JUST ACT NATURAL ARTISTS
« Back to Exhibition Homepage| Darryl Bank | D.R. Harper | Lauren Hortie |
| Hyein Lee | Julia Mensink | Laura Paolini |
| Mark Prier | Nicole Rayburn | Nikki Reimer |
| Talie Shalmon | Tamara Sponder | Jennie Suddick |
| Matthew Williamson | Lisa Visser |
DARRYL BANK
Artist Statement:
In April 2008, the performing chimp-and-bulldog duo Pankun and James filmed the final episode of their popular segment for the TV show Tensai! Shimura Dobutsuen in the Miyazaki Prefecture of Japan. After filming was complete, the animals were "deported", taken away from their homes, and sent to a zoo nearly 200 kilometres away in Kumamoto Prefecture, where they have resided since.
Who was behind this deportation? The Japanese Government. And why was it carried out? Pankun's behaviour on Tensai! Shimura Dobutsuen, where he has done everything from farming a rice paddy to re-enacting scenes from Jurassic Park, was becoming "too human".
Co-sponsored by Performing Chimpanzee Advocacy International, The Canadian Interspecies Alliance, Bulldog Rescue of Kumamoto Prefecture, and Canadians Against the Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, this traveling educational exhibit provides an illuminating behind-the-scenes look at the Pankun and James tragedy.
Biography:
Darryl Bank is a Toronto-based artist and arts administrator. Select past projects include "Every Stratified Thing on Earth: John Anderson and the 'Kingston Tapes' " (The Artel, 2008), and "Critical Conditions: Contemporary Art from Wayne, Michigan", in collaboration with John Murnaghan (Union Gallery, 2006). Notable curatorial projects include "Trickx of Light" as part of Vtape's 2009 "Curatorial Incubator" program, and "Ghosts of Presence: International Emerging Artists' Video" at the AGYU in 2007. He is currently working on a suite of artist-book projects exploring the lives of famed distance runners Tom Longboat, Gerry Lindgren, and Henry Rono.
JENNIE SUDDICK
Artist Statement:
Through my research of the various ways humans interact with nature in our currently cultural state, I began exploring the field of cryptozoology, a study of animals that may or may not exist. Spurring believe in the existence of creatures including the sasquatch, Loch Ness monster and hundreds of other mysterious beings, cryptozoology functions on the basic principle that there is still more to the natural world that humans are yet to explore or conquer.
Here, I have chosen to work with the image of the Sasquatch, or Big Foot, because of its interesting relationship to both folklore and human characteristics. A mix of human and cryptid, the sasquatch has supposedly been documented in a few sightings. These sightings have played into human interest so much so that these few case have become well-know worldwide. The possibility of a humanoid mammal that has remained living in secrecy so close to civilization clearly peaks people's interest, in part because they allow us to romantically imagine a world where a creature so related to man can live surreptitiously in a close relationship to nature.
With these pieces, Sighting, Father and Son, and Warming, I have depicted sasquatches in situations associated with human behavior. Sighting, based on the famed 'still 352' from the 'Patterson-Gimlin' film documentation of a Big Foot sighting from 1967, depicts a sasquatch casually standing in a clearing, calmly waving at the viewer. Father and Son, shows a father sasquatch strolling through the woods, leading his offspring, which is loosely based on the iconic Andy of Mayberry leading his son Opie home after a fishing trip. Warming, depicts a sasquatch and its mate casually perched on a log near a bonfire, making the simple, human, gesture of reaching towards the fire to warm its hand. This one gesture prevents us from viewing the creature as a wild animal, and rather, as a version of ourselves.
These scenes, perfectly frozen in time in miniature diorama form, provide us with a glimpse of a world that humans seem to curiously yearn for- one in which we can view our relationship to nature as close, as well as slightly mystical and limitless.
