// THE ANNUAL //
Thursday October 10 to Sunday October 13, 2013
Exhibition Hours: Fri & Sat | 11am-8pm, Sun | 11am - 5pm Venue: 2nd Floor Gallery Opening Reception: Thurs October 10, 7pm – 10pm
//THE ANNUAL// is the Gladstone Hotel's annual independent contemporary art event, offering an open and fertile ground for engaging and emerging practices. Over the course of four days, //THE ANNUAL// brings together artists, curators, and collectives to present new work and site-specific installations.
The Call for Proposals for //THE ANNUAL// 2013 is now open
Click here to download the Call for Proposals
//THE ANNUAL// 2013 is curated by Katherine Dennis
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//THE ANNUAL// 2012 featured artists Tara Bursey, Soon Cho, Shlomi Greenspan, Brady Gunnell & Mikhail Mansion, Thea Jones, Maria Flawia Litwin, Isabel M. Martinez, Faye Mullen, Jen Spinner, Laura Taler, and keep it UP guest-curated by Zach Pearl & Caoimhe Morgan-Feir and featuring artists Andrew MacDonald, Johnson Ngo, and Cecilia Tiburzio.
To download the 2012 exhibit catalogue click here
//THE ANNUAL// 2012 was curated by Noa Bronstein and Deborah Wang
//////// About the 2012 participating artists ////////
Tara Bursey is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture and installation as well as drawing, craft and self-publishing. Her conceptual work can be characterized by its labour intensive and inventive use of materials such paper and food. In the past few years, she has exhibited locally in a diverse range of venues, from storefront window installations, tattoo shops and telephone poles to the Textile Museum of Canada and the Ontario Crafts Council, as well as in group exhibitions in Halifax, Saskatoon, Berlin, Montreal and Copenhagen. Bursey’s most recent projects include coordinating installation/exhibition programming for City of Craft, a contemporary craft event that takes place in Toronto. She began studies towards a degree in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University in September of 2009 and recently returned from a semester of study at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.
Soon Cho holds a Textiles degree from Rhode Island School of Design. Cho is an artist based in Toronto, whose practice involves making her daily imaginings into reality. Since finishing school, she started applying her textile inventions to lighting design. She first publicized her lamp designs and textile pieces at the Interior Design Show 2009, followed by Radiant Dark 2010, Come Up To My Room 2010, and the Artist Project Toronto 2011. Cho’s work mostly involves lighting, however depending on the qualities that they have, the finished works take a variety of forms such as chandeliers, installations, functional and sculptural objects.
Shlomi Greenspan is an Israeli artist, currently living and working in Toronto. He studied at the Avni Institute of Art and Design in Tel Aviv and at OCAD University where he received his BFA. His work has been featured in various curated exhibitions across Canada and in the United States. Greenspanʼs practice is multidisciplinary, with an emphasis on painting, animation and video installation. His work interfaces elements of time, narrative and storytelling to explore the various ways information technologies and mechanical devices mediate and distort the perception of time and space. By calling attention to certain patterns, cycles and unfolding moments inherent in every day life, Greenspan examines the ambivalence and mutability of lived experience in the 21st century.
Brady Gunnell is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and musician living and working in New York City. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. The expanse of the desert landscape has made a lasting impact on the way he approaches spatial challenges. He holds degrees from the University of Utah and Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently the interaction designer and visual artist at Bullett Magazine. Gunnell has exhibited extensively in the United States as well as internationally. His work can be found in such permanent collections as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, The Salford Zine Library in Manchester, England, and il Circolo die Lettori in Turino, Italy. His work is primarily focused on man’s connection to his environment in the digital age, and attempts sound, and spatial analysis.
Mikhail Mansion is an artist, musician, engineer and educator living in Providence, Rhode Island. He holds degrees from Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University and the University of Tampa. He currently teaches computer programming within RISD’s Digital Media, Illustration and Photo departments. Mikhail’s works have been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, in parts of South America, China and also New Zealand. Most recently his work has been exhibited at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture part in Lincoln, MA. The subject of his work is focused on media ecology, science and environment, typically incorporating real-time data culled from nature. He is currently the technical coordinator for the US National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR project in Rhode Island, an experimental program aimed at enhancing art and science collaboration. He also founded the group Trans-Mission, an artist collective and hackerspace that explores media ecology at the intersection of art and science.
Thea Jones is a video, textile, and sound artist who has exhibited in galleries and artist-run centres across Canada, most recently in Toronto, Montreal and Windsor. She received her BFA from Concordia University where she worked at Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies. Jones completed her MFA at York University and has been an artist in residence at The Banff Centre, Broken City Lab’s Storefront Residency for Social Innovation in Windsor, and Oboro in Montreal. Jones' research focuses on uncovering gestures of memorialization, her videos reinvent demarcations of the past in the landscape and explore the activation of ritual in repetition. Jones' video diptych at the Gladstone Gallery, Glamour & War and Remix, feature two stuttering landscapes, one at the seam of water and mountain and the other of architecture and explosive sky, collapsing between a semblance of synchronicity and chaos.
