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Sculpting New Reads

August 28, 2014

Sculpting New Reads Logo

We are thrilled to officially launch Sculpting New Reads, the inaugural installation art program at The Word On The Street Toronto.

This year’s program, curated by Labspace Studio, brings together Canadian artists and authors to explore how books can inspire new ways of thinking, creating, and innovating. Five local artists have been paired with five books released in 2014. Each artist has been challenged to create an art installation inspired by the themes of their book, applying their own unique practice to the creative process.

Stay tuned for more updates as we bring you up close and personal with the artists in their studios!

Curators

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Labspace Studio is an artist-led creative agency and art house run by Co-Directors John Loerchner and Laura Mendes. Together they develop interdisciplinary art projects, curate large-scale exhibitions, and experiment with new methods of collaboration. Their projects are often site-specific and participatory in nature, blurring the lines between art and life, incorporating elements of performance, installation, multimedia and user-generated content. 2014 projects include commissions for The Artist Project Contemporary Art Fair, Art of the Danforth, Art in Transit, Harbourfront Centre, No.9 Contemporary Art & The Environment, Art Souterrain, and Nuit Blanche.

MARK PRIER & NICK CUTTER

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The Troop by Nick Cutter: Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip. The boys are a tight-knit crew. For the most part, they all get along and are happy to be there. But for some reason, Tim can’t shake the feeling that something strange is in the air this year. Something waiting in the darkness. Something wicked…

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Artist: Mark Prier’s multimedia art examines the interaction between culture, ecology, and survival. Working from diverse sources, such as botany, folklore, geology, and history, he re-articulates this examination into mediums including installation, new media, performance, sound, and video. His exhibitions include shows in Canada (CAFKA, Modern Fuel, The Rooms, & White Water Gallery), Mexico (Kunsthaus Santa Fé), the United Kingdom (the Lost O), and the United States (City Without Walls, and [Untitled] Artspace).

FELIX KALMENSON & JOHANNA SKIBSRUD

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Quartet for the End of Time by Johanna Skibsrud: Quartet for the End of Time takes us on an unforgettable journey, beginning in one of the most fascinating, and largely forgotten, periods of American history—the Bonus Army March of the 1930s—through to the end of the Second World War. The lives of Arthur and Douglas Sinclair—a World War One veteran and his son—and the children of a powerful US congressman—powerfully and irrevocably intersect during the Bonus Army Riots in Washington DC.

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Artist: Felix Kalmenson is a Russian-born, Toronto-based artist, with an artistic practice in installation, video, photography, book works, performance and sound art. Kalmenson’s practice is concerned with the mediation of histories and ongoing narratives by state, institutional and corporate bodies. He explores how transformations in the landscape of communication, visualization and space radically reposition the individual in relation to constructed knowledge and lived experience. Kalmenson has created an extensive body of work in public space, galleries, and artist-run centres in Canada and internationally.

LAYNE HINTON & RUSSELL WANGERSKY

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Walt by Russell Wangersky: From critically acclaimed author Russell Wangersky, comes a psychological thriller about Walt, a grocery store cleaner who collects the shopping lists people leave in the store and discard without thought. Abandoned, he says, by his now-missing wife, Walt is pursued by police detectives unsatisfied with the answers he’s given about her disappearance.

 

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Artist: Layne Hinton is a multi-disciplinary artist, holds a BFA from OCADU, and has received awards including the InterAccess Prize, OCADU Printmaking Award and OCADU Faculty Film/Video Scholarship. Her work has been shown at the AGO, YYZ Artist’s Outlet, O’Born Contemporary, L’École des Beaux Arts Paris and the Hermitage Museum. She recently completed a solo exhibition at InterAccess Electronic and Media Arts Centre and is co-curator for Art Spin.

BAMBITCHELL & SHANI MOOTOO

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Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab by Shani Mootoo: Jonathan Lewis-Adey was nine when his parents separated, and his mother Sid vanished from his life. It is only as a grown man that Jonathan reconnects with his lost parent, only to find, that the woman he knew as “Sid” has become an elegant man named Sydney living quietly in Trinidad. In the years since then, Jonathan has paid regular visits to Sydney, trying to rediscover the parent he adored inside this familiar stranger.

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Artist: BAMBITCHELL is an award winning, artistic collaboration between Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell. The duo has been producing mixedmedia installations since 2008 and has exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally. Their practice uses queer and feminist frameworks to re-imagine borders, historical patterns of mobility, labour, migration and memory. These frameworks, often showcased through irony and a camp aesthetic, invite nuanced and complicated re-workings of images, language and architecture. Upcoming exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario Scene with SAW Video and Gallery44.

NICHOLAS CROMBACH & KATHLEEN WINTER

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Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter: Kathleen Winter, bestselling author of Annabel, gives us her first work of narrative nonfiction. In breathtaking prose charged with vivid descriptions of the land and its people, Kathleen Winter’s Boundless is a haunting and powerful story, and homage to the ever-evolving and magnetic power of the North.

 

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Artist: Nicholas Crombach graduated from OCAD University’s Sculpture and Installation program in 2012. Crombach exhibits his work in a variety of gallery exhibitions, project spaces and sculpture gardens. Crombach has been awarded the Hayden Davies Memorial award and Samuel Lazar Kagan award from OCAD University, The Abraham & Malka Green award, and in 2013 his sculpture, Man with child’s Bow and Arrows, was preselected for the Figurativas 13 exhibition at the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona. In 2012, Crombach was the selected winner of a First Capital Realty public commission installed in Burlington, Ontario.

 

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