Antimatter 2014
Media Installations
October 17 to November 1, 2014
in the main Deluge gallery
five states of freedom
Christina Battle & Adán De La Garza | 2014
five states of freedom operates both as documentation of performative actions and as a critique of larger political issues. By drawing attention to our distancing of military actions from our own geographical landscape, the work increases conversations about the physical byproducts our military engagements have on domestic spaces. With a high percentage of land contaminated by military development, five states of freedom draws attention to the mainly invisible residues that still preside over the land. Fireworks have a direct tie to the history of artillery and in turn to notions of perceived American freedom. As we continually distance ourselves from directly engaging in battles at home, the celebratory acceptance of fireworks seems almost a disengagement with the physicality of war.
Shot at various active and abandoned military installations in the United States, the work in this exhibition consists of a series of videos actively seeking out landscapes with histories of missile-based military presence. Focusing on visualizations of the residue of the military industrial complex upon the environment, five states of freedom is an ongoing project.
Originally from Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), Christina Battle is currently based in Denver, Colorado. Her works are often inspired by the role of nonofficial archives and our notions of evidence and explore themes of history and counter-memory, political mythology and environmental catastrophe. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries including: The Images Festival (Toronto), The London Film Festival (London, England); The Toronto International Film Festival (wavelengths); the Festival du Nouveau Cinema (Montreal); The International Film Festival Rotterdam (The Netherlands); the Jihlava Documentary Festival (Czech Republic); the 2006 Whitney Biennial: “Day for Night” (New York); YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto); White Box (New York); Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC),The Foreman Art Gallery (Sherbrooke, QC); MCA Denver; the Aspen Art Museum; Gallery 44 (Toronto); and the Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto). Christina is a contributing editor to INCITE Journal of Experimental Media and a co-curator and organizer of the media arts exhibition series Nothing To See Here in Denver.
Originally from Tucson, Arizona, Adán De La Garza holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Art Practices from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Criticism of authoritative figures—be it human, institutional, ideological or weapons based—an investment in deconstructing hierarchy, challenging societal expectations, and subversion are the foundation for the terrain De La Garza navigates. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally—including exhibitions at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO), The New School (New York, NY), Deluge (Victoria, Canada), and The Future Gallery (Berlin, Germany). De La Garza is also a founding member of the sound and performance art collective The Flinching Eye, which has toured both the southwest and northeast regions of the United States performing in notable contemporary art venues including: Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ); Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA); and Silent Barn (NY).
in the Deluge entrance foyer
Catalogue
Dana Berman Duff | 2014 | 7 min
Catalogue is a silent black-and-white film that considers the time it takes to look at desirable objects, in this case, those presented in a successful furniture company’s catalogue of copied designer pieces photographed in staged rooms. The catalogue’s desaturated photographs are shot and printed to look like film noir movie sets. The products are popular designer furniture knock-offs sold at a much-reduced price in several catalogues by different manufacturers, but in these images they are indistinguishable from the originals.
The layering of representation is revealed as the surface quality of the pages becomes noticeable and tiny item identifiers appear (for example: a. sage, b. ochre, c. fig). Hence the film represents already-photographed objects, which are themselves representations of high-quality objects of original design. The film gazes at page after page of objects, each one exquisite and exquisitely photographed, aware of the time it takes for the rise of desire and its dissolution.
Dana Berman Duff lives and works primarily in Los Angeles and Mexico. Her object works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC), the Phillips Collection (DC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), The Carnegie Museum (Pittsburg), and a number of private collections. Her works in small-format film and video have been screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Geneva), EXiS Experimental Film Festival (Seoul), South London Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, (Seattle), and other programs. Duff is a professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
in the Deluge entrance foyer
Picture Frame
Ryan Murray | 2012 | 3 min
This sculpture uses the digital picture frame as subject matter and as an animated video format. Photos of the frame itself are displayed on the frame and repeat until a tunnel is formed. Then the temporary wormhole recedes back to blackness.
Ryan Schmal Murray creates conceptually-driven artwork that combines media such as video, painting and sculpture. His work uses the aesthetics of psychedelia, fantasy and pop-culture to address the connections and disconnections between rationality and mysticism in the search for meaning. Murray was born in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has exhibited in galleries, museums and film festivals across North America and in Europe. Murray currently lives in Baltimore, MD and serves as an Assistant Professor of Electronic Media and Film at Towson University.
in the Deluge transom window
humming, fast and slow
Rainer Kohlberger | 2013 | 9 min
humming, fast and slow is an interference between the analogue and the digital. It operates on the line that was defined as the absolute threshold of visual perception. 60 hertz, 24bit colours and a few million pixels should suffice to create the illusion of a continuous event. Kohlberger employs a buzzing, both visual and acoustic, that fills the whole range of this definition in order to make the threshold itself disappear. Analogue disparity and digital continuum merge. – Eno Henze
Rainer Kohlberger was born in Austria and works in Berlin. His work is primarily based on algorithmically generated graphics seen during live performances, as parts of installations and as mobile apps. His work field won the ZKM App Art Award for artistic innovation and humming, fast and slow received the Crossing Europe Local Artist Award in 2013.
at Legacy Art Gallery
Minimal Vandalism
Kay Walkowiak | 2013 | 4 min
With the emergence of Minimal Art in the 60s, the way we experienced art changed fundamentally. With their set-ups of simple geometric objects, artists such as Robert Morris created choreographies, activating the space and thus the viewer. Minimal Vandalism brings the outside to the inside of the Generali Foundation’s white cube in Vienna where Spanish skateboarding wünderkind Kilian Martin uses post-minimalist sculptures by Walkowiak as obstacles and enablers in his masterly skate performance. Minimal Vandalism produces a choreography which integrates sculpture into highly stylized skateboarding culture, and in which the human body is used to test the boundaries of the sculptural object. Not unlike Morris with his iconic show Bodyspacemotionthings in 1974, Walkowiak turns the Generali exhibition space into both playground and stage, on which questions of social spaces are negotiated in practice.
