Deluge/Antimatter

Somewhere. Something. Sometime. – Matt Trahan at Deluge Contemporary Art March 22 to April 26, 2024 Opening Friday, March 22 @ 7pm 636 Yates St, Victoria | http://deluge.ca | Wed–Sat noon–5pm My work explores the possibilities and outcomes of cumulative mark-making, as well as the accidental beauty of found objects, detritus and chance. The slow accumulation of marks, which is common across the majority of my work on paper, transforms a drawing from an image into an object by way of process—sometimes arduous and mechanical, other times meditative and arbitrary. The labour invested in each piece imbues the work with a kind of humanity and the process/time spent returns my focus to the immediate present. In many ways, the work is a meditation on time and a conscious attempt to create something that doesn’t participate in a utilitarian system of meaning. Matt Trahan holds a BFA from the University of Western Ontario (2009) and an MFA from the University of Victoria (2012). In 2019, he opened an independent art gallery in Victoria called Empty Gallery, which held 13 solo exhibitions by various emerging and mid-career artists from across Canada before closing in 2021 due to the pandemic. He currently lives and works in Victoria.

Territorial Imperative: An exhibition of artists' moving image work November 3 to 25, 2023 | Wed to Sat 12 to 5pm Deluge Contemporary Art | 636 Yates St, Victoria | http://deluge.ca Territorial Imperative explores issues around ecology, colonialism, commodified landscapes and interspecies communication with media installations by Sarah Ballard, Big Top Collective, Yusuf Demirors, Kimberly Forero-Arnías, Janelle VanderKelen and Sebastian Wiedemann. The six works presented here—all made on analog, celluloid film—engage with imperialist motivations, the environmental effects of late capitalism, traditional ecological knowledge and the regenerative power of nature.

Antimatter [media art] International Media Art & Experimental Cinema Screenings & Installations Deluge Contemporary Art, 636 Yates Street, Victoria BC Full schedule, program guide and tickets at http://antimatter.ca Encompassing screenings, installations, performances and media hybrids, Antimatter provides a noncompetitive festival setting in Victoria, British Columbia, free from commercial and industry agendas. The 26th annual event starting October 20 presents 111 films in-person and online, as well as free public installations and a special group exhibition through November. Hailing from 30 countries, the majority of festival offerings are world, North American or Canadian premieres. As in the past three years, Antimatter 2023 is a hybrid IRL/online event: in-person screenings at Deluge Contemporary Art are followed by online streaming of most programs for 24 hours the next day.

Over the last decade, Barry Doupé has produced an acclaimed body of hand-drawn and computer-generated animated films. Shaped in part by experimental writing and drawing exercises, Doupé’s films are often characterized by fragmented and porous narrative structures, richly textured characters and surreal everyday situations. The artist has recently produced a series of digital drawings and animations using software developed for the Commodore Amiga, a computer that was first introduced in the mid-eighties and became the industry standard for graphics and animation. The resulting works revel in the capacities of this early technology to evoke both strange and nostalgic visual effects. Born in Victoria in 1982, Barry Doupé holds a Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. His films have been screened nationally and internationally at festivals and venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, Pleasure Dome (Toronto), MOCCA (Toronto), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Tate Modern (London). Recent exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Western Front (Vancouver) and Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles). Deluge Contemporary Art Opening Saturday, September 9 @ 2pm 636 Yates St, Victoria | deluge.ca | Wed–Sat noon–5pm

Opening Friday, April 28 @ 7pm Deluge Contemporary Art 636 Yates St, Victoria BC | http://deluge.ca | Wed–Sat, 12–5pm Canadian artist Laura Dutton has long been interested in making photo-based work untethered from referents. This approach has allowed her the exploration, study and documentation of the ineffable while illuminating the materiality of the photo itself. Staring Into Fog arose from a trip to St. John’s, Newfoundland where the artist experienced an extreme example of this natural weather phenomenon from Signal Hill, leading her to embrace it as a subject that both conceals and reveals. This will be Dutton’s second solo exhibition with Deluge Contemporary after Nearness To or Distance From in 2018 and will include photographs and moving image. Laura Dutton is a photo/video-based artist and an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria. She received an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2011 and a BFA (Hons.) from Concordia University, Montréal in 2006. Dutton works with photography and video installation to unravel the materiality of photographic images and disrupt our ability to look straight through to the referent described. By obscuring, degrading, or removing the subject matter altogether, her images reveal their own process and become distilled suggestions of what once stood before the lens, offering an epistemological space for the viewer to meditate on the act of seeing and knowing. Recent solo exhibitions include The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna), Deluge Contemporary (Victoria), Esker Foundation Project Space (Calgary), PAVED Arts (Saskatoon), VU Photo (Québec City) and group exhibitions at Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Jones (Vancouver), Chernoff Fine Art (Vancouver) and Open Space (Victoria). She was included in the opening exhibition for the inaugural year of the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver and was the Québec winner of the 2006 BMO First Art competition. She has received project grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council. Her work is included in collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Bank of Montreal and the University of the Fraser Valley.

