The Arbor Lake Sghool is a collective of artists that have created ecological interventions in suburban gardens and developments. The Sghool’s mandate is to provide a stage for the creation and display of artistic or critical projects in a way which explores and engages our suburban setting. Activities under this mandate excite, entertain, and often serve as comic interlude in the not-so-secret game of suburban one-upmanship. A loose association of artists, athletes, musicians, trades-people and students form the core group of project participants. Membership in the group is not determined by any specific criteria other than a desire and willingness to collaborate in a diverse and open-minded atmosphere.
ARBOUR LAKE SGHOOL WEBSITE
Thomas Blanchard is a photo-based artist living in Toronto. His artwork addresses the hidden nature of commodities found within our domestic lives. His most recent projects involve the dichotomy between the psychological comfort of the modern home and the often toxic realities found within those intimate spaces that often go unnoticed. Although the motivation behind his art originates from his interest in the relationship between the political economy and how it affects our health and the environment, he is equally interested in how the aesthetics of art can serve as a portal to an experience beyond conscious thought.
Born in Rochester, N.Y., Thomas holds a Masters in Fine Arts from York University and a BFA from Ryerson University's Image Arts. Before that, he studied political science and geology at New York State University at Potsdam, where he graduated with a BA in 1994.
THOMAS BLANCHARD WEBSITE
Borins and Marmon have been working in large scale installation and sculpture to find surprising patterns and hidden desires in the elements of everyday life. Their brash confrontational approach with the art world and with the elements of everyday life produce new ways of looking at place and design.
Their work addresses tensions that arise in the politicization, historicization and visuality of the artwork. These tensions are presented as a confrontational platform, whereby aesthetic and ideological perceptions are either eroded or re-affirmed. While their work is conceptual by inception, Marman and Borins rely on the physicality of the art object to convey a stance that shifts paradigms of object based art, rather than dematerializing the object. Their work addresses subjects on an aesthetic and conceptual level by positing strategies of visual resistance and paradox, amidst the ambiguity of a globalized political landscape where ideological stances are dissipating.
DANIEL BORINS + JENNIFER MARMAN WEBSITE
Collyer has spent the last thirty years in Willowdale and has been an active participant in issues related to sustainability and development. His photographic and sculptural works have engaged with the history of this place.
Collyer immigrated to Canada from England in 1957. He presented his first solo exhibition at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. His early sculpture shows the influence of Minimalism in its geometric design, abstraction and unadorned materials. By the mid-1980s Collyer had moved further away from his early minimalism to include photography and text on the surface of his sculptures. Constructed from elements and materials that retain some of their association with an established urban context of commerce, construction and mass media, these discrete objects preserve an open-ended narrative and function as contemporary metaphors.
ROBIN COLLYER ARTIST PROFILE
Patricio is a designer, artist and researcher. He has worked on projects that involve graphic design, photography and video, writing and research, curation, information architecture and interactive design.
PATRICIO DAVILA WEBSITE
Christine Davis has long pursued an installation based practice that, while it eschews easy stylist classification, has resulted in a range of highly evocative and influential works. Her slide projection based installations and photo works are intellectually demanding, yet simultaneously resonate on visual, visceral and material levels. Interweaving technologies old and new, the range of her conceptual and material exploration is, following the lead of Michael Snow, unusually innovative: words laser etched onto contact lenses, genetic code sewn into armor and her extraordinary slide dissolves onto material screens that combine analogue optics with digital control.
At its core, her work addresses the conception and representation of the body at key and transformative moments in the history of modernism, from the nineteenth century, through to the current moment. It draws on highly wrought histories of visuality and explores the interconnections of such histories to mechanistic, technological and scientific cultures as well as concepts of the divine.
CHRISTINE DAVIS WEBSITE
Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist, and media studies scholar. Since 1998 Friz has predominantly created self-reflexive sonic art/works for broadcast, installation or performance-- from a childhood fiction of "the little people in the radio" to multi-channel radiophonic installations. She also creates dynamic, atmospheric sound works for theatre, dance, and solo performance that are equally able to reflect upon public media culture or to reveal interior landscapes. Friz has performed and exhibited installation works at festivals and venues across North America, Europe, and in Mexico. Her radio art/works have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Austria, Germany, Danmark, Spain, and Mexico, and heard on independent airwaves in more than 15 countries. Anna Friz is a doctoral candidate and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities. She is a founding member of the L.O.T. Collective, and a free103point9.org transmission artist.
ANNA FRIZ WEBSITE
Richard Fung is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic whose work deals with the intersection of race and queer sexuality, and with issues of post-colonialism, diaspora, and family. His award-winning tapes, which include My Mother's Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Islands (2002), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and broadcast across North America. His essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including his famous "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn," in How Do I Look?, ed. Bad Object-Choices (1991). A former Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University and winner of the Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art, he teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
RICHARD FUNG WORKS
RICHARD FUNG WEBSITE
Michael Graham is a media artist based in Toronto. His recent work has been exhibited at Nuit Blanche and the Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto, the Site Gallery in Sheffield (UK) and the Rencontres Festival in Paris and Madrid. Michael has a BFA in new media from Ryerson University and completed an MA in fine art and studio-based research at Sheffield Hallam University (UK), where he was also an Associate Lecturer in multimedia and communication design. Michael is currently a Rogers Fellow in the Joint PhD Programme in Communication & Culture at York and Ryerson University.
The recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art, John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world. He is active in various anti-censorship, AIDS, peace and queer activist media projects, including The Olive Project, Deep Dish TV, Blah Blah Blah and AIDS Action Now. His contributions as a member and through service on the boards of arts organizations include V/Tape Distribution, Inside Out Film/Video Festival, the Euclid Theatre, Trinity Square Video, Charles St. Video, LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers Toronto) and Beaver Hall Artists Housing Co-op.
JOHN GREYSON WEBSITE
David Han is a film, video & digital media artist living in Toronto. He studied video production at Ryerson University and is currently completing an MFA in film at York University. Often employing playfulness and absurdity, his work negotiates the liminal state between cinema, video art and new media. His most recent work explores the ways in which traditional cinematic relationships with the screen are being challenged, altered and expanded by interactive technology.
DAVID HAN WEBSITE
Born in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, Husain studied film and media art in Offenbach, Germany and Gujarat, India. Today he lives and works in Toronto.
Oliver Husain's films and video works include music videos, 3-D-animations, performance and sometimes incorporate Bollywood dance choreographies. Shot in Germany, India, Indonesia, China and other places these works are playful travelogues of a space that never existed. Through the combination of computer generated sets with photographed film Husain creates an artificial ambience. Fabrics, hats, feathers interrupt smooth surfaces and connect that which happens onscreen with the space of the cinema.
OLIVER HUSAIN WEBSITE
Claire Ironside and Angela Iarocci have been collaborating together for the past five years. Their art and design practice focuses on social, cultural and environmental phenomena and the use of information design for education and advocacy.Their work draws on their diverse professional and academic backgrounds in urban design, landscape architecture, architecture, product and communication design. They are the recipients of numerous grants, awards and commissions and have exhibited in Canada and England.
Since 1999, he has been engaged in sculpture and installation work which explores issues of function, occupation and cultural coding in the domestic and urban realms. His works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, Cologne, Berlin, Seoul and Toronto. Recent exhibitions include Style and Epoch at MKG127 in Toronto, 246 and Counting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture, Hier ist Amerkia oder Nirgends at the Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin and Matter at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 2009 his work will be exhibited in the international Exhibition of Visual Art in Limerick, Ireland and in Future Has Arrived at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
AN TE LIU WEBSITE
Ryan Livingstone is a Toronto based artist who creates playful yet poetic combinations of art and craft. Pattern, repetition and the multiple are significant characteristics embedded in his artwork. His paintings, installations and sculptural work build upon relationships found within the materials and subjects being examined. He continues to be inspired by the romanticized rural landscape and its collapsed architecture, distance and time, and ideologies surrounding domesticity.
RYAN LIVINGSTONE WEBSITE
Shana MacDonald is a doctoral candidate in the Communication and Culture program at York University. She has an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from York University (2005) and a BFA in Film from Ryerson (2001). Her present research entitled “Revolting Bodies: The Performative Cinemas of the American Avant-Garde,” examines the discursive history of feminist experimental film in North America between 1945 and 1975. Her recent publications include contributions to the film journal Senses of Cinema and the forthcoming anthology Rape in Art Cinema (Contiuum 2009) edited by Dominique Russell. Shana is also a Toronto based filmmaker and visual artist. Her films have been screened across Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Her visual art and installation work has appeared at local public art festivals including Toronto’s Alley Jaunt and AluCine Media Festival. She is a member of both the Loop Collective and L.O.T: Experiments in Urban Research.
SHANA MACDONALD WEBSITE
Angela Joosse is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities. She holds an MA in Communication and Culture, BFA in Film Studies from Ryerson, and BA in Philosophy and Fine Art from Calvin College. Angela has contributed to the recent publication, Image and Territory: New Essays on Atom Egoyan (2007), edited by Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell. She is also a Toronto-based film and video artist. Her recent works include Shapes Eat Shapes and 4C, which have received national and international screenings. And her latest film, Film-Landscape-People: and Exquisite Corpse, a hand-processed film made in collaboration with Marcia Connolly, has been included in the official selection of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2009.
ANGELA JOOSSE WEBSITE
Kim Tomczak and Lisa Steele have collaborated in the production of video since 1983. They each have significant solo careers and have played important roles in the development of video in Canada. Their collaborative work as producers and distributors of video has afforded them a unique place in the national and international video milieu. The number of national and international solo and group exhibitions, festivals and curatorial projects the two artists (individually and together) have participated in is staggering. Their work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Städtische Kunstmuseum in Bonn, among many others. It has been documented in over 150 articles and critical essays by senior curators and critics. Born, respectively, in Kansas City, Missouri, and Victoria, B.C., Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak currently live in Toronto.
KIM TOMCZAK + LISA STEELE WEBSITE
Michael Taglieri (b. 1979) is a Toronto photo-based artist; he studied at Concordia University and the Ontario College of Art and Design, from which he received his B.F.A. in photography in 2006. Taglieri’s rich large scale photographs deal with issues of the figure and landscape. Playing off of the dense history of landscape documentation in both paint and photograph, Taglieri grapples with issues oscillating between place and space, and the resulting activation by the human gesture in an environment. Taglieri has been featured in Prefix Magazine.
MICHAEL TAGLIERI WEBSITE
