2018-19 Programming

For 2018-19, WIA is focusing on the work of artist/researchers as they deal with issues, fears, phobias and challenges. We have for the fall two exhibition spaces: The CWSE Hallway Gallery & WIAprojects@1313: The Window Box Gallery

CWSE Hallway Gallery

Opening Tues. Sept. 18, 2018, 5.30PM - 7PM and running until Jan 1, 2019.
Julia Louise Pereira & CARPOS Collective, Toronto, ON.

Julia Pereira is an illustrator whose work varies across the board, but focuses on telling compelling stories through images and engaging her audience in emotionally and politically engaging designs. In her exhibit for fall 2018, she, as an emerging feminist artist, re-frames myths by providing us with open narratives that challenge us to question our deepest fears, desires and beliefs.   

Julia is currently attending OCAD University, majoring in Illustration and minoring in Creative Writing, and Associate Director and Designer for WIAprojects.

Talking Wellness OCAD U!

Exhibition Jan 30-April 1 2019

Art and Design Education (ADEL): Community at OCAD University have been investigating various concerns around how we might achieve a healthier art and design education community at OCAD U. We have taken this up through personal observation and in conversation with the staff at the Health and Wellness Centre. Our intention was not to suggest definitive policy changes nor do a rigourous quantitative research but rather to explore, as artists, through personal discovery and dialogue, what we might envision as an ideal – or even imaginary – healthy community for those who study, teach and work in art and design at OCAD U. This exhibition presents creative voices in dialogic as they imagine a healthy thriving community for OCAD U.
Artists/Researchers: Jerad Beauregard, Rhys Castro, Tara Clews, Tania Costa, Hana Elmisry, Zen Huang, Cori Jin, Nataly Kais, Angie Ma, Kaylee Meyer, Kais Padamshi, Cleopatria Peterson, Ariella Polisuk, Sam Young
Project Co-facilitators: Tal Sofia Braniss, Marta Chudolinska, Pam Patterson, and Robyn Shaw.

Thank you to Vladimir Spicanovic, Dean, FoA for providing assistance for mounting this exhibition, Marta Chudolinska, facilitator and provocateur extraordinaire and the Learning Zone for encouragement and direction, and Amanda Hotrum and Cathy Cappon, ODESI, for resources and support.

A special thank you to the Health and Wellness Centre (HWC) OCAD U for partnering with ADEL artists/researchers: Robyn Shaw, for taking on the role of one of the project facilitators who, with Courtney Ward, Nathan Klaehn, Alanna Fletcher, Tamara Aleong, Alex McLaren, Sarah Cree, Kaitlyn Young, met in many one-on-one conversations with students, and to the HWC administrator, Gloria Han for co-ordinating all these meetings. 

OCADU Gleaners circa 2019

Ines Scepanovic

Exhibit runs April 3- June 28
CWSE Gallery

2nd Floor OISE 

252 Bloor Street West, Toronto

This site-specific installation uses imagery from Francois Millet's 1857 painting, The Gleaners, which depicts three impoverished farmworkers collecting grain left behind after the harvest. The scale of Millet's original painting was 84cm X 112cm, a monumental size that was unprecedented in its depiction of themes of labour and poverty. The work was met with negative criticism and suspicion by the upper classes who saw this work as a glorification of the working class.

Originally located by the Sessional Faculty office at OCADU, this installation repeats, in varying sizes, multiple drawings of these three figures from The Gleaners. The figures are representative of the 77 sessional instructors currently employed at the Faculty of Art. As is the case with most Canadian universities, sessional faculty are precariously employed at OCADU. The university prides itself on hiring practicing artists, and yet arguably fails to foster an employment environment that encourages their art practices to flourish.

Ines Scepanovic has always been compelled to use visual language to express and challenge important ideas. Before entering the BFA program at OCADU, Ines’ focus often lay elsewhere. But, she has always made it a priority to carve out a space for her art practice. As an undergraduate and graduate student in Political Science, and then as a law student and lawyer, Ines variously studied art at the Ottawa School of Art, at the Faculty of Continuing Education at McGill University, and at the Toronto School of Art. The head of a single-parent family, she is currently pursuing her BFA at OCAD University on a part-time basis.

Motivated by an egalitarian belief that art can enrich us all, the focus of Ines’ art practice has been to make work that engages viewers outside the gallery setting. Capitalizing on the magic that happens when one comes upon artwork in a non-traditional or unexpected place, Ines has staged temporary installations in Canada and abroad since 1998.

