We are pleased to announce the artists participating in Knot Projections, a new program launched through our Knot Project Space in October 2018. Congratulations to Pansee Atta, Ryan Conrad, Hélène Lefebvre, Maayke Shurer, and Sasha Phipps.
Knot Projections is a commissioning program funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation that seeks to build capacity for regional artists to create experimental moving image works that are intended for a public context. Through the program, the participating artists will each produce individual video commissions that address, utilize and respond to the unique challenges and opportunities that outdoor, public projection creates and offers. The production period for these commissions will begin in October 2018 and conclude in May 2019, with the final works being projected large-scale on an urban surface in Ottawa as part of a group exhibition in Spring/Summer 2019. Over this period, Pansee Atta, Ryan Conrad, Hélène Lefebvre, Maayke Shurer, and Sasha Phipps will work regularly with the program’s Resident Critic, Malini Guha, as well as SAW Video’s Programming Director, Neven Lochhead, who will both provide curatorial and technical support.
Read more about the Knot Projections program and our Video in he Public Sphere speaker series, which runs October 2018 to April 2019.
About the Artists
Pansee Atta is an emerging Egyptian-Canadian artist and scholar whose practice considers themes of colonization, feminism, and Muslim representation, as well as the role of Canadian cultural institutions in legacies of epistemic violence. Her multimedia practice includes new media forms such as GIF animation, 3d-printed and laser cut sculpture, as well as installation, painting, and video work.
Previous exhibitions have taken place at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Z Art Space in Montreal, MSVU Art Gallery and others. As a member of Turbines Curatorial Collective she co-curated UTOPIAS, a 3-day Queer performance art festival in Kingston, Ontario. Previous residencies include the Impressions Residency at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the SparkBox Studio Award, and at the Atelier of Alexandria. Her current research investigates the decolonial role of racialized communities in ethnographic museum representation.
She is now completing a PhD in Cultural Mediations and a diploma program in Curatorial Studies at Carleton University, and continuously collaborating on community-based artistic and curatorial projects.
Ryan Conrad is artist, activist, and scholar based in Ottawa. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the AIDS Activist History Project housed in the Sociology and Anthropology department at Carleton University. He holds a PhD from the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Society and Culture at Concordia University and an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts with a focus on film, video, and performance from the Maine College of Art.
Conrad is the co-founder of Against Equality, a digital archive and publishing collective based in the United States and Canada. He is the editor of the collective’s anthology series that are compiled together in Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion (2014). He has also contributed single-authored and co-authored chapters to several anthologies including: Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (2016), The Gay Agenda (2014), Queering Anarchism (2013), and After Homosexual (2013). His work as a visual, media, and performing artist has exhibited internationally in Europe, Asia, and North America. An archive of all his projects is available online at faggotz.org.
Hélène Lefebvre’s practice is an inquiry into identity and alterity, all the while weaving links between visual art, culture, and society. The body in movement and sensorial active listening (epicentre of performance action) are a sustained interest of hers since Les Moissons in 2009. Recently, the Ottawa-based artist's work has taken the form of performance, installation and video. Her practice in corporeality takes inspiration from studies in visual art, contemporary dance, and authentic movement, a form in which improvisation is central.
Maayke Schurer is engaged in the development of magic realistic moving-image works, which entail real-time experimentation without the use of digital effects or manipulation. As such, her works are handmade, using naturally occurring elements such as light, smoke, water and reflection. Her motivation is two-fold. First, her deep concern for the environment meets a conviction that true change does not occur without an initial shift in individual awareness. Second, she believes in the ability of handmade object communicate a more powerful message about the environment than could be achieved by direct assertions of fact. Hence, while her work is firmly rooted in the here and now, it opens onto scenarios nostalgically constructed from the imagination and can be seen as highly dramatized nature documentaries.
Schurer is a graduate of Queen’s University where she received undergraduate degrees in Fine Art and Biology. She received an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2009. She currently teaches and edits video in Ottawa where she lives with her husband and three daughters
Sasha Phipps is an Ottawa-based French-Canadian artist working in video, installation, painting, and public art interventions. He received a college diploma in 3D animation at La Cité collégiale in spring 2006 and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa in the spring of 2010. He maintains an artistic practice in the City of Ottawa and works as the photography and media arts technician for the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa.