The Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) and York University present Streams~ Nuit Blanche 2022 at York University, an evening of campuswide exhibitions, art installations, and events featuring 34 artists and showcasing 18 projects located around the central core of York’s Keele Campus and surrounding the Harry Arthur Commons. Each artwork and program is conceived as a distinctive whole, but the title Streams~ identifies their shared commonalities in theme, process, and research methodology.

As part of the broader Streams~ event, and in collaboration with the Archives of Ontario and the AGYU, Archive/Counter-Archive is organizing six media art installations across the Keele campus. Five of these will be united under the exhibition title, Biophilia: Artist and Archive, with the sixth being tied to the launch of CineMobilia, a new mobile infrastructure dedicated to digitizing archival moving image material.  See below for Janine Marchessault’s curatorial statement and details on each of the individual projects. If you have any questions, please reach out to our Knowledge Mobilization Officer, Andrew Bailey, at kmo@counterarchive.ca.

Curatorial Statement
Biophilia: Artist and Archive references a love of living things. At the heart of the exhibition are more than human animals and our entanglements with them. The five artworks commissioned for Biophilia: Artist and Archive offer an extended conversation with the Archives of Ontario's exhibit Animalia which engages with a history of animals in the archives documented through photographs and films. Biophilia seeks to reimagine archival interfaces -- interactive screens (Public Visualization Studio), CRT sculptures (Logue), architectural projections (Dysart), water and AR (Norton), and a planetarium (Chong). The artists reflect upon the place of animals in Indigenous cultures, their hidden histories beneath the earth, the AI fabulation of bestiaries, and ancient knowledge systems transformed by climate change.

CineMobilia -- mobile archiving and presentation bus will be launched at Nuit Blanche with a micro-cinema set up across from the Archives of Ontario. Screening throughout the evening will feature archival films from the Archives of Ontario, documentaries as well as artists’ experiments and performances with archival film projections.

Curator
Janine Marchessault

Producer:
Asad Raza

Artists:
Chris Chong Chan Fui, CineMobilia, Jennifer Dysart, Deirdre Logue, Jenn E Norton, Public Visualization Studio

Sponsors:
Biophilia: Artist and Archive is funded through the City of Toronto, Nuit Blanche, Archive/Counter-Archive’s Partnership Grant, the Canadian Film Institute, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

Featured Image Credit: Chris Chong Chan Fui, Nocturnal Zodiac, 2022, AV installation, image courtesy of the artist.
 

Fabulous Ones - Public Visualization Studio

Project Title: Fabulous Ones
Artists: Public Visualization Studio (Patricio Dávila, Dave Colangelo, Immony Men) with Nehal El-Hadi, Karina Iskandarsjah, and Patricia Pasten
Location: Wooded area across from the Archives of Ontario

Project Description: Fabulous Ones presents creatures inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ writing conjured by Public Visualization Studio and collaborators (Nehal El-Hadi, Karina Iskandarsjah, and Patricia Pasten). Three-dimensional digital masks of these creatures look back at viewers, interacting with them through motion-sensing cameras and AI-generated animations. Through processes of social and technical translation, this project aims to combine, dramatize, and question concepts of description, classification, imagination, speculation, and diaspora.

Programmed by Archive/Counter-Archive with Nuit Blanche; curated by Janine Marchessault & Dr. Julie Nagam. Fabulous Ones is featured as a part of Streams~ Nuit Blanche 2022, which is being organized by the Art Gallery of York University.

About Public Visualization Studio: PVS is a design collective whose members are designers, artists, creative technologists and researchers. The collective creates projects as a means to pursue inquiries into the political and conceptual aspects of interaction, space, and media. Its members attempt to investigate how specific technologies of vision, communication and gesture support our experiences in participatory spaces. Members of the collective have exhibited nationally and internationally, and have worked in a variety of areas including public projection, media architecture, locative media, video installation, exhibition design, interaction, communication design, and media scholarship. PVS works in collaboration with the Public Visualization Lab, a university-based lab in Toronto.

Tributaries - Jenn E Norton

Project Title: Tributaries
Artists: Jenn E Norton
Location: Reflecting Pool on The Harry Arthurs Commons

Project Description: Tributaries uses multimedia projection and augmented reality content of native and invasive species to mark and draw attention to the freshwater habitats of the York University campus area. These tributaries were buried or rechanneled as a result of urban development. The animated projection and superimposed AR component show the biodiversity of the surrounding area to create an ethereal intermingling of native and invasive species.