Maria Flawia Litwin began her art education in the dusty museums of Europe, followed by a BFA in Sculpture/Installation from OCAD and MFA from York University in Toronto. Her education continues as she applies research strategies in her art practice-- where with skill and biting humour she dissects the art institution through an array of media from installation, correspondence, video, fiction writing, data collecting to alter egos. Her work has been written about in View on Canadian Art, the National Post, Eye Magazine, the Toronto Star and her interview with feminist activist Shailoh Philips can be found in Poor but Sexy Magazine. Flawia Litwin hopes her art playfully engages the audience in questions relevant to art and society at large.
Isabel M. Martínez spent her formative years in Santiago de Chile and holds a BFA from Universidad Católica de Chile. In pursuit of a graduate degree she ventured into Canada and earned an MFA from the University of Guelph. With exhibitions in Chile, England, the US, and Canada, her artwork has been presented in CONTACT (2011), Magenta Flash Forward (2011), PhotoWeek DC (2011), Día Nacional de la Cultura Chilena (2011), Gallery 44 (2008), FotoAmérica Bienal (2004), and included in various public and private collections. As an artist, she is interested in the phenomenological aspects of human experience. Perception is a recurring theme within her practice, and has become a foundation for her to explore photo- based means of visual transcription for ideas that reflect on notions of time, space, simultaneity and duration. Spatio-temporal relations are predominant subjects, thus experimentation and process are at the forefront of much of her work. Martinez is based in Toronto.
Faye Mullen, often through a dissection of architectural space,employs the body to speculate theories concerning loss, lack and limitation. Her work has been informed by a sculptural practice and is often combined with performance, video and installation. Her phenomenological investigations of absence and presence are articulated through durational and poetic imagery. Mullen was born in the Niagara Region, Canada. She studied studio art with an emphasis in sculpture at l’école National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto as well as the University of Toronto, where she received her Master's degree. Mullen has exhibited internationally in solo and curated group exhibitions in Australia, Canada, France, South Korea, USA and has participated in international artist residencies in Buffalo, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Wongil and on the Toronto islands. She is the founder of minnow & bass Gallery, a nomadic space.Currently, Faye situates her practice in Toronto.
Jen Spinner is an artist and graphic designer exploring context and meaning through paper sculpture. Her work includes pieces shown at Red Head gallery, The Square Foot Show, collages for the SpeakEasy Spring Craft Show and paper installations for City of Craft and Come Up To My Room. Additionally, she contributed paper illustrations to The Walrus and MoneySense magazines. Spinner lives in Toronto and is the senior designer at Toronto Life magazine.
Laura Taler is a Romanian born Canadian artist working across a range of media including dance, film, sound, sculpture and installation. Taler began her career as a contemporary dance choreographer before turning her attention to filmmaking and visual art. She has been a resident at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires), and a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin). Her work has been screened in festivals, special screenings and broadcast internationally. Awards include a Gold Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival, the Best Experimental Documentary award from Hot Docs!, and Best of the Festival from New York’s Dance on Camera Festival. Publications include Tension/Spannung (Turia+Kant, 2010), Revisiting Ephemera (Blue Medium Press, 2011) and the forthcoming Embodied Fantasies (Peter Lang Publishing, 2012). Taler holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa.
In keep it UP at //THE ANNUAL//, three emerging artists offer unique depictions of support, emphasizing its disparate but related forms—ranging from literal to abstract.
In Cecilia Tiburzio's intaglio prints, support is visualized as a psychological system, a precarious and layered composition of identity. For Johnson Ngo, support manifests as a substantial but fragile structure. His pile of rice paper pillows nods to the comfort that support provides, yet their delicacy suggests the constant need to nurture something so easily breakable. In Andrew MacDonald's work, support is an invisible force. The space around his hanging sculptures and yarn installations are as integral to their structure as the materials themselves. Overall, these works beget a larger discussion of intricate relationships and networks—of reliance and interconnectedness. Support is not only the tie that binds these artworks, but the spirit of the entire arts community— specifically the efforts of emerging practitioners.
keep it UP at //THE ANNUAL// is guest-co-curated by Zach Pearl & Caoimhe Morgan-Feir.
Cecilia Tiburzio is an interdisciplinary artist living in Toronto. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Toronto, majoring in Psychology and Visual Arts. Her work is a dissection of psychological structures, illustrating what happens when these structures must be broken down and renewed. She is co-founder of Bound, a Toronto-based interdisciplinary collective, and founder of The Urban Vestiges Project, a new initiative promoting the exploration of urban neighbourhood histories.
Johnson Ngo is a Toronto-based artist exploring connections and disjunctions between his gaysian identity and Western queer culture. He created the Blackwood Gallery’s 2011 Billboard Commission and is guardian of the Feminist Art Gallery.
Andrew MacDonald is a graduate of OCAD University, and received his Master of Fine Art from the University of Western Ontario in 2008. Currently based in London, Ontario, MacDonald produces figurative and abstract sculptures, and installations employing knitting and yarn.
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