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  • Emmeline De Mooij

    Emmeline de Mooij was born in Delft, The Netherlands, in 1978 but today lives and works between Amsterdam and New York. Her work consists of a mixture of performance, photography and installations and deals with evolutionary biology, humanity in relation to nature and the often ambivalent frontier between freedom and chaos. She has studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) and is currently completing her MFA at Bard College. She has had solo exhibitions at Villa Nouailles (Hyeres, France), Steinsland/Berliner (Stockholm), Salone del Mobile (Milan), Tsumori Chisato (Paris), Daegu Photo Biennale (Korea), Capricious Space (New York), and Motive (Amsterdam). de Mooij has participated in group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Museum Nacht Rotterdam, Robert Berman (Los Angeles), Art Cologne (Germany), and YK3 (Melbourne), among others. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Museum Paper, Purple Magazine, Dazed and Confused, GLU magazine, Dagens Nyheter, YKKY, and Volkskrant.

  • Michael Dumontier

    Michael Dumontier co-founded The Royal Art Lodge collective in 1996 and continued as one of the three remaining members with Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber from 2003 until they officially concluded the RAL in 2008. He continues to work with Farber, meeting every Wednesday to collaborate on paintings and drawings. In 2011, Drawn and Quarterly published their book Constructive Abandonment. He has collaborated with numerous other artists, including Tom Elliott, Todd Martin, and Micah Lexier, as well as being a part of Paul Butler and Guy Maddin s Keyhole Experiment. Throughout, Dumontier has continued to work independently and has presented solo exhibitions in New York, Boston, and Padua, Italy. He recently had a major solo exhibition at the Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art in Winnipeg. The Royal Art Lodge has had solo exhibitions in New York (The Drawing Center), Toronto (Power Plant), Los Angeles (MOCA), Dublin, Madrid, Brussels, Burgos, London, and produced a major commission for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial. Dumontier s work is held in international private and public collections, including The National Gallery of Canada, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Folkwang Museum, FRAC Picardie, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, and Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos.

  • Andrea Heller

    Andrea Heller was born in Zurich in 1975. She trained as a graphic designer, then spent a brief period in self-employment before going on to study at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) of Hamburg and at the Zurich University of the Arts. She graduated in 2003. Between 2004 and 2006 she was awarded a studio scholarship from the BINZ39 Foundation, a work grant from the Canton of Zurich and a scholarship from the City of Zurich to work in a studio in the Cité des Arts in Paris. Her artwork encompasses various media; as well as painting and drawing, she works in silhouettes, collage, photography and sculpture. Her pieces are included in a number of public and private collections, and have been featured in various solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, such as the “aller/retour II – Carte Blanche à Fischli/Weiss” exhibition at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris.

  • Mina Totino

    Mina Totino lives and works in Vancouver. In 1982 she received a diploma in art from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Oboro Gallery, Montreal; Diaz Contemporary, Toronto; Galerie Likofabrik, Berlin; and the Latvian Center of Contemporary Art, Riga.

  • Until We Have A Helicopter

    Until We Have A Helicopter is the collaborative entity of Vancouver−based artists Wes Cameron and Matthew Robertson. Working together since 2005 they have developed a practice that includes large−scale sculptural production, curatorial projects, gallery direction and functional-object making. Invoking themes of sport, leisure, travel and adventure to humanize a conceptual approach, UWHAH perpetuate the overlap of life and art with a serious and critical wit.

  • Sheryda Warrener

    Sheryda Warrener is a poet and award-winning teacher. She is the author of the poetry collections Hard Feelings (Invisible, 2010), Floating Is Everything (Nightwood, 2015), and Test Piece, forthcoming from Coach House Books this fall. You can read her work in literary journals online and in print in the Believer, Puritan, The Malahat Review, and others, and in the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018, and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. She lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations, where she is a lecturer in poetry and interdisciplinary forms in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

  • Daniel G. Wong

    Daniel G. Wong is a Canadian artist and a wanderer. He publishes his adventures through a variety of interdisciplinary forms including print editions, websites, and recordings. His publications have been exhibited around North America and internationally in places such as Japan and Iceland.

  • Kim Nguyen

    A curator and writer based in San Francisco, where she is Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute. Nguyen was formerly Director/Curator of Artspeak from 2011-2016. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues and periodicals nationally and internationally, with recent texts in catalogues published by Pied-à-Terre (San Francisco), Gluck 50/Mousse (Milan), and the Herning Museum of Art (Denmark). Nguyen is the recipient of the 2015 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Emerging Curators in Contemporary Canadian Art and the 2016 Joan Lowndes Award from the Canada Council for the Arts for excellence in critical and curatorial writing.

Exhibitions

As Far As I Can See

EMMELINE DE MOOIJ, MICHAEL DUMONTIER, ANDREA HELLER, MINA TOTINO, UNTIL WE HAVE A HELICOPTER, DANIEL G. WONG
November 17–January 12, 2013

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Artspeak - As Far As I Can See

Bringing together six international and Canadian artists, As Far as I Can See contemplates a theme of running away from home. The exhibition investigates the metaphorical space of running away—the lost, explorers and wanderers, and meandering thoughts and dreams—and the physical act of escape—traversing other worlds, ghostly creatures, the dark forest, and the unknown. The exhibition presents both a voyage provoked by the imagination and the beacon that brings us home.

Among the works included is Cloud Studies by Mina Totino (Vancouver), an ongoing series of Polaroid photographs of clouds taken since 1997. Marked with a date, time and occasional anecdotes, the Polaroids reference both the idle pursuit of cloud watching and the transcendent nature of the sky. As a sobering counterpart to Totino’s clouds, Michael Dumontier (Winnipeg) presents a series of foil-stamped books in which the sky is grounded by uniformity and repetition. While no photograph is alike in Cloud Studies, Dumontier presents a scenario in which the intangible sky suddenly feels defined and decisive.

In her 2011 work Hello Trouble, Emmeline de Mooij (Amsterdam) subtly points to the dark and foreboding aspect of fleeing. Composed of plastic, burlap, mud and fabric, the work insinuates a welcoming of the ominous, underlining the possibility that despite the potential for danger, running away breaks us from the confines of the ordinary. The desire to explore the uncharted extends to Daniel G. Wong’s (Lethbridge) work, Are You Wild Are You Free (2012). Wong’s practice is an exploration of wonder, mystery, and poetry in everyday living. He embarks on adventures to immediate and faraway surroundings, wandering to encounter the mundane and remarkable. Wong produces meditations on his findings, questions, and discoveries in the form of zines, posters, and blogs, and his work in this exhibition is generated from recent excursions in Iceland.

Inspired by the memories of her childhood, Andrea Heller (Paris/Zurich) creates a sombre universe populated by creatures and shadows. The playful aura in her work is juxtaposed with suggestions of gloom and abyss. Heller’s work examines the forest as hiding place, incorporating elements of mischief, cheerfulness, and humour. This excursion to the edge of the woods is met with Beacon For The Moonshined Wanderer (2009) by Vancouver-based collective Until We Have A Helicopter, a work comprised of a collection of antique lanterns suspended by rope. The work hangs from the window of the gallery, acting as the destination and departure point for those that stray and the ones that return.

Postscript 49: Sheryda Warrener on As Far As I Can See (PDF)

Talks & Events

  • Artist Talk

    MINA TOTINO
    December 1, 2012

    Artist Mina Totino will discuss her work in the exhibition As Far As I Can See at Artspeak.