Programmed by Archive/Counter-Archive with Nuit Blanche; curated by Janine Marchessault & Dr. Julie Nagam. Tributaries is featured as a part of Streams~ Nuit Blanche 2022, which is being organized by the Art Gallery of York University. 

Artist Bio: Jenn E Norton is an artist using time-based media to create immersive, experiential installations that reframe familiar objects, landscapes, and activities as fantastical, dreamlike occurrences. Using stereoscopic, interactive video, animation, augmented reality, sound, and kinetic sculpture, Norton’s installation work explores the blurring boundaries of virtual and physical realms. Often using video as a starting point within her process, Norton’s imaginative video compositions of disjunctive imagery are bound together in post-production, using a combination of pre-cinema and contemporary display technologies.

Nocturnal Zodiac - Chris Chong Chan Fui

Project Title: Nocturnal Zodiac
Artists: Chris Chong Chan Fui
Location: Vari Hall Rotunda 

Project Description: Chris Chong Chan Fui is known for his experimental film-based artworks, which take into question the objectivity of fact and the possibility of defining reality. Nocturnal Zodiac re-configures traditional Eastern and Western astrologies into a new cyclical archive of modern human characteristics and future-telling that drive our fate on this planet. A star map will be projected and mapped onto the entire rotunda of Vari Hall.

Programmed by Archive/Counter-Archive with Nuit Blanche; curated by Janine Marchessault & Dr. Julie Nagam. Nocturnal Zodiac is featured at Streams~ Nuit Blanche 2022 organized by the Art Gallery of York University.

Artist Bio: Chris Chong Chan Fui works with varying materials in an installation format that interconnects fields such as architecture, science, sports, economics, and the moving image. Chong has exhibited his works at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Palais de Tokyo, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, and the 2018 Gwanju Biennale. Chong has also premiered at the Cannes' Directors’ Fortnight, Vienna, BFI London, and Toronto's Wavelengths. Works within public collections include the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden.Chong is a Smithsonian Institute fellow (National Museum of Natural History), a Ford Foundation fellow, and most recently, he was awarded the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Arts Fellowship, Italy.

Revisiting Keewatin - Jennifer Dysart

Project Title: Revisiting Keewatin
Artists: Jennifer Dysart
Location: The Archives of Ontario (Exterior)

Project Description: A multi-screen projection installation on the window surfaces of Archives of Ontario, Revisiting Keewatin is a film found at Library and Archives Canada by Jennifer Dysart. The film documents the Keewatin Missions in Northern Manitoba showing Catholic Missionary Activity with the Cree community in the 1950s. Focused specifically on the animals visible in this archival footage, the work sifts through the Indigenous relationships with animals.

Programmed by Archive/Counter-Archive with Nuit Blanche; curated by Janine Marchessault. Revisiting Keewatin is featured as a part of Streams~ Nuit Blanche 2022, which is being organized by the Art Gallery of York University.

Artist Bio: Jennifer Dysart is a director of short films, a set decorator (Nabet 700-M Unifor permittee status coming soon), an assistant director, a field producer, an archival researcher, legal clearance coordinator, production coordinator, and occasional arts jury member. She is the recipient of the York University master’s thesis prize in 2014 for her documentary film Kewekapawetan: Return After the Flood.

The Opposite of Ignoring Chickens - Deirdre Logue

Project Title: The Opposite of Ignoring Chickens
Artists: Deirdre Logue
Location: The Archives of Ontario (Lobby)

Project Description: The Opposite of Ignoring Chickens documents the artist tending to and interacting with her 7 chickens. The fascinating symmetry between the artist and her chickens reveals a relational codependence that collapses the sensual and the intuitive, wildness and domestication. The project’s sculptural and installation components incorporate multiple 4:3 ratio, CRT monitors dating back to the 1980s, and the sounds of the birds and the artist in ‘dialogue,’ remixed to create a polyphonic soundtrack.
 
