Opening Night Reception: Friday October 25th, 5 – 7 PM (Food and refreshments will be provided)
Exhibition Dates: Monday, October 28th – Thursday, November 7th
Location: POD Student Gallery (POD 056-A), Lower Ground Floor of the Podium Building, across from the Career and Co-op Centre
Gallery Hours: Monday to Friday, 12 PM – 6 PM
ANASTOMOSIS is an exhibition of interactive new media + transmedia works that interrogate perceived truths that join realities together, marked by tangled relationships and obscured environments. Using sound, video art, physical installation and tangible / computational media, the works attempt to pull back a long running thread of beliefs, confessions and events that have been sewn into understandings. The objective and subjective devour each other: whether something is true or not, does it actually compel us to rework our pasts, reckon with the details and change our futures? What happens to us when what we know is stained, and what we don’t, we crave?
Anastomosis refers to the joining of two adjacent parts of a biological network together to create new pathways, within parts such as blood vessels or intestines. The exhibit offers a theory of anastomosis as a way to understand meaning-making. The artists exhibited are considering and navigating art-making through a new media framework, which theorist Lev Manovich determines in relation to discrete representation and variability. A digital or computer-mediated object can exist not as a single state but in infinite versions, where parts of something can be broken down into equally alive fractals that function on their own and also in combination with each other. They employ this in the emotional language of their pieces, creating a complicated network, one that converges and separates in equal measure. Audiences are invited to place themselves between / among the artworks within space and use their own physical behaviour to alter certain artworks through, in the same way that interconnectedness can ground or (inversely) convolute stories over time, whether true or untrue.
Exhibiting artists include: Aeena Asif, Yves Al-Sharifi, Vicky Huang, Declan Key, Liam Mackenzie, Chau Nguyen, Angela Ruth Sundiam, and May Yu.
Curatorial Essay
by Dean Vukovic, Programming Curator
ANASTOMOSIS is an exhibition of interactive new media + transmedia works that interrogate perceived truths that join realities together, marked by tangled relationships and obscured environments. Using sound, video art, physical installation and tangible / computational media, the works attempt to pull back a long running thread of beliefs, confessions and events that have been sewn into understandings. The objective and subjective devour each other: whether something is true or not, does it actually compel us to rework our pasts, reckon with the details and change our futures? What happens to us when what we know is stained, and what we don’t, we crave?
Anastomosis refers to the joining of two adjacent parts of a biological network together to create new pathways, within parts such as blood vessels or intestines. The exhibit offers a theory of anastomosis as a way to understand meaning-making. The artists exhibited are considering and navigating art-making through a new media framework, which theorist Lev Manovich determines in relation to discrete representation and variability. A digital or computer-mediated object can exist not as a single state but in infinite versions, where parts of something can be broken down into equally alive fractals that function on their own and also in combination with each other. They employ this in the emotional language of their pieces, creating a complicated network, one that converges and separates in equal measure. Audiences are invited to place themselves between / among the artworks within space and use their own physical behaviour to alter certain artworks through, in the same way that interconnectedness can ground or (inversely) convolute stories over time, whether true or untrue.
Angela Ruth Sundiam’s Dear God explores the layered experiences of religious trauma inspired by Catholic and Southern Baptist Christian practices, embodied by a weathered wooden prayer kneeler. Examining fractured senses of belonging at the site of personal identity, spirituality and institutionalized religion, Sundiam etches a raw confession into this structure symbolic of the negative impact of organized religion on identity and self-worth. Created using CNC milling and other digital fabrication techniques, Dear God invites you to engage in introspection and vulnerability by physically kneeling – in doing so, one is placed in the experience of a queer non-believer who grew up in a conservative Christian environment. This act of physical immersion, of placing oneself in a pose of salvation already attempted and lamented upon, Sundiam creates an alternative act of transcendance found away from organized religion – one marked by the connection of participants to each other and the artist in its repetition.
Chau Nguyen’s Returned to Sender is crafted in reference to Canadian street mailboxes, inviting users to write a letter to someone in their life that they regret not sharing something with. Whether it is a lost loved one, someone recently out of touch, someone unable to receive a message, the viewer is placed in a choice that exposes one’s sore spots: deposit the letter to be hung around the mailbox and shared with others to read, or shred the letter and destroy it permanently. Returned to Sender is an intentional site of catharsis for individuals to express that which is deeply embedded in themselves towards the people they are tethered to, even when those connections are made faint or quiet through time, loss or circumstance. The choice between permanence and impermanence given to each individual engaging with the work is an equalizer, a choice which is continually on view in both measures. This becomes a common ground for people to witness each other and access lodged pieces of consciousness.