        

The CWSE Hallway Gallery closes June 30, 2019

The Window Box Gallery - WIAprojects@1313

WIA will maintain an ongoing presence in Toronto thanks to the support of Phil Anderson and Gallery 1313. WIAprojects@1313 will present monthly exhibitions in the gallery courtyard window at Gallery 1313. These exhibitions may be accompanied by courtyard performances.

For 2018 WIA Directors, Leena Raudvee and Pam Patterson will, as co-curators, present a series of 4 window exhibits by provincial artists and designers opening with an ARTIFACTS window, Tiny Homes: Everyone is Downsizing on August 1^st.  Mary Kainer will be exhibiting Location Location Location in October, Pamela Dodds will be our November window and Berenicci Hershorn will be in December. 

Starting January 1 2019 to Sept. 2019 WIA Associate Director and curator, Julia Louise Pereira will work with Joyce Jodie Kim and Shirley Shoning as Carpos Collective and curate a series of window exhibitions by emerging artists. The fall 2019- spring 2020 series will feature work by disability artists. 

August 1 - Sept 30 
Tiny Homes: Everyone is Downsizing 

ARTIFACTS (Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee) http://g1313.org/6221/tiny-homes-everyone-is-downsizing-artifacts-pam-patterson-leena-raudvee-aug-1-31/

Wed Sept 26 to Sunday Oct 21 

Location, location, location

an urban landscape

Mary Kainer

Sighting a ghost bike I pause, take a moment to locate myself and observe my urban landscape.  

Reminded of my vulnerability, I pedal off and continue on my way.  Visions of my surroundings once again narrowed and foreshortened to concentrate on potholes, streetcar tracks, passing cars, ambulance sirens, traffic signals.

The unseen presence of blood, death and injury seeps into the grey concrete and I seek the lines of white on pavement as shelter.  Only the wind on my face reminds me there is a natural world beyond the danger. 

The misfortune of location is the subject of Mary Kainer’s installation in the Window Box Gallery.  The two collaged side panels illustrate the location of the death of cyclists in the neighbourhood. Lying behind a ghost bicycle, car and bicycle tire treads collide in the central panel. 

Born in Saskatchewan, Mary Kainer has lived, worked, volunteered and raised three children in Toronto, working as an administrator and community activist.  She pursued art studies at the Toronto School of Art.  In 2017 Kainer was awarded Ontario Arts Council’s mid-career artist grant. In 2015, her Fracking series earned a first prize in the John B. Aird’s Contemporary Drawing Exhibition.   Her works have been shown in the Dunlop and Art Gallery of Peterborough, artist-run centres, commercial galleries and in juried exhibitions. Her artistic practice addresses the political, personal and purely visual through drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, obsessive construction, and installation.

The artist thanks WIAprojects’ curators,  Pam Patterson and  Leena Raudvee, and gallery director, Phil Anderson for the opportunity to exhibit in the Window Box Gallery, Gallery 1313.

Wed Oct 24 to Sunday Nov 18 opening Thurs Oct 25 

SWIMMERS
Pamela Dodds

Pamela Dodds’ practice explores the complexities of human relationships, drawing from a lesbian, feminist sensibility that embraces and explores the inter-connectedness of humanity across time and space, with a focus on women and women’s agency as a core perspective. In relief print media of linocut and woodcut, she employs the gesture of the human form, mirrored or counterpointed within an expressive environment, to describe complex and layered moments and encounters. In her recent installations of Undertow – tall scroll-like prints evoking swimmers in the ocean – viewers are encouraged to walk among the prints.

For the Window Box Gallery at Gallery 1313 she has created a version of her ocean-inspired woodcut print installations.

Pamela Dodds’s work is exhibited regularly in Canada and USA. Reviews include Globe and Mail, Art New England and Boston Globe. Her work resides in collections such as Cleveland Museum of Art, Purdue University, Boston Public Library, Carleton University, and many private collections. Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, ON presented Come Closer, a survey of her work in print (2017). The Undertow suite was featured in a solo exhibition at Impact 10, International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference in Santander, Spain in September, 2018

www.pameladodds.net

Image:  Swimmers 

Illuminated night view
Natural wood grain patterns printed from plywood boards onto clear acetate and hung in layers; suspended figures cut from brass and copper foil.