Opening Friday, January 27, 7pm. Deluge Contemporary Art 636 Yates Street, Victoria BC | http://deluge.ca Exhibition Hours: Wed–Sat 12-4pm (Thurs 1-5pm) Split Screen is an experiment in encouraging language and conversation between 2D (in this case painting) and media artworks while expanding experiential possibilities for viewers. Less a situation of work coexisting alongside other work in aid of a specific set of ideas, appositions or overarching theme, the exhibition loosely harnesses syncopations—visual, audial, kinetic—to imagine a larger composition within which infinite possibilities for comprehension exist and from which infinite numbers of questions arise, much like abstraction itself. In Leslie Bauer’s Fahren 7 velocity deforms our understanding of static objects, effecting surfaces into recondite dynamic shapes. “Traffic, as something very essential and characteristic of a particular time, is presented as a pattern of order and a perceptible form of structuring space and time. Locomotion makes a holistic view impossible. In the state of movement, speed and distance determine the perception of the landscape traversed. The road network itself is a pattern, a space-rastering construct, which in turn offers a reservoir of patterns, images and narratives." Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s film Dada Ship wrests itself away from the homogeneity of the historical movement to set sail for other, queerer shores employing disrupted stereoscopy and collaged détournement of archival imagery. In his paintings, Todd Lambeth has long been interested in optically challenging unfixed areas of interest by flipping figure and ground. Like the moving image artists in Split Screen, Lambeth understands the actions of fracturing, splicing and splitting in order to animate lacunae between seeing and recognition, between “this” and “that.” Kate Shults has created a video portrait of a disaster—2017’s Hurricane Irma—from the precarious safety of her home in inland Central Florida. Through anticipation, impact and aftermath, Irma explores the fragility of digital images and landscapes while deftly challenging the politics of looking. While the artists in Split Screen engage with varying approaches and concerns, they often utilize similar techniques and processes—layering, montage, chroma shifting and hybrid analog/digital workflows—to enrich the vocabulary of contemporary abstraction across disparate media.

Live Expanded Cinema Performance by Sara Sowell Deluge Contemporary Art | 636 Yates St, Victoria BC | http://antimatter.ca Dada’s Daughter is an expanded cinema performance comprising 16mm projections, cinema-objects and a live score. The performance is introduced with hand-developed black and white 16mm photograms made from the imprints of microplastic stars, tacks, jewelry and industrial scrap metal. This process of exposing objects onto celluloid is drawn from Man Ray’s “rayographs,” produced as early as 1923. Spliced in between these images are sections of clear film leader that cue a live performance re-animating the cinema-objects used to create the photograms. When placed in front of the projector these objects create tactile optical images; impressions of form, shape and pattern that reenact the photogramming process. The presence of the photogram reel and performative qualities of this work highlight the tension between ontological concepts of cinema—the material and the ephemeral.

Expanded Cinema/Magic Lantern Performance by Melissa Ferrari Deluge Contemporary Art, 636 Yates Street, Victoria Relict: A Phantasmagoria is an experimental documentary performed with antique magic lanterns and hand-drawn animation. Invoking the history of magic lantern phantasmagoria as an exercise in belief and perception, Relict considers the zeitgeist of pseudoscience, fake news, religion and documentary ethics collapsed within contemporary cryptozoology. Adapting modern cryptozoological lore such as the Loch Ness Monster to hand-drawn magic lantern slides based on antique designs, Relict employs the visual language of magic lantern phantasmagoria, including geared slides and dissolving views. These pre-cinematic images are infused with the aesthetics of veracity in current nonfiction filmmaking, including CGI speculative animated documentary, thermal imaging and interventions of rotoscoped documentary re-enactment. The performer’s comments on skeptical cryptozoology are nested in a collage of audio including interviews with Dr. Brian Regal (Keane University), a leading historian of science on the politics of skepticism in cryptozoology, recent creationist sermons and excerpts of pseudoscientific wildlife documentaries ranging from Disney’s infamous White Wilderness (1958) to the Discovery Channel’s Mermaids (2012).

