marks of aging serve to illustrate the futility of preserving youthful features.
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For more information on the Window Project, please contact: hotam88@gmail.com
The Window Project acknowledges the supports of David Broome and Mike Huston of the Department of Fine Arts, University of Victoria for the webhosting of this site