Opening Reception: Saturday, March 2, 2-5pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, March 2, 3:30pm
Exhibition Dates: March 2 – March 30, 2013
The gallery is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of work by visual artist Clive Holden. “Media, Mediated” features prints as well as new media installations that explore dynamism, variation, and renewal.
As part of Holden’s creative process, he mimics the seemingly random order found in nature. The result is that the final part in the creation of his new media works can be witnessed, live, through the use of randomization algorithms. His original materials (brief film segments or snap shots, for example) are "mediated" through their use in several related but distinct media. In this way, the relationship between art media and genres, and the charged spaces they create, informs the results on all sides. He hacks web technology to create complex patterned projections and media wall installations, and by watching these works' continually re-mixing juxtapositions (they can never be viewed the same way twice), the art itself teaches him how to complete each related print.
The balance between cinematic montage and visual motif is expressed in different ways through each medium. His installations (and also net art works viewable at cliveholden.com) are data-driven. They have no fixed duration and use cutting edge as well as lo-fi technology (such as HTML5, javascript, GIFs and film frame blow-ups), resulting in new hybrid forms. The often sequential polyptych prints also express this dynamism, containing charged movement that is expressed spatially.
Holden’s best-known work to-date is the multi-disciplinary project “Trains of Winnipeg” (2001 to 2006). The project includes an award-winning feature-length cycle of films that was exhibited internationally. His films have been screened at: the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Images Festival, Toronto; transmediale, Berlin; Anthology Film Archives, New York; the London Film Festival; the Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen; Kino Arsenal, Berlin; and the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam.
Currently, Holden is continuing his work on “U Suite