Antimatter 2022: International Media Art Festival Celebrates 25 Years International media art and experimental cinema: screenings, performances, installations. Deluge Contemporary Art | 636 Yates Street, Victoria BC While Antimatter [media art] is a powerhouse in the world of experimental moving image work, its programming remains personal, intimate and thoughtful. The 25th annual festival this October 20 to 30 will present more than 120 films and live expanded cinema performances—in-person and in online streaming programs, as well as free public installations and virtual artist talks/profiles. Hailing from more than 30 countries, three-quarters of festival offerings are world, North American or Canadian premieres. Tickets for in-person screenings and performances can be purchased on the Antimatter website. Installations and online programs are free or by donation. The complete schedule and festival program guide is available online and throughout Greater Victoria now: antimatter.ca.

Opening Friday, September 9, 7pm Deluge Contemporary Art 636 Yates Street, Victoria BC 250 385 3327 | deluge.ca Wed to Sat, 12 to 5pm In making art, it’s not that I have nothing to say, rather, I choose to say nothing—preferring the artwork find you, the viewer, held between the spatial complexity/absorption of not knowing. This recent body of work marks my continuing interest in the built environment of the city. Where our cinematic experience of space and time is shaped by informational matrixes of light, reflection and perpetual movement. What if the ephemeral aura of contemporary city life could be retrieved, or even suspended momentarily? Like the earlier futurists, my artworks orchestrate the unstable and conditional reveal of things, objects and pictures, as if dislodged fragments extracted from an urban field. With repurposed charge—these new abstractions exist like individual flashes of synchronic flotsam and jetsam captured upon your light-washed retina. I have long been drawn to the avant-garde for its brash experimentation and futurist vision. This influence has led me to develop ideas fluidly and free of didactic impulse. My practice is an open ended studio pursuit around the construction of objects, images and the ephemeral voids of light and shadow—necessary in our perception of the material world. Intuition also plays a big part in my process, helping to keep the work fresh aesthetically and intellectually tuned to the ever changing cultural/societal vagaries of time. Robert Youds, a brief narrative: I graduated from the University of Victoria in 1978 with a BFA, and completed my MFA from York University, Toronto in 1982. I have been working and exhibiting my artwork professionally since the late 70s. While I initially began my career as a painter, by the early 80s I became interested in issues of colour and space beyond the limitations of the historically pre-ordained aesthetic boundaries. These goals developed into my career-long query of real space and its relationship to the constructed object. Perhaps by today’s standards this may no longer seem like such a radical claim, but with a few exceptions of internationally known artists like Judd, Stella, Palermo, Truit, Flavin, Pfaff, Irwin—among other notables of the time—there were not many artists significantly contributing toward the jurisdictional shift away from and therefore between the identifying areas of sculpture and painting. This early change in my work was also being driven my growing interest in architecture and industrial design. I saw these professional fields as holding even further possibilities for my artworks operation within the social and psychological realms of viewer experience. I have had my work shown in prestigious galleries and institutions such as Surrey Art Gallery (2019), Site Santa Fe, NM (1999), Vancouver Art Gallery (2015), National Gallery of Canada (2010), Xi’an Art Museum, China (2014), Remai Modern (2019), Power Plant (1995), Oliver Art Center, CCAC, Oakland (1999), Art Gallery of Ontario (2003), Mendel Art Gallery, SK,(2013), Today Museum, Beijing (2015), Glenbow Museum, Calgary (2006), Museum of Mexico City (1999) and Hamilton Art Gallery (2021), among many others.

Why This Word: Hou I-Ting | Valentina Jager | Wang Yahui Curated by Jo Ying Peng July 17 to August 21, 2021 Deluge Contemporary Art 636 Yates Street, Victoria BC 250 385 3327 | deluge.ca Gallery Hours: Wed to Sat 12 to 4 pm Why This Word is an exhibition that draws an axis between interpretation and vocalization to deconstruct the act of writing as a way to shape identity. The title is inspired by a quote—“the word is my fourth dimension”—in Clarice Lispector’s novel Agua Viva, and partly borrowed from a biography of the author (Why This World, Benjamin Moser, Oxford University Press, 2009). Referencing the looming myths of Lispector’s own life as a means to speak to universal female experiences, Why This Word considers how fractures in the socio-political world may otherwise remain invisible.

