EXECUTIVE director/curator for the Art and Media Lab, Isabel Bader Centre for Preforming Arts 2024-25
The Art + Media Lab, situated at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, is a space for artistic innovation, community engagement, and other forms of creative practice. It is a space for experimentation, creation, process and exploration.The Art & Media Lab can take on many programmatic formats. Artistically and curatorially, it can follow the conventions of a gallery or performance space, used to host exhibitions and events. Experimentally, it can become a workshop for producers and learners who are needing space to chart trajectories for where their work may lead. At the Art + Media Lab, our mandate is to facilitate a unique space at Queen’s University where students, faculty and the public can meet to engage directly with artistic practice and new forms of academic research.
Open Monday – Friday, 10 am – 4 pm
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
390 King Street West, Kingston, ON , Canada
2024
Ribbons: Diana Nadia Lawryshyn, September 1 - 13, 2024
With a painting style described as “tremulous” and “introspective”, Emerging Ukrainian-Canadian artist Diana Nadia Lawryshyn welcomes you to her debut solo exhibition, "Ribbons”. Influenced by raw materials, her arrangements of brushstrokes aim to unveil the subtle interconnectedness of the natural world. The subjects in her paintings are intentionally ambiguous, inviting viewers to embrace a shift in perspective with each interaction, much like the ever-changing dance of ribbons in the wind, where no flutter is quite the same twice.
As a classically trained pianist, Ukrainian folk instrumentalist, and electroacoustic composer, Diana’s approach to brushwork is deeply influenced by the repetitive and resonant quality of musical patterns, soundwaves, and vibrations, leading to works that seem to hum with life. Her Ukrainian-Canadian heritage also informs her work, with cultural elements such as traditional Ukrainian embroidery and attire subtly emerging as she paints.
My Experiments in Hope: Evan Sharma, September 16 - 27, 2024
For this exhibit, called My Experiments in Hope, I’m presenting works from three series. The first is about wildfires, as they are becoming increasingly problematic each summer in Canada (and elsewhere). Next is my 2050 Series, which looks at what famous landscapes will look like in 2050 if we commit to using green resources. It is based on research I did in high school on the enzyme methane monooxygenase (MMO), which reduces methane emissions. For each of the paintings in this series, I mixed MMO directly into the paint. The third and final, called The Last Year, narrates the remaining days of a patient suffering from prion disease. This is a topic I learned about in my microbiology course. The central ethos of the exhibit is based on the intersection of science and art.
The concept for 2050 was born in the lab. During his research, artist and scientist Evan Sharma discovered that the enzyme, monoxygenase (MMO) which reduces methane emissions by up to 70%, was successfully transferable to cattle--who emit methane at a rate ten times the potency of carbon dioxide--thus revealing a promising development in sustainable agriculture. By mixing the enzyme into paint, Sharma's 2050 series highlights the complicity of each of us in preserving the landscapes we love.
In 2050, iconic landscapes thrive thirty years from now - Sharma's prediction of a possible future for our planet if we, as a society, begin embracing sound environmental research, like MMO development, to prevent climate change. His palette of strong reds and blues, symbolizes methane build-up in the atmosphere without collective action, because methane absorbs red light and reflects blue.
Each painting depicts the contour of a cow as a symbol of our society’s reliance on beef–a significant contributor to global warming. Contours of cows recur throughout the series, highlighting both our reliance on beef (a significant contributor to climate change) and a scientific solution to our current climate crisis (MMO). Through a uniquely scientific lens, Sharma presents the viewer with both utopia and dystopia leaving it to them to choose a future. In this way, the 2050 series confronts the most central conflict of our times: survival.
Black Masses (preface to a proposal): Noah Scheinman, October 2 - 12 2024
Black Masses (preface to a proposal) comprises the first installment of research and creative works-in-progress from CRITICAL/MINERAL, a new long-term project which investigates the media, ecology, and logistics of the “new age of metal.” For the run of the exhibition, the Art and Media Lab becomes an experimental space for exploring questions provoked by this developing regime, moving through a series of configurations which inspire geographic, artistic, and collaborative forms of research and practice. Beginning with a period of open studio hours (pictured here) and culminating in a multidisciplinary roundtable discussion and the presentation of a new film, the lab functions as an invitation to engage with one of the most complex and urgent issues of the contemporary moment.
