Artcite Inc., Windsor’s Artist-run Centre for the Contemporary Arts, is pleased to present NINE.
The Artcite group exhibition features recent Master of Fine Arts graduates of the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts / Visual Arts Program.
Guest curated by Sigi Torinus, Artcite NINE exhibition features new works representing diverse media and approaches by Windsor area artists:
Patricia Coates, Vanessa Cornell, Nicolas de Cosson, Amy Friend, Arturo Herrera, Mike Marcon, Victor Romão, Laura Shintani and Joey Stewart.
Patricia Coates works in performance, multimedia installation and, more recently, social media. Common threads in the work — entropy and the absurd — raise questions about our power relations within our built and living environments, and among ourselves.
The creation and development of a persona under the pseudonym “Lucy Palustris” subverts established gender roles, and in a Sisyphean vein, “Lucy” resists issues larger than herself spanning from: GMO crops, ecological degradation, aging and death.
In equal parts naive, willful, and stoic, “Lucy” is, however, a woman refusing limits. Artist Patricia Coates has exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally and has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Thames Art Gallery, in Chatham Ontario.
Vanessa Cornell is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in Chatham, Ontario. Informed by her childhood growing up in a family of merchants and her infatuation with Victoria’s Secret Angels, Vanessa’s artistic practice explores notions of luxury, absence and presence and our roles as consumers. Her ongoing research revolves around themes associated with consumerism, commodity fetishism, conspicuous consumption, spectacle, display and desire.
Nicolas de Cosson creates projection-based sculptural works that are designed to support time-based digital constructions. His work focuses on animating skin-like or membrane-like projection surfaces through a technique known as “projection mapping.”
He explores aspects of presence: the corporeal and physical, the virtual, the temporal, and the boundaries that illuminate, separate and yet connect projection and surface, viewer and artwork, past, present, and future.
Amy Friend works with the medium of photography by experimenting with analog and digital methodologies. Her process often involves investigating archives or “small histories” to form work that plays with fact, fiction and the seemingly unanswerable.
Most recently, Friend presented her work and a monograph of the Dare alla Luce series at the Guatemala Photo Festival in Antigua City. Friend also has an upcoming solo exhibition, Assorted Boxes of Ordinary Life, curated by Marcie Brinson at Rodman Hall in St. Catharines.
Arturo Herrera is a Canadian-Honduran artist working and living in Beverly Hills, Michigan. Through the use of socially-engaged art, photography, and sculpture, Herrera creates works that are literal and devotional, in the sense that they speak to the existence and authenticity of subjects such as sexuality, patriotism and identity.
Mike Marcon is a multidisciplinary artist from Windsor. His artistic practice encompasses a range of mediums including sculpture, photography and archiving. These works have explored a number of issues related to identity, history and masculinity.
His work has recently been exhibited as part of the Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Windsor, at Arnica Artist Run Centre in Kamloops B.C., and at the Centre d’exposition de Rouyn-Noranda in Rouyn-Noranda Quebec.
Victor Romão is a multi-disciplinary Canadian artist living and working in Windsor, Ontario. His years spent living in rural Southwestern Ontario have acted as the catalyst for his present interest in exploring the topics of fear, otherness, and male violence. He is interested in a variety of practices that focus on drawing, painting, sculpture, and print media. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, the U.S., Japan and New Zealand.
Laura Shintani‘s projects include her monumental You+Me Sculpture for Windsor. She was invited to work on a seven year national project that reconsiders Japanese Canadian oral and visual history, has traveled extensively, and challenges the reader: “to let all things human be not foreign to you”.
Joey Stewart‘s practice is primarily concerned with investigating “the copy” as a means of generating new images, an idea rooted in the notion that painting is both a critical and material space. Focused primarily on re-making previous works as a way of looking at contemporary concerns, Stewart uses the surface of a painting to flatten and compress hundreds of years of art history into discrete objects.
Stewart received his BA at McMaster University and MFA from the University of Windsor. He lives in Windsor with his wife and baby.
Sigi Torinus is an installation and performance artist with an MFA from the Braunschweig Art Institute, Germany and from San Francisco State University in California. Her work explores our perceptions of the migratory journey, through time and space, in both physical and digital worlds.
She is a professor of Integrated Media at the School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor, where she currently serves as MFA chair.
The Artcite NINE exhibition and opening event are presented as part of the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts – School of Music / School of Visual Arts Winter Celebration on Jan 16, 2016. The SoCA Winter Celebration exhibition and performance are presented in cooperation with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and Artcite Inc.
Admission to the NINE exhibition and reception at Artcite Inc. is free and open to the public.
Admission to the School of Music Alumni Winter Celebration performance at the Capitol Theatre is $20 adults / $10 students with I.D.
Please contact the Capitol Theatre Box Office at 519-973-1238 ext. 2 or link to: www.uwindsor.ca/music for information and tickets to the Winter Celebration performance on Sat Jan 16, 2016, featuring University of Windsor School of Creative Arts / School of Music Alumni.