Biography:
Jennie Suddick is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. Jennie has lived and shown in Canada, USA and Italy. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Ontario College of Art and Design, where she was the recipient of multiple awards. She has gone on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts, which she completed at York University in Spring 2009. Her work, based in print, photography and sculpture, deals with issues of Canadian identity, cryptozoology, museological display, hyper reality, and her own mediated relationship to nature. Recently, she has shown at Board of Directors, The Gallery at The Mississauga Living Arts Centre, Hallwalls "Artists and Models", The Gladstone Hotel's "upArt" and received of the Award of Excellence at the 2009 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. Jennie will be participating in Open Studio's Visiting Artist Residency in 2011.
JULIA D. MENSINK
I lived with Zombie for one winter. She showed up on my porch in November and began sleeping in a roll of foam I'd put out for garbage pickup. Eventually it got cold and snowy, so she moved inside the house. She seemed to feel comfortable and was comforting. She stayed in the house until June, approaching my move-out date. As I was preparing to leave the house, I wondered what to do with Zombie.
An answer came unexpectedly as I sat on the porch with her: "There's your cat!" A mother and her son told me she was theirs, and: How long have you had her? We're happy she's okay. Days later, a man from down the street had the same reaction - the cat usually slept in his garage; he would feed her, talk to her. Zombie was everyone's cat. She was no more mine than the street was mine; if I could leave the street, I could leave her, too.
Once I'd moved out all my furniture and the house was entirely empty, I went back to clean. Sure enough, Zombie was on the porch. She got in by accident. She raced up the stairs, down the hall, and into the living room. She used to have a spot that was all her own, on the corner of the Ikea carpet. The carpet was gone, of course, but she sat down in the place she'd always sat, this time in the middle of an empty room. She stayed as I cleaned and then I took her outside. I never saw her again.
Artist Statement and Biography:
I: An alphabetized list of problems to be solved:
Are you listening to me? Why do you have your eyes closed?
If you could have seen how they dragged those words through the storm
If you could have seen how they welcomed the death of that precious thing
It is two and it is one
I won the lottery, I burnt down your house.
People clapping loudly for small things that will save them
Polar ice caps
Thank you
They are me and every one
They are onto you but they have nothing to find
They are opposites and the same even in the stories that set them against each other.
Your journals from elementary school
II: Some background
julia mensink is an emerging artist whose work includes sculpture, collaborative performance, prose, poetry and sound/musical installation that explores memory and its muddy parts, loss, the archaeology of language, lies and the determination of truth. she is currently interested in the space we give ourselves - in all its forms - endings and beginnings, icebergs, Al Green, stray cats, zines, synthesizers, typewriters, your garbage and ugly art. she lives and teaches in Toronto.
LAURA PAOLINI
Artist Statement:
The Mystery
The American cult television show Mystery Science Theatre 3000 features a man and his robot sidekicks, trapped on a satellite by an evil scientist and forced to watch a selection of terrible movies. One episode opens with the protagonist reading The Velveteen Rabbit to his two robots and refers to it as their favorite book. This reveals a rather uncanny parallel where the two potentially sentient beings, the rabbit and the robot, both simultaneously aspire to the "real."
The Gallery
Enter a new satellite of sorts: a gallery viewer meets a small white creature, apparently a rabbit. Upon being held upright by the viewer, the rabbit sighs and then after breathing its last breath, dies. The viewer must decide what to do: give the dead rabbit a tour of the gallery, put the rabbit back? Is this sudden death a response to touch, to interaction, to the prospect of contact... was this supposed to happen?
Being
Many stories use rabbits and bunnies as a signifier for innocence lost and a pursuit of the real. The Velveteen Rabbit had to go away when his boy got sick and needed to heal and grow (up). In the same gesture, Lenny from Of Mice and Men eagerly wanted to be rabbit keeper on a farm that he and George will never have. The artist Joseph Beuys tried to explain paintings to a dead hare, both in an egalitarian gesture and as a statement of our own limited understanding of being. In these examples the rabbit is a symbol of our mortality and our capacity for feeling, loving and understanding.
