Triennial – Physis: Production of Nature, Human and Technology

It is my great honour to be part of the Triennial, “Physis: Production of Nature, Human and Technology,” 2020 WuHan 5th Documentary Exhibition of Fine Arts,  at HuBei Museum of Art in China. Opening is November 20, 2020. Six pieces of my performance photograph from “Alone Together” series will be exhibited in the museum. For more information about “Alone Together,” please click here. For more info about the exhibition, please click here

Exhibition date: November 20, 2020 – March 7th, 2021
Address: HuBei Museum of Art,
1 Sanguandian, Donghu Road, Wuhan, Hubei, 430077
curator: Fu XiaoDong

 

 

Prix en art actuel du MNBAQ

I am very pleased to announce that I am shortlisted for Contemporary Art Award at Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec ( Prix en art actuel du MNBAQ), for more information, please visit here

Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, en collaboration avec RBC Fondation, est fier de dévoiler les cinq artistes finalistes de la quatrième édition du Prix en art actuel du MNBAQ, un prix bisannuel qui se démarque au Canada. Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Stanley Février, Chloë Lum et Yannick Desranleau, Marigold Santos ainsi que Walter Scott, ont été retenus par le jury composé de Georges Azzaria, directeur de l’École d’art de l’Université Laval, Nathalie Bachand, commissaire indépendante et autrice, Eunice Bélidor, directrice de la galerie FOFA de l’Université Concordia et membre du comité externe d’acquisition du MNBAQ, Katrie Chagnon, professeure associée au département d’histoire de l’art de l’UQAM, Audrey Genois, directrice générale de MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, et Bernard Lamarche, responsable du développement de la collection et conservateur de l’art actuel au MNBAQ.

Depuis l’an dernier, les cinq finalistes se partagent une bourse de 10 000$, chacun se verra donc remettre un montant de 2000$. « Nous traversons tous ensemble une période difficile où les artistes sont particulièrement touchés par les conséquences de la fermeture temporaire de lieux d’exposition, de l’annulation ou le report d’événements artistiques. Nous souhaitons nous inscrire dans un mouvement de maintien des activités essentielles et contribuer ainsi à soutenir des artistes et nous préoccuper de la vitalité de la communauté des arts visuels du Québec », souligne Annie Gauthier, directrice des collections et des expositions au MNBAQ.

Un second jury se réunira prochainement afin de déterminer le grand gagnant selon les critères établis – soit l’exigence d’une carrière étendue sur plus de 10 ans, la qualité et le caractère soutenu de la production ainsi que la reconnaissance par le milieu d’une réelle contribution artistique. Son nom sera révélé par l’équipe du Musée par la suite. L’exposition du futur lauréat est pour l’instant prévue à l’automne 2021 au MNBAQ, moment où sera lancée sa monographie.

 

Group Exhibition – Human Learning. What Machines Teach Us

Exhibition: Human Learning. What Machines Teach Us
Date: February 05th, 2020 – April 17th, 2020
Opening: February 4th, 2020 6-8pm
Gallery: Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris
Address: 130 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris

Produced by the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris as part of the official programme of Nemo, the Biennial of Electronic Arts Ile-de-France, in partnership with Elektra (Montreal) and with the support of Région Ile-de-France.

Human Learning. What Machines Teach Us is an exhibition that documents the world using the technologies that shape it. The works in the exhibition feature a large variety of styles: interactive devices that make us learn their playabilities, generative installations whose processes are entirely autonomous and digital creations made out of digital forms.

The concept of artificial intelligence emerged in the 1950s. It served as a vehicle for an imaginary world immediately adopted by science-fiction writers who endowed machines with the ability to “think”. In the 1980s, the idea that machines could themselves learn, by deduction, appeared. This is known as “machine learning”. Finally, since the turn of the millennium, the term “deep learning” has been used for the processing of vast quantities of data by computers.

We have taught everything to machines and continue to supply them so that they pursue the “desire” for autonomy we would like to grant them. Isn’t it time that we started thinking that we, too, learn from them by observing their specificities or qualities? If there is one community that observes the world to give us its interpretations of its transformations, it is the artistic community.

Artists have always made use of the tools and materials of their times. Thus, more and more of them are turning to the creative potential of digital technologies, which are also used by researchers in their laboratories. In doing so, they accept what the machines offer them while adding an element of unpredictability to their creations. Sometimes, they distance themselves from their works, which run so that their modes of actions may be observed better. Machines or robots are also the subjects of photographs or films that other artists produce to encourage new forms of empathy in us. It is not an application or a service that does not work as soon as it opens. From the special-effect filters of mass-market software to the networks of artificial neurones that artists share with researchers. They both learn and appropriate these technologies by rubbing shoulders with them.

We have a certain proximity with the works that emerge from the use and/or observation of the technologies that shape our relationship to the world, to others and to ourselves. Recognizing the technologies of our daily lives in an artistic context makes us envisage them differently. Knowing that it is through contact with others that we build ourselves, it is about time to think about the “mechanical” other we increasingly frequent without being too aware of it. Dedicating an exhibition to machines and ideas or the resulting aesthetics amounts to accepting their teachings.

