Joshua Bonnetta, Parting, 2009.
Acrylic and oil on Mylar.
16mm to digital video. 10 min loop.
Image courtesy of Artist.

Beginning with a fragment of found footage Parting employs roto-scoping and hand drawn cells to model an imaginary cycle of images. An original process combining painted cell animation with direct animation creates a succession of images which foreground the poly-rhythmic and contrasting temporal features inherent in the analog. Micro passages of sound 'peeled' from 78-rpm records processed via radio transmitters and custom software create a whispered sonic counterpoint accentuating both the shifting surface and spatial depth of the frame.

Joshua Bonnetta uses digital and analog media to create animation and sound based works in an attempt to coax latent and imaginary narratives out of the archive. His work primarily focuses on the intersection of sound and moving image and is concerned with how the spatial and textural elements of sound construct representation. He has exhibited in Russia, South America, U.K., Canada, U.S., Korea and throughout Europe. He currently resides in Montreal where he is creating a series of double system animations using lathe cut records. He is an MFA candidate in studio arts at Concordia University and a member of the collective AKVK.

Warren Brown & Adam Goddard, Big Box (2009)
Image courtesy of artist.

Big Box explores the relationship between screen based media and the viewer by introducing a series of characters who become the screen and in turn become part of the viewer's physical space.

Warren Brown is a director, designer and animator. By combining his background in anthropology, interpretive illustration and interactive art, Brown has found himself with opportunities to create work that has been seen in galleries, on network television, in feature films and on the world wide web.
warrenbrown.ca

Adam Goddard is a musician, composer and producer. From international art commissions to feature music production, Goddard's work has received accolades for innovation in music and audio design including the Prix Italia, the world's most coveted award for audio art.
adamgoddard.com

Brad Harley, Of Fish and Foul

A cycle of health and wealth to resigned decline.

A short cyclical flash generated animation that is alternatively happy/hopeful and bright/bleak or if viewed backwards the meaning is reversed and the opposite becomes the truth...

Brad Harley is an artist, designer and theatre craftsman who graduated from the York University, Fine Arts program. Inspired by Welfare State's Tempest on Snake Island, he was involved with a group of Toronto Island artists who presented Shadowland Theatre's first major community production, Island Follies. He has worked extensively as a theatre designer with VideoCabaret, Peter Minshall's Callaloo productions in Trinidad, Horse and Bambo (UK), Bread and Puppet Theater (US) and is Shadowland's chief designer. Brad teaches design and visual theatre crafts in his extensive experience working with community groups. Brad is the recipient of three Dora Mavor Moore awards for costume design.

This three minute video is an image of a women's handkerchief on a black ground. Crumpled and stained with lipstick, smudged with mascara, suggestive of a woman's grieving process. The image is floating, spinning slowly and quivering as if by some unseen hand in a significant moment of loss.

I have been photographing objects for over eight years now ... All these objects allude to the female body and in some ways stand in as representations. The animation of some of these objects will underline the assumed reading, linking the objects and their use more closely to the body ...

April Hickox is a photo based artist, teacher and independent curator who has been practicing for over 30 years. Often taking the form of a narrative her photography, film and installation work is based on ideas of the passage from one experience, to another in the life process encompassing history, memory, our sense of place, and communication or voice. April's work has been exhibited widely, and is represented at the Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto.

Patrick Jenkins, Labyrinth, 2008.
Paint on glass animation, 35mm movie on dvd, 8.5 mins, colour, sound.
Image courtesy of Artist.

After being given an enigmatic locket to protect, a detective encounters strange phenomena and beings from the afterlife in this surrealistic film noir story.

