news & events : visiting artists

Visiting Artists: Summer 2009

The MFA Visiting Faculty Lecture Series is free and open to the public. All lectures begin at 6:30 pm in the new Osher Hall, located on the second floor of the Porteous Building, 522 Congress Street.

Learn more about the MFA at MECA.

June 22

Paul Butler (CND)
Paul Butler is an artist, curator and dealer with an interest in multidisciplinary, social and alternative pedagogical practices. His projects include hosting the “Collage Party,” a touring experimental studio established in 1997, and directing the operations of The Other Gallery, a nomadic commercial gallery focused on overlooked artists’ practices. His recent experimental residency organized for artists, writers, and curators at the Banff Centre for the Arts entitled “Reverse Pedagogy” will have a second life at the 53rd Venice Biennale as an experimental, temporary art school complete with tents, air mattresses, and four canoes housed in a Venetian palazzo. Butler has recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto; White Columns, New York City; Creative Growth Art Centre, Oakland; and Sparwasser HQ, Berlin. His curatorial projects have included works by Matthew Higgs, Mitzi Pederson, DearRaindrop and Guy Maddin. In 2010 he will curate The Milwaukee International's Ice Fair on Winnipeg's Red River, and organize "The Exchange," a two-part exhibition at Dorset Fine Arts, Cape Dorset and The National Gallery, Ottawa, in an effort to bring together Canada's southernmost and northernmost art communities. Butler lives and works in Winnipeg.

theotherpaulbutler.com

June 25: Collage Party with Visiting Artist Paul Butler in the ICA at MECA

Paul Butler's Collage Party is a nomadic workshop in which local artists and the public are invited to produce collage together in a party atmosphere. The Collage Party provides a free space for the local community to meet, interact, and share a process of production. In this way, the Collage Party unleashes the spontaneous energy of juxtaposition, encouraging both material and social experimentation.

"Canadian collage artist Paul Butler takes the experience of art off the wall and turns it into a full-on party. Literally. A “traveling experimental group studio with a rotating cast,” Collage Party has roamed North American and Europe creating walk-in, full-room cut and paste installations.

Unlike your run-of-the-mill house party, these all-nighters are no-holds-barred creativity jams. The results range from nailing Teddy Bears to the wall to multi-colored floor to ceiling construction paper towers to mummifying one of the artists in scraps and taping them to a pillar… when you think about it, why not? It’s like pre-school craft time without having a teacher telling you not to eat the paste. No material is off limits as long as you can cut it, draw on it, and then stick it to something else.

Having referred to some of his own collages as “the visual equivalent of Prozac,” Butler’s individual works revolve around cutting, taping, pasting, and combining found images and objects in way that completely alters their original meaning and creates a whole new visual message. Austere and seemingly simple (taping the words “Go Go Go” on a discarded plastic shopping bag bring up a certainly layered take on the state of consumer culture), it’s that apparent simplicity that makes the deeply meaningful messages within so delicious to uncover. In just a few words he can dilute these consumerist images into a commentary on what’s really being sold to us –- when he glues “Change” onto a picture of a forest glade the relevancy of what he’s saying becoming subtly and immediately clear."

June 29

Amelia Jones (UK/US)
Amelia Jones is Professor and Pilkington Chair in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She has organized exhibitions on contemporary art and on feminism, queer, and anti-racist approaches to visual culture. Her publications include the co-edited anthology Performing the Body/Performing the Text (1999), and the edited volumes Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003; new edition coming out in 2010) and A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (2006). Following on her Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998),
Jones’s recent books include Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004) and Self Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006). Her current projects are an edited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (with co-editor Adrian Heathfield) and a book tentatively entitled Seeing Difference Differently: Identification and the Visual Arts. Jones studied at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2000. Jones lives and works in Manchester.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Jones

July 6

Jane Wildgoose (UK)
Jane Wildgoose is an artist, writer, broadcaster, and NESTA Fellow, with a background in design for stage and film. Since 2003 Wildgoose has been Keeper of the Wildgoose Memorial Library (WML) where she oversees a collection of found and made objects that function as a forum for collaboration on memory and mortality, providing subject matter for her photographic still lifes and a backdrop for her photographic portraits. Working with American radio artist and producer Gregory Whitehead, and British producer Neil McCarthy, Jane has incorporated her practice at the WML into radio programmes for the BBC, including A Tale of Two Skulls (BBC Radio 3, 2008) and On One Lost Hair (BBC Radio 4, 2004). She regularly collaborates with museums and galleries and is currently developing a project with the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven where she is working with the curators and collections at the Peabody Museum of Natural History and Yale University Art Gallery to produce a site-specific installation to accompany the exhibition Mrs Delany& Her Circle opening at Yale Center in September 2009 and traveling to Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, in 2010. Wildgoose lives and works in London.

