Research residency with Zoja Smutny and Guntar Kravis
June 15 – 29, 2013

Looking at the relationship between liveness and images is an ongoing interest at Gallery TPW. Following this trajectory of thought and presentation,TPW R&D is pleased to host a two week residency with choreographer Zoja Smutny and photographer Guntar Kravis. Their recent collaborative research takes form in a developing body of durational performance video portraits. Performers are asked to sit for fifteen minutes fixing their gaze on the lens of a camera. The research asks what this gaze embodies and performs both within its moment of recording and then within the encounter by an audience. The videos are juxtaposed with related experiments in the live moment, considering the affective impact of proximity and duration in performance. Alongside regular public studio hours in the TPW R&D project space, there will be a live public event each Saturday night of the residency.

Schedule of Activity

Open studio hours
June 15 – 29, 2013, Tuesdays – Saturdays, 2:00 – 5:00 pm

Performances
Saturday, June 15 and June 22, 2013, 8:30 – 9:30 pm
A duet considering ways of looking within both live and recoded moments.

Choreographed Conversation
Saturday, June 29, 2013, 8:30 – 10:30 pm
With Anthony Burnham, Ame Henderson, Guntar Kravis, Therese Mastroiacovo, Zoja Smutny

Participant Bios:
Thérèse Mastroiacovo is a Montreal based multi-disciplinary artist. Her work is about art itself as an idea, artistic process itself as methodology. She interacts with the precarious relationship art has to its own definition – open, half open, or slightly open for re-classification at any given time. Her work is situated here, in a space of potential created in the middle of existing structures. Recent exhibitions include projects for the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, White Box Gallery (Portland), Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery (Montréal), and Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne).

Anthony Burnham is a Montreal based artist. His conceptual painting practice weaves personal, art historical and formal narratives to explore the many contexts in which painting can be seen and understood. Over the past years he has exhibited his work in Canada, Spain, Austria, and France. He is represented by Gallery René Blouin where in 2012 he presented “Even Space Does Not Repeat” a solo show negotiating gestures of framing.

Ame Henderson lives in Toronto where she is the Artistic Director of Public Recordings, an atelier for choreographic experimentation. Committed to collaborative working structures both aesthetically and politically, she maintains ongoing collaborations with artists from across disciplines and continents. Recent research focuses on the political implications of the synchronous gesture and its potential as a collaboratively authored improvisatory practice of togetherness. Public Recordings recently presented “what we are saying” as part of Harbourfront’s World Stage (Toronto) and Festival Transmériques (Montreal).

Special thanks to: Elinor Fueter, Anna Smutny, Jody Hegel, Anthony Burnham, Ame Henderson, Frank Cox-O’Conell, Patrick Lamothe, Claudia Fancello, Peter Knegt, Benjamin Kamino, Pieter Ampe, Gui Garrido, Victoria Cheong Sheena McGrandles, Ana Trincao