Glowing Madonna was an interactive video installation, whereby the viewer’s shadow together with a video projection of a contemporary Virgin Mary, were exposed onto a large photo-luminescent wall panel. This piece blended elements of celebrity culture and religion in a somber and restless search for a self-defined woman’s identity. Glowing Madonna was inspired by the representation of women in Catholicism and pop culture, including Virgin Mary apparitions, glow-in-the-dark figurines and superstar shows like Canadian Idol.

Teresa Ascencao is a multimedia artist whose work toys with social constructs of body language, costume, customs, and inner corporeal experiences. Her folk and pop inspired artworks employ concept-related mediums and technologies that invite audiences to play with iconographies and scenarios involving gender, seduction, consumption, and class.

Teresa was born in Brazil to Azorean parents, and immigrated to Canada at a young age. She graduated with distinction from the University of Toronto’s Honours Fine Art Studio program and holds an MFA specializing in Media Art and Sex-Positive Feminism from OCAD University. Ascencao’s work has been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. She lives and works in Toronto and teaches at OCAD University and University of Toronto.

To learn more about Teresa and her current work, visit her website.

From the summer 2006 Brochure

When entering the exhibition space, visitors [were] greeted by a wall of lazar light; 48 parallell beams running horizontally down the gallery centre. These are the strings of the Harp: Phase 1. The audio comes from 48 speakers attached to the wall. The beams or “strings” can be played s a harp by breaking the beams to activate corrosponding audio. In this case, the tones produced encompass all utterances for English, French, German and Dutch (possibly others as well). The viewer, through the use of this technology, can access and compose with these identified human utterances. At first glance, such a technology forsees (lightheartedly) a universal laguage, but the babble produced by the machine undercuts this vision, suggesting the romantic and synchronistic nature of such a proposal.

Robyn Moody (b. 1975, Lethbridge, Canada) lives and works in Calgary, Canada and received his MFA from NSCAD University in 2006. He takes a whimsical and multifaceted approach to artmaking, lately focussed on electronics, mechanics, installation, sound, mechanics and sculpture.

Often humorous, often strikingly beautiful, and often hiding a dark secret, Moody’s work explores (in whole or in part) the complex relationships between technological advances, human belief and interpretations of the world, and humanity’s relationship with science, politics, and nature.

In the past decade, he has shown his work regularly across Canada, Mexico, Scandinavia and Europe. Notable recent examples include Fondation Vasarely (Aix-en-Provence), Transitio festival (Mexico City), Kling and Bang (Reykjavik), Lydgalleriet (Bergen), AND festival (Liverpool), the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art (Edmonton), the Confederation Centre for the Arts (Charlottetown), The International Digital Arts Biennial (BIAN) at the Centre PHI and Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal (Montréal), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes, FR), Transmediale (Berlin, DE), Lighting Guerrilla (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Scopitone festival (Nantes), Werkleitz festival (Halle, DE), and the Némo Biennial Internationale des Arts Numériques (Paris, FR).

He has twice been nominated for the Sobey Art Award; in 2010 and 2012.

To learn more about Robyn’s current work, visit his website.

Kristi Malakoff situates her work at the intersection of 2-D and 3-D space by inflating imagery from two-dimensional objects back into three-dimensional format.

The Glade was inspired by the iconography of the Victorian fairy tale, Tinykin's Transformations, from the late 1800’s a book by Mark Lemon. The story is about a boy with whom Titania, Queen of the Fairies, falls in love with. Because she is so besotted by him, she grants him any wish he so desires. And so, he wishes to be, in turn, a buck, a fish, a raven, a horse, a mole etc. The story follows his transformations and the ensuing adventures they cause. All the transformations and periods of enchantment happen in a mysterious, glade filled with flowers in the middle of a dark forest.

For her installation, Malakoff had created a set of sorts - comprised of about 20 different, free-standing elements. The large collages, composed of photos of over 400 varieties of flowers, depict various manifestations of Tinykin's transformations throughout the tale.

From the 2006 brochure:

By Curtis Grahuer

In The Glade, Kristi Malakoff has created an immersive environment based on a Victorian fairy tale by Mark Lemon. This installation invites viewers to escape from the reality and banality of everyday life into a fantasy world of fairies and gnomes—a place of both wonder and trepidation.

With 23,000 photographic cutouts of flowers representing 400 different species, it is difficult to disassociate the labour involved in the creation of The Glade from the themes that it addresses. Considering the installation’s inspiration is a Victorian novella, it is fitting that the quantity and detail involved in the work is typical of and highly integral to the Victorian style. Malakoff’s obsessive use of flowers to create textured mosaics of fantastical forms finds relevance in 19th-century England’s fascination and obsession with nature; the colonization and categorization that allowed the wild and exotic to be controlled and manipulated.

The Glade’s encompassing impression echoes the tangible worlds of Disneyland - which Malakoff acknowledges as having influenced her practice. Similar to the ideals, quantity and detail inherent to the Victorian era, every last detail of Disneyland is moulded as part of the Disney universe; it is the ultimate escape, the outside world having been swallowed and sanitized. Disneyland and The Glade are both immersive environments that allow visitors an escape from everyday life, but where the former animates reality, the latter stimulates the viewer to imagine nature animation in concentrated space.

