In October 2018, SAW Video Media Art Centre launched ‘Knot Projections,’ a unique capacity-building commissioning program funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation that explores the public context as a site for video projection. The initiative involves five regional artists who will each receive support to produce individual video works that are to be exhibited on an urban surface within Ottawa as a large-scale outdoor projection in Spring/Summer 2019. In lead up to this ambitious commissioning aspect of the program, the ‘Video in the Public Sphere’ speaker series aims to open up and sustain a discursive space in which the wider Ottawa community can navigate, expand upon, and challenge the notion of ‘publics’ through critical lenses and contemporary concerns. A series of visiting artists, critics and curators, working at the intersection of artistic production and public space, will engage with the complexities of this terrain from various points of entry. Each will deliver substantial talks at Knot Project Space about their work and research, and in some cases also conduct intensive follow-up workshops and discussion groups.
Archive of Activities | Oct. 2018 – April 2019
Oct. 11 – Lecture | Promiscuous Publicness and the Uncommon In-Common, Patricia Reed.
Oct. 25 – Lecture | The Public Sphere(s) of Massive Media, Dave Colangelo.
Oct. 26 – Workshop | The Space Around the Screen.
Conducted by Dave Colangelo.
Dec. 6 – Screening | Tonsler Park, Kevin Jerome Everson.
Dec. 10 – Discussion | The Reality-Based Community – Erika Balsom.
Moderated by Malini Guha.
Jan. 24 – Workshop | Collective Editing.
Conducted by Neven Lochhead.
Mar. 1 – Reconstructing Screen Experiments from Expo 67’s Archives, Monika Kin Gagnon.
Mar. 4 – Discussion | Communication Clinics – André Jansson.
Moderated by Malini Guha.
Mar. 21 – Off-Site Visit | Soundings, Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Kingston, ON.
Curated by Dylan Robinson + Candice Hopkins.
Mar. 27 – Lecture | Art’s Possible Worlds, Amanda Beech.
Mar. 30 – Seminar | Art and the Conception of Reality.
Moderated by Amanda Beech.
Apr. 6 – Seminar | Theories of Sensory Implication for Public Art.
Moderated by Dylan Robinson.
Core Members: Hélene Lefebvre, Ryan Conrad, Pansee Atta, Maayke Schurer, Sasha Phipps.
Occasional Members: Alejandro Salgado Cendales, Eric Archambault, Mathieu Hallé, James Goddard, Pavel Pavlov, Jinny Yu, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Norman Hogg, Leah Snyder, Katherine Wyatt.
Resident Critic: Malini Guha
Artworks
Presented as part of Public Syntax exhibition at Critical Distance, Toronto:
Thicker Realities, Video in the Public Sphere Working Group.
Presented as the itinerant exhibition Imagining Publics at various sites in Ottawa from August-November 2019:
Open Water, Hélene Lefebvre. Les Suites parking garage.
Don’t Believe the Hype!, Ryan Conrad. Bank Street / Ottawa Gay Village.
we only liberate ourselves by binding our liberations to those of one another, Pansee Atta. Victoria Island Hydro Station.
Tranquil Traffic, Maayke Schurer. STEM Complex, uOttawa.
The Future is Up, Sasha Phipps. STEM Complex, uOttawa.
Imagining Publics
Imagining Publics is an extended public projection series that will take shape as a sequence of five ephemeral video installations, each occurring at different sites within Ottawa, beginning in mid-July and concluding in late October. In conversation with SAW Video’s curatorial staff, five local commissioned artists have each selected specific sites and surfaces to host their newly created video projections. Each of these special projects implicates or acknowledges the preexisting architectures, dynamics, and histories of the sites that surround the edges of their frame.
Varied in both form and content, the works are linked by the artists’ ‘imagining’ of public viewing as a transitory and fleeting moment of encounter. In these outdoor locations, the tactics of immersion, narrative, proximity and control, inherent to moving image presentation within the gallery or theatrical setting, have had to be modified or abandoned. In their place, the artists have developed compositional and editing strategies that generate density, compression, seduction, fluidity or ambience, producing modes of imagistic address that make use of the attention offered within the span of a passing glance. Through this conjuring of curiosity and ultimately commitment, these works invite the public to gather around a sequence of illuminated surfaces, to peel back the layers of facades, and engage in an act of collective imagining.