David McCallum is a Toronto based media artist and musician. His is characterized by a playful appropriation of everyday technology towards idiosyncratic and often performative ends. He has a background in physics and Music and received a Masters in Art and Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden.

His Warbike project was featured as one half of Sound Cycles and Mobile City a show held at Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto this past fall.

David McCallum, Warbike , modified bicycle, 2005-2007

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VoCA recently caught up with 2007 Sobey Art Prize winner Michel de Broin, by phone from Berlin, where he is now based.

The Montreal artist has a Toronto court case coming up this spring to contest charges brought against the driver of his increasingly notorious pedal powered Buick, the Shared Propulsion Car, which was recently on view at Mercer Union.

The public is invited to the hearing, which will take place in Toronto on April 3rd, in courtroom R at 60 Queen Street West
at 3 pm. Watch this space for more info.

Michel de Broin, Solitude. Colour Photograph, 2002. Image: micheldebroin.org.
The project consists of suspend a mobile home in isolation but in the centre of traffic for a retreat.

VoCA: There seems to be something of a contradiction between Western society’s desires – for a healthy planet, for example – and our cultural behavior. Your work seems to harness this contradiction, to make objects that somehow embody that contradiction.

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VoCA wishes you a very Happy New Year!

While we were sunning ourselves in beautiful Costa Rica, Bill Clarke, writer, collector and FoV (Friend of VoCA) caught up with Toronto artist Robert Waters in Mexico City, where Waters currently resides.

Since receiving his BFA, with honors, from York University in 1998, Waters’ work has been exhibited in Spain, Mexico and Canada.

Waters’ drawings are influenced by his interest in collage. In his best-known work, Waters begins with brown packing tape and uses it as a background for portraits and life drawings drawn with thick black line using permanent marker. Waters adds highlights to his figures by cutting away areas of the tape, revealing the paper beneath.

Robert Waters, Beauty and the Beast, 2007. Image: pmgallery.ca

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ONE TO WATCH: ADAD HANNAH

Adad Hannah, Traces, 2007 (video still). Image: Courtesy the artist

Montreal-based artist Adad Hannah makes video installations in which the videos appear to be still, when in fact they are videos whose subjects hold their poses…sometimes. The work holds the viewer – who is expecting some forward movement – in suspense.

VoCA caught up with Hannah after his installation Traces had been deemed one of the most successful installations at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. He also exhibited Recast and Reshoot, based on Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal during Mois de la Photo, 2007.

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Francesco Vezzoli, a poster for ‘Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!’ 2006.
Image: saatchi-gallery.co.uk

Italian artist extraordinaire Francesco Vezzoli’s exhibition, which includes the North American premiere of his new 22-minute fake television show Marlene Redux : A True Hollywood Story!, opens at Toronto’s Power Plant on September 7th.

The exhibition also features a series of film posters that the artist has commissioned from long-forgotten, Italian film-poster artists; and a number of his embroideries.

Vezzoli reformulates this classic film as a sensational fake television programme about art, fame and the deconstruction of a public persona.

Francesco Vezzoli, a poster for ‘Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!’ 2006.
Image: thepowerplant.org

VoCA CAUGHT UP WITH VEZZOLI AS HIS WORK WAS BEING INSTALLED AT THE POWER PLANT:

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Grand Gestures: An Exhibition in Three Parts by 640 480 video collective is showing at Gallery TPW, Trinity Square Video (TSV) and the public space in between.

September 6 – 13 October, 2007.

Each of the three projects uses the aesthetics of public memorials and museums to discuss the preservation of video and its inherent value system.

Beginning at TSV with an installation of hundreds of memorial pins made from VHS tape that recall Memento Mori, the visitor will then walk to Gallery TPW. Along the route ten “memorial” style bronze plaques have been installed, each containing a partial transcript from a personal video (sourced from Youtube). Finally, at Gallery TPW, these ‘throw-away’ memories are preserved into an everlasting state – as diamonds.

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Image: spots-berlin.de

Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer spoke with VoCA about his 6-piece exhibition as Mexico’s representative at the Venice Biennale, and about his 200,000 watt interactive light sculpture Pulse Front: Relational Architecture 12 for Luminato festival in Toronto this week.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is representing Mexico at this year’s Venice Biennale (June 10 – 21 November, 2007). The exhibition will consist of 6 large-scale installations in the Palazzo Van Axel, a 15th-century gothic landmark bordering the Chiesa Santa Maria dei Miracoli, in the vicinity of the Rialto Bridge.

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A puppet in the image of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Image: visualarts.walkerart.org/the artist

VoCA caught up with Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija on the eve of the opening of his exhibition at OCAD‘s new Professional Gallery.

Tiravanija is known in contemporary art circles world-wide. He won the Guggeheim’s Hugo Boss prize in 2004 and was featured in the New Yorker magazine in October 2005.

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CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist, one of the main players in the feminist art movement of the 1960s and 70s. She lives in upstate New York but keeps a studio in Montreal.

She is perhaps best known for her 1975 performance Interior Scroll, where she stood naked on a table and painted her naked body with mud. She struck several poses while reading aloud from a paper scroll as she slowly extracted it from her vagina.

Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975. Image: caroleeschneemann.com
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