#winnipegwindow

[windowwinnipeg]

WINDOW WINNIPEG, WINNIPEG’S ONLY 24 HOUR ARTIST-RUN CENTRE PRESENTS

window is pleased to welcome Noor Bhangu, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, and Sarah Nesbitt as co-curators of window 2019. Commencing in April, the curatorial team will present a series of exhibitions that investigate the intersection of gender and space. 

From January to March, Muñoz Gomez will curate works by Francesca Carella Arfinengo and Luther Konadu on behalf of Collecting, Citing, Curating (CCC), a research cluster based at the University of Manitoba, with funding from the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities. More details coming soon! 


 Bios:

Noor Bhangu is an emerging curator and scholar of South Asian descent, whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices from the University of Winnipeg. Her written work has appeared in academic and public journals, including Black Flash, gal-dem, Moveable Type: The University College London English Journal, Public Parking, Uncommon Sense, and C Magazine. Her curatorial practice includes projects: Overlapping Violent Histories: A Curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge (2018), womenofcolour@soagallery (2018), and Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art (2018). Mariana Muñoz Gomez is an emerging artist, writer, and curator based in Winnipeg, MB/Treaty One Territory. She is a co-founder of curatorial and artist collective Calling Card. Recent and upcoming curatorial work includes screenings and exhibitions at Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Flux Gallery, Window Winnipeg, and the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation. Her research and work is informed by intersectional feminism, diaspora, and displacement. Sarah Nesbitt is an independent writer and curator based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Her work is informed by intersecting issues related to land, imperialism, racial capitalism, and identity politics, with a sincere interested in understanding structural oppression within the arts. From 2016-2018 she was the Assistant Curator at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art on Treaty 1 Territory, Winnipeg where she curated Blinky Is Reading, (2017) a site-specific vinyl installation by Walter Scott, and co-curated two major international group exhibitions: Entering the Landscape (2017), and Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs (2018). Her writing has been published in esse + arts and opinions, PaperWait, The Eastern Door, and Border Crossings.  

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WINDOW 32: KRISTIN NELSON (March - April 2017)

WINNIPEG’S ONLY 24 HOUR ARTIST-RUN CENTRE PRESENTS KRISTIN NELSON

Location: Artspace Building, corner of Bannatyne @ Arthur [sidewalk level]

window is please to present our thirty-second installation, Dear Cheryl (2017), by Kristin Nelson

Statement

The name, Cheryl Lashek, in its particular and cursive font, is familiar, and rests on the tip of our local and collective tongues. This ‘feeling of knowing’ becomes a unity of culture, or meme, borrowing its form from what is seemingly insignificant.

While the physical machinations of our world are attended to on earth, by architects and by engineers, our necks crane ever higher.

Cheryl Lashek is a professional engineer who works for the City of Winnipeg in the position of Director, Inspection and Technical Services. Her name and signature font is recognizable on valid elevator permits across Manitoba. Cheryl Lashek remains unavailable for comment.

About the Artist

Born in Ajax Ontario, Kristin Nelson received her BFA in Visual Arts at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2003) and MFA at Concordia University (2014). Through a process of examination and re-contextualization, she transforms mundane subjects into larger social concerns. Kristin has completed a Canada Council International Residency in Sydney Australia (2015) and at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2008). She has exhibited work across Canada and in México. Her work is represented by Lisa Kehler Art + Projects.  www.kristinnelson.ca

[windowwinnipeg]

INTERVIEW WITH SATPREET KAHLON

NB: Can you tell me a little bit about your arts practice and current methodologies?

SK: I employ two different methodologies in my work. The first is working with recognizable tropes to create a point of access for viewers and then to create a moment of surprise and vulnerability. This can be a new way of approaching important topics around identity, which tend to go around in circles. Through the moment of surprise, I feel that a rupture is created that can lead to conversations we haven’t had before.

