INFINITE LOOP

INFINITE

CENTRAL MEMORIAL PARK - 1214 4th St SW 2 3

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ARTIST GUIDE 1

ASHLEIGH BARTLETT

8

JESSE STILWELL

2

LIA ROGERS

9

STEPHEN NACHTIGALL

3

AUSTIN TAYLOR

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LINDSAY SORELL

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WEDNESDAY LUPYPCIW

11

KALI URQUHART

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CASSANDRA PAUL

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KATHLEEN RENWICK

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LOWELL SMITH

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PAUL ROBERT

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CARL SPENCER

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LINDSAY WELLS INFORMATION BOOTH

INTRODUCTION EMMEDIA presents INFINITE LOOP, an outdoor multi-projection exhibition that focuses on formally abstract and looping videos. INFINITE LOOP will bring together a group of Calgary-based media artists to create a collaborative environment of moving light and sound in Central Memorial Park.

Facilitated by Justin Waddell and with technical assistance from media artist Joe Kelly, the works being presented were produced through an EMMEDIA workshop, which provided participating artists with free and open access to EMMEDIA’s production equipment and post-production facilities. Participants also had the support and guidance from the workshop mentors, to provide critical feedback and inspiration throughout the creative process: from initial group meetings, pre and post-production, through to the final exhibition.

The theme for EMMEDIA’s programming in 2013 is SHIFT. Artists were asked to consider the potential of this theme when producing work for INFINITE LOOP. Suggestions include shifts in perception, media, and form; shifts between spaces/places/states; shifts in context, syntax, or paradigms; shifts in meaning and/or understanding. Formally however, there will be an emphasis on producing seamlessly looping, abstract videos, which have the potential to shift/transform the experience of time or spaces in which they are exhibited.

INFINITE LOOP is one of many events occurring through out the province during Alberta Culture Days 2013, and supported by the Government of Alberta. Alberta Culture Days is an annual celebration of our culture, heritage, artistic diversity and provincial pride. This province-wide initiative is part of Culture Days – a national movement to raise the awareness, accessibility, participation and engagement of all Canadians in the arts and cultural life of their communities. To learn more, visit www.AlbertaCultureDays.ca EMMEDIA would like to take the opportunity to thank mentors Justin Waddell & Joe Kelly, staff members Vicki Chau & Joel Farris, Alberta Culture Days & the Government of Alberta, and all the artists and volunteers for making this special night happen!

Bucketheads

Ashleigh Bartlett

Using a painterly approach to video, Bucketheads explores light, movement, repetition and synthetic colour to create strange and humorous compositions. Muppet and cartoon-like figures emerge through a playful engagement with material. Through the arrangement of found objects and discarded fabrics, it references costumes, kitsch, still life, and the artist’s studio, while creating conversations between characters. The video loops as a diptych, suggesting relationships between characters, further emphasizing their attitudes and personalities.

Ashleigh Bartlett’s interest in artifice, disguise and abstraction has prompted an amplification of an exaggerated and imaginative element into her practice. Bartlett’s work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions across Canada. She earned an MFA from the University of Guelph in 2011 and a BFA from ACAD in 2006. Bartlett teaches Painting at the Alberta College of Art + Design and maintains a studio practice in Calgary, Alberta.

Wednesday Lupypciw

CO-HOST

This is television about television that doesn’t exist yet, or could have existed in the past.

Wednesday Lupypciw is from Calgary, Alberta, where she pursues a video and performance art practice. To make money, she is a part-time maid. She also maintains a concurrent practice in textiles — weaving, machine knitting, embroidery and crochet — but this is done mostly while procrastinating on other, larger projects. The performance art collective LIDS, or the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society, is one of those projects.

Little One

Stephen Nachtigall

This is a video of a big waterfall that I captured with my iPhone in Maui, Hawaii on August, 2013. After a hike through a bamboo forest, I encountered this waterfall and stood underneath it, feeling the force of water pummel me from hundreds of feet above. When I returned home and watched the video, I found the file had been corrupted without my intervention. The memory of this now distant natural force is mediated by the interrupted pixels that cascade across the screen.

Stephen Nachtigall is a visual artist and curator from Calgary, Alberta. A graduate of the Alberta College of Art + Design Sculpture department, Stephen is a current MFA candidate at the University of Oregon. Interested in a merging of physical and digital production streams, Stephen’s work emerges from a need to create and build while reflecting on the immateriality and social perspectives of a mediated environment. Growing up with a respect and affinity for the outdoors in a time when the internet has become ubiquitous, Stephen is interested in the dialogue between these two realities.

Cassandra Paul

Nic Cage

Nic Cage was filmed in the abandoned upstairs suite of an old house in Sunnyside. The final tenants of this space were evicted due to unpaid rent and noise complaints, and the suite has remained vacant since they left. The furniture has all been removed and the only indication of past tenants are the dirtied carpets, beer spray stains on the ceilings, cigarette butts, and small pill casings strewn across the floor. The ghostly early 1900’s tricycle roaming the halls suggests the suite was not always home to disconcerted tenants, and instead proposes the dwelling is a capsule for many different people’s stories, histories and lives.

Cassandra Paul is an emerging artist living and working in Calgary, AB. She is currently the Administrative Director of AVALANCHE! Institute of Contemporary Art. Paul has shown her work both locally and nationally. Paul’s work explores notions of abandonment and home, documenting deserted spaces and the personal objects past tenants have left behind.

Thursday

Kathleen Renwick

Taking a slow and sunny wander here and there in Calgary, this video captures a little of the spirit of an aimless summer afternoon, spent exploring the nature in the background of the city along with Dinosaur, and a fortunate encounter with Scully the rabbit.

