WRECK CITY RESIDENCY // CURATORIAL STATEMENTS
WRECK CITY artists Jeremy Pavka & Karly Mortimer
Photo by Diane + Mike Photography
Matthew Bourree’s work employs sculpture, drawing, and video that adopts a wide range of materials both fabricated and found. He investigates the relationship and the overlap between humans, nature and industry as a departure point. His presentation of objects are not solved, but in flux, poetic representations of the themes that drive their form. These objects mimic human bodies and environments along with the permanent expectation of performance.
His extended interest in Wreck City lies intertwined in the exploration between freedoms and law. Not only the synthetic law that has been manufactured by humans but natural law as well. Using science fiction and mythology as a lens to investigate normative behavior, language, infrastructure, finance and technology, his main concern is in how malleable these ideas are and what impact testing them has on their longevity.
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//MATTHEW BOURREE
//CAITLIND r.c. BROWN
Caitlind Brown is interested in artists working in non-traditional spaces, public contexts, and self-organized situations. What draws people to establish independent art spaces, free from pre-existing structures? Are we searching for democratic circumstances? Freedom? Sustainability? Are we critiquing institutions and power dynamics? Are we vultures, swooping down opportunistically on the underbelly of cities? The WRECK CITY Residency will draw together a micro-community of artists interested in examining these questions – and more.
As a WRECK CITY curator, she is interested in artists who:
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Make large-scale work (physically or conceptually)
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Consider the context of their work carefully + holistically
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Engage viewers directly
and art that:
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Overwhelms
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Peels back in layers
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Builds icons for this time + place
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Burns slowly
Jennifer Crighton is a cross-disciplinary creative, a professional artist and musician who is currently employed in film and television as a costumer. She has been at work in the local community from within grassroots organizations, and banding together with a variety of arts instigators for over 10 years. Her specific curatorial interest is with the stuff on the margins, especially domestic works and intimate cultural and craft traditions. Of particular importance to her is giving voice to underrepresented communities, with a distinctly feminist bent.
//JENNIFER CRIGHTON
//BRANDON A. DALMER
Brandon Dalmer is a painter, installation artist and occasional curator living in Toronto, ON. His practice is based within the scientific method, exploring themes of impermanence, the way images are made, the relationship humans have with expanding technology, decaying memory and the passage of time.
His curatorial ambitions for this project are inspired by NASA’s analog experiments. Researching the effects space travel and isolating environments have on the human body and mind within a controlled environment. Through specific weekly tasks, alternative forms of communication and dedicated research time, artists will develop new avenues within their practice. Whilst forming closer working relationships with peers and becoming more autonomous individually. Dying alone in space is not an option.
//NATALIE MACLEAN
Natalie MacLean is an artist and curator residing in Calgary. She is interested in experimental approaches to object making, exhibition, and history.
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Natalie believes in WRECK CITY’s power to question how people interact with art, space, and each other. In this project, she is particularly interested in work that addresses the fundamental futility of making art that will be demolished with the site, and the futility inherent in making art generally. She hopes artists will create work in reaction to the physical realities of the space, as well as the psychological space of a building slated for demolition. She wants to ask (although not necessarily answer) “What is created when something is destroyed?”