Patrick Jenkins is an artist, animator and documentary filmmaker. His latest film Labyrinth (2008) is a surreal detective story done using the paint on glass animation technique. It has been shown at festivals around the world. His recent documentaries, Of Lines And Men: The Animation Of Jonathan Amitay and Death Is In Trouble Now: The Sculptures Of Mark Adair premiered on BRAVO! Television in October 2007. His film The Skateboarder premiered at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival and was shown at the 2005 Ottawa International Animation Festival and the prestigious 2006 Annecy Animation Festival in Annecy, France. His stop motion animated film Man Versus Geometry premiered at the 2004 Ottawa International Animation Festival and was also shown at the 2005 Annecy Animation Festival in Annecy, France. His documentary film RALPH: Coffee, Jazz and Poetry; The Poetry of Ralph Alfonso premiered at the 2001 Montreal World Film Festival and was broadcast on CBC Television's Canadian Reflections and BRAVO! Television.

Patrick Jenkins Art and Animation

Tanya Read, Stasis (2009)
super 8 animation/digital video installation, 10 min looped.
Image courtesy of artist.

In Mr. Nobody's latest film we find our hero trapped in an alternate reality. He struggles to breach the boundary between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional world.

Mr. Nobody is a black and white anthropomorphic cartoon animal of questionable pedigree. The inspiration for this character comes from the Depression era cartoons of Max Fleischer (Betty Boop, etc.) and George Harriman (Krazy Kat). The drawing style of Mr. Nobody is a reference to the cast of characters that often appeared in animations of this era. Mr. Nobody is an attempt to embody the ambiguous and surreal quality of those cartoons. He is a Buster Keaton, a Charlie Chaplin, an average 'Joe' of our times, somewhat perplexed by the state of affairs in the world today.

Tanya Read graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1995 and since then she has been active in the Toronto art community. She created a character called Mr. Nobody in 1998 and since then her art practice has focused on projects featuring this character. Read has made super 8 animations, drawings, sculpture, silk screened t-shirts and video all featuring Mr. Nobody. Her work has received extensive critical acclaim including articles in The Globe and Mail, National Post, Canadian Art Magazine, Calgary Herald and Korea Times. She has exhibited work in Toronto, Calgary, Hamilton, Seoul, Korea and Japan. Tanya looks forward to working with Mr. Nobody for many years to come.

Chantal Rousseau, And now let us weep for the lovely lovely ladies of CSI: Owl, 2009.
Still from looping animation, 40 s.

An unexpected relationship is formed between a prone woman and an owl.

Chantal Rousseau's practice includes animation, drawing, video and painting. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Donkey Skin, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston, Ontario (2008); Jolly Rogers, Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario (2008); and Expo Hah!, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario (2009). Rousseau currently resides in Kingston, Ontario.

Thanks to

Seth Scriver, BACKWARDS TIMES, 2009,
3 minute looping animation,
Image courtesy of artist.

3 minute looping animation accompanied by some free jazz saxaphoning played by Brodie West.

Seth Scriver, born and raised in Toronto has shown widely nationally and internationally. For his most recent show — The Hose Heads get Unhosed — he made a full size canoe out of one big piece of layered poster peeled from an advertisement hoarding, in the same fashion as a birch bark canoe. Also included in this show was the ongoing project of animating stories that his brother and father have told him about their experiences in the bush.

With collaborator Shayne Ehman, Scriver has been working on a double feature animation Asphalt Watches, an epic cross-Canada true hitchhiking story, which has taken him to multiple residencies from Japan to Sackville N.B.

Currently Seth resides at his head quarters Hassle Kastle in Toronto Ontario. Seth Scriver's STOOGE PILE will be an 80 page compilation of new and old work.

Intrinsic to my work are the details and scenes, the fragilities and brutalities of contemporary human existence, both actual and fictitious. I combine a documentary approach, with staging and construction, drawing on my own and others experiences and thoughts to create accounts of the real world, and self-contained fictions. I often incorporate found occurrences taken from newspaper articles, stories, conversations or everyday life. I gather these small pellets of information in an attempt to create work that emotionally engages the viewer, making a comment, informing or questioning our lives in some way.

Penny Klepuszewska, Untitled,
from the series Living Arrangements, 2006.
Image courtesy of Artist.

