Between Us — A Toronto/Vancouver Exchange
Copyright Will Kwan, 2008
Exhibition dates: September 4 - 18, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 2008, 7 PM
Posters by Luis Jacob & Paul De Guzman, Will Kwan & Kristina Lee Podesva, and Fedora Romita & Sara Mameni
Curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland & Johan Lundh
Between Us - A Toronto/Vancouver Exchange is an experimental, curated group project that invited six artists to participate as key contributors to, and creators of a national dialogue between the cities of Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. The project is comprised of three double-sided posters. In each instance, two artists collaboratively conceptualized and crafted one poster in a long distance dialogue.
Luis Jacob is a Toronto-based artist, curator, educator, writer, organizer and activist whose practice challenges categorization. Jacob shares an interest in social spaces like his Vancouver collaborator Paul De Guzman. De Guzman is a self-taught artist, and his practice draws from his training as an engineer. Both have incorporated the image of a tower in their poster works, but notably, not the high-rise architecture conventionally used to visually represent their respective cities.
Toronto artist Will Kwan uses a range of approaches such as installation, performance, photo, text, video and editions in his practice. Like his Vancouver collaborator Kristina Lee Podesva, he addresses the politics of space, geographies, identity and globalization. Podesva is the founder of Colourschool, a free school within a school, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. The project is dedicated to the speculative study of five colours: white, black, red, yellow, and brown. Through their poster works, Kwan and Podesva have described the space that exists between the two of them and more broadly, the space between humans in a global context.
Toronto artist Fedora Romita’s versatile practice encompasses performance, video, and drawing. Romita’s process-based works are self-referential, as they both respond to and envelop their own methods of creation. Both Romita and her Vancouver collaborator Sara Mameni use text and transcribe information through painstaking labour. Sara Mameni’s practice of drawing, design and text deals with language and translation. These artists’ poster works are in direct conversation with one another, and act as a record of what communication took place between the artists up to the point of production. The posters describe the unpredictable dialogues and inevitable miscommunications that take place in any long distance relationship.
This conceptual framework provides space for artists of two cities to exchange ideas in the creation of new work, and engineers a distribution mechanism for art between organizational partners and cities. By choosing the form of three double-sided posters, we distribute six new works to two major cities in a format that is challenging to artists and affordable to all.
The opportunities presented by Between Us - A Toronto/Vancouver Exchange over the long term are what we find most exciting of all. We imagine this project to be a point of departure for an increasingly dynamic relationship between the two cities, one that could catalyze future exchanges between Toronto and Vancouver-based artists.
Western Front Media Arts acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $11.8 million in media arts throughout Canada.
Media contact:
Alissa Firth-Eagland
Director/Curator
Western Front Media Arts
303 East 8th Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V5T 1S1
604-876-9343
media@front.bc.ca
www.front.bc.ca