THE NATURAL & THE MANUFACTURED 2012
August 16 – September 21, 2012
Opening Thursday August 16, 2012 | Artist Talks at 7:00pm | Reception at 8:00pm
EXHIBITIONS
B.j. Vogt | Ebb and Flow
Gallery Installation
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 16, 7pm, KIAC Ballroom
Andrew O’Connor | Frequencies: Dawson City
Outdoor Site-specific Sound Installation
(Tune your radio to 107.9FM between 2nd & 3rd Ave, and Princess and King St)
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 16, 7pm, KIAC Ballroom
Arts Festival Installation Walk: Sunday, August 19, 2pm
Adriana Kuiper & Ryan Suter | Burned
Outdoor Site-specific Installation
(Located on 2nd Ave, between Princess and Queen St)
LECTURE
Sheila Heti | The Soul of Time
Friday, August 17, 7pm, KIAC Ballroom
DOCUMENTATION
Jp King | Post-exhibition essay
To be released Fall 2012
The Natural & The Manufactured is a unique thematic project jointly organized by the ODD Gallery and the Artist in Residence Program at the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture. Conceived as a speculative research and presentation forum, the N&M looks to the myriad ways in which we both influence and are influenced by our natural and constructed environments.
The Natural & The Manufactured 2012 — the ODD Gallery’s 8th annual edition of the project—features six prolific artists and writers. The ODD Gallery is pleased to present an interactive sound installation by Andrew O’Connor (Toronto), an outdoor public installation by Adriana Kuiper & Ryan Suter (Sackville), a gallery exhibition of sculpture, video and photographs by B.j. Vogt (St Louis), a lecture by writer Sheila Heti (Toronto), and a commissioned critical text by writer and artist Jp King (Toronto).
Through a rich program of exhibitions, installations, actions, lectures and essays, The Natural & The Manufactured endeavours to engage both artists and audiences in a re-examination of the cultural, physical and economic values imposed on the environment. This project seeks to explore alternative political, social and aesthetic agendas and strategies towards a reinterpretation and new understanding of our relationship to the environment and our social infrastructure: the indelible ways in which our natural landscapes influence, inspire and sustain us, and conversely the ways in which our perceptions of- and actions upon- these landscapes directly impact the environment itself.
PROJECTS
B.j. Vogt | Ebb and Flow
The focus of the work in Ebb and Flow is to investigate the various fluid states of human culture and its by-products in comparison to naturally occurring objects, systems, and events; especially the mechanisms of rivers, glaciers, and igneous rock formation. It is hard to conceive of, within the daily human timeframe, the scope of impact that we as a collective organism have affected upon the landscape. However when the duration of certain events and processes are sped up, slowed down, or captured our impressions become more evident. Mediated through the forms of site specific installation, sculpture, photography, and video; the works in this exhibition consolidate or expand the minutia of everyday life into dynamic natural processes and systems whose purpose is to re-examine, through the lens of time, the place of humanity within the natural world.
Andrew O’Connor | Frequencies: Dawson City
Frequencies; Dawson City is an installation for a series of low watt FM transmitters placed around Dawson City. Each transmitter is tuned to the same frequency (107.9FM) and laid out in an array where, as you move through the installation, different transmitters will fade in and out of range. The transmitters are each broadcasting a different loop of soundscapes, stories and, reflections about the physical space where they are located. Each loop is of a different length, so as you walk through the installation with your radio tuned you will encounter an ever-changing collage of stories, and juxtaposition of opinions. The idea is to create a narrative documentary, but one that’s never the same twice. What each person ends up hearing depends on where you access the piece, the speed you move through it, and the direction you point your antenna, leaving the listener to draw their own meaning from the contrasting ideas they encounter.
Adriana Kuiper & Ryan Suter | Burned
This work references burn barrels, a source for providing heat or burning trash. However, instead of setting wood ablaze, ice in the form of firewood slowly melts into a bucket in the base of the barrel. The water collected from the melting wood is regularly recast/frozen into more icy wood to fuel the failed fire. The work also alerts its viewer when the “fire” needs to be restarted as a somewhat sad alarm of drips (amplified through a speaker) stops when the firewood runs out.
