Postcards From Home
How does your home affect who you are? Is your home where you were born, where you live now, or somewhere in between?
A home is not only a physical location but also a construct of the mind. How can you exchange a piece of your home with another? This exhibition asks you to consider how your home affects your identity, and how you can capture the nature of home in a postcard.
Using diverse media, including digital images, printmaking, collage, drawings and paintings, these artists have captured their experiences of home. Some of these experiences are harmonious and others contradict each other; depictions of homes that are sweet and nurturing while others are harsh and disregarded.
This vastness of experience of home points to different relationships with our surroundings. As home is not only a physical space but also a set of relationships with people and places, one’s relationship with their home can direct other aspects of their lives. This exhibition attempts to illuminate these relationships.
This exhibition was shown at Ste. Emilie Skillshare in Montreal, Canada as well as online at http://postcardsfromhomeexchange.wordpress.com
The Fountain Project: Duchamp as Muse
Marcel Duchamp’s “The Fountain” is generally regarded as the first piece of conceptual artwork. As contemporary artists we either build on or reject this tradition of conceptual art. These artists have created a response to the work “The Fountain” whether literal or conceptual which informs our understanding of Duchamp’s work and contemporary art. These works question “What is contemporary art, and what is it’s purpose in our lives?”
This is an ongoing project for more information or to submit works please contact duchamp.fountain@gmail.com
The Pillow Exchange: An Experiment in Art and Sleep
co curated with Jasia Stuart
Our initial investigation was born from in interest in creating an aesthetic experience that was both private and specific to an individual. While many lines of artistic enquiry assume the viewership of the greatest number, this inquiry aims to explore in depth an individual’s response. Can the aesthetic space in proximity to a sleeping person alter their dreams? How do we receive ideas, can ideas be exchanged through art objects? What translates between viewer and artist across time and space?
The Pillow Exchange seeks to open a dialogue about the conscious and unconscious role of art in our lives. We predict the Pillow Exchange will help build a community that shares ideas about interaction with art, leading to a better understanding of the effect of ideas and aesthetics on our dreams.
Each of the participants will take on the responsibility of both maker and sleeper, making or altering a standard pillowcase. Completed works will be sent to a sleeper, while each participant will then receive someone else’s pillowcase to sleep on. The resulting dreams will be documented and shared on a blog. As a democratic and mass media the blog provides an interesting opportunity for diffusion of a project that happens on a very individual level. The resulting data (the pillow cases+ dream documentation) will be displayed for further observation and discussion.
The data collected can be viewed at http://pillowexchange.wordpress.com. In one short month we have generated over fifty detailed posts by our participants, and the blogging continues.
The Pillow Exchange is an open experiment, continuously changing and altering, as viewers interact by posting a comment to the blog, dreaming differently, or simply looking, reading and thinking. Pseudoscience? Yes. A tad kitschy? We hope so, at the Pillow Exchange we aim to be friendly and open and sometimes even a bit silly in order to build community and make viewers think about the role and impact of art in our lives.