Born in Salzburg in 1980, Kay Walkowiak completed his studies in Philosophy, Psychology and Fine Arts at the University of Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. He graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2010, where he studied with Erwin Wurm. Walkowiak has been the recipient of many awards and scholarships, and has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows, including The Mechanics of Form at Kunstpavillon (Innsbruck, 2012), Rectangles at The Lust Gallery (Vienna, 2012) and Kann es Liebe Sein? at the Grimmuseum (Berlin, 2012). Walkowiak lives and works in Vienna.
at the Living Wall, Centennial Square
Ophelia
David Ferguson | 2014
Suddenly Dance Theatre’s latest outdoor dance-video installation utilizes the vertical garden on the west side of the CRD Building as a projection surface. Created by David Ferguson, Ophelia features dancer Jung ah Chung in reference to Shakespeare’s misunderstood character. However, she is not succumbing in calm rapture to the watery elements of mental illness and abandonment as she is usually portrayed. Ferguson’s Ophelia is a woman made of flowers, camouflaged by stillness yet made visible through a suspended dance. The repeated cycle of her emergence and vanishment becomes a silent beacon for those missing, outcast, unnoticed and disappeared.
Created and directed by David Ferguson; featuring Jung ah Chung; costume design by Miles Lowry; director of photography: Daniel Carruthers.
David Ferguson is a writer, painter and producer of dance and film. As a Founding Artistic co-Director of Suddenly Dance Theatre (1992–present) in Victoria, BC he has been a producer/curator of numerous collaborative, multi-media projects and dance productions, including the annual Romp! Festival. In 2005, he co-founded Suddenly Media Productions to develop, create, produce and distribute new media works made for public art gallery, stage, print, broadcast television and feature film. His original works include Opium (2005), a made-for-television dance film seen nationally on Canadian Television; Nature Ecstasy (2007), a silent dance film made for composers; and the Bravo!FACT films Aisling: We Saw a Vision (2007) and Guthrie Swims the Lake (2010). As a writer, supported by The Belfry Theatre’s Incubator/Spark! Festival, he premiered his stage play Agnes B (2010). In 2013, he returned to the Belfry to workshop his next play Sugarglass. Also in 2013, David premiered a new dance-play Kiki starring Jung ah Chung (with whom he regularly co-choreographs and performs), with live appearances in Korea at The World Dance Stars Festival, Busan International Dance Festival and the Next Wave Dance Festival and at Vancouver’s Dancing on the Edge. In summer 2012, the duo premiered their work Rush of Water/Rush of Air, an outdoor dance-film installation in Victoria’s Centennial Square.
at the fifty fifty arts collective
Divining Bowl
Nicholas Vandergugten | 2014 | 6 min
Divining Bowl is a film of a projected image of the planet earth as it appears from a moving vehicle that is driving through a forest at night. As the projection surface shifts, the image of the earth moves in and out of focus, and as the speed increases beyond our ability to register the forms of the trees themselves, we begin to see kaleidoscopic images in which faces, shapes, and other semi hallucinatory spectres appear. At other times, the organic fractal shapes of the branches combine with digital degrading to create unexpected geometric “sparks” that seem to emanate from the central image.
With Divining Bowl, we are presented with an image that transforms from the decipherable to the indecipherable, at which point the subconscious imagination is engaged to help us make sense of what we are seeing. Divining Bowl represents both a playful experimentation with new forms of combining media in creative ways, and a careful layering of binary components to create an experience rich with meaning and depth, yet unique to each viewer
Nicholas Vandergugten is a Victoria-based artist with roots in sosuko hanga, or single plate lino block printmaking. While Nicholas’s current printmaking includes oversized, hand printed multi tonal block prints that challenge the mediums technical limitations, other projects include tactile interactive sculptures, an ongoing exploration of conceptual text based work and projection driven investigations into the modern phenomenon known as “The Overview Effect,” of which Diving Bowl is part.
at Ministry of Casual Living
The Secret Handshake
Karin & Didi Fromherz | 2014 | 5 min
In a classroom, “The Best Handshake Ever” is being recorded with a smartphone camera. At the same time a catastrophe is escalating in the schoolyard.
Karin and Didi Fromherz are a Swiss artistic duo who primarily create single channel video works as well as media installations. Their work has been exhibited in festivals and galleries internationally. In addition to this output they are active in the creation of animated television, as animators and voice talent. Both Fromherz’ have been recipients of various scholarships and prizes in Europe. They live and work in Trogen.