Window Dimensions: 66x25x22 in. / 168x64x56 cm

Berenicci Hershorn 
MANY, SEVERAL, SIX, 9, 10
Nov 21 to Sunday Dec 16
opening Thurs Nov 22

You catch a glimpse through a window as you pass by at twilight…

You hold a twenty to the light…

Berenicci Hershorn is a Toronto based artist who has, in both solo and collaborative works, produced a unique body of site-specific art over a period spanning many decades. Informed by research applied tangentially, her work incorporates performance, video, sculpture and installation and includes durational work, public art commissions, street performance and an extensive history of recognition in art venues around the world.

Curated by Carpos Collective:

Jan. Window Box Gallery 
Repetition 3740 
Miguel Caba 

An act as simple as painting a square more than 3000 times is a metaphor to describe the patterns within our lives. Repetition 3740 blurs the lines of perceived action.  Influenced by clothing manufacturing (hand dying the fabric and stitching over multiple days), the creation of this work both degraded my mental processing and built skill within the specific crafts.  By simplifying specific iterative motions, a once underappreciated job is identified by repetitive motion. A scientist testing drug samples that utilities a repeated pattern of motion is prestigious compared to a garment worker that can sew jeans yet they are essentially the same. Our biological limitations determine that we use the same motions in everything we do. Understanding the limitations of human motion allow the deconstruction of specific subjects and transformation of their value from clear to vague. Repetition 3740 uses humans to create a very human infinity.

Feb. Window Box Gallery

Sound Travels Better Through Us

Calum Csunyoscka

What sound and resonance produce in this object, emotions produce in

me.

A poem on the subject with the same title:

Listen close

The bell sounds

A voice as big around

as the universe allows

Ringing

Telephone lines droop

between distant landmarks

A shout and a drum beating

a gong and a voice singing

through alleys in the brain

and highways through the heart

and pancreas

Listen close

to the sound

of your lips on my eyes

the sound of the signal fire

that lights in my gut

A harmony strikes up on the buzzing, fuzzy edges of my soul.

March Window Box Gallery:

Parable of the Talents

Stephan Goslinski

‘Talent’ as an idea has fallen from its pedestal in recent years, I think for good reason. When we praise talent, we often abstract the hundreds of hours of discipline that it took to learn how to create well, making the talented one an other in our eyes—something beyond our reach, at once prized and privileged. In my experience, this view of talent leads only to apathy and jealousy. The humility of discipline tempers both of these, and breaks the distance between apathy and excellence into discrete units of hard work, measured in days and hours, sweat and tears.

However, just as I don’t believe in talent as a miracle cure, I don’t believe in discipline as internal combustion. Both of them come from somewhere; there is something that plants a seed and something that encourages us to water it. 

As its name suggests, this piece is concerned primarily with talent, but at its heart, it’s just as much about redemption. The crops will fail. The glass will break. The pen will run dry. In spite of it all, he who started a good work will bring it to its completion. Art is the privilege of helping to pick up the pieces.

April Window Box Gallery
Reading the Runes
HELEN MCCUSKER
A graduate of Sheridan’s Illustration Program, Helen has been making art for more than 40 years. Her main focus is on Figurative work – creating Expressionistic drawings and paintings that speak to movement, energy and the deeply personal. Helen’s Figurative work always begins with drawing from live Artists’ models – looking for the elusive ‘something’ that carries the work beyond the skill of the drawing. It is mostly created in-session, using models with whom she has worked closely over many years. She sometimes brings in outside elements – found imagery, which is then incorporated into the work to create narrative. Helen also works with Paper Engineering as counter-point to her drawing and painting, creating Abstract Pop-Up sculptures incorporating hand-painted papers and collage. Helen is a member of the Etobicoke Art Group, Neilson, Park Creative Centre, and Visual Arts Mississauga. She works as an Art Instructor with Haliburton School of Art and Design, Visual Arts Mississauga and Neilson Park Creative Centre.
 Helen’s websites are: eaglewoodstudios.blogspot.ca theartfulpopup.blogspot.ca
Her work can also be seen on Facebook at Helen McCusker Artist and on Instagram@helen.mccusker

May Window Box Gallery:

