The 2008 Junction Arts Festival was a great success! Visit here for news and updates about site changes, thejunctioncity.com for continued programming throughout the year, and otherwise enjoy reading about the artists and performers that made this year's festival such a blast.

Installation Art

Again this year selected Junction area shops and stores acted as venues for indoor multimedia, music, video installations and performances. There were also a number of outdoor art installations throughout the street closure area. Below you will find information on the artists that did installations during the 2008 festival.

Indoor Installation
Chris Flanagan
Location T.B.D.

Biography

Having extensively exhibited all over Australia and Canada, Chris Flanagan installation practices are aesthetic as they are conceptual, based around meticulous sculptural making and often incorporating elements of video, sound, and kinetics. His reference points include pop culture, urban mythologies and his enormous record collection.

Artist Statement

Chris Flanagan proudly presents More Fire for this year’s festival. Reconfigured from tow solo exhibitions for display in one of the shop-fronts, More Fire is a stop motion animation which follows an abandoned hut in the wood from dawn ‘til dusk which ultimately burns to the ground, only to be resurrected again in the morning. The hand painted cardboard hut sits nestled in a paper pine forest as comically ominous paper clouds echo the faux-horror score composed specially for the film. This perpetual loop represents a present which encompasses booth past and future and charts a cycle of destruction and renewal.

Jennifer Wardle
Location T.B.D.

Biography

Jennifer Wardle is a Toronto based artist who began her studies at an early age at the Art Gallery of Ontario Gallery School where she received the Ford Canada Award and continued her studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She completes her final thesis year in the studio program in Florence, Italy. Since graduating, Jennifer has been an active member of the Toronto art scene, participating in solo and group shows with her drawings, paintings and installations. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in Canada, the Untied States, Hungary an Italy and is included in several corporate collections in Toronto.

Artist Statement

In my recent work I’m revisiting old dreams and desires, places and memories of other times. I am interested in creating a visual language in which all things that I feel to be beautiful and meaningful come together in an intuitive way, evoking a sense of hope and despair.

Ian Birse and Laura Kavanaugh
Location T.B.D.

Biography

Ian Birse and Laura Kavavnaugh create improvised and composed audio/video artworks through site-specific action, using computer performance systems they design. From 1997 to 2002 Kavanaugh and Birse traveled through Canada and Europe, making instillation and performance works for festival venues and art galleries. In 2003 they began Instant Places, a series of location specific works which have been presented across Canada, Australia, and Japan. During 2006/2007 Laura and Ian crossed Canada with a media art lab called Removable Room, and presented public projects at the LOLA festival in London and the Guild Inn, Scarborough.

Artist Statement

For the Junction Art Festival, this creative duo will be showing an intermedia artwork to be presented in public projection events during the festival. The work will combine research on 100 years of Junction history with photographs and sound recordings of contemporary Junction life in an immersive intermedia performance. Central to the work are large-scale projections of image sequence to present contemporary media art in a direct and accessible way to a diverse audience.



Outdoor Installation
Nathalie Quagliotto

Biography

Nathalie Quagliotto is an Italian Canadian artist. She has received her BFA from Concordia University in 2007 and is currently in the MFA program at the University of Waterloo investigating conceptualism and relational practices. She has exhibited in Canada and Australia.

Artist Statement

Maturity Correlation is a swinging sculpture. It displays two swings that are faces together and thus construct the relation of the same object that faces itself to become hazardous. It challenges the viewer’s perception of sculpture by creating an urge to intersect childhood temptation with mature remoteness. Two people can make this participatory sculpture function to it full potential if they trust each other to correlate and synchronize their swinging together.

nathaliequagliotto.blogspot.com
Robert Hilts

Biography

Attempting to stay "of the art industry", but not in it, allowed the use of an early art education to define and understand the use of art to communicate change to existence. Through placing efforts in gaining practical making skills in traditional craft and sculpting in France and Japan during the late 1980's and early 90's, entry was gained into the maker/artist movement that provided a ways and means of continuing. Yet it was meeting Daniel Crichton, a professor of glass at Sheridan School of Crafts and Design/Ontario in 1995, who allowed a stay of 4 years in a 3 year program, to address the issue of personally and fully internalizing years of cultural practice, education, and project experience into a quiet, realizable effort to understand what new art is required at the present time. Having been trained in a wide area of the creative arts, Robert has been able to engage in architecture, craft and design in a unique integrated and situational manner. For example, providing architecture, purposing and project management services for the arts areas of local developments, such as the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga, where he and his team enlarged the scope of the project and designed, built and managed the construction and fit in of 10 visual and digital arts studios. The brief also required the development of an original programming plan, and a resident artist structure with the self imposed rule within the context of artists building of, and for themselves, and for others to follow. Conducting a practice that primarily produces objects in an effort to create percept thoughts, the practice is expanded at times to work on a varied set of projects involving, material, cultural change with national and local governments, industry and material cultural institutions. The Junction Arts Festival room objects are an effort to situationalize the physical existence of the current Junction with the clawing of the history in the present and it's determination to assist in the making of the future. The work is a strengthening and furtherance of the idea piece which Warner Bothers Canada encountered where Robert convinced the Canadian and American principals of Warner Bothers Canada to throw out the idea of film sets for their feature film Three to Tango, by suggesting they construct an actual working glass studio, to cause the film to become somewhat "real" - a situation rather than a staged act, for the brief period of days where filming in this area occurred. Inherently the approach of the practice is creation, in hope that the viewer will briefly see, feel, or maybe just use creation through the works.

Artist Statement

Mediated Pavilion. This work creates an immersion sculpture; one that disassembles common thoughts and experience about our material and social culture as it relates to community culture. The mediated pavilion is conceived as a streetscape of building interiors that the public can step into, gain framed views, and experience a manipulated sense of the historical industrial processes and working methods used in the junction over periods of its existence. It will be comprised of the ideals and real artifacts of the blend of the industrial, commercial and residential uses that have built, nurtured, disembodied and revitalized the Junction area. The work should provide a thoughtful and provoking, yet pleasant and exciting, work for many of the people who pass by and/or become aware of its presence.

breakingprojects.com