A thematic residency and exhibition project organized by the Odd Gallery and KIAC's Artist in Residence program, The Natural & The Manufactured 2008 will see an expanded line-up of project activities with solo exhibitions by artists Toni Hafkenscheid, Max Liboiron and Joan Scaglione, along with contributions from theorist and writer Ted Hiebert ,and writer and critic John K. Grande.
Through the exhibitions, artist talks, essays and lecture, The Natural & The Manufactured 2008 will engage artists and audiences in a re-examination of the various cultural and economic values imposed on the environment, while exploring alternative political, social, economic and aesthetic agendas and strategies towards a re-interpretation of the regional landscape and social infrastructure.
The year's project opens with a solo exhibition of Toni Hafkenscheid's landscape series HO that is accompanied by a commissioned essay by Ted Hiebert. Hafkenscheid's exhibition is followed with two site-specific exhibitions in August by Max Liboiron & Joan Scaglione, each being developed and produced during the artists' six-week KIAC Residencies. In conjunction with Liboiron and Scaglione's exhibitions, Montreal-based writer John K. Grande will travel to Dawson to present a lecture addressing recent histories and current trends of site-specific, land based, and environmental art practices, based on his extensive work in this field, and has been commissioned to write a post-exhibition essay addressing and reflecting on the work of Liboiron and Scaglione.
The Exhibitions
Toni Hafkenscheid HO
Hafkenscheid's landscape series HO consists of large scale photographic works of touristic points of interest, engineering feats, small town streets, suburban neighborhoods and modes of transportation. Though these are images of actual places, through the artist's manipulation of depth of field & focus, and colour saturation, these landscapes look artificial and are highly reminiscent of miniature model train sets/dioramas. The images blur the limits between reality and fiction and also evoke and recall a certain 1950's American Dream, and it's manufacturing of an idealized built environment.
Max Liboiron Abundance
This installation will be site-specific in that it will be made up entirely of Dawson City's resident and tourist garbage. The trash will make up a walk-in diorama reminiscent of the local landscape. Because this landscape will be pleasing, gallery visitors will be invited to take pieces of it away with them as gifts, enacting a landfill that erodes out of the landscape and back into people's homes. Based on the idea that what gets to "count" as natural and what types of land are valued is culturally manufactured, the installation is built facilitate the re-valuation and uptake of previously aesthetically worthless garbage, encouraging gallery visitors to consider how they participate in Dawson City's landfills and landscapes.
Joan Scaglione Earth Bed Tells
Scaglione's series of "Earth Beds" are a constellation of structures that address the corporeal, pschological and alchemical connections we maintain with the landscape. The bed, as an object, projects a strong connactive charge that invites viewers to experience and reconsider. Situated on the rocky incline at the foot of one of Dawson City's most recognizable geological features--the Moosehide Slide--Scaglione's installation juxtaposes earthen materials, manufactured objects and hand-hewn sculpture. This work looks to the imbalanced relationship between Culture and Nature, as well as out often outmoded definitions of each, to re-mythologize and rejeuvenate our inherent connection to our immediate surroundings.
Biographies
Toni Hafkenscheid is a Toronto-based fine art and commercial photographer. He was born in 1959 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 1989, he graduated from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and shortly thereafter moved to Toronto. During the following six years he was active in the arts community in Toronto and received several Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council awards. In 1996 Toni moved back to Amsterdam to pursue a career as a commercial photographer and to teach photography at the Rietveld Academy. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Canada, the U.S., and Europe. His works reside in a number of important national and international collections.
Max Liboiron grew up in rural northern Alberta, where her understanding of environmental relationships was formed. These early experiences have been influential in both her early studies in biology and her more topical inquiries in art. Now living in New York, she brings the ideas, skills, and points of view she developed in the north to her art and to local instances of "nature." Max Liboiron holds an MFA and a certificate in cultural studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and BFA with Distinction from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. She is currently pursuing a PhD at New York University in Visual Culture and environmentalism.
Joan Scaglione is interested in the power of the earth to reflect and integrate human experience, culture, and spiritual vision. "The initial impulse for any work I engage in derives from my interior Self as I intuit relationship to the world around me," Scaglione reflects. She has developed a body of work that includes sculpture, environmental and site-specific installation, drawing, and recently video. Growing up in Massachusetts near the ocean developed in Joan Scaglione a sense of infinite space. Currently, the Saskatchewan prairie is her home where she teaches and works as a practicing artist. Joan Scaglione recently received her MFA from the University of Regina.
Ted Hiebert is a Canadian artist and theorist. His artwork has been shown across Canada in public galleries and artist-run centres, and in group exhibitions internationally. His theoretical writings have appeared in The Psychoanalytic Review, Technoetic Arts and CTheory, among others.
Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photography, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books, 2004), Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (State University of New York Press in 2004), Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream (Pari Publishing, Italy & in North America, 2007). His latest book Art Allsorts; writing on Contemporary Art, will be released this June 2008.
Links:
Toni Hafkenscheid: www.thphotos.com
Ted Hiebert: www.tedhiebert.net
Max Liboiron: www.maxliboiron.com
John K. Grande: www.grandescritique.com
The Natural & The Manufactured is conceived as an ongoing, annual project to involve visual, media and interdisciplinary artists, curators, art historians, writers and cultural thinkers through residencies, exhibitions, lectures, essays and workshops.
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