Opening reception:
Saturday, March 10, 2012, 2-4pm

Artist Talk with Jenn E Norton: 
Saturday, April 7, 2012, 2-4pm
 

Trinity Square Video and Pleasure Dome are pleased to present No Place, an installation by artist Jenn E Norton. Using video and photography, Norton's new body of work, is a playful reflection on real estate development and consumption through fantastical animated compositions.
 Through her depictions of fragile and unlikely structures, Norton explores the tenuous relationship we share with residence, ownership, and the idea of home.

The new and recent works featured in No Place depict onscreen worlds where intricate architectural forms and delicate organic elements coexist: plush moss on a forest floor forms a city square as luxurious condo towers appear in boreal fungi; a tightly framed image of the cracks in a rock reveals an interior of a bustling metropolis replete with cars, suspended gondolas, and stylized skyscrapers. Using motion graphics and 3D animation, Norton's digital tableaus articulate an anxiety that traverses the meeting of natural worlds and our built, electronically mechanized reality. The irony of the work corresponds to these concerns: instead of building from the 'ground up', Norton's neighbourhoods are perfectly integrated into an existing natural landscape, appearing inviting and desirable, yet obviously impossible. These miniature civilizations are propositional vignettes, not unlike the concept renderings of architectural firms; often impossible to achieve, but sought after nonetheless–a utopia.

International Film Festival Rotterdam

Wee Requiem, single channel video, still, Jenn E Norton, 2010

Wee Requiem was included in the 2012 International Rotterdam Film Festival.

"DINAMO (Distribution Network of Artists’ Moving image Organizations) is a network of independent distributors of video art and experimental film from the USA, Canada and Europe. The IFFR presents four Press & Industry programme slots in which 12 of the DINAMO distributors will show recently acquired work. These titles can also be seen in the festival video library."

NO PLACE: Trinity Square Video and Pleasure Dome

 I will be showing a new body of work in a solo exhibition at Trinity Square Video Gallery this March (2012) in Toronto, Canada.  The show is presented in partnership with Pleasure Dome and Trinity Square Video.  

 Comprised of photography, 3D animation and video, this new body of work is a playful indictment of realty consumerism through fantastical composites of delicate architecture integrated and in conflict with geological structures.

This image used for Pleasure Dome's Winter 2012 poster, is a sneak peak of a photo within the series included in the exhibition. For a full listing of Pleasure Dome's Winter Programme please follow this link.

         

SUPERMARKET

This February Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins, Stan Krzyzanowski and I will be featured artists of Ed Video Media Arts Centre at the Stockholm Independent Art Fair, SUPERMARKET.

"SUPERMARKET has been arranged since 2007 by a small group most of whom are artists themselves. Supermarket is a development of Minimarket, which was held at Konstnärshuset in February 2006 in reaction to the new commercial art fair Market.


Initiated and organised by artists, this project has rapidly evolved from a modest group of local initiatives to a full-fledged international art exhibition that has made its mark and helped firmly establish Stockholm on the art world map.

SUPERMARKET started in small scale as MINIMARKET in 2006 in an art nouveau palace, the following year it became SUPERMARKET, with international presence in the same site, 2008 it moved to a run-down industrial space, then to a newly built first-class designer hotel (Clarion Hotel Stockholm) and 2010 to the very heart of Stockholm - Kulturhuset (House of Culture)."

Rendezvous with Madness: Artist Talk, Screening, Panel Discussion

Rendezvous with Madness has invited me to speak at this year's festival.  I will give an artist talk tonight at 7pm at the Workman Theatre.  This precedes a screening "Wee Requiems" at 8pm and I will also be participating in a panel discussion afterwards.  Here are the details.

Mirador, 2010, Detail, Still From 2 Channel Video Installation

"Please join us for two events at Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival (651 Dufferin Street) on Sunday November 6. At 7pm there will be an Illustrated Artist Talk by Jenn E Norton, to be followed with a program of experimental video curated by Deirdre Logue and Erik Martinson titled Wee Requiems at 8pm (title list below). 

7pm 
Artist Talk by Jenn E Norton:

The imaginative work of Jenn E Norton is not quite a surrealist dreamscape, but an actively dreamed scape, a place built with architecture of wonder and rumination. Ordinary objects and activities become strange through the bending of their longstanding expectations, often achieved through disjunctive content realistically glued together with composite editing. This uncanniness constructed through digital intervention invites new approaches and consideration to the familiar. Her cast may be her cats, inanimate objects or multiple versions of herself in situations that derive from her immediate experience, yet the formal considerations allude to greater ontological questions.

Jenn will discuss how working intimately with the technology used in the production of her practice in a DIY capacity marries intuitive and formal approaches to her creative process. Working in near isolation, honing her technical skill as an editor, animator, compositor and sound designer via online tutorials and trial and error, Jenn creates moving images outside of a rubric of traditional cinematic roles of director and producer.

