where phantoms meet comprised of two sizeable and meticulously lifelike boulders placed within the gallery, what at first looked quite simple began to take on more significance as one realized that the rocks were, in fact, moving and in the process of executing a choreographed dialogue. Housed within each boulder was an omnidirectional robotic platform providing the ability to pivot or move in any direction required.

The boulders took turns responding to one another’s actions. One raised to slightly hover, pivoted, moved sideways then forward before gently returning to the floor. Following a contemplative pause, the second rock lifted itself from the floor and responded in kind. The slow and silent exchange between boulders choreographed specifically for the Alternator exhibition, continued on throughout the day. The serene pace is periodically interrupted by a more sudden, albeit extremely short-lived burst of movement. These spastic actions break away from the set rhythm as if a stumble or misstep within the preordained order.

There is an inherent level of absurdity where two boulders are locked within a lengthy slow dance. However, within a culture in which one finds wood grain pressed into the surface of plastic lumber, plastic birds twitch while sputtering out an electric song, and rubber ‘wood-chips’ are available in a wide assortment of colours, it finds itself in familiar company. The project followed a sustained and evolving exploration within Hengeveld’s art practice that focused on the intricate and increasingly disconnected relationship we have with the natural world. Yet it moves beyond to explore the complex dialogue that can occur between two animated objects however simple they may be. As we witness the back-and-forth exchange between boulders we inevitably begin to anthropomorphize the objects.

In addition to this exhibition, a satellite event called Still Looking took place in collaboration with Kettle River Brewing. Messages texted to a specific number would be repeated back to patrons in Morse code via a chandelier hanging from the brewery ceiling.

Robert Hengeveld is an artist living and working in Newfoundland. His creative practice manifests itself in many different forms, but exploring and experimenting with how we perceive and preconceive the world around us would be one way to summarize a given direction in the past several years. The means through which this has been achieved is quite diverse ranging from autonomous robotics to the reworking of salvaged materials. Projects often emerge through collaborative investigation, incorporating the expertise and insight of engineers, musicians, choreographers, poets, community members, and other artists.

Hengeveld’s work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. Past exhibitions include Bonavista Biennale (Bonavista, NL), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo US), Art Athina (Athens, GC), The Power Plant (Toronto, ON), Mercer Union (Toronto, ON), Mulherin New York (NYC, US), Opinion Makers (London UK), and Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, LV).

For more information on Hengeveld and his work, visit his website.

where phantoms meet // Interpretive essay by Emma Richards

The initial sight is perplexing: where phantoms meet consists of two substantial and authentic looking boulders that perform a carefully choreographed sequence of movements around the gallery space, responding to the movements and actions of its counterpart. Programmed to “dance” carefully around each other, the boulders (Ike and Obelix) are masterminded on top of mechanics that allow them the fluidity and elegance similar to that of carefully crafted dancing partners.

The mechanics that the boulders are crafted upon are designed to allow for movements that are both extended and momentary, as well as curved and straight. The authenticity of the exterior in tandem with the gentle hum of their engines provoked me to reimagine the significant relationship between technology and the natural world.

Is there anything that is sacred within nature anymore?

where phantoms meet presents a dilemma to its audience. We inhabit a world that is rich with nature and life, but our inventions and technology have continuously ingrained itself within our society. Whether it be positive or negative, that’s for the audience to decide.

One may perceive the exhibition to display a loss of the natural world with technology overwhelming our world, but alternatively technology has developed to allow for our species to sustain on our planet for so long. Humans were not imperative to the establishment of the natural world, but we have always been a necessity for the development of technology.

We are surrounded by the natural world, and yet we have become dependent on technology to sustain and survive. This has led to a 21st century development on the definition of what is natural which is greatly different than 100 years ago, when technology wasn’t nearly as integrated into our lives as it now. The idea of what is natural can be symbiotic to our personal understanding of what is art, and the value that each is subjective. We conceive an idea of what is considered natural as an interpretation by each individual.

As an individual born in the nineties, my idea of technology coupled with nature is inherent and immanent. Nature and technology has developed into a mutually beneficial relationship; they are reliant on one another to sustain in our current world.

The idea of what is natural has gradually shifted from a literal explanation to a spectrum of different understandings in relationship to a progressively more technological society. A discussion emerges in the exhibit that focuses not only on the importance of modern technology within nature and the discourse between the two, but also on the value in which they hold together.

