Image
Un-camouflaging #12 (Forms of Awareness: Ghillie Suit). Performance, Windsor, ON Photo: Bree Arbor. 2012. Courtesy of the Artist.
Opening Reception (in conjunction with SWARM) Friday, September 11, 2015, 7:00 PM
“Water Witching” Workshop with Alana Bartol, Saturday, October 31st, 2015, 2:00 PM
Link to Exhibition Broadsheet with curator's essay
“
I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.” – Jonathan Safran Foer
Far Away So Close is a series of exhibitions, publications, and events that explores the idea of distance, considers the bridging of distance as an ultimately quixotic gesture, and investigates the particular relationship of this gesture to art making. Presented over the course of 2014–15, each instalment features emergent artists who draw upon a variety of modes, materials, and methodologies, and whose practices are scattered across the globe. Part III of Far Away So Close turns its attention to the always and ultimately inadequate, representation of landscape or, more properly, to three artists - Alana Bartol, Mike Bourscheid, and David Semeniuk - who examine the elaborate proxies we invent in our attempt to capture, represent or claim the “authentic” natural experience.
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Alana Bartol is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator from Windsor, Ontario. She is interested in ecology as a ‘life science’ that interrogates relationships between place and self, nature and community. Her collaborative and individual works explore concepts of visibility and survival through our relationships with nature and each other. Bartol holds an MFA from Wayne State University (Detroit), where she developed and taught the first Performance Art course in the Department of Art, co-founded the first student-run gallery, and received a Thomas C Rumble Fellowship. She recently taught Bioart: Contemporary Art and the Life Sciences at the University of Windsor.
Mike Bourscheid lives and works in Luxembourg and in Vancouver. He holds an MFA from the University of Arts Berlin (UdK) where he was trained under the guidance of Michaela Meise and Lothar Baumgarten. In his present body of work, Bourscheid translates his heritage through sculpture, photography, and performance. The body is often used as a reference, either directly, as in self-portraiture, or suggestively through sculpture and photography. His work operates to express darker social and political concerns through the device of humour.
David Semeniuk is a formally trained scientist and a self-trained artist. His art practice addresses how the histories of capital and the production of scientific knowledge have influenced the production of photographic objects, the construction of meaning in photographic images, and the exhibition of photographic works. He is also interested in using art objects to investigate spatial and temporal scales of environmental changes, how we experience these changes, and ways of representing them.