Works by Matthew Biederman, Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Grégory Chatonsky, Douglas Coupland, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Emilie Gervais, Sabrina Ratté, David Rokeby, Justine Emard, Louis-Philippe Rondeau, Samuel St-Aubin, Skawennati, Xavier Snelgrove & Mattie Tesfaldet, with an exterior installation by Olivier Ratsi.

Guest curators: Dominique Moulon and Alain Thibault
Associated curator: Catherine Bédard

Exceptionally open on Saturday April 4, from 10am to 6pm for Paris Art Fair.

For more info about the work, please visit here
For more info about the exhibition, please visit hereand here

Solo Exhibition – In Transition

Solo Exhibition: In Transition
Exhibition: January 2nd to February 2nd 2020
Vernissage: Thursday, January 16th 2020 from 5 – 8pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, January 16th 2020 at 5:00pm
Gallery: Downtown Gallery at Ottawa School of Art
Address: 5 George Street , Ottawa,  Ontaria, K1N8W5

Free to the public – Everyone welcome

A hyperreal vision of our near future, exploring how humans and robots coexist and bind together with one destiny. Through performative gestures and expressions by creating different interactions between a robot and the artist herself, this work provides an alternative perspective for a better understanding of ourselves, our bodies, our emotions, our responsibilities, and our relations with non-human others. In Transition also raises questions about binary system, about how to challenge boundaries of self/other, culture/nature, and human/machine, moving beyond traditional gender, feminism, and politics, creating a new social relation that expands and amplifies humanity.

For more info about the work, please visit here
For more info about the exhibition, please visit here

Group Exhibition – Meaningful Code

Group Exhibition: Meaningful Code
Curated by Katie Micak
Exhibition date: October 26 – January 12, 2020
Opening reception: Thursday, November 7, 6 – 8 pm
Address: Living Arts Centre
4141 Living Arts Drive, Mississauga ON L5B 4B8

Meaningful Code looks at the ways in which artists are engaging with emerging technologies and tools in order to speculate on what our collective future might look like.

Featuring works in video, animation, 3D printing, photography, digital collage, augmented reality, AI and hacking, these works explore how we are integrating technology into our lives, how digital futures might change the ways we see ourselves, and what it might mean to live alongside artificial life forms.

For more info, pleas visit here

Film Screening – Queer City Cinema

I am very pleased to announce that my four channel film “They” will be screened at Queer City Cinema as part of Bad (Ass) Bodies, presented by Performatorium Festival of Queer Performance 7 and Queer City Cinema Film Festival 16.

Screening time: 8:30 pm, September 20, 2019
Festival: September 18-21, 2019
Address: Regina Public Library Film Theatre, 2311 12th Avenue, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

For more info about Queer City Cinema, please visit here
For more info about my work, “THEY,” Please visit here
The film available upon request

“The focus of Queer City Cinema 16 and Performatorium 7 will centre on marginalized bodies – those that are often viewed as less than, unhealthy, burdensome, defective, dangerous and threatening – and those artists that use their body to confront stigma, to resist and defy perceived and systemic attitudes, to activate awareness and insight, and to engage a rethink towards empathic impulses. Bad (ass) Bodies will see films, performances, workshops and discussions involving Fat, HIV+, aged, disabled, diseased and abject Queer bodies.”

Gary Varro
Executive & Artistic Director
Queer City Cinema & Performatorium

Group Exhibition – MOMENTA Biennale de I’image

Exhibition: The Life of Thing
Presented by MOMENTA Biennale de I’image, Montreal
Curated by María Wills Londoño and Audrey Genois
Date: Sept 4-Oct13, 2019
Opening: September 4th at 5:00pm
Address: Galerie de L’ UQAM
1400 Rue Berri, Montréal, QC

Under the theme The Life of Things, MOMENTA 2019 explores the nature—or even the personality—taken on by objects conveyed through images. Through the eyes of 39 artists from 20 countries, the biennale examines the economic, social, and cultural contexts in which material production is prevalent. With respect to the issues of consumption that characterize the contemporary world, these thingified objects are given dizzying visibility even as, ironically, they are rendered invisible by boundless accumulation. For its 2019 edition, the biennale brings out universes that are constructed between individuals and their environment, highlighting transferences that take place between subject and object.

MOMENTA transcends the polarization between the symbolic and the functional in the economies of the object. To this end, the biennale’s four thematic components offer different ways of imagining the relationships between human beings and objects. Encompassing a variety of ideas tied to questions of consumption, these components intersect in various ways to shed light on the works shown. They allow us to envisage the complexity of the connotations and resonances of things in contemporary societies.

For more info about Mother, please visit here
For more info about MOMENTA Biennale de I’image, please visit here

 

 

 

 

 

Group Exhibition – Walking the Bridge

 

I am having a group exhibition at Museo de la Cancillería, Mexico City,  from July 11 to August 23, created by Elizabeth Ross. I also do a performance on July 13 at 4:00pm.