www.janewildgoose.co.uk

July 13

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (CND)
Nemerofsky Ramsay is an artist, diarist and aspiring bon-vivant. Since 2000 his work has involved performance, video and print works as vehicles for examining the singing voice and the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into words, and the impact of popular culture on identity. His work has been exhibited in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won numerous prizes at film and media art festivals in Canada, Germany, Poland and Portugal. His work is held in both private collections as well as the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Recent solo and group shows include Radio Killed the Video Star at the Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba; Lyric at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria; Queering the Archive at Nikolai Church, Købnhavn, Denmark; You Can’t Get There From Here at the York Quay Gallery, Toronto; and Reverberations at the Yuangong Art Museum, Shanghai, China. Nemerofsky Ramsay lives in Montréal and travels internationally.

www.nemerofsky.ca

July 20

Ken Lum (CND)
Ken Lum's art is concerned with issues of identity, especially as they relate to image production in contemporary urban society. Working across multiple media, Lum's art aims to challenge our fixed ideas about who we are when faced with the processes and pressures of cultural and political assimilation. Since his first solo exhibition in New York in 1982, Lum has developed a complex body of work that includes Furniture-Sculptures, Portrait-Logos, Language Paintings, Photo-Mirrors and Shopkeeper series works. All of his work involves the dialectics of private and public constructions of identity, space and politics. Lum has participated in many prestigious international art exhibitions including Istanbul Biennial, Documenta XI, Shanghai Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Carnegie International, the Sáo Paulo Bienal, and the Johannesburg Biennale. He is an active writer and has published in many leading art journals and magazines including, Art & Text, Art Margins, Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art and Art & Collections. He is also Founding Editor of Yishu: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He was curator of the 2004 NorthWest Annual exhibition held at Center of Contemporary Art in Seattle, Shanghai Modern: 1919 - 1945 for the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, and co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 7, held in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. More recently, Lum has been working on a number of public art commissions, including ones for the cities of Vancouver, Stockholm, Zurich and Leiden. These new works are more involving of a language of critical urban politics. Lum lives in Vancouver and travels internationally.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Lum

July 27

Jonah Freeman (US)
Freeman’s work has been primarily focused on the phantasmagoria of the constructed world.
In the past five years, two of Freeman’s major projects, The Franklin Abraham and Hello Meth Lab in The Sun (in collaboration with Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh) have produced several bodies of work that include a quasi-feature film, a historical photograph/print archive, sculptural installations, and a 16-room environmental installation. The Meth Lab project will be continued in a sequel installation at Deitch Projects, NYC titled Black Acid Co-op (in collaboration with Justin Lowe), scheduled for the summer of 2009. Screenings and exhibitions of Freeman’s work have occurred at several galleries and museums including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; P.S. 1, NYC; Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC; Le Centre pour l'image Contemporaine Saint Gervais, Geneva, Switzerland; Maison Populaire, Paris; and Galerie Edward Mitterrand, Geneva, Switzerland. His forthcoming project, In The Kaleidoscope Room, takes its title from a book by Elizabeth Stone about the mega-exhibition San San International, a result of the merger of several kinds of trade fairs, contemporary art exhibitions, technology displays and performance festivals into one behemoth event. Freeman lives and works in New York City.

Andrew Kreps Gallery

August 3

Brian Dunn (CND/US)
Brian Dunn is a doctoral candidate in affective neuroscience at Concordia University in Montreal. In his research, he uses fMRI to map human emotional reactions, in particular, experiences of pleasure and displeasure. His work is rooted in the tradition of experimental psychologists and philosophers of mind who view emotion as a primary, somatically-driven phenomenon, and the long tradition of philosophical-religious inquiry that seeks to investigate the nature of the self through the close scrutiny of hedonic preferences. His academic work includes a BA in Philosophy, and graduate study in Philosophy of Religion, which he ended in order to write and record music professionally. Returning to research and clinical work, he conducted studies of mood disorders and substance abuse at a psychiatric hospital for five years. Dunn is a practitioner of traditional Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and a formal student of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism. His direct collaborations with studio artists began in 1994, and most recently take the form of consultations with artists on the neural and psychological bases of their concerns. Dunn lives and works in Montréal.

Visiting Artist lectures are free and open to the public. For additional information, see www.meca.edu or call (207)775.3052.