Max
Dean
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Introduction by Mela Constantinidi,
Director of the Ottawa Art Gallery |
RealVideo
for 56k
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Max Dean
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Max Dean has been utilizing interactivity and exploring issues of relation to the audience in works spanning a 30 year period, from performance work in the mid-1970s to advanced robotics works in recent years. His presentation will raise the question, "what is interactive art?", reflect on interactivity within an expanded range of art practices (including his own), and explore issues of ethics and power. RealVideo
for 56k Max Dean was born in Leeds, England. He graduated with a B.A. in art history from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1971. He was an active presence on the Ottawa arts scene in the 1980's, where he taught at the University of Ottawa from 1979 to 1988, and presented work at the National Gallery of Canada (Pluralities, 1982), The Festival of the Arts (Memory/Souvenir, 1987) and The Gallery at Arts Court (Gardens, 1989). Max Dean has gained international acclaim for his interactive media installations, which include such technologies as video, robotics, and animation. He was Artist-in-Residence at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa from 1985 to 1986, and in 1997, he was presented with the Ontario Arts Council’s Jean A. Chalmers National Visual Arts Award for his work As Yet Untitled. Among his recent exhibitions are Future Cinema (2002) and Iconoclash (2002) at ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Found and the Familiar, Gallery TPW, Toronto; Platea dell’umanita (2001) and d’APERTutto (1999) at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Facing History (2001), Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; Quality Control (2001), Site Gallery, Sheffield, England; Canadian Stories (2000-ongoing), Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto; Voici, 100 years of contemporary art (2000), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium; Umedalen Skulptur (2000), Umeå, Sweden; The Fifth Element (2000), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in Toronto.
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Sabine Himmelsbach's presentation will center on her experiences of working for a museum whose focus is on media art. She will discuss forms of immersive environments and participatory strategies, raising the question of whether current forms of art practice are really interactive as yet. Selected works from the Media Museum and projects from the exhibitions net_condition and FUTURE CINEMA will be shown to discuss immersive strategies and participatory processes in current media art. RealVideo
for 56k Sabine Himmelsbach studied Art History, Medieval History and Cultural Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany and graduated with an MA in 1992. From 1993 to 1996 she worked for galleries in Munich and Vienna, and later became the Project Manager for exhibitions and symposia at the Steirischer Herbst Festival (Styrian Autumn Festival) in Graz, Austria. In 1999, Sabine Himmelsbach took up the position of Exhibition Director at the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, a contemporary art museum and media center dedicated to interactive art, with a mediatheque, a production space with artist-in-residence programs, in-house projects and a dynamic exhibitions program, whose most recent exhibitions include Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (2002) and the current FUTURE CINEMA. Cinematic Imagery After Film. She is curator of multiple choices (2002), an exhibit addressing fundamental question of identity construction and the decay of the category of the subject. As a writer, she has contributed to several ZKM catalogues, including Rhetorics of Surveillance, From Bentham to Big Brother (2002), Iconoclash and FUTURE CINEMA. Forthcoming projects and exhibitions include Banquet. Metablism and Communication, Media Works from the Goetz Collection, and a lecture series based on net based art. Her special interest lies in media-related and net based art.
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Michelle Hirschhorn’s presentation will focus on interactivity in non-gallery and interdisciplinary contexts as an artistic and curatorial strategy that emphasizes direct human contact. Using her own ambivalent relationship to digital technologies as a starting point, she will highlight some of the issues that have shaped her current position and present a few recent projects that underscore her interest in works that employ interactive technologies to foreground physical experience, engender collaboration and challenge existing models of production and presentation. RealVideo
for 56k An independent curator, writer and arts consultant, Michelle Hirschhorn studied photography in California, and graduated with a B.F.A from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988. She was the Assistant Director of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (LACPS) in 1989, and later traveled to the U.K. where she completed her MA in Feminism and the Visual Arts from the University of Leeds in 1994. From 1995 to 1998 Michelle Hirschhorn was the Curator of Zone Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne (U.K.). In 1999, she became the Photography and Digital Arts Officer in the Department of Published and Broadcast Arts for the Northern Arts Board (Newcastle Upon Tyne). She was the Acting Director of Site Gallery in Sheffield, England (2001) where she participated in the development of Ex Machina, an international exhibition centred on the interface between the human body, mind and machine, and programmed a two week live art festival. As an active contributor to the visual arts in Northern England, Michelle Hirschhorn has worked on several successful art projects and exhibitions, including as project developer and curator of The Big M, an inflatable mobile venue for the presentation of digital video, which toured 21 contemporary commissioned and contemporary works by 16 artists throughout the UK and Europe in 2000/2001 and has just launched a new programme of 24 works by 18 international artists to tour through 2003; and most recently as curator of connecting principle, a 48-hour event at Newcastle University that featured over 20 British artists and musicians whose work engages time-based processes. She is an active contributor to numerous periodicals, catalogues and conferences.
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In his 1995 essay, “The Finished Work of Art is a Thing of the Past”, Tom Sherman argued that, by contrast to the traditional ’finished’ art object, interactive mechanisms constituted a strategy for sustaining the life of a work of art and maintaining its value as information and knowledge. In his symposium presentation, Sherman will update and expand upon the ideas first developed in this influential essay. RealVideo
for 56k Tom Sherman was born in Michigan, U.S.A. in 1947. He received a B.F.A. from Eastern Michigan University in 1970, and emigrated to Toronto in 1972. In Toronto, Sherman developed video, performance, and concept-based, sculptural installations while helping to establish organizations such as A Space Video (1973; later to become Charles Street Video) and Fuse Magazine (1978). He began working as Video Officer at the Canada Council in 1981 and in 1983 became Head of its newly-formed Media Arts Section. He was an international commissioner for the Venice Biennale’s Art, Technology and Informatics exhibition (1986). Renowned for his career in video, installations, broadcasts, performances and web projects, he is equally esteemed as an influential writer of reflective texts on art, technology and culture. An anthology of his writings to that date was gathered in the 1983 catalogue, Cultural Engineering (National Gallery of Canada), of the ten year retrospective of his work, while a new anthology of texts from 1979-2000, Before and After the I-Bomb: An artist in the information environment (Banff Centre Press), was released this year. His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in galleries throughout the world, while he has also actively developed work for broadcast and websites. Among his many achievements, Sherman’s work has been featured at the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1980), the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Documenta X (Kassel, Germany), Musee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, LUX Cinema (London), Montevideo (Amsterdam) and Elektra 2001 (Montréal). Sherman divides his time between Syracuse, N.Y., where he teaches video and media history and theory in the Department of Art Media Studies of Syracuse University, and his home in Nova Scotia, Canada.
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Renee Baert |
Renee Baert is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Ottawa Art Gallery, and curator of its exhibition, Max Dean. She began her curatorial work in the area of video art and, until joining the OAG, worked as an independent curator for many years presenting the work of national and international artists in exhibitions for galleries across the country. Her writing on contemporary art has been widely published in art magazines, journals and anthologies in Canada and abroad. She holds a PhD in Communications from McGill University.
The Ottawa Art Gallery wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts (Media Arts and Visual Arts), the National Gallery of Canada, Les Suites Hotel Ottawa, Novotel Ottawa, Artengine and the British Council for their support of this event. |
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