Cindy Mochizuki’s dawn to dust presented a multi-media installation comprising of audio, animations, video and sculpture. The animations were displayed inside architectural, cinematic viewing spaces inspired by the memories of Mochizuki’s father and his sibling of an abandoned shack house - one of the post-war "homes" that her father's family inhabited following the release of Japanese Canadians from the internment camps of B.C. in 1949. During this time, Japanese Canadians went through a second uprooting designed as the final solution to the so-called Japanese problem in Canada. Two policies were announced: 'dispersal' and 'repatriation' - her family took 'repatriation' (return to Japan). Mochizuki’s father’s family, along with another 4000 Japanese Canadians, were sent to a country with poor economic and living conditions due to the war; a country they had never known and where they would still feel quite alienated.

The installation presented several pieces including a single-channel video work, a five-channel audio piece, a miniature facade of an abandoned shack house in Fukuoka, Japan and several animations experienced through five individual smaller-scale viewing spaces and other forms of projection. The animations were seen and told through the cinematic eye of 5 fictional characters (a house snake, a meijiro bird, a shepherd dog, a ghost, and a stone statue) - each inhabiting an aspect of the lived space and surrounding land (rice patty field, pathway, garden, forest, well, trees). Together their viewpoints attempted to 'make sense’ of the mysterious disappearance of a family as they one-by-one vacate the home. What remained is a family recollection of childhood, as Canadian-born children trying to survive and make sense of everyday life in a foreign country. The five characters/perspectives grappled and attempted to figure out what it is they witnessed as simply a strange disappearance of both home and the people who came to inhabit it.

Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation, drawings and community-engaged projects. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its complex relationships to site-specificity, the transpacific, invisible histories, archives, and memory work.  Her artistic process moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, performativity, chance, and improvisation. She has worked extensively on a large body of work that is informed by and within Japanese Canadian communities in B.C and Japan. In these projects she works with members of these communities and often includes her paternal family’s history both within the internment camps and their experiences as repatriated Japanese Canadians in Japan in the post war.

She has exhibited, performed and screened her work in Canada, US, Australia, and Asia. Exhibitions include the Frye Art Museum (Seattle, Washington), Yonago City Museum (Yonago, Japan), The New Gallery (Calgary), Hamilton Artists Inc (Hamilton), and Koganecho Bazaar (Yokohama). She has performed as part of 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), Richmond World Festival with Cinevolution Media Arts Society (Richmond) and has worked with numerous collaborators from other disciplines including Theatre Replacement, Dreamwalker Dance Company, and Project In Situ. Her community-engaged projects including Magic School (Daisen Laboratory, Japan), Things on the Shoreline (Access Artist Run Centre) 2016 and Shako Club (grunt gallery) 2015.  In 2015, she received the Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award in New Media and Film. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts (2006).

For more information about Mochizuki’s work, please visit her website.

Places of Memory // Interpretive essay by Toby Lawrence

“Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.” 

 ~ Pierre Nova, 1989. 

Oscillating between poetic intention and full disclosure, Cindy Mochizuki assembles instances of engagement with her family’s history and their memories of their homes and lives in Oouchi in Shizuoka and Shida-machi Fukuoka-ken, Japan after being expatriated from Canada in 1946. Following the end of the second World War and their release from internment camps in Sandon, Bayfarm, Popoff, and Slocan, B.C. where they spent four years, Mochizuki’s grandparents with six children were given two choices and, along with nearly 10,000 other Japanese Canadians, opted for ‘repatriation’ rather than ‘relocation.’ 

Through interviews with her father, four aunts, and one uncle, and her own site research, Mochizuki locates the actions of memory within dawn to dust. The conflation of history and memory, that would otherwise distinguish (biased) fact from experiential subjectivity, unfolds in the re-articulation of key characters from the siblings’ stories in Ghost, Statue, Snake, Dog, and Bird, and through their collective and individual descriptions in Lines to Remember. This active recollecting represented through their aging hands–solo or together–lends itself to the ways in which stories are rebuilt within our bodies, through forgetting and remembering. The application of stop-motion animation to bring life to the characters constructed out of clay, porcelain, and paintings in Ghost, Statue, Snake, Dog, and Bird alludes to the fantastical tone that frequently dominated the interviews. The memories of characters and events build from the Mochizuki children’s experiences as Canadian citizens living in the country of their ancestors, but not of their home—devastated by war. The “visual stories” told by the siblings, are, in many ways, like the animations, “handmade.”

The bookwork accompanying the adjacent projection, Lines to Remember, functions as another articulation of remembering and of the actions undertaken by Mochizuki in her own process of gathering stories and understanding her family’s histories. This layering additionally offers a bridge to the animated sculptures on the other side of the central wall, wherein each character represents a point of recollection abstracted from the trauma of dispossession and systemic prejudice. Through the exploration of storytelling as memory, dawn to dust moves beyond scripted behaviours and parameters of enacting and processing personal and collective histories.