Programmed by Archive/Counter-Archive with Nuit Blanche; curated by Janine Marchessault. The Opposite of Ignoring Chickens is featured as a part of Streams~ Nuit Blanche 2022, which is being organized by the Art Gallery of York University.  

Artist Bio: Deirdre Logue’s works are most directly influenced by early performance art and video, when time was real and unedited. Thriving on the results of a gesture and the ‘happy’ accidents of life, her deeply personal works are often characterized by their unpredictability, honesty and humour. In a deliberate reversal of traditional understandings of the subject, Logue’s works resist a ‘master narrative’ in favour of a self-presentational discourse, as it is different from conventional autobiography. Minimal in nature, Logue has performed for the camera now countless times and has finished over 60+ individual installations and media art works. Logue’s practice also includes large, site specific sculpture, performance and visual art works in collaboration with Allyson Mitchell. Together they have produced many works most notably, Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House (Toronto, London (UK), Los Angeles and Philadelphia) and together, Logue and Mitchell ran the F.A.G Feminist Art Gallery (Toronto, 2010-2020). Logue has been part of the Independent Imaging Collective, also known as the Film Farm, since 1999, and currently works at Vtape in Toronto. 

CineMobilia Launch and Screening Programme

Project Title: CineMobilia
Artists: CineMobilia (Janine Marchessault, John Greyson, Patricio Davila, and Jean-Pierre Marchant) 
Location: York Boulevard parking lot (across from the Archives of Ontario).

Project Description: As part of the 2022 Nuit Blanche festival, CineMobilia is being launched by Archive/Counter-Archive with an all-night, outdoor micro-cinema installation and screening programme. The micro-cinema space will be located across the street from the Archives of Ontario on York University's Keele campus. The screening programme will start at 7 pm, run throughout the rest of the evening, and involve many drop-in talks by artists. Happening alongside the screening program will also be an ongoing hands-on phytogram workshop with music and animation throughout the evening.

About CineMobilia: Taking its name from the multitude of historical media literacy projects that sought to bring film and media to underserved communities - “cines móviles” of Cuba, cinema trains in Russia, and “Cinema Mobile” projects by the Canadian Film Board, CineMobilia (project members include Janine Marchessault, John Greyson, Patricio Davila, and Jean-Pierre Marchant) is a mobile infrastructure lab tailored to the unique archival and presentation needs of marginalized communities in Canada. The CineMobilia project is a flexible, responsive infrastructure tailored to the unique archival needs of Canadian marginalized communities, specifically collections with limited staff, those with difficulty making their collections represented and discoverable, and/or collections that represent an underserved/underrepresented community (Indigenous and Black communities, women, the LGTB2Q+ community, and immigrant communities). The hope is to attract members of York University and surrounding communities to bring their analogue or born digital archives to be preserved.

The 2022 Nuit Blanche Cinemobilia Inaugural Screening Program

Ongoing: A hands-on phytogram workshop with accompanying music and animation that will be led by Ranvir Singh Sanwal.

12 Hour film screening programme by JP Marchant and Janine Marchessault

7:00 – 8:00 PM: Archives of Ontario screening of films from their Prieto-McTair collection.

8:00 – 9:00 PM: Mr. Winston LaRose, Ngardy Conteh George (director, producer), and Alison Duke (producer) present Mr. Jane and Finch, 45m (2019).

9:00 – 10:00 PM: Odeimin Runners Club, with films by Debbie Ebanks Schlums, Rebeka Tabobondung, and Adrian Kahgee; Saugeen Takes On Film program, with films by Tiffany Kewageshig, Cassidey Ritchie, Sharon Isaac, Kelsey Diamond, and Natalka Pucan.

10:00 PM – 11:00 PM: Works in Progress from the 2022 Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm). 

11:00 PM– 12:00 AM:  Film Farm and Flower Films by John Greyson, Deirdre Logue, Scott Miller Berry, Rob Butterworth, Phil Hoffman and Alex Granger.

12:00 AM - 01:30 AM: Personal Archive Films by Artists (Smoker’s Cinema) including Christina Dovolis, Cleo Sallis-Parchet, Franci Duran, Jennifer Dysart, Nada El-Omari, Samuel Kiehoon Lee, Xin Liu, Jean-Pierre Marchant, Ajla Odobasic, Tamara Segura, Ranvir Singh Sanwal, and Jamie Whitecrow!