affection of otherness: Works by 3 Canadian Artists who undertook Residency in Korea

- BRENDAN FERNANDES

- PAVITRA WICKRAMASINGHE,

- JUNE PAK

Date:   March 30th (Thur.) ~ April 28th (Fri.), 2017

Venue: KCC Gallery, Korean Cultural Centre Canada

Artist talk: KCC Theatre, March 30^th (Thur.) at 5pm

Vernissage: KCC Gallery, March 30^th (Thur.) at 7pm

International Artist-In-Residency (AIR) program is considered as one of the best opportunities for artists to engage in inter-national cultural exchanges. The program not only gives professional artists from all around the world a chance to meet and work together in a same location for a certain amount of time, it also allows those artists to give back to the community by leaving behind a legacy of the work they will create together with the community!  Opening their minds against difference between identity and otherness; affecting and being affected by each other; artists in residency poise themselves as a trigger of communication and understanding between different cultures.

First initiated by the Korean Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in the mid-1990s, the international AIR program has gained a reputation as the window of substantial international cultural exchange in Korea. The number of AIR programs in Korea has been increased rapidly for the past 20 years. There are currently more than 120 AIR programs in Korea nationwide, which are also looking for international participants.

The popularity of AIR program between the artists in both Korea and Canada has resulted in the establishment of an institutional level of partnership. The MMCA of Korea and the Fonderie Darling in Montreal have formed a reciprocal AIR program in 2016, as the first one of this kind between the two countries. This partnership is expected to pave the way to expand artistic communication and understanding between our countries.

The exhibition affection of otherness presents Korean experiences and inspiration by 3 Canadian artists who undertook their residency in Korea recently. These featured artists are Brendan Fernandes, Pavitra Wickramasinghe and June Pak. Brendan undertook his residency at the Gyeonggi Creation Centre in 2009; Pavitra worked in the Changdong Studio at the MMCA in 2012; and June carried out her research in Litmus Ansan in 2013. Although the works presented here mainly reveal the outcome of their residency in Korea, it is not possible to separate the cause and the consequent influences of their residency from these direct outcomes of their experience.  Hence, Brendan’s “Foe (2008)” reflects the precursor of his Korean residency, while Pavitra’s “Au-delà de la terre/ Landless Longitude (2016)” presents the much evolved influences from Korea. Focused on her ongoing research on ethnicity and the cultural impact of visual representation of ethnic subjects in popular media, June’s works in the exhibition portray her thoughts on her identity and ethnical presentation as a Korean-Canadian.        

Korean Cultural Centre Canada wishes for this exhibition to provide more Canadian artists and arts students with opportunities to consider their future artistic engagement with Korea. We also hope this exhibition of Korean experience and inspiration by 3 talented Canadian artists to highlight continuing interest in and support for Korean arts and culture here in Canada by the Canadian public.    

Artist Talk:

Date: Thursday, March 30th, 5pm / KCC Theatre

Participants      -June Pak (artist) 

- Pavitra Wickramasinghe (artist)

- Brendan Fernandes (artist)

- Caroline Andrieux (General & Artistic Co-Director, Fonderie Darling) 

- Stefan St-Laurent (Director, Axe Neo 7) 

- Moderator: Jinny Yu (artist. University of Ottawa)

RSVP Link -  https://goo.gl/forms/9PLhzpRwSj8BAjXf2 

Artists and their Works

Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from the University of Western Ontario and his BFA (2002) from York University in Canada. He has exhibited internationally and nationally including exhibitions at the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Museum of Art and Design New York, Art in General, the Musee d'art contemporary de Montreal, The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, The Andy Warhol Museum, the Art Gallery of York University, Deutsche Guggenheim, Bergen Kunsthall, Stedelijk Museum, the Sculpture Centre, Manif d'Art: The Quebec City Biennial, The Third Guangzhou Triennial and the Western New York Biennial through The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. 

Fernandes has been awarded many highly regarded residencies around the world, including The Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Trinidad and Tobago (2006), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Work Space (2008), Swing Space (2009) and Process Space (2014) programs, and invitations to the Gyeonggi Creation Centre at the Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Korea (2009) and ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2011). He was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award, Canada's pre-eminent award for contemporary art in 2010, and was on the longlist for the award in 2013 and 2015. He was a 2014 recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Residency and Fellowship. A national Canadian tour of his work recently concluded and will culminate in a monograph produced by Black Dog Press in London this Fall (2016). He is currently artist in residency and faculty at Northwestern University in Department of Art Theory and Practice. 