For press at China Hoy, please visit here
chick here for the press at Paso Libre

 

Solo Exhibition – THEY

Solo Exhibition: THEY
Gallery: Le Lieu, centre en art actuel, Quebec City
Date: May 31 – June 23, 2019
Opening: May 31 at 7:00pm
Address: 345 rue du Pont, Quebec, Quebec G1K 6M4

They est une installation vidéo à quatre chaînes qui emmène le public dans les mondes de quatre femmes pour examiner de près leur vie quotidienne ritualisée, leurs obsessions, leurs tiraillements et leur détermination à être ce qu’elles sont. Les quatre femmes sont différentes, mais se ressemblent: elles vivent des transitions difficiles, des relations ambivalentes et des désirs qui les troublent, tout en célébrant leur propre existence de manière subversive, et même presque méditative. Le titre de l’installation est dérivé du pronom neutre anglais they. Dans cette vidéo, they est à la fois singulier et pluriel, désignant les femmes comme des individus uniques qui sont pluriels, mais dont les corps ont été marqués autrement.

Dans ce vidéo à quatre perspectives, l’artiste présente le corps de la femme comme un endroit de transgression et de resistance socio-politique. En employant des gestes symboliques, un rythme poétique et des répétitions, Dong révèle une réflexion complexe sur la médiation des identités à travers les écrans les performances et sur la manière dont elles nous parviennent avec le temps. Cette installation vidéo multicanal s’inspire des traditions du cinéma et de la performance pour tenter de créer de nouveaux récits visuels qui permettent au public de faire directement l’expérience de la dimension temporelle du corps, tout en fournissant une clé pour comprendre le pouvoir corporel à l’ère numérique d’aujourd’hui.

Group Exhibition – rames narratives / Storylines

Exhibition:  Trames narratives / Storylines
Gallery: Centre d’exposition L’Imagier
Date: May 24 – July 28, 2019
Opening: May 24 at 6:00pm
address: 9, Front St., Gatineau (Aylmer), Quebec, Canada

In addition to present my photographic work, ” Skin Deep,” I will present a performance, ” Come Home” at the opening, start at 5:00pm

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The Centre d’exposition L’Imagier is pleased to present Trames narratives / Storylines, the very first exhibition presented in its new building.

The opening will be held on Friday, May 24th, 6 p.m., at Centre d’exposition L’Imagier, 9, Front St., Gatineau (Aylmer).

The inaugural exhibition of the new L’Imagier seeks to showcase a multiplicity of practices and perspectives by bringing together six curators: Katarzyna (Kasia) Basta, Marianne Breton, Paul Brunet, Marie-Hélène Leblanc, Stefan St-Laurent and Julie Tremble. Artists Chun Hua Catherine Dong, David Elliott, Kablusiak, Kim Kielhofner, Carl Trahan, Jennifer Lefort and Mélanie Myers present discourses, experiences and stories weaving different narrative layers. By promoting the sharing of artistic visions, knowledge and interests, the exhibition fosters dialogue.

Guided by the notion of narration, the curators present artists whose works testify to their genesis, the experience of the artist or the observation of society. The works of various artistic mediums – photography, drawing, collage, sculpture and performance – are highlighted both in their differences and in their common filiations. While some appear closer to reality, others appeal more freely to fiction. Blurring the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the exhibition promotes a contact with a plurality of truths.

For more info

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Trames narratives / Storylines
Le Centre d’exposition L’Imagier est heureux de vous présenter Trames narratives / Storylines, la toute première exposition présentée dans son nouvel espace.

Le vernissage se déroulera le vendredi 24 mai 2019, à 18 h, au Centre d’exposition L’Imagier situé au 9, rue Front, Gatineau (secteur Aylmer).

L’exposition inaugurale du nouveau Centre d’exposition L’Imagier cherche à mettre en valeur une multiplicité de pratiques et de points de vue en réunissant six commissaires : Katarzyna (Kasia) Basta, Marianne Breton, Paul Brunet, Marie-Hélène Leblanc, Stefan St-Laurent et Julie Tremble. Ceux-ci présentent les artistes Chun Hua Catherine Dong, David Elliott, Kablusiak, Kim Kielhofner, Carl Trahan, Jennifer Lefort et Mélanie Myers, qui offrent aux visiteurs des discours, des expériences, des récits tissant différentes couches narratives. En favorisant le partage de visions artistiques, de connaissances et d’intérêts, l’exposition se veut un lieu de dialogue.

Guidés par la notion de narration, les commissaires ont sélectionné des artistes dont les œuvres témoignent de leur genèse, de l’expérience de l’artiste ou de l’observation de la société. Les œuvres de diverses disciplines artistiques – la photographie, le dessin, le collage, la sculpture et la performance – sont mises en lumière tant dans leurs différences que leurs filiations communes. Si certaines apparaissent plus proches de la réalité, d’autres font appel plus librement à la fiction. Ces croisements entre le réel et l’imaginaire, au sein de l’exposition, favorisent un contact avec une vérité plurielle. For more info

 

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