Kathleen Renwick, graduate in Art and Philosophy, and international correspondent for The New York Times: Calgary Edition, has spent the summer arduously waitressing, sportily exploring the city of Calgary and developing a taste for sweet German wine. And yet, still, was unsuccessfully distracted from artistically oriented work.

Paul Robert

So Far

The 1971 movie Escape From the Planet of the Apes closes with a baby ape repeating the word “mama”, indicating that even though its parents have been killed, the recurring processes of evolution (and possibly annihilation) will continue indefinitely. This scene is paired with my daughter “posing” for a video while an excerpt from the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, “Déjà Vu” (taken from the album “So Far”) repeats “We have all been here before”.

Paul Robert is a Canadian artist who works in a variety of media. He has an MFA from NSCAD University in Halifax (2005), and a BFA from the Alberta College of Art + Design (2002), where he currently teaches in the departments of First Year Studies, Media Arts and Digital Technologies, and Liberal Studies.

The Climb

Lia Rogers

An indistinct figure climbs endlessly up and down.

Lia Rogers is a practicing interdisciplinary artist concentrating on sculptural works, interactive installations, software and online interventions. She started out as a production potter, making vessels to put herself through a BFA in sculpture at the University of Calgary.

During her studies, she discovered media art and computers, and went on to get a BSc. degree in Computer Science. She has spent time working at the Banff Centre and for the Integrated Arts Media Lab. She is the Calgary Dorkbot overlord, and a past member of EMMEDIA’s Board of Directors. Her work has been exhibited all over Canada.

Lowell Smith

Labyrinth Generator

The Labyrinth is a spiritual meditation tool used in many different religions and cultures. There is only one path towards the centre, with the path circulating in and out from the edge towards the centre. The pathway can be used as a metaphor of the life we live. Following the path gets us closer to the centre of where our spirit and mind meet.

The Labyrinth is re-drawn again and again, each time growing in size and complexity. Things in life seem to build up on top of each other, becoming more and more enormous until we break it down to a simple path we must follow. Lowell Smith received his BFA from Alberta College of Art + Design in Media Arts + Digital Technologies. His work manipulates electronics and media in a variety of forms. Gathering ideas from social culture, science, math and spirituality, he tries to control the viewer without their mind knowing.

I Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye So Here Lindsay Sorell Lindsay fills her sink with water and then drains it. Internet-ripped karaoke songs of sincere heartbreak and incompleteness are ironically coupled with the video, to confuse the viewer as to whether or not I mean it.

Lindsay is saying goodbye. And I’m sorry I never wrote you.

Lindsay Sorell received her BFA in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2012. In recent months, she worked with artist-in-residence Marilyn Volkman during the NEOCraft Calgary workshop facilitated by The New Gallery’s John Snow House. She also participated in a performative, site-specific animation residency in collaboration with the Calgary Animated Objects Society to create the animation project A Lonely Mountain, and hosted the lecture series, BEDTalks, a series of lectures by local artists, clerks, and businessmen in the venue of her bedroom.

Carl Spencer

śruti #02

This piece is primarily a study of imperceptible modes between light and shadow, as this relates to the phenomena of video feedback. This work is an extension of my research in the area of Systems Art, much of which is dictated by the principle elements of control theories (feedback, noise, entropy) as first proposed by Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon.

Carl Spencer is an instructor in the department of Media + Digital Technologies at the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Nouveau Noir

Jesse Stilwell

My current work centres around the themes of optical art. This type of artwork reveals the levels of simulation that our brains are truly capable of generating, and probing the depths of our neurology through illusion allows us to better understand how far the “rabbit hole” goes. In addition, optical work breaks down the ideological barriers that exist between the viewer and art. With optical art, the audience no longer needs an in-depth understanding of ‘art’ or any of its pseudo-conceptual insider trading. To get it, it gets you.

Jesse Stilwell has recently received his BFA with distinction from the Painting program at the Alberta College of Art + Design, and was a nominee for the 2012 BMO painting award. Stilwell has shown work at the Marrion Nickel Gallery, Truck Gallery, Avalanche Gallery, Haight Gallery, and The Art Gallery of Calgary. Articles on his work have appeared in Blend (online copy), FFWD Weekly and Beatroute magazine.

Austin Taylor

Conjugal Visit

This digital tour through a distorted reality, takes the viewer into the mental space of late actor River Phoenix. The loop harnesses themes of claustrophobia, confusion, substance abuse, danger, excess, shyness, vulnerability, film theory, ramalamdingdong and art history.

During Phoenix’s death, he was accompanied by Brother Joaquin and friends Johnny Depp and Flea (of Red Hot Chilli Peppers). River was a known clairvoyant.

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

final frontier

Kali Urquhart

Costumes and fashion have been criticized because of their devotion to creating unconvincing curves on the female body, in order to fit an ideal that was not created by women. The function of fashion as ornamentation can be traced back to its religious significant, metamorphosing a woman’s body into an ambiguous idol. Through clothing, a woman becomes a plant, panther, diamond, mother of pearl, blending flowers, furs, jewels, shells, feathers with her body. She perfumes herself to spread an aroma of the lily and the rose. All this serves to hide the crudity of her flesh, her odor. Using video, I explore the thoughts of infinity and outer space through fashionable language.

Kali Urquhart is Calgary based and has a BFA majoring in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art + Design. She is always preparing for survival.

Lindsay Wells

Versace Baby

This project was meant to shine light on the behind the scenes of the artist; a dizzy, fragmented, non-linear look into the doings of the mind.

Lindsay Wells is an artistic truth seeker. She is 24.

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