 Foe (2008)

“Foe presents video footage of me receiving lessons from an acting coach hired to teach me the “accents” of my cultural backgrounds. I am not interested in the authenticity of these accents but in the idea of being taught to speak in these voices. The text that I have learned is taken from a book with the same titled as my piece. This book, a sequel to “Robinson Crusoe” was written by J.M. Coetzee. In this book, Friday (the savage) has been mutilated; his tongue has been removed and he cannot speak. For this work I have memorized the specific passage where Crusoe explains this to another.” http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/foe/

Pavitra Wickramasinghe is a multidisciplinary artist mainly concerned with new ways of conceptualizing the moving image and conventions of seeing. Her current work is an exploration of notions of traveling, fluidity of place and memory. She uses light and shadows as extensions of the projected image to create installations where the viewer occupies filmic space instead of being physically removed from the work. Selected exhibitions include: Kunst Kraft Werk (Germany), SIGHTINGS, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montréal), Yeosu International Art Festival (South Korea), Centre des Arts Enghien-les-Bains (France), Cable Factory (Finland), Centro Cultural del Matadero (Spain) and Galerie B-312 (Montréal) among others. She is a recipient of numerous residencies, awards and grants including, Art Omi (NY), La Chambre Blanche (Québec), Pépinières Européennes pour jeunes artistes, (Spain), UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists Programme, Changdong Art Studio, National Museum of Contemporary Art (South Korea), Canada Council for the Arts and The Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. (http://www.pavitraw.com/index.html)

Gone (2012)

Video Still / Sound by IDA Grändå

“Gone is made of photographs from the Choansan Mountain in northern Seoul, South Korea. I photographed the ancient tombs hidden among the trees over time, capturing the dancing shadows among the still monuments. I was compelled by their forgotten place in the city. Once strong stones are weathered over centuries overtaken by the surrounding forest. Their place marks the progress of time and the collective forgetting by the city. “

Gone was made possible by La Fondation De La Familie Claudine Et Stephen Bronfman; UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists and Changdong Art Studio, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea.

Au-delà de la terre/ Landless Longitude (2016)

“I am mainly concerned with new ways of conceptualizing the moving image and exploring conventions of seeing. My work attempts to draw the viewer in through curiosity, intrigue and a sense of wonder, while hovering between experiment and play. I am guided by the need to know how things work – to break down motion, video and screen to their basic elements and to build them up again. Projections become particles of light and moving shadows; screens deconstruct and crystallize; and motion is suspended into still elements.

Currently, I am exploring the notion of "here." The sense of place and locale plays a large part in my work and I am playing with imagery that provokes notions of traveling, the fluidity of place and memory. I am inspired by the writings of Italo Calvino and the recurring themes of travel within his stories. Calvino believed living in a foreign land is ideal because it stimulated his awareness of his surroundings. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” (Invisible Cities). I use shadow as a stand in for these notions. Shadows are an illusion of presence, and proof that not all knowledge can be presented in light. Through the untouchable density of their smoky void, shadows indicate the absolute consistency of change and the impossibility of fixed meaning.“http://www.oboro.net/fr/activite/au-dela-de-la-terre

JUNE PAK was born in Seoul, South Korea, and now lives in Toronto, Canada. By utilizing the assumed functions of hyphenation, as to both connect and divide two (or more) entities, she investigates different means to articulate visualization of ethnicity. She resists the prescribed ethnic subject’s positioning in the current universalized and institutionalized construction of ethnic work. Her multi-disciplinary works (photo, video, sound, text, installation, performance and writing) have shown around nationally and internationally. She received numerous grants and awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council for her projects, including the K.M. Hunter Artist Award (2004) and the Chalmers Arts Fellowship (2016). She holds a BFA from York University, a MFA from University of Windsor, and a PhD (Practice-based in Visual Arts) from York University. She currently teaches as a sessional lecturer in Visual Studies program at University of Toronto and in the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University.

Retelling (2012)

Multichennel audio-vido installation

As the Caucasian actor’s declaration of her Asian identity shapes up into a story of a person who was born in Korea but now lives in Canada, the nature of the fictional character’s origin begins to raise doubts concerning the actor’s truthfulness, triggering questions, in fact, about whether she is a fictional character or a real person. 

Invisible Transformation Project (2013, 2014)

Performative project shown in video

The Invisible Transformation Project is an ephemeral project of painting and repainting a wall. When the painting process is done, it appears as if nothing happened to the wall. To those who did not see the process, the existence of the yellow paint underneath is unknown. The fact that the laborious hours of painting the wall yellow have now disappeared from sight is the point of departure for me; the yellow is hidden, invisible, but the wall is permanently marked by the yellow paint. Can we ignore its transformation just because it is not visible? The relationship between visibility and ethnic identity is questioned in this work.

Disclaimer

The characters and incidents portrayed and the names herein are fictitious and any

similarity to the name, character and history of any person, living or dead,

is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

The above text can be found in most fictional films disclaiming truthfulness of made-up characters and stories.  The disclaimer situates a film in its in-between state, blurring reality and fiction, representation and the imaginary.  Instead of separating the filmic space and the real one, the text bridges the two as a co-existing fictitious reality and/or realistic fiction.  The text draws a fine line between reality and fiction.

June on June (2014)

Artist book

“June on June features two identical but distinctively autonomous entities with the same name and plotless storyline. They argue about little things, yet agree on a lot of other things. The two Junes do not represent the double identity of the artist’s being; rather they animate the absurdity of being hyphenated. They are willing participants who activate the cyclical state of being in-between. They do not have to carry the duty of representing the artist.” http://www.junepak.ca/june-on-june.html

      Retelling

      Invisible Transformation Project

       June on June

Inquiry: Moonsun Choi (moonsunchoi@korea.kr / 613-233-8008 ext.205)