Opening: Saturday, January 23, 12 to 5pm Book Launch: Saturday, February 20, 3pm (COVID protocols in place: capacity, distancing, masks) Deluge Contemporary Art 636 Yates Street, Victoria BC 250 385 3327 | deluge.ca Gallery Hours: Thurs to Sat 12 to 5 pm A collection of individual works that can be read in concert with one another or on their own, A Separate Peace, and other bouquets continues Kegan McFadden’s exploration of the queer imperative through printed matter, experiments in textiles and sculpture. Accompanying this exhibition will be the release of two new publications by McFadden: local artist book publisher, flask, presents A Separate Peace, a 500-page tome related to the central work in this exhibition. As We Try & Sleep Press has partnered with Deluge on the publication of and other bouquets, which includes essays by Letch Kinloch, Kim Nguyen and Jeanne Randolph commissioned in response to McFadden's work from the evolving series Exuberant Intimacy. A new video work derived from A Separate Peace will be available via the Deluge website throughout the presentation of this exhibit. This video comprises the five hundred images McFadden has assembled to investigate the nature of homosocial and queer male relationships and includes the reading of an essay he wrote in response to this collection. Kegan McFadden is a writer, curator, publisher and artist whose work has been exhibited in print and exhibition form throughout Canada. Partners in Crime, a fifteen-year survey exhibition of McFadden’s printed matter, artist’s books, and multiples was produced for HOTAM Press (Vancouver) in 2020. This is McFadden’s first solo show in Victoria, where he now calls home.

23rd annual Antimatter Festival. Screenings, installations and online programs of international media art and experimental cinema. Nightly screening programs 6pm and 8pm at Deluge Contemporary Art repeat online the next day for 24 hours. Full program guide and details at http://antimatter.ca

Curated by Andrea Valentine-Lewis Opening Friday, September 11, 7-9pm Deluge Contemporary Art 636 Yates Street, Victoria For this exhibition, Callum Monteith and Alex Tedlie-Stursberg will present a new body of work that considers the contradictory nature of the term Utopos. Through the development of their shared research interests including the relationship between humans and nature, explorations into artificiality, manicuring of environments and abstracted or absurd artistic gestures, Monteith and Stursberg challenge the conditions of Utopia. Their research has advanced through an open and wide-ranging dialogue between the artists that looks to many topics for inspiration, including pop-culture, sociological/philosophical studies, art history and fictional narratives. Gallery hours: Wed–Sat, 12-5pm

La Decanatura (Elkin Calderón Guevara & Diego Piñeros García) On March 25th, 1970, less than a year after the arrival of the first man on the moon, The Space Communications Centre of Colombia was inaugurated in the tiny municipality of Chocontá. The monumental satellite antenna, built in the middle of an untamed landscape, would be responsible for microwave transmissions of radio and telephone signals. In 1981 the second antenna or Ground Station for International Communications would complete the Space Communications Centre complex. Chocontá, whose colonial name is the Loyal and Noble Villa de Santiago de Chocontá, began to be known as the "Satellite City of Colombia.” For more than two decades the Satellite City was a destination for the curious. 45 years later it is in decline; people no longer visit, while the surrounding landscape seems to slowly absorb these massive and neglected structures. Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia was planned as a tribute, a lullaby and a farewell. The Chocontá Symphonic Youth Band, whose members range from seven to fifteen—too young to have first-hand knowledge of the antennas in their prime—were responsible for creating and performing a requiem. The structures’ imposing nature and location within the inhospitable climate of the dense Colombian savannah evoke a glorious past, an agonizing present and an uncertain future. La Decanatura is a collective made up of Bogotá artists Elkin Calderón Guevara and Diego Piñeros García. Their artistic projects generate new approaches to art from hybrid perspectives and disciplines, questioning hegemonic forms of knowledge and power. La Decanatura is interested in displacement as a metaphor to explore other realities, as well as to create links between memory and ruins of the past. Through the audiovisual medium La Decanatura establishes poetics of time and space, playing with mise-en-scène to document events, places and objects, creating narratives of dislocations and alteration towards new readings of reality. Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat, Noon–5pm