Scotiabank Nuit Blanche at OCAD September 29, 2007

From sunset at 7:03 pm on September 29, 2007 to sunrise

Make OCAD your destination during Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, an all-night city-wide celebration of exhibitions, live performances and creative programs throughout Toronto. The event runs from dusk to dawn starting at 7:03 pm on September 29.

TESTBED
Curated by David McIntosh
Assistant Curator, Patricio Davila

TESTBED is an exhibition of new media works that converts OCAD's landmark tabletop building into an interactive platform for intensive artistic research, experimentation, prototyping and testing of real-time simulation models where virtual and material worlds collide to produce new meaning. The six installations that comprise TESTBED are all new works, most of them commissioned specifically for this exhibition, some of them new site-specific iterations of the artists' ongoing research and creation activities for the OCAD exhibition space.

All part of the OCAD community, as former students or as current or former OCAD faculty, the TESTBED artists have created works that explore the technological, philosophical and experiential tensions and resonances between immersive virtual digital 3D installation and the more traditional physical presence of material 3D installation. As a group, the works express a range of new forms of interfacing and translating across the narrowing 3D virtual/material divide. These works also test the limits of our understanding and occupation of our built environment – our houses, our homes – transforming them into powerful virtual memory structures. And it is important to note that these works are not simply structural investigations of hard and software linkages between material place and virtual space; they engage a range of social, political and aesthetic contexts that give the virtual/material discourse new directions.

Judith Doyle's Long Crescent : House Transformer offers a navigable performative virtual house, inhabited simultaneously by human presences and virtual avatars, that rests on her strong emotional and memory links to the represented house as her own childhood home. Robert Houle's Do not open until you get home brings his perspective as an abstract painter and First Nations artist, writer and curator to his reluming of horrific human and viral histories in a digital context. Lorena Salomé's Closeness embeds autonomous technologies inside kinetic sculptures to probe temporality, randomness and mutual destruction. Simone Jones and Julian Oliver's Unprepared Architecture invites us to play and to consider the philosophical relationship between the particularity of material space and the universality of virtual space, as well as the implications of new forms of remote control. Brenda Goldstein and Alissa Firth-Eagland's spin builds a dialogue concerning fate from virtual myths and embodied human undertakings, while Noam Gonick's Precious Blood models a physical site of social control – a prison – to serve as the surface for the projection of multiple insurrectional desires.

The TESTBED artists have employed a range of creative methods, from spontaneous, provisional and analogic imaginings to experiential, metaphoric and heuristic improvisations to create prototypical, evolving, immersive art that operates interdependently with the public. We invite the exuberant and engaged Nuit Blanche public to intersect, interact and experiment with us and with TESTBED all night long.

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Currents
Curated by William Hodge

In welcoming back OCAD's Material Art & Design, Applied Art & Design, Material Arts alumni for a weekend of programming, OCAD presents an exhibition of work by alumni and faculty in OCAD's Great Hall, curated by Professor William Hodge. During Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, demonstrations will take place in the ceramic, jewellery and fibre studios until midnight.

Currents features the work of Beth Alber, Mildred Avendano, Patricia Bentley, Lois Betteridge, Carolynn Bloomer, Suzanne Carlsen, Ruth Chambers, Ying-Yueh Chuang, Ian Chung, Alissa Coe and Carly Waito, Marta Dal Farra, Jocelyn De Backere, Angelo di Petta, Michael Doxey, Martina Edmonson, Eva Ennist, William Hodge, Kate Jackson, Michael Jaroszewicz, Arounna Khounnoraj, Chung-Im Kim, Margaret Lim, Susan Low-Beer, Rory MacDonald, Michelle Mendlowitz, Dorie Millerson, Robert Mitchell, Julie Moon, Joni Moriyama, Kathleen Morris, Ken Nicol, Michele Perras, Anrea Piller, Greg Sims, Greg Sloane, Don Stuart, Mary Jane Varro, Ken Vickerson, Sarah Washbush Byrne, Laurie Wassink, Andrée Wejsmann, Robert Wylie, Lily Yung, Susan Warner Keene, and Cybele Young.

An exhibition reception will be held Saturday, September 29 starting at 4 pm ($15 unless previously registered for weekend reunion events, cash bar. Tickets can be reserved online at https://secure.ocad.ca/currents/). Currents is presented in conjunction with Craft Year 2007.

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Nomadic Residents: Rirkrit Tiravanija
Closing reception: reopening the OCAD Professional Gallery
Remarks from 7 to 7:30 pm; open all night

The OCAD Professional Gallery closes its inaugural exhibition. Last April, internationally acclaimed artist Rirkrit Tiravanija erected walls barring the entrance and exit to the gallery space. Now, the walls will come down and the exhibition's final component will be revealed.

Globe and Mail art critic Sarah Milroy describes Tiravanija's work as "…exemplar of 'relational aesthetics'…or 'service-based art'—work that intends to provoke new social relations in response to contradictions set up by the artist". OCAD Associate Professor Jim Drobnik describes this installation as "a radical change in Tiravanija's practice, and a renegotiation of his relationship to the art world."

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World So Small
OCAD's Student Gallery presents an exchange exhibit between ceramic students from OCAD and the University of Regina in which they employ the material qualities and associative meanings of clay to investigate how we engage with others and the world. Previously shown at the 5th Parallel Gallery in the University of Regina, the exhibition is held in conjunction with Craft Year 2007 and continues until October 6.

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Concept to Commodity
OCAD's Transit Space presents an exhibition of work by third- and fourth-year Material Art & Design students working in ceramics, fibre and jewellery. The exhibit focuses on the process of design from initial conception through to the creation of the finished object. The exhibition continues until October 5.

Official Website: http://www.ocad.ca