Public Syntax: SAW Video at Critical Distance

EXHIBITION

February 7, 2019 – March 31, 2019

Featuring naakita feldman-kiss, Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Henry Andersen, Mara Eagle, Phil Rose, Molly Teitelbaum, Anna Queen, and the Video in the Public Sphere Working Group.

Curated by Neven Lochhead and presented in partnership with Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC, formerly SAW Video), Ottawa and Critical Distance, Toronto.

VIEW THE CATALOGUE HERE

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

In partnership with DARC, Critical Distance  presented Public Syntax, an exhibition that highlighted the distinct time-based practices and approaches of seven artists, as well as those participating in the Video in the Public Sphere Working Group, the majority of whom are either Ottawa-based or connected. Situated in-gallery at Critical Distance and across multiple public spaces at Artscape Youngplace, the works in the exhibition embodied and expanded upon the recent and ongoing programming initiatives of DARC and their Knot Project Space, launched in early 2018. Responding to Critical Distance’s mandate to advance curatorial inquiry and encourage collaborative frameworks, exhibition curator Neven Lochhead employed a conversational mode to form ‘syntactical’ relations between these various practices, identifying collective editing processes where the ‘sequence’ becomes a vector on which to group together. In the gallery and public spaces, artists in this exhibition generated affinities not through the question of where will we meet, but rather when will we occur?

The opening reception took place on February 9, 2019, with a building-wide tour of the exhibition with curator Neven Lochhead.