With decarbonization, comes a massive rise in demand for critical minerals essential to the manufacture of digital technologies and energy infrastructures that will power a so-called greener future. This is the “new age of metal,” and instead of moving beyond the current paradigm of resource extraction it signifies a possible intensification of it, giving rise to important geopolitical, cultural, and ecological questions. Emerging within this context is Black Mass, the name given to the polymetallic substance leftover when lithium-ion batteries are recycled—a kind of material afterlife where various metals, each with its own location of origin, are reduced to an indistinguishable dark powder. Black Mass represents the optimistic promise, but also the challenges and paradoxes, of the shift away from fossil fuels: more mining but less greenhouse gases, heavy processing, and therefore waste generation, but also greater potential for recycling and a transition from linear to cyclical material lifecycles. From a century driven by oil to an era based on metal, the earth is once again being reorganized, but what kind of earth is in the making?
Sarap: Ms. Nookie Galore, Horror Drag Queen, October 24, 2024
“Have you ever felt like your feet are planted in one place but your heart is somewhere else? Join me as I perform SARAP: my one-person horror drag cooking show that reimagines the origin story of the Philippine vampire” – Ms. Nookie Galore
Food is central to cultural sharing, and cooking is an embodied performance of gathering in the kitchen to tell the stories that make us who we are. Join horror drag queen Ms. Nookie Galore as she takes up this act of cultural nourishment by animating the scary stories of her childhood for the audience. Sarap is a reworking and a reanimation of the origin story of the Filipino vampire, the Manananggal, within the context of the migrant worker. The performance explores who Ms. Nookie Galore is through the formats of the cooking show, horror storytelling, and drag entertainment.
Mediating the Otherworldly: Spectres, Absence, and Presence, October 24 - November 2, 2024
Curators: Maeva Baldassarra, Steve Bates, Michelle Bunton, Baiqing (Audrey) Chen, Ying Cui, Sasza Hinton, Seymour Irons, Nicola Koroknay, Andrew O’Neil, Sam Sunwoo, Mark Wheeler and Anran Zheng
In addition to archival materials, the exhibition features work from: The Witch Institute, Eman Haram, Jenn E Norton, Emily Pelstring, Edie Soleil, Steve Bates, Seymour Irons, Michelle Bunton, and Nicola Koroknay.
Mediating the Otherworldly asks questions about the role of media in capturing and representing presence, absence, and spectres. The exhibition is also interested in marginalized subject matter and persons. The theoretical grappling done by the curators stems from readings from Michel Foucault, Tiffany Lethobo King, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.
The class curatorial project of the graduate course SCCS 812: Theoretical Approaches to Screen Cultures & Curatorial Studies taught by Dr. Ali Na.
Wave over Wave: Rita McKeough, November 11 - 14, 2024
Curators: Mikhel Proulx and Peggy Fussell
As Queen’s University VPR Artist-in-Residence, Rita McKeough presents this restored version of her artwork Wave over Wave, first created in 2000. This installation was originally developed for a specific site on the harbour in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It serves as a memorial for her father, Frank McKeough, who had been a fisherman. The artwork explores themes of grief and loss within social histories of coastal communities, serving as a memorial to those who have lost their lives working on the ocean and migrating by sea. The installation consists of twenty-four motorized drumsticks that play a rhythmic accompaniment to a video projection and audio recordings of three vocalists: Janice Jackson, Melodie Leach, and Alyssa Robichaud.
The artwork was nominated for the inaugural Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award in 2006.
This presentation is the result of conservation efforts supported by the Vulnerable Media Lab, with technical development and production by Peter Flemming. It is made possible through the VPR Visiting Artist-in-Residence Fund, the Postdoc Initiative Fund and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
Artist Talk and Closing Reception • November 13, 5pm Art + Media Lab Opening Hours: Nov 7–14 • 10–16:00
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