Just Act Natural
This exhibition attempts to identify the private lives of animals and respect their public lives. I responded to the invitation with a robotic work that culminates the physical and ontological manifestations (and consequences) that occur when landscape, animals, and humans are romanticized. It is important to note that while this is a Beuysian (arguably Duchampian) gesture, there is a pointed moment of choice once the rabbit is dead in the viewers arms. I view the gallery as a stage for history unfolding, a stage of transition, and a stage for presentation. Several of my other installation-based artworks reference the above concerns using interactivity as an entry point. This new work continues that trajectory by exploring notions of technology as an "emotional surrogate" and a means of dealing with inadequacy and compensating for lack.
I am very happy to be participating in this exhibition. I am also very grateful for the support from the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, who are contributing to the continued development of this project, and by extension, my larger artistic practice.
Biography:
Laura Paolini is an artist living in Toronto. She is as a professional writer, arts administrator, sometimes educator and internet-kitty enthusiast. Her artwork is primarily conceptual and is executed in media-based installations. It has been described as quirky and refreshing, as well as seductive yet subversively political. She has exhibited at art-based fundraisers and fairs and in gallery settings such as "Other.World," described as "an exhibition of five contemporary artists at the cutting edge of animated machinations," at Redbull 381 Projects in Toronto. Her most recent solo show 'Hello, Schrödinger" presented at Hamilton Artists Inc. took place from January 9th-February 26th 2010. Laura graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and holds a BFA with Distinction from the Sculpture/Installation Department in the Faculty of Art. Her theses on problematics in the history of art have appeared in arts-based publications such as Les Fleurs du Mal, Fuse, Musicworks and
LAUREN HORTIE
Artist Statement:
In this series of illustrations I wanted to comment on the aesthetic and intentions of American Apparel ads. The ads have become a mainstream portrayal of "indie" culture promoted by a multi-million dollar chain that got its start as an alternative to mainstream exploitative fashion. The ads have become a part of our everyday culture, gracing the back pages of independent magazines with their shots of young nubile women in sports socks. They are supposedly of real' cool' store employees, which is either exploitative of female staff or a total fiction, as its been revealed that most of the women photographed have had modeling experience. The ads are also often racialized, ex: "Amy is French and Maria is Mexican" in the small type under the photos. Perhaps most noticeably the ads are meant to mimic the look and feel of homemade pornography with the women portrayed as blank objects of desire. With my illustrations I wanted to replicate the style of the ads with an empowering twist. These are no dumb bunnies or deer in the headlights in my drawings. Instead my models are meat-eating beasts that might just return your carnal gaze.
Lauren Hortie is an artist, DJ and teacher living in Toronto Canada. Born and raised in small towns in Ontario and Quebec, Lauren's interest in nature and pop culture developed as a result of being surrounded by beautiful landscapes by day and being stuck watching videos in friends' basements by night.
For over two years under the pseudonym Sigourney Beaver she has organized Steers & Queers, a queer country and western variety show and dance party in Toronto. She also throws Sleazy Listening, an adult contemporary party and takes part in Granny Boots, a free weekly night of queer entertainment at Toronto's historic Gladstone Hotel. Currently Lauren has been receiving attention from venues in Toronto for the intricate hand drawn posters she creates for her events.
Biography:
Lauren's past work such as Sigourney Beaver's Sheroes, exhibited in Bristol, UK in 2008 is a reflection of her passion for nature, music and art. Sheroes honoured the women of music and popular culture who are often overlooked by the canon. Lauren uses photocopies, sharpies, scrap paper and low tech silkscreens to make low art of low subjects. Stevie Nicks, Yoko Ono, Missy Elliot and Tina Turner among others all receive tribute through Lauren's tongue-in-cheek illustrations. "American Feral," a set of nature program inspired drawings, provides a response to popular images of women propagated by American Apparel advertisements. Recently, Lauren exhibited her original series of "My First Lesbian Colouring Books" at the Ontario Council of the Arts DIWhy? exhibit. The colouring books feature portraits of famous lesbians and encourage people to send in their coloured illustrations in exchange for herbal tea and mix tapes. Lauren continues her work illustrating queer life and pop culture though the creation of her "Gay and Night" portrait series.
NIKKI REIMER
Artist Statement:
East Vancouver, "East Van" to the locals, is a historically and currently contested space and a site of economic marginalization within Vancouver, British Columbia. In this space of light industry, commerce and residential zoning are countless felines who wander the streets at will, some feral, some not.
According to Scientific American magazine, the house cat is the most popular pet in the world, but compared to the upwardly mobile modern dog, the cat is hard to anthropomorphize and more difficult to bend to human will. Cats occupy the territory between fetishized status object and wild beast, between pampered pet and punching bag, between garden pest and teddy bear. Cats have also frequently stood in for the feminine and the marginalized (witches or the spectre of the "crazy cat lady") and according to a 2010 CBC Radio documentary, they are the animals most likely to be abused.
Cats rule East Vancouver. These felines have been encountered in shared or public spaces, at random, whilst walking through the various neighbourhoods of East Van. This series of photos troubles the notion that the cat is what we wish the cat to be, even as the gaze of ownership is reinforced by the point of view of the camera lens.
Biography:
Nikki Reimer, poet and artist, is the author of [sic] (Frontenac House, 2010) and fist things first (Wrinkle Press Chapbook, 2009). Recent work has appeared in VancouverisAwesome.com, W 2010, West Coast Line and Matrix. In 2005 two of her poems were featured in the poetry-inspired dance show "Larimer St." performed by Decidedly Jazz Danceworks. She is interested in inter-disciplinary practice, publishing, mental health issues, animal rights and contemporary poetics. Reimer is an active member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective.
TALIE SHALMON
Artist Statement:
Animals play a significant role in the mythologies of many cultures and religions throughout history. From Christianity to Native American to Asian cultures, animals are attributed with symbolic meanings and they represent unique qualities and traits. When considering a species of animal, we automatically associate them with the traits they symbolize, having learned these symbols from our cultural surroundings. For example, the tiger has come to represent courage, indignation and passion, the snake symbolizes intelligence, seduction and deceit, and the deer represents tranquility, caution and gentleness.
The emblematic qualities of animals are sometimes attributed to humans; they are recognized as sharing certain characteristics and behaviours. However, people are complex and have many seemingly divergent parts of their personalities that are revealed in specific circumstances and with different people.
Biography:
Talie was born in Toronto, Ontario and graduated from the Queen's University Fine Arts (Honours) program in 2007. Talie Shalmon is currently exploring collage in her work, using wallpaper from discontinued sample books. Since acquiring wallpaper sample books several years ago, Talie has been compelled to use collage in her art. Talie's work often incorporates graphic shapes and a love for colour and pattern, while revealing an innate sense of humour. Talie currently lives and works in Toronto and hopes new adventures are on the way.
DAVID R. HARPER
Artist Statement:
I am fascinated by representations of nature in mediated environments, and am particularly interested in ways in which people bring wilderness landscapes into domestic interiors, using flora and fauna, bouquets and bearskin rugs to amplify their personal identification with nature or, perhaps, with cultures of nature.
By considering our relationship with animal imagery and form, I am taking account of our empathic tendencies, both in the sense of the identification with and understanding of an "other, and in the sense of joining one's own feeling to an object.
To frame all these elements, I refer to periods and modes of domestic embellishment that seem to have invented their own peculiar links to an 'ordered' natural world, such as mid to late 19th century parlors, museums, and libraries, mid 20th century suburban rec rooms, and modern western rural homes.
No one really believes that they live within a natural world, or that bringing animal imagery or rough log walls into their home is anything but cosmetic. Where nature and culture collide in this way, so do pathos and pride, the recognition of the animal's mortality and the deferral of our own.
My current investigations reference the hierarchy of objects and architectural spaces in the late 17th C and the early 19th centuries. Creating installations that look at important time periods of cultural, scientific and artistic development and exploration, and how they have unfolded to shape and mold our current views of the macabre and mystical.