Using a technique akin to parade float decorations, Malakoff never allows the illusion to become too ‘real.’ She impressionistically builds an atmosphere of facts to which one can escape mentally and physically, still maintaining the awareness that it is all a meticulously crafted illusion. In THe Glade, Malakoff has created a world that is critical and conceptual and at the same time boldly manages to be fun and beautiful.

Curtis Grahauer is an artist and writer based out of Vancouver.

Kristi Malakoff is a Canadian visual artist with a BFA from Emily Carr University, where she was the recipient of many awards and scholarships, among them the Alvin Balkind Memorial Scholarship, the Helen Pitt Award and the Governor General’s silver medal for the top Emily Carr University graduating student of 2005. Since graduating, she has participated in artist residency programs at the Banff Centre, the Stride Gallery, Calgary, SÍM, Reykjavík, Iceland and Proekt Fabrika, Moscow, Russia. She has exhibited in an exhaustive schedule in both group and solo shows throughout Canada and in England, the US, Germany, Mexico and Russia. Her work has been featured and reviewed in many Canadian newspapers, journals and arts-related magazines. In 2010, she received a Canada Council Project Grant for Visual Artists. Her work is held in private and corporate collections across Canada and the US.

To learn more about Kristi and her current work, visit her website.

Socio-economic issues faced by North America’s consumerist culture inspired the content of KC Adams work. Her main focus had been investigating the dynamic relationship between nature versus technology. Adams drew her inspiration from popular culture, the internet, television, sci-fi, and biology to create work that blurred the line between fact and fiction. Some of her sources included the movie The Matrix, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, nano-technology and genetic research. The exhibition Cyborgs at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art included two bodies of work called Cyborg Eggs and Cyborg Hybrids. The work cyborg albeo pullus [cyborg chicken eggs] or what Adams commonly referred to as Cyborg Eggs was a multi-media installation based on genetically modified foods. The work cyborg hibrida genitalis humanitas [techno-savy, creative, human; humour, education, culture] or Cyborg Hybrids were digital photographic prints that combined humans and technology to create a new classification of beings that attempted to counter stereotyping.

KC Adams is a Winnipeg-based artist who graduated from Concordia University with a B.F.A in studio arts. Adams has had several solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and been in three biennales including the PHOTOQUAI: Biennale des images du monde in Paris, France. Adams participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, the Confederation Art Centre in Charlottetown, the National Museum of the American Indian and the Parramatta Arts Gallery in Australia. Her work is in many permanent collections Nationally and Internationally. Twenty pieces from the Cyborg Hybrid series are in the permanent collection of the National Art Gallery in Ottawa

To learn more about KC and her current work, visit her website.

Cyborg // Interpretive Essay by Steven Loft

hy-brid: anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of elements of different or incongruous kinds

cy-borg: cybernetic + organism, a person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by machine technology

For KC Adams, the intersection of organic/technological and socio-cultural evolutions presented a realm of speculative invention. With Cyborg Hybrids and Cyborg Chicken Eggs, she presented two wholly different perspectives of our possible future while holding a mirror to our collective past.

In the Cyborg Hybrids series, Adams presented a cross-cultural, as well as a bio-technologic ideal, an intriguing interplay of contemporary race politics and analytical detachment. Her portraits were, at once, beautiful, sensuous and powerful, compelling and somewhat threatening (depending on your politics) visions of an indigenous hybrid world.

These cyborgs obviously inhabit a much different reality than we’re used to seeing in futurist theoretics. Adams sought to inhabit the world of the trans-biological and of manufactured “idols” with a radical indigeneity. Theirs is an indigeneity based on strength (power), unity, persistence and survival.

Her use of theatrical staging gave her portraits a contemporary, celebrity feel that belies their subversive and specific political edge. Her puns and double entendres, hand beaded and chosen by her subjects, spoke to a shared politic in a way that was layered with cultural significance and poignancy. The use of white, as an aesthetic as well as historico-cultural choice, posited a post-victim stance and articulates a clearly anti-colonial perspective to the purposefully “cover girl (or guy)” style of the photographs.

In a much less sanguine, though somewhat playful installation, Adams explored a convergence of technology and biology much less sublime. In Hybrid Eggs she offered a disturbing and satiric vision of our genetically modified future with a sort of “Flintstones meet Monsanto” aesthetic.

This work was indicative of Adams’ penchant for creating experiential environments and here she used an ancient medium (clay formed into vessels) to express her concerns for our technological future. Her dysmorphic, luminescent eggs became an indictment of our drive to “improve” nature and dominate our world.

A garden of earthly delights it certainly is not.

Steven Loft is Kanien'kehá: ka (also known as Mohawk), of the Six Nations of the Grand River, also with Jewish heritage. He most recently held the position of Director of Strategic Initiatives for Indigenous Arts and Culture and formerly Director of the Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples program with the Canada Council for the Arts. A curator, scholar, writer and media artist, in 2010 he was named Trudeau National Visiting Fellow at Ryerson University in Toronto. Loft has also held positions as Curator-in-Residence, Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada; Director/Curator of the Urban Shaman Gallery (Winnipeg); Aboriginal Curator at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and Producer and Artistic Director of the Native Indian/Inuit Photographers’ Association (Hamilton). He has curated group and solo exhibitions across Canada and internationally; written extensively for magazines, catalogues and arts publications and lectured widely in Canada and internationally.