Sheila Heti | The Soul of Time
“I have always thought a lot about the word ‘soul’ and have often wondered how it relates to anything real. One day, waiting for a subway with a friend, I thought that maybe Time was the real thing — the “body” — and we were ITS soul, rather than the common idea of people having bodies, and HAVING a soul. In the years since that thought came to me, I have tried in various ways to pin it down. Sometimes the notion that “we are the soul of time” seems so clear to me, as plain as that tree standing over there. Sometimes I have no idea what “we are the soul of time” could possibly mean; it looks bizarre. In this lecture, I’ll try to understand and explain and make sense of this idea, hopefully with the help of the audience.” – Sheila Heti
Jp King | Post-Exhibition Essay
Commissioned to write a text on the N&M 2012, King will be present during the various ODD Gallery exhibitions and events of Arts Festival weekend. His essay will at once work to document and critically assess the ideas generated by the projects. King will also be leading some book/zine making workshops during the festival.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
B.J. VOGT lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, USA where he received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture in 2006 from Washington University. Vogt has been the recipient of a Critical Mass for the Arts Creative Stimulus grant, a Santo Foundation Individual Artist award and, in conjunction with a residency at the Cite’ Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, the 2006 Bill Kohn Travel Scholarship from Washington University in St. Louis. His work is currently featured in the Urbanity exhibition at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the 2011 Creative Stimulus Award exhibition: Anomalous Perspectivesat the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, Missouri.
ANDREW O’CONNOR is a transmission artist based out of Toronto. Active in community radio for over 15 years now at stations like CKMS FM in Waterloo, CKLN in Toronto and Shouting Fire Radio in San Francisco, his work has also been heard on programs across the CBC network including Inside the Music, The Signal, Two New Hours and The Current among others. Andrew O’connor’s radio work has also been featured internationally on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, WGXC in New York State, and Radio Zero in Lisbon. His sound installations, often radio based, have been presented at The Vancouver New Music Festival, The Third Coast Filmless Festival in Chicago, Megapolis in Baltimore, OK Quoi in Sackville, and the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound in Kitchener.
ADRIANA KUIPER is an installation artist who lives and works in Sackville, New Brunswick. Her recent work explores versions of modified, hidden architectural structures meant to suggest safety from extreme forces, natural and otherwise. Her work investigates provisionally built structures found in the local landscape, and she often adapts and manipulates existing instructions for “Do-It-Yourself” shelters and small buildings. Outdoor public installations of her work have been show recently at Nuit Blanche in Toronto, and at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Kuiper’s work has been shown across Canada in cities such as Kitchener, Oakville, Vancouver and Calgary, and has been exhibited internationally in Oslo, Norway. Adriana Kuiper is a faculty member at Mount Allison University where she teaches sculpture and drawing.
RYAN SUTER is a multi media artist currently living in deep Middle Sackville. His media work explores the spaces between things seen and things heard through the lens of film, music and installation. Ryan teaches at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His work has exhibited throughout Canada.
SHEILA HETI is the author of five books. Earlier this summer, she published How Should a Person Be?, which the New York Times called a “nearly unclassifiable book… unlike any other novel I can think of.” Last year, she published a book for children titled We Need A Horse, and a book of “conversational philosophy” called The Chairs are Where the People Go, with her friend Misha Glouberman (deemed a Best Book of 2011 by The New Yorker). Her books have been translated into five languages and published internationally. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer magazine and lives in Toronto.
JP KING is an artist, writer, critic, publisher & printer living in Toronto. He runs Paper Pusher Printworks, a Risograph printing operation with a literary and arts publishing arm. He currently writes for Kolaj, an international collage magazine run out of Montreal, and his book of narrative poems and illustrations, We Will Be Fish, was first published by PistolPress in 2008. As an artist-in-residence at KIAC in the fall of 2011, King took inspiration from the Gold Rush era to work on his anachronistic book project Manhole, which explores a future vision of Canada sustaining itself on an excavated landfill. His personal work explores contemporary mythology, masculinity, garbage, and collective activity. His obsession with paper manifests itself in collage, installation, murals, and multiples. When the timing is right, he plays the role of designer, editor, residency coordinator, and conversational facilitator.
The ODD Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Yukon Government Department of Tourism and Culture and the Canada Council for the Arts.