October 26th, 2011 1:40-2:25pm

Berkeley Church, 315 Queen Street East

Place, Memory and Site Specific Art Exhibitions

This talk will address new approaches to site specific art by looking at several examples that combine urban screens, large scale architectural projections, locative media and participatory art forms.  Her current research seeks to understand how such media art exhibitions create experimental communities and social excavations that redefine our sense of urban place and common purpose.

Digifest is Toronto’s international festival celebrating innovation and digital creativity. From October 26-30, we will be bringing together some of the world’s best and brightest to showcase next generation digital art & design. Established and emerging designers, technologists and artists will come together during Digifest for presentations, incredible demos, interactive exhibitions and parties.

See full post on Professor Marchessault, click here.

Presented by                                                                
Public Access

Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art
401 Richmond St. West, Suite 124
Toronto
Friday March 5^th 2010
10:30am – 6:30pm

As complement to the Leona Drive Project (www.leonadrive.ca) and in response to the reception, both critical and popular, of its suburban problematic, this symposium asks quite simply: how do we—how have we come to, why do we even want to—know ‘the suburb’? And why does it appear that, just as it has begun to wane as an historical form, the suburb has become a privileged object of knowledge, circulating at such a speed within a variety of discourses.

Rather than pose these queries of suburban knowledge under the traditional rubric of an academic symposium—considering that ‘the rubric’ derives, quite materially, from red clay, from the ground—we instead seek to orient ourselves according to the mood of Leona Drive itself. Where a series of post-WWII homes sit vacant, awaiting their development/destruction; a space simultaneously nostalgic and anxious, essentially on hold. Thus, we invite our participants to think about the suburb within the scenario of the wake. To enter a period of mourning for that, precisely, which is in the process of passing: the suburban as an integral whole, as a paradigmatic form of dwelling which, as the breath which flees the organs, may not survive passage into the register of objective knowledge. Here, at home (however temporarily) within the interim, we wish to dwell upon the historical transition of dwelling—as the productive techno-social relation between subjects and space—in an attempt to recognize our relationship, both real and imaginary, to the suburban legacy.

Janine Marchessault: "Art and Suburbs: Revisiting the Leona Drive Project"

Feb 10, 2010, 10:30am-12pm

Dr. Janine Marchessault, associate professor of media studies in the Department of Film and Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media & Globalization, hosts a film presentation and panel discussion reflecting on the impact and significance of The Leona Drive Project.

The Leona Drive Project was a landmark collaboration in which more than 20 noted artists joined with students, developers and place-makers to create a site-specific exhibition on a street in one of Toronto's oldest inner suburbs, Willowdale. The project, which ran for 10 days in October 2009, featured 18 original artist projects installed in a series of five vacant bungalows slated for demolition.