VANCOUVER

Upgrade! Vancouver is launching a series of outdoor art video screenings. The videos will be local and international – and will “appropriate the functional model of online videosharing sites”. The event will be promoted through flyers at each screening, encouraging word of mouth promotion.

Upgrade! is an international network that collaborates to produce publications, exhibitions, happenings at the intersection of art and technology. There is also Upgrade! Montreal, but sadly, those are the only ones in Canada.

CALGARY

Keep your eye out for Curtis Cutshaw, who will present new photographic work at Skew Gallery in May. Cutshaw developed his practice at the Alberta College of Art and Design, at NASCAD - the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s New York residency and at the Skowhegan School in Maine.

Curtis Cutshaw, Bloom Version 2, 2006. Image: Skew Gallery

Using a conventional dowsing rod with string and pen attached, Cutshaw undertakes a series of chance operations to produce line compositions on paper. The drawings are done on the ground as to respond to the waters below, pulling drawings from the ground. The drawings are then reworked in the studio and printed through Lightjet and Utrachrome process.

Curtis Cutshaw, Full Version, 2006. Image: Skew Gallery

TORONTO

Painter Gina Rorai presents her first solo exhibition with Birch Libralato in Toronto:

Gina Rorai, 2007. Image: Birch Libralato

The exhibition runs from February 17 to March 17.

Gina Rorai, 2007. Image: Birch Libralato

Through March 1st at the Centre for Culture and Leisure No. 1 in Toronto: A residency by artist-slash-curator Alissa Firth Eagland with Johan Lundh will investigate relationships between public, private, work and leisure zones.

(I’ll be in conversation with MoCCA director David Liss on February 28 at 5 pm – please come by!)

The Centre for Culture and Leisure No. 1 is not a collective or rental gallery but a place where artists and curators have been invited to explore and experiment, for free, with new art practices, media work and projects.

The directors say of the development of art district Queen Street West: “The problem is the assumption that artistic production is divorced from dynamic social process and, that creativity and art look like things that can be applied to a surface.”

MONTREAL

From February 23 - March 31, the Galerie de L’UQAM in Montreal presents Basculer, a group exhibition featuring work by:

Sebastien Cliché:

DisastAir. Image: aplacewhereyoufeelsafe.com

Claudie Gagnon:

Curiosity Cabinets. Image: mcq.org

Philomene Longpre:

Octopus. Image: Oboro.net

As well as the art collective BGL and Yann Pocreau. The show will include installation, web projects, video and photography.

A rough translation of the press release explains (rather confusingly, we admit) that the exhibition will unite works which have the particularity of exploiting that which seems to be near and captivating, resulting in a questioning of personal ways of life and contemporary collectives.

NEW YORK

If you’re in New York or planning to be, be sure not to miss this.

Adad Hannah shows video tableaux vivants at the corner of 8th Avenue and 24th Street in New York City from February 17 – 24th. The work is presented by Pierre-Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain from Montreal, as part of DiVA New York 2007, the first art fair dedicated to video and digital art.

Adad Hannah, Room 112, 2004. Image: wro05.wrocenter.pl

DiVA Streets provides a public viewing space for the display of video art by placing ten video art exhibitions in shipping containers in select locations in Chelsea.

VoCA first saw Adad Hannah’s video installation at the National Gallery in Ottawa, as part of Acting the Part: A History of the Staged Photograph. We love and highly recommend seeking out this work.

At first glance the works appear to be static photographs, but they are in fact carefully staged tableaux vivants where the posed models are asked to remain as still as possible for several minutes while the artist videotapes the performance. This process mirrors photographic practices of the mid 1800’s when exposure times were measured in minutes. The result is a time-based work which questions and challenges our ideas of what constitutes a photograph or a “moving” image.

And now for something COMPLETELY different…

VoCA saw a Hermann Nitsch performance in London years ago and was recently reminded of it.

Das Orgien Mysterien Theatre.

HERE is his website. If you are at all interested in great performance art, please check it out.