BANKSIA SERRATA

Sarah Dawn Richardson

I am a textile and bio-artist. I don't like the ordinary. I have a flair for the absurd, the gaudy, the surreal. I use fabrics, 
beads, needlework, and the use of biological beings to create visualizations of a world outside of this 
one. I believe art shouldn’t be confined to a visual experience. While my work is visually stimulating, 
my work is also experienced through tactile stimulation. My work explores the traditional ideas of craft, 
women's work, the hierarchy of biological beings, and the boundaries of fine arts in today’s artistic 
establishment. BANKSIA SERRATA was inspired by an australian plant of the same name, as well 
as fungi and molecular structures.  I use fabrics, beads, needlework, and the use of biological beings 
to create visualizations of a world outside of this one. I believe art shouldn’t be confined to a visual 
experience. While my work is visually stimulating, my work is also experienced through tactile 
stimulation. My work explores the traditional ideas of craft, women's work, the hierarchy of biological 
beings, and the boundaries of fine arts in today’s artistic establishment. BANKSIA SERRATA was 
inspired by an Australian plant of the same name, as well as fungi and molecular structures.

Sarah Dawn Richardson is a 25 year old textile and bio artist. She was born in Hamilton, Ontario,
and recently finished a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts and Art History from the University of
Windsor. Richardson uses bold fabrics, beads, needlework, and living biological beings to create
otherworldly sculptures.

SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLES:

Instagram: @braysl

FB: @sarahdawnrichardson (https://www.facebook.com/sarahdawnrichardson/)

Email: sarahdawnrichardson@gmail.com

June Window Box Gallery
Window into Another World

Erin McKluskey
Windows are a divider between one world and the next. One is instinctively drawn to its power and possibility. Is freedom just on the other side? Inside, the traveler makes her way to unknown places. This piece is inspired by Hokusai's landscapes and the paper doll cut outs from my mother’s old activity

Born in Ottawa, Erin is an emerging artist and illustrator working in Toronto. With a background in illustration and theatre, she creates images that exist on paper, walls, objects, spaces, and stages. Erin is interested in using imagery as an opportunity to explore the world, our environment and social issues.

July Window Box Gallery

Mala
Sarah Kaatz

It is said that during the Neolithic age (10,000 BC), there was a 4000-6000 year period of relative peace and stability in matriarchal cultures across Europe, where several goddess figurines have been uncovered, indicating that the feminine was revered as divine. Entitled Mala after the artist's matriarch – her maternal grandmother – the piece shines a light on cultural context and expectations of life-birthing, aiming to mend the dissociation many of us have to the feminine. The felted sculpture is of a pregnant demi-Goddess mother figure, in front of a representation of the fallen woman. The mother figure tends to herself with one hand and holds her belly with the other. The artist wishes to shine a light on motherhood and life-giving, as we find ourselves in the throes of instability on psychological, communal, and political levels, and renewed politicization of women's bodies.

Sarah Katz is a published poet and fibre artist in the start-up phase of a wool-slipper social enterprise. After completing her studies in psychology and English literature, she has endeavoured to help add kindness and playful to the world. Her art touches on existential themes on the psyche, belonging and human worthiness, examining the value of body, heart, spirit in a capitalist context.

August/Sept. Window Box Gallery

The DukkeoBeeKeepers

CarpOs Collective

The conversation of sustainability is as prevalent as always, but in the era of hype culture, is this conversation getting lost in the ever-changing- twenty-four-hour news cycle? Are we asking enough questions, or even the right questions? In a world where the system works against the cause and many world leaders turn a blind eye, how do we as individuals do more? 

    CarpOs Collective’s newest installation juxtaposes the idealized sustainable world against the harsh reality that is our industrialized world. Despite reality’s persistence to crash down on sustainability’s efforts, we are still hopeful. We are hopeful in the collective power of society to see the need for change. Our earth is desperate. We can succumb to the overpowering industries and suffer in a dying world, or we can persevere through the difficulties and change our collective habits. Our lifestyle choices and our consumer habits hold the most effective power against those sitting in their smog filled thrones.

The DukkeoBeeKeepers are those who will not let this conversation get lost in the infinite scrolls and the newest fads. We will continue the difficult conversations, and share knowledge, ideas, and resources. We strive to seek understanding, and lend an ear before lending a hand. We will breach reality with our idealism, and we will win.

CarpOs is an art collective initiated in 2017 by Shirls, Julia, and Joyce. Their relationship was born from a shared love for creating art and stories. They aim to create a healthy space for much-needed conversation among their diverse communities and celebrate the beautiful results of being open to differences and allowing these differences to work together.