Biography:
David R. Harper is a Toronto born artist currently working in Chicago. Harper received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006 and is Currently working towards his MFA at the School of the Art institute of Chicago. Harper's installations, Which speak to the intersections of personal and universal mythologies, Loss, Identity and gender, are notable for their skillful mix of embroidery, taxidermy, and woodworking. Most recent Solo exhibitions include "Noblesse Oblige" at MKG127 Toronto, "Atlas" at Art Gallery of Acadia University and "Skin and Bone" at the Textile Museum of Canada as part of the umbrella exhibition "Person, Place, Thing".
HYEIN LEE
Artist Statement:
As a vegan animal activist and an illustrator, it is a constant struggle when I draw animals 'cute'. By drawing them cute, I feel like I'm objectifying them. It seems to go against my principal of not using animals for any purpose. Also, cute animal images might give an impression that only cute ones deserve to live. However, it is hard to breakaway from such paintings. As long as I have eyes, I'll never be able to completely demolish my bias towards pleasant appearance.
Here, I give in to the temptation of drawing cute animals, and deflect the moral question to you. Do you think it's wrong to depict animals in such way?
Biography:
Hyein is an Engineer turned an Illustrator, who used to not like her job. She gave up her big fat paycheque to pursue her dream as an illustrator. She is poor now, but somehow a lot happier. Hyein completed her Engineering bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto in 2004. She also completed her Illustration bachelor's degree at Sheridan College in 2008 with Hambly & Woolley Best in Show award. Working as a freelance illustrator and a web designer, her work has been published in magazines such as Canadian Family, Shameless, Ricepaper, Globe and Mail, Crow Toe Quarterly and Applied Arts. Her recent exhibitions include Lonely Robots (Magic Pony, Toronto), SOS (Project 165, Toronto) and Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (Toronto).
NICOLE RAYBURN
Artist Statement:
My current studio productions explore the terrains of multi-media video and performance installations to examine human-animal-machine relations and address concepts of boundary and transgression. The locus of my practice is an exploration for new relations premised in difference. These issues are explored through the use of costumes, props and editing, and incorporate references to myth, science and popular culture. Filtered through a series of absurd propositions, these references include figures such as Pinocchio and Frankenstein, myths associated to Tasmanian tigers, werewolves and vampires, contemporary film and television references such as Battlestar Galactica and Terminator, and scientific research surrounding the development of bio-mimetic organisms. My theoretical interests engage with issues of boundary, transgression, community, 'the other', and theories of the transhuman. This research examines the anxieties associated with monstrous entities - figures socially and morally deemed abject and relegated to the periphery of society - and the factors determining their social segregation. Through such inquiries, I seek to examine the hierarchical and exclusionary underpinnings that support particular notions of boundary and community to reveal presuppositions and promote positive conceptions of difference. Navigating the dynamics between the human and the non-human through such entities as animal, plant and machine, these diverse references seek to generate intersections between seemingly disparate bodies to stimulate new patterns of interaction and challenge conventional mechanisms of segregation and categorization.
Biography:
I enjoy the absurd and subtly perverse. I often wear animal costumes creating questionable propositions. I seek to disrupt embedded preconceptions, dissipate hierarchical constructions, and celebrate relations of difference.
I work primarily in the realms of video and performance based media. The cultural milieux of science-fiction, scientific research, cinematic, and literary sources continually infiltrate and inform my practice. My research interests focus primarily on theories of the post-human and the possibilities of reconceptualising human and non-human relations. I am a graduate of the University of Western Ontario Masters of Fine Arts program and currently reside in Toronto, Ontario.
MATTHEW WILLIAMSON
Artist Statement:
My work is a series of process-based art projects that explore the creative possibilities of community on the Internet. These projects present a set of processes, tactics, strategies and tools for reconciling the virtual with the real. They deal with the immateriality of information and are designed for subverting the database. In my work, any element of information culture is fair game including web applications, video games, and movies. The end result is second to the process. More than anything, this body of work attempts to develop a form of information literacy that decodes the influence of the Internet on the rest of life.