My second method is more obtuse. It is not so much about access but about working more intuitively. It is installation-based and through it I embrace my lack of knowledge and resources. For example, I’ve started using wood even though I don’t know how to use wood. Since enrolling at RISD, I have access to wood but the wood shop terrifies me. As a women of colour, I don’t like asking for help because everybody there already thinks that I don’t know anything. So it’s weird that I’m in an institutional space with and without access. Also, installations that are tenuous and break over time can reflect the precarity of institutions so, in that sense, my second method responds to POC survivorship in a broader sense.

I would love for these two bodies of work to crossover at some point and the bindis feel like a good start. With them, I am also thinking of creating an installation of a desi dukan, which can be a space for our culture and future.

NB: Your work, especially the installation-based projects, has been attributed to disrupting the “unseen boundaries and tacit assumptions” of the art world – can you speak to this?

SK: We have a lot of issues at macro level – who are white people, who comprises the institution, and who is inside and outside the lines? I’m interested in interrogating these in specific ways. While I too have responsibility in these structures, I have the tendency to bite the hand that feeds me and to ask at what cost it is feeding me? The real work doesn't get done until we start disrupting the art world and the broader world. Some of the people I’ve worked with are trying to be disruptive but they’re ultimately still inside these systems. So, how do we refuse has been refused to us? We have to at least try. I’m not sure what art can be outside of institutional spaces and that’s dangerous.

NB: When you first announced this project on your instagram page, you expressed some hesitation in making public your “fake kinda funny kinda poignant products.” Can you unpack this hesitation a little bit and the binary between commercial and serious work that it essentially points to? Is this work starting to make sense within your larger practice?

SK: I’m thinking about going to India, but don’t want to bring a colonized lens to India because I didn’t grow up in that culture. I’m asking myself: How can I not fetishize my own culture? How aware am I about my white instagram audiences? I want to document my travel, but I have to be responsible too. With the bindis and dukan, it’s the same thing. How do I make white people uncomfortable when they feel so entitled to it? I don’t know how to do this and that’s my hesitancy. The bindis are for a specific audience and I’m thinking about how to realistically control they ways in which they can be accessed.

NB: What are some other projects you’re currently working on?

SK: One of the bigger projects is in Seattle, where I’m working with two Indigenous curators (Tracy Rector and Asia Tail) to curate a show that will open at Kingstreet Station in November 2018 and will be open until February 2019. There is an open call for Indigenous artists from Pacific Northwest and out of these artists ten to fifteen will be selected for mentorship. We will also commission artists for site-specific work.

Another project is a three-person show at Wing Luke Museum in Seattle about oral histories and intercultural exchange.

[windowwinnipeg]

WINDOW 21: Christopher Lacroix & afallenhorse (March 2016)

WINNIPEG'S ONLY 24 HOUR ARTIST-RUN CENTRE PRESENTS CHRISTOPHER LACROIX & AFALLENHORSE

Location: Artspace Building, corner of Bannatyne @ Arthur [sidewalk level]

window is pleased to present our twenty-first installation, The gun in the drawer has the safety on (2016), by Christopher Lacroix & afallenhorse

Statement

The gun in the drawer has the safety on (2016) is a text/short script work that alludes to loss, intergenerational trauma, and the resulting anxiety and ignorance. The text is a script that will never be produced; a dialogue without a character that will never be performed; it is facing a black void, an audience that no longer exists. Without a character, the dialogue provokes the viewer to conjure a character fit for this particular form of loss and longing.

About the Artist

Christopher Lacroix & afallenhorse’s practice consists of video, performance, and script works that straddle performance art and acting to explore how an individual can assume, construct and perform their identity. Central to this is the artist’s own gay, white male identity and the ways it informs, is informed by, and interacts with other identities. His work often considers the notion of conditioned yet genuine performance, otherness, and desires of belonging.