Liam Mackenzie’s Last Time is unabashed and curious in how it explores aspects of disability and disabled stories that tend to be minimized and looked down upon. These fixtures of disability found gross and unpleasant – such as “excess mucus, uncontrollable bowel movements, a constant need to wipe saliva” as the artist writes, cannot be unlinked from those that experience it. Mackenzie’s inkjet prints made with silkscreen ink are an intentional call to reflect on the ways we engage, appreciate and connect with disability among conventions of society that choose to suppress it or alter it to be more palatable.
May Yu’s Sorry, I Missed You is a tangible electronic piece that modifies a telephone to trigger the playing of Yu’s mother’s voicemails. Once the viewer selects messages to listen to, they are immediately placed in a delicate dynamic of mother and child. The emotional stems pulled out with each voicemail bring with them anxieties and difficulties around growing up, accompanying admonishments for neglecting household responsibilities and reminders of essential commitments, coupled with extended silence that compel the viewer to confront the artificiality of this kind of communication, the voice on the other end remains unreachable and unresponsive. These tokens of maternal connection and familiarity churn fear of change and a reluctance to embrace adulthood. A faceless mother, a speck of a conversation, of a life dropped into and pulled out of. As the artist confesses: When do I stop missing you?
Vicky Huang’s A Place That Exists Within My Memories is a sculpture diorama of a physical location from Huang’s childhood which exists in the artist’s consciousness yet in reality, is gone. This space, an old business storefront accompanied by sound, is coated in liminality on the way to its disappearance. Huang prompts the audience to examine the unreliable nature of human memory, creating something precise out of what grows further unclear. This rendering of the intangible into something frozen, is an attempt to construct what still remains for Huang, before it slips away. Creating this physical reconstruction, and in turn, haunting one’s own synapses over and over, Huang becomes a sort of archivist: creating a living record of a memory, so that it can remain to be received and interpreted before it obscures itself.
Declan Key’s HearTO: The Auditory Map of Toronto, an immersive exploration of urban life in Toronto, interpreted by its rich soundscapes. Key meticulously sources audio recordings from parks, streets, shops and live music venues and creates a navigable 3D map and particle system, challenging “primacy of visual cues by foregrounding the power of listening as a mode of understanding”. A celebration of familiar space and sensory engagement, the piece is an invitation to listen with care and intention. HearTO makes Toronto’s hidden stories open and expressive through sound art, and in doing so, creates another archive for one to think on the spaces we inhabit, and how their sounds transform us.
Yves Al-Sharifi weaves sound video art, creative writing and early Internet aesthetics in transmedia project It Means Everything, placing the player in the center of a relationship between characters Donna and Fay – a constantly increasing relationship that pushes up against complex identity, mental health and existentialist reiteration: “This isn’t for you.” As players interact, they wade through a website tree, gradually finding audio stems from an accompanying EP project, flittering among heartfelt letters and pixelated webcam memoirs. These intense calls, coming from an undefined space with sorts of unclean longing and self-perception under latent Internet voyeurism, make up the persona of Donna Come Home. The artist makes it extremely clear: one is left without any control over her fate, a “position the Internet encourages”. Al-Sharifi’s piece personally addresses and creates an experience for the viewer to become linked to fallible human figures gradually and slowly – this is done almost in instinct, almost without awareness. The exchange allows one to witness a fabricated and brutal act of self-discovery, mediated through machine.
Aeena Asif’s How Will I Go Home? is a diasporic lament on grief and cultural loss between generations. In this motion graphics piece, Asif asks: “When my parents both die, how will I be able to go back home?” The artwork places the viewer in the point of view of someone holding multiplicities in their hands: their parent’s comfort, their anxieties, the conjuring of a situation yet to exist and an answer to a question without one. In its uncertain imagery and purgatorial state, Asif considers the ramifications of assimilation for the second generation of diasporas – weaving viewers around the subtext and heartbreak found in and through language, family and locality.
ANASTOMOSIS is on view at the POD Student Gallery (POD 056-A) from October 25 – November 7, 2024, at Toronto Metropolitan University.