Aurora Del Rio
Linda Duvall
Leah Decter
Anne Sophie Lorange
Stephanie Reid
JoMichelle Piper
Shelia Lynch
Sheila Lynch (Chicago)
Leah Decter (Winnipeg)
Aurora Del Rio (Germany)
Linda Duvall (Saskatoon)
JoMichelle Piper (Sydney)
Anne Sophie Lorange (Norway)
and
Stephanie Reid (Austin)
Join us in this roundtable discussion as seven artists discuss their relationship to their surrounding landscape and how it has affected their art practice during this time of a global pandemic.
Ely Center of Contemporary Art is delighted to organize and host these artists and their event.
Sheila Lynch is an artist whose practice examines the body and natural landscapes as sources of knowing.
During the pandemic limits on movement and interaction with other offer a space to explore more subtle energies. Studies look at how connection is enhanced, deepened, contained, changed abruptly. Media include drawing, photography and video.Sheila is also working with Faith Arnold, the Community Writing Project and the SEIU (Service Workers International Union) in Chicago to examine members' individual and shared experiences of the past year. sheilalynch.com
Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist, educator and scholar based in Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Canada. Working from a critical white settler perspective her current artistic projects address social-spatial dynamics of settler colonial contexts and consider the ethics of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty. Decter has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India, and Australia, where she was a Visiting Research Fellow at University of New South Wales’ National Institute for Experimental Arts in 2017. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, Canadian Theatre Review, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and Fuse Magazine’s Decolonial Aesthetics Issue. Decter holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. From 2019-2020 she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University's Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and she currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies in the Media Arts Division at NSCAD University. leahdecter.com
Aurora Del Rio is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She incorporates painting, performance, writing and sound into her practice. She holds a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, and an MFA degree in Art Practice from Transart Institute Berlin/New York. Her artistic research investigates the idea of limit, explored through the impossible compresence of opposite movements. Her recent work on Rituals challenges established ritualistic forms, within the freedom of mistranslation.
Linda Duvall (she/her) is a visual artist based on Treaty 6 land near Saskatoon, Canada. Her hybrid practice addresses themes of connection to place, grief and loss, and the many meanings of exclusion and absence. Her work speaks to the nature of interpersonal relationships, particularly as they are enacted through conversation. Her usual artistic tools are photography, video, writing, and performative responses to situations.
Duvall has completed degrees in Sociology and English (Carleton University) and Visual Arts (OCAD University, University of Michigan, Transart Institute), and is currently a Professional Affiliate at University of Saskatchewan. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Guatemala, Ireland, Barcelona, Shanghai, Slovenia, London, Dubai and various kinds of places and spaces across Canada.
JoMichelle Piper / I approach drawing as a form of meditation on light, breath and air; a calm approach in the face of complex urgency.
I approach walking as a form of meditation, imprinting the landscape to memory that fall like shadows onto drawn spaces back at the studio.
This was a foreign time when we were free to walk on distant landscapes. The revolution is never quiet but the whispered solution will be almost silent.
Anne Sophie Lorange / Born in Boston, MA in 1977. Anne Sophie (MFA Transart) grew up in the U.S and moved to Scandinavia as a teenager. With a bilingual background, she explores different states of interpretation, in-betweeness, and identity through her paintings, drawings and outdoor installations.
The painting and drawing act is to see and be seen, and seeing has the aim of letting us explore what is in-visible to the eye; a language from within, and a human need to meet one another through space. Her work develops through a sudden balance between automatic and construed gestures, like a balance between everything and nothing, an inner necessity to a directness of space giving a sense of belonging. Along the stony coastal area of South Norway, her intimate dialogs appear, and meaning can exist, a simple marking is meaningful. The charcoal lines become visual fragments, drawing a poem of being here. Like a way of grasping the world, both visible and invisible, a deep connection to nature exists with all its complexities and endless potential; a living presence within it; breathing.
Stephanie Reid has been a photographer, short film maker, and montage artist for three decades. She added animation and video effects to her practice in the late 1990's. She regularly exhibits her work throughout the United States and Europe in group and solo shows. After moving to the green city of Austin, Texas early in her career, the focus of her work shifted to the great outdoors. Through art, she meditates on humanity's psychological connection to various aspects of nature. In 2016 she completed an MFA in Creative Practice, with a concentration in digital arts, through the Transart Institute. Her final thesis research and studio project illustrated the symbiotic relationship between geography and culture. Her work can be seen at haikuflash.com
Just before the Covid-19 pandemic, she started a not-for-profit arts organization, Diorama Room, LLC. They are currently offering an online micro shorts film series called, "Tune in to Green". A new compilation, featuring works by video makers and nature enthusiasts around the world, will be offered quarterly. The first exhibition is available through February 19, 2021 at Vimeo.