My most recent work Living Arrangements visually investigated how the changing patterns in contemporary family life have created an expanding number of elderly people living alone, often with deteriorating health and no family support to hand. A recent report has suggested that one in ten elderly people living alone do not see a single person on an average day. For many elderly people their only daily human contact, if any, may be the person who is sent to get them up in the morning, prepare their food and put them to bed at night. Being cared for at home rather than in hospital or residential care when we become old and frail is apparently what most of us want. In line with Government policy over the last decade, elderly people who get state-funded homecare are those with relatively high levels of need and it's both means-tested and rationed according to strict ‘eligibility’ criteria. Increasingly, the elderly are left on their own.

Living Arrangements won Penny Klepuszewska the BJP Endframe Award in 2006, the LCC Sproxton Award in 2006, the Pilsner Urquell UK Photographer of the Year Deeper Perspective Award in 2007. For Living Arrangements she was one of five international nominees for a Lucie Award in 2007, runner-up for the Baume & Mercier Photography Award in 2007, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2007, shown in the Tate Britain exhibition How we are: Photographing Britain co-curated by Val Williams & Susan Bright in 2007, shown in 2007 at Rencontres Internationale de la Photographie Le Off in Arles, PhotoEspana DESCUBRIMIENTOS International Festival of Photography & Visual Arts in Madrid and the 4th International Festival of Photography in Kaunas.

Klepuszewska was recently awarded a National Media Museum Photography Bursary for Living Arrangements. It will also be exhibited as part of Artfutures 2008 at the Bloomberg Space in London from 6 - 12 March 2009.

The new sections of work created for I wouldn’t like to live in the open air but sometimes I would are less specific than Living Arrangements but have grown from and are entwined within the ideas and original concept of the first series. These new sections of work were recently exhibited at ZOO Art Fair at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

“A body ... so old and so new, new second hand ... a strange, composed, chimerical body, evacuated and grafted ... with genisises one hundred times generated ...”
— Thank You Helene Cixous

Who are we — creature riffs? For instance, our very DNA has been gathered and spliced from creatures far and wide. Or, look within each cell, organelles which were once tiny loners now cooperate and bring us life. Further, our very organs, each and every one, are universes where tiny creatures nourish us, heal us, maintain us, bring us health and sometimes misery. Again, think of our origins long ago when we first gathered words from the songs of wild birds. Then also, our dances followed creatures' lead — for instance, hare's leap, or duck's sudden flight. Consider how psyche and imagination took embodiment aeons ago through awesome creatures roaming mind's eye. Some centuries later, we first took hand to writing after deciphering reticulations adorning tortoises' shells. On and on, we could gather ourselves from creatures and thus discover how we've come to be.

So, here we are secondhand, yet ever new, a gathering/becoming we never quite recognize or admit. We claim ascent over all others, relegating them to eclipse and silence. Our/their exile we call 'human' — above all else, insisting that it surely must be a condition uniquely worthy. Yet, despite us, our others patiently wait and beckon...

"— here we are and always well be — join our chimera, hear our questions, play out/your songs. Begin riffing ..."

Alfonso Volo (Eden, New York) is a painter, sculptor, and video artist who creates interconnected bodies of artworks that question our ambiguous relationship with the world at large and its many inhabitants (both seen and unseen). Using found objects, such as decorative knick-knacks of rabbits and mice he finds at thrift stores and rummage sales that he then minimally modifies, Volo engages the viewer to ponder how man, beast, and science interconnect in the most precarious ways.

North Atlantic Ocean

India ink on Japanese Paper

"I see my drawings as objects, produced by the thoughtful repetitive actions of my body."

Doug Guildford splits his time between his studios in downtown Toronto and on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. His practice is rooted in drawing, encompasses print making and allows for obsessive crochet projects. Between the Tides, a comprehensive solo exhibition of his work has recently been shown at Saint Mary's University Gallery in Halifax, NS, following showings at Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, ON and the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, ON. He is represented in Toronto by Edward Day Gallery.