Digital Arts Resource Centre are very excited to announce our 2022 artist of the Expanded Practice Residency Program.
Based in Ottawa, Cheryl Pagurek’s artistic practice highlights the constructed nature of lens-based media, while embracing the creative expression offered by computing and technology. Since receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Victoria, her work in video, photography and digital media has been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally, including presentations at MSVU Gallery (Halifax), Patrick Mikhail Gallery (Montréal), Vu (Québec), Gallery 44 (Toronto), numerous video screenings in Canada, USA, Brazil, France, Columbia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Currents, a commissioned video work at Marketplace transit station in Ottawa. Her solo exhibit Connect/Connexion at the Ottawa Art Gallery in 2019 featured an interactive video and audio installation. She is the recipient of the 2020 Corel Endowment for the Arts Award celebrating the integration of technology and the arts. http://cherylpagurek.com/
During the open house, you will be able to interact with the video and audio interactive installation States of Being. States of Being was conceived to expand the expressive potential of interactive installation by inviting dancers to engage with it. Each dancer brings their own movement language when navigating and synthesizing the videos and rhythmic audio tracks. The work creates a poetics of our present-day experience, when meanings shift continuously around concepts of distance/togetherness, safety/threat, inside/outside, individual/collectivity. Videos evoke fleeting sensibilities: dense urbanity, vast natural space, solitude, chaotic crowds, organic forms, built environment, rushing speed, slow contemplation, immediacy, distance, claustrophobia, freedom. Dancers’ movements and spatial position determine which of the paired videos appears within their moving body silhouette and which in the background, as well as how the musical layers, contributed by Jesse Stewart, build up into a soundscape. Each participant’s interactions uniquely express our precarious human condition amidst the fluctuating states of being we strive to balance.
Cheryl Pagurek gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the City of Ottawa and the Ottawa Arts Council.
