Apertures
Curated Digital Micro-Residency
Curated By Felix Kalmenson
With work by Rosa Aiello, Matt Goerzen, and Elliot Vredenburg
Gallery 44 Vitrines
March 8-April 13, 2013
Exhibition Website: LINK
Rosa Aiello: Blog Residency
Matt Goerzen: Blog Residency
Elliot Vredenburg: Blog Residency
Project Text
Apertures is a month long micro-residency of three digital-based artists within the mediating installation of artist and curator Felix Kalmenson. Like the adjacent show Site, Sight, and Insight, Apertures dissects and investigates the process of image making; deconstructing the notion of the camera, with the aperture serving as a frame of looking upon digital images constructed in virtual spaces, from Toronto, Montreal, and Berlin. The virtual spaces of Gallery 44's three vitrines will serve as digital sketchbooks where the participating artists—Rosa Aiello (Montreal), Matt Goerzen (Berlin) and Elliot Vredenburg (Toronto)—will upload work daily.
The framing structures constructed by Kalmenson are wooden trapezoidal pyramids made to resemble the bellows of a camera with the aperture used for viewing the constructed image rather than constructing one. The images are uploaded by the participating artists onto three Tumblr pages which are blocked from the wider internet, existing only within the computers in which they are accessed by the artists and the monitors in the vitrines. In this sense Apertures attempts to temporarily create a site specificity to the internet, linking the digital spaces of the participating artists with the site of the vitrines. When the show was completed the archives of the Tumblr will made public to the wider internet.
Apertures also attempts to subvert the fixed organizational functions of established artist-run centres such as Gallery 44, which have become inflexible, due to long term programming, and inaccessible to younger emerging artists. By curating within a curated space set out for Kalmenson by Gallery 44, he attempted to inject less fixed, more spontaneous forms of art presentation more reflective of an increasingly digital age. Furthermore, in doing so Kalmenson involved other emerging artists allowing for the opportunity to multiply and increase accessibility to the mean of communication and reproduction of images in the institutional setting.
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