113Research

 Vincent Depoivre, Boy Toys, opening March 1 2024 in the vitrine and lounge galley spaces until April 30. In Boy Toys , Vincent Depoivre reflects on masculine tropes using the form of children's toys. These LEGO pieces feature rounded edges, lack defining characteristics, and are made of plastic—there is nothing inherently sexual about them. Choosing these figures to act as signifiers of what we perceive as making the masculine form sexual challenges the viewer to reconsider their own perceptions of sexuality. Vincent Depoivre is a French artist and designer, and Director of Maison Depoivre Art Gallery in Prince Edward County. Image:  VINCENT DEPOIVRE ,  Am i a Unicorn?, 2021,  Aluminum dibond print, ( 40” x 52” x 1″)

  Catherine Heard’s exhibition  Making  ––  Redwork: The Emperor of Atlantis   employs the creative form of the graphic novel to reflect on the five-year process of creating a community-based textile installation.  Her narrative emphasizes subjectivity, revealing the complexities, uncertainties, and anxieties of producing a work of art.  The installation, which is on view at the Niagara Artist Centre in Fall 2023, camouflages scenes of war, injustice, and resistance in a patchwork of antique redwork embroideries.  The complex work integrates embroidery patterns depicting WWI, WW2, The Vietnam War, The War on Terror, Black Lives Matter, and the current war in Ukraine. FREE ONSITE WORKSHOP & ARTIST TALK on Oct 25, OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, 3rd Floor, Room 316, 12 - 3 PM. All supplies provided and all are welcome! 

  In Phases (In and Out) , Hollis McConkey speaks indirectly to her own disabilities by addressing her sister’s lived disability experience. Hollis invited her sister Charlotte to write down her feelings and struggles in living daily with a painful disability. This resultant collection – scraps of paper, napkins, and wrappers – exposes the viewer to the consistent and exhausting nature of surviving with certain disabilities. In addition, Hollis unpacks the TTC’s accessibility poster campaign. Despite appearing in street cars, buses, and subway trains across the city, the TTC’s poster is often passed over and misunderstood by travellers in the rush of commuting The resulting dissonance between the TTC’s ineffective poster campaign and Hollis’ sister’s visceral writing opens the viewer to questioning how a lack of visibility further disables people with invisible disabilities. In this, Hollis emphasizes the continuous marginalization of invisible disabilities. More information  

Curatorial Team: Parwana Ayubi, Catherine Bradley, Madelaine Ella Daniels, Ella Gray, Farid Hjer, Rhi Hopperton, Pam Patterson, Ella Taylor, Yeokwang Yoon -- Ashlynn Doljac, 18" x 24"oils on canvas  -- Situated at 113Research , one of the three sites of the APRÈS QUOI festival, Medicine + Cabinet plays with the unique form of the vitrine gallery by asking artists to reimagine the space as a medicine cabinet for post-pandemic life. In exploring ideas of collection, hybridity, messiness, reconstruction, organic and inorganic forms,  Medicine + Cabinet  considers the changing patterns of care in the wake of major social and environmental change and aims to create a space of care and comfort.    The exhibiting artists depict community-centered healing, reflect on their personal practices of care, and imagine how these notions of healing and care can be extended to the environment around us and to our more-than-human kin.   Curators viewed submissions though a sustainabilit

  The Drawing Board is an artist-educator collective (Natalie Majaba Waldburger, Amy Swartz and JJ Lee) that performs methodological explorations at the intersections of labour, process and drawing. Our creative dialogue investigates the complexities of work contextualized by institutional structures. Our artworks examine the role of drawing through collaboration, mediated by the institution’s colonial legacies including race construction, gender identification and organizational hierarchies among human resources. The Drawing Board is a collective of Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) educators/creatives researching institutional structure through drawing as play methodology. We came together in response to curiosities and frustrations with the rigidity of the institutional structure within which we work. We use play and humour as tools for critique. One method we use is performance, structured like committee meetings, and our drawings emerge from satirical play pr

The recent regulated and confining pandemic years have operated to aggravate already existing anthropogenic anxieties. Climate change – oppressive unpredictable heat waves, uncontrolled forest fires, rising oceans levels – have had an impact on the race that both facilitated it and now roils from its effects. Aggressive urban sprawl bulldozes the land, and we search from among the rubble to find what of “land” remains. In Canada, the colonial project created divisiveness, poverty, and an early death for some, but also vast wealth and proprietorship for others. Can this unsettling situation be unraveled, or have we gone too far? Anxiety became an oft-experienced emotion in our classrooms – mostly online - at our universities over the last two years. A research team, here represented by Pam Patterson, OCAD University and Joanna Black, University of Manitoba, sought to explore generative potentials found in addressing anthropogenic and Covid-19 anxieties. We worked alongside our students