The artist holds a BFA from Ryerson University (2012) and has shown at Artspace Contemporary Art Projects, Peterborough; Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto; YTB Gallery, Toronto; and VideoFag, Toronto. He contributes to the publication “Carbon Paper” and lives in Toronto. www.afallenhorse.com --

[windowwinnipeg]

WINDOW 20: Mohamed Ibrahim Ali (February 2016)

WINNIPEG'S ONLY 24 HOUR ARTIST-RUN CENTRE PRESENTS MOHAMED IBRAHIM ALI

Location: Artspace Building, corner of Bannatyne @ Arthur [sidewalk level]

window is pleased to present our twentieth installation, Mariam (2014), by Mohamed Ibrahim Ali

Statement

Part of the series Repeated Failures

“Tired of using adjectives.”

“Story of my life, searching for the right but it keeps avoiding me.” “I have been here many times before,” “the need to destroy things creeps up on me every time;” “and the more I see, the less I grow, the fewer the seeds the more I sow.” “So far removed from all that we went through.”

“To be accepted, I must blend into convention's way.” “Nobody helps a liar.” “Carrying lies is a task,” “and i'm not my perspective, or the lies i'll tell you every time.” “Pretending those words were not mine”

“All the immediate unknowns are better than knowing this tired and lonely fate.” “Embarrassed by your obvious indifference.”

“Go up to where they're blind to mistakes.” “I'd rather move on.” “All of your failures are training grounds,” “and all I can do is try.”

About the Artist

Mohamed Ibrahim Ali is an Egyptian-American artist in Canada doing his best. He graduated with a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Through chance portraiture along with video performance, Ibrahim Ali engages with themes of failure, Muslim mysticism and the effects of diaspora on identity formation. He is currently based in Vancouver endlessly negotiating his ties to home and his status as a settler. www.mibrahimali.com

WINDOW TAKEOVER ONE

Throughout 2016, visual artist DIVYA MEHRA will be guest-programming WINDOW. Mariam by Mohamed Ibrahim Ali is Mehra's first selection. This year will also see WINDOW doubling the amount of artists exhibiting in the space, with new work being rotated every month.

[windowwinnipeg]

WINDOW 19: Doug Melnyk (November - December 2015)

WINNIPEG ONLY 24 HOUR ARTIST-RUN CENTRE PRESENTS DOUG MELNYK

Location: Artspace Building, corner of Bannatyne @ Arthur [sidewalk level]

window is pleased to present our nineteenth installation, Just Hold Me (2015), by Doug Melnyk until December 31st 2015.

Statement

Just Hold Me

This text is an excerpt from a prose poem in "Naked Croquet", published in 1987 by Turnstone Press. The presentation in window is also a return to an earlier way of working for me, in treating and presenting written work as original large scale drawings.

About the Artist

Doug Melnyk works in drawing, handmade books, video and performance, often in collaboration. In collaborations, he has performed in numerous Winnipeg Fringe Festivals, plus the Edinburgh Fringe, and venues in New York and London, England. He is the author of "Naked Croquet" and "Doctor Meist", and a number of zines, and his video work is included in collections of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. http://dougmelnyk.net

[windowwinnipeg]

WINDOW 15: Daniel Romphf (February - April 2015)

WINNIPEG’S NEWEST ARTIST-RUN CENTRE PRESENTS DANIEL ROMPHF

Location: Artspace Building, corner of Bannatyne @ Arthur [sidewalk level]

window is pleased to present our fifteenth installation, just in time for Valentine's Day: GRIP (2015) by Daniel Romphf from 14 February to 14 April 2015.

  Statement

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.”

-  Albert Camus

  About the Artist

Daniel Romphf’s practice gravitates towards appropriated images and objects rendered through a discourse of commodification and of personal experience. Often drawing from visual sources that imprinted on the artist during his adolescence and current adolescent nostalgia, he re-constructs paraphernalia informed by the endlessly scrolling gesture of miscellaneous screens. Alongside his use of found objects and readymade images there is a meta-fictional take on rural and suburban culture throughout his artistic practice. Daniel Romphf will receive his Honors BFA in May 2015 and has exhibited in various venues throughout Winnipeg.