Norton will also discuss the melancholy present beneath the visual glitter. Curator and artist Ufuk Gueray recalled a quote by Francis Bacon in an essay to describe Nortonʼs work, “Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.” There is no overt violence in Nortonʼs practice, but darkness lurks beneath the glittery surface [...].

8pm
Wee Requiems
Curated by Deirdre Logue and Erik Martinson:

Wee Requiems is a program of short experimental videos in lament. Mourning for the increasingly complex worlds of animals, plants and people, these works wander in and around both the real and alien, animated, mutated, recorded and illustrated. Fables of savagery and shame, death in the everyday, dilapidated interiors and microscopic utopias sit side by each, calling out for our sympathy, asking for our forgiveness, needing our attention.

Program:

How to Care for Introverts, Leslie Supnet, 2010, 1:48

An animated instructional video on how one should deal with people whose personalities are characterized by extreme shyness and reserve.

Exercises in Faith: Bird, Julieta Maria, 2010, 1:52

“Bird is a close up of my hand holding a canary, while it moves, trying to free itself from the grip…The video reflects on fragility, beauty and violence, questioning the limits of our ethical relationship to one another and to the world.” - Julieta Maria

Wee Requiem, Jenn E Norton, 2010, 7:03

Through recontextualized imagery, video can provide its viewer with the opportunity to remember an event differently. Wee Requiem explores the ability of the mediated moving image to articulate a propositional reality, or prosthetic memory. For seven minutes we observe a “wee requiem” for the passing of a fallen nuisance—a pest—who has been recast as a beloved protagonist.

Beauty Plus Pity, Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, 2009, 14:19

The contemporary fables of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby propose that existence is abject, farcical, and messy. In their richly textured videos, Duke and Battersby employ live action footage, scavenged images, and simple animations to create episodic structures that evince a simultaneously utopian and dystopian worldview. Beauty Plus Pity is presented in seven parts, the video considers the potential for goodness amidst the troubled relations between God, humanity, animals, parents and children.

The Fire Theft, Isabelle Hayeur, 2010, 9:00

This video explores the themes of dispossession and repression. It was produced using sequences broadcast on the Web and scenes filmed in an abandoned house. It includes shots of the Olympic flame relay (Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics) and the Keith Sadler Foreclosure Resistance. The degraded video signal mirrors the difficult social conditions evoked in the work, especially in the shots of dilapidated interiors. The Fire Theft reminds us that major sports events benefit a handful of corporations, and often are used as a pretext for real estate speculation and gentrification.

Thalé, Barry Doupé, 2009, 5:07

Thalé is a series of alien flowers modeled after decorative fiber optics ornaments.

Golden Room, Michael Stecky, 2008, 5:11

Beginning with images of flowers and insects, and ending with fantastic visions of microscopic utopias, Golden Room burrows itself deeper inward using disintegration as a metaphor for loss and the passage of time.

Cartoon For Those Who Have A Certain Fondness For Ideas But Are Tired Of Thinking, Steve Reinke, 2010, 2:15

Simple line drawings form and wriggle against a solid background, each linked to a verbal proposal. In the end, everybody's happy as the possibilities proliferate. Nobody gets hurt.

Total Runtime: 46:35

Q&A with panel to follow screening."

The Message: Gallery 1313

 

"Gallery 1313 is pleased to present The Message, an exhibition of new media artists who explore the effects of technology on popular culture and society. The exhibition is also a celebration of the legacy of Marshall McLuhan.

Including installation, video and photo based works by artists Zeesy Powers, Jenn E . Norton, Myfanwy Ashmore, Robert Lendrum, Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman, Matthew Williamson and Nicholas Stedman.


There will also be panel discussion Wed Nov. 9 at 7pm which will address the future and effects of technology in artistic practice and society in general. Panelists to include Ed Slopek, Program Director for the New Media Option (Ryerson University), School of Image Works, Johanna Householder, Chair of Criticism and Curitorial Practice (Ontario College of Art and Design) and Judith Doyle, Chair of Integrated Media (The Ontario College of Art and Design) . The panel will be moderated by writer and cultural commentor, Russell Smith.


Main & Process Galleries
Nov. 2-13
Opening Reception: Nov. 3 at 7pm
Panel Discussion: Nov. 9 at 7pm


Gallery 1313
1313 Queen St. West
416-536-6778 www.g1313.org


The exhibition is sponsored by Highland Park Single Malt Scotch Whiskey. We would like to thank Highland Park Single Malt Scotch Whiskey for their generous support."




From the Gallery 1313 site.

Magenta Magazine: K-TOWN: Five karaoke videos by artists

Wrik Mead, Johanna Householder, Kotama Bouabane, Edward Birnbaum and Michael Jacobs, and I were reviewed by K-TOWN curators Luke Painter and Meera Margaret Singh for Magenta Magazine.    Originally shown at Angell Gallery in Toronto, then at XPACE for Toronto Nuit Blanche, this show is coming to Guelph's Ed Video Media Arts Centre this December.  Here is the post with a playlist of artists and the songs they contributed to the exhibition.