The most beautiful things in the world are usually the simplest, and two-dimensional things are easier to grasp than three-dimensional ones. There’s nothing like a white cube for isolating a work of art, to better look upon it, but it isn’t as simple as that. There are things that move and sometimes even images that aren’t images but are more like constructions, or experiences. Images that one can practically enter.

Deployed in Alexis Bellavance’s installation, apart from the frame that hung on the wall, was a machine (a rudimentary and useless technology, that generated a quiet, fan-induced hum); and as like to potato chip bag as it is to bubble gum (no reductive thinking intended), mylar sheeting, normally used as an emergency covering. Its function here was entirely aesthetic, and poetic, the machinery recalling some of James Turrell’s work, or Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan. 

Next to the frame on the wall and the fan was a closed door. When one opens this door, the Big Bang, the universe and the Milky Way, the darkness and the light and the whole shebang that came with it, is set in motion. A quiet black hole. The mylar (so-called space blanket in its NASA-inspired manifestation) became enchanted; waltzed, changed, crackled and sang. On the flip side of the coin, Bellavance’s was a machine that revealed its own simple and incredible operation, its shimmering, quicksilver, ever-changing and never repeated rustle, like leaves in a gust of wind – taking us from space travel to elementary nature.

Multidisciplinary artist, Alexis Bellavance works within time. His findings, sometimes loud, sometimes silent, are concrete observations of his surroundings. Cycles, positions, laws, echoes, materials, become the segments of conceptual scaffoldings that leads to multiple disciplines: audio art, performance, installation, photography. The consequences of his work are empirical results emerging from his attention to reality and certain of its accidents.

He is a co-founder of the Montreal based performance event VIVA! Art action and an active member of the art center Pertede Signal. Bellavance’s work has been presented in numerous events, festivals, galleries and artist-run centers in North America, Europe and Asia. Candidate for the MFA in InterMedia and Cyber Art (IMCA) at Concordia University, he lives in Montreal, CA.

For more information about Bellavance’s work, please visit his website.

The Scale of Clusters v3 // Interpretive Essay by Dylan Ranney

You are approaching the gallery, anticipating its contents- you spy inside a window, eager to consume a fresh experience. What is the scale with which we measure human experience? Could an art gallery be such a scale? Through the sensorial milieu of this space, such self-observation feels encouraged.

These first moments inside the gallery seem innocent and evoke a conversation around sterility in the art gallery: White walls, the drone of fans pushing air through an industrial space. This is a familiar environment with a singular picture frame on the wall, appropriately dressing another ‘waiting room’ experience. Only two or three steps later; Bellavance catches your full attention: A glint of silver, a small distant motion, and all at once you realize the illusion; the picture frame is in fact a portal to another space! How often do we ignore our surroundings, or take for granted our routines through space and time? The picture is in fact a window looking into metallic bubble, reflecting our curiosity back at us.

A fan, a window, a door, there is still something banal about this room. If you do not give yourself permission to open the door, then the room stands still, a vaccuum, and you will miss out on that experience you were craving just now. What is this place? What is this bubble? Subconsciously the mind gathers the audacity to answer these questions.

Opening the door, the air from the room rushes past and the Mylar balloon deflates, as if at once holding its breath and then releasing a slow sigh of relief at having been understood. Everything you thought you knew about the exhibit is at once shifted. In the first space, experiencing themes of unknowing and curiosity. In the second space, being empowered by making the decision to enter, you may then water others struggle with their own decision.

The crackling of an exhaling Mylar balloon breaks the sound of humming fans. You close the door, the air pressure returns, and once again the balloon inhales deeply. This balloon has become the very lungs of the gallery, immersing the space in sound and light and breath, you are immersed in it, a part of it now. Bellavance paints the room with whimsy; fractal patterns of light dance from floor to ceiling, reflected from the now rotund metallic balloon like one of Jeff Koons’ esoteric chrome fantasies.

You all at once become self conscious in that the Mylar balloon allows you to view others still in that first room, and that you yourself might have been watched. Distorted by light and motion your own reflection taunts you. Reminiscent of James Turrell’s Skyspace. You aren’t just observing the installation; the installation is now observing you. From one organism to another, you share another breath and return to the first chamber. The once esoteric and industrial space has exposed itself to you and revealed its true colours. Going back to the car you take some whimsy home, one experience richer.