The subject matter in this work is predominately popular culture. It also proposes a new popular culture that embraces large-scale cultural entities as well as the amateur productions typical of web users. These projects comprise different stances on information management, each representing a tactic to be utilized to manage the increasing fluidity of computer life. My work considers and responds to the inevitable and always increasing flow of information, and seeks to transubstantiate it in meaningful ways. My practice is about developing effective tools to manage the consumption and re-production of information.
Biography:
Described once as "frustratingly engaging", Matthew Williamson examines the gaps between the internet and so-called 'real life'. While working in a broad range of formats from print to video, websites to electronics his work is focused on the humorous relationships we forge with our machines. A graduate of the Fanshawe College Fine Art program and the Ontario College of Art & Design, Matthew has shown work in Trieste, Italy; Providence, Rhode Island; and Toronto, Ontario.
MARK PRIER
Artist Statement:
My artwork investigates the materials and forms of improvised construction and survival - things like lean-tos, cabins, hunting blinds, fencerows, seed broadcasting, and folklore - adopting them for sculptures, installations, videos and performances. My performances often examine the imagery of survival techniques and scientific study, seeking poetry in the resources-extraction landscape by combining ritual, repetition, and randomness with folklore and natural systems. By stepping into this diverse vernacular I am grappling with how local culture - rural and urban - responds to the problems posed by survival.
Biography:
Mark Prier's multimedia work deals with themes of wilderness, mapping and survival. He has exhibited in Canada, Mexico, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Prier is a graduate of the Visual Studies program at University of Toronto. Prier lives in Peterborough, Ontario.
TAMARA SPONDER
Artist Statement:
Anthropomorphism is utterly pervasive throughout history and across cultures. It is somehow innate to feel familiar with, and even altruistic towards, beings that share similar traits to humans. Anthropomorphism, however, is also egocentric. We project assumptions onto beings that share traits with us. In this world, those other beings are animals. And somewhere in between our understanding of animals and our own emotional projected selves, lies folklore. In folklore animals become talking, upright walking beings, while humans wear masks to make themselves more animalistic. The combining of animal, nature and human becomes so prevalent that the creatures should be hardly recognizable. And yet rather than dismiss their presence as obscene, our brains are hardwired to feel for them. Show a child a picture of a monster and their brain will register fear. Trees with faces are oddly wise.
These projections of our human selves onto the natural world do more that enlighten our own understanding of the relationships we share with animals; they demonstrate an almost subconscious understanding of how we handle our gut feelings in this world. Sentiments that include overwhelming helplessness, and hopelessness, and inevitable devastation.
The work created for Just Act Natural begs the question 'what is happening here?'. This unnatural evolutionary scenario invites an internal conflict of wanting to help, but being unable to. How can we begin to reconcile the events that are happening here? What type of altruism can be expected for these creatures?
Biography:
Tamara Sponder's work is known for being bizarrely familiar. While evoking abstract sentiments of nostalgia and emotional devastation, her work remains strangely comfortable, and often delightful. In adopting certain stylistic elements she is interested in the familiarity that storybook, or folkloric narrative invites. She tends to work intuitively to access the visual vernacular provided by her diverse upbringing in a military family that moved frequently. She grew up with cape dorset prints and carvings, kitchen witches, Ukrainian eggs, Venetian and Haitian masks, and her own personal interest in video game and anime iconography.
Tamara Sponder graduated with a BA in Art History from Queen's University in 2005 and a BFAH in Painting and Printmaking also from Queen's University in 2009. She is currently entering the second and final year of her MFA at the University of Western Ontario.
Her work has been shown in Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, and Montreal, and also internationally in Glasgow, Scotland and New York City.
LISA VISSER
Biography:
Lisa Visser is an artist and curator. Visser's art practice ranges in media from textiles and comics to video, performance and drawing, emphasizing craft and a DIY approach. Acknowledging humour in tenuous human-animal relations, Visser's artwork refers to the process of becoming-animal and animal performance. Interests include the juxtaposition between live and dead animals and secret communication across species. Her curatorial projects aim to shed light on obvious and everyday relationships.