As a prelude to this year's
award-winning Curatorial Incubator,
Vtape and OCADU
presents

Scarce as hen's teeth:
considering the merits and challenges
of the solo exhibition in media arts

a one-day curatorial symposium

Saturday, January 15, 2011
1-4pm
@
OCADU GRADUATE GALLERY
205 Richmond St. West
ground floor

The survey, the retrospective, the spotlight – these are all ways of describing that most rare exhibition format: the solo show. But is the solo show – so valued by artists – alive and well, or fighting for its life in the media arts? What is the role of the institution (the museum, the gallery) in either promulgating, or pulling the plug, on these important opportunities for public engagement and appraisal?

Vtape has invited professionals to share their experiences mounting solo exhibitions in the media arts.

Jean Gagnon is the interim Director of Collections at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal. Previously with the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, Gagnon served as Executive Director of the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology where he founded the Centre for Research and Documentation and acquired major audiovisual-archival fonds for the Foundation and the DOCAM research alliance for the documentation and preservation of media arts.

Emelie Chhangur is an artist and curator living in Toronto. She is currently the Assistant Director and Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), where, for the past seven years, she has been instrumental in transforming the gallery into a responsive, artist-driven art centre. Her single channel videos have been shown nationally and internationally and she has upcoming curatorial projects in São Paulo, Bogotá, and Havana. 

Kerry Swanson is a scholar and independent curator.  She is the former Executive Director of the imagineNATIVE International Film + New Media Festival and the co-curator (with Candace Hopkins) of Shapeshifters, Time Travellers and Storytellers a major exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007, that combined works from both traditional and contemporary Aboriginal artists. She recently completed her Masters in Communication and Culture with a focus on Canadian Aboriginal film and video, in a joint program between York and Ryerson Universities.  Kerry is a member of the Michipicoten First Nation in northern Ontario.

Moderator: Lisa Steele, Vtape Creative Director, artist and Graduate Program Director, Visual Studies, University of Toronto.

For more information: info@vtape.org (Erik Martinson) 416 351-1317

401 Richmond St. West, #452, Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
lisas@vtape.org

www.vtape.org

The Curatorial Incubator v.8.
SUSPICIOUS FUTURES:
Select Video Work by Susan Britton
Curated by Allison Collins (Vancouver) 

January 29 – February 26, 2011

Single channel works 1976-1983
and the video installation Tutti Quanti.

The Curatorial Incubator v.8.
Please join us for the opening of
SUSPICIOUS FUTURES:
Select Video Work by Susan Britton
Curated by Allison Collins (Vancouver)

Opening and curator's talk
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29, 2011
1:00-5:00pm Curator's talk 2:00pm

The work of Susan Britton, one of the original artists/founders of Vtape, has been out of distribution – and thus out of the public eye - for almost 15 years. Recently restored, this body of work reveals an important early voice from the past life of video art in Canada. Vancouver-based emerging curator Allison Collins has assembled this sprawling, ambitious body of work into a beautifully structured whole, with just the right amount of loose ends as befits Britton's proto-punk personae. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, Collins' cogent reading of Britton's work and a full videography of this restored oeuvre.

video still from Love Hurts (1977) by Susan Britton

401 Richmond St. West, #452, Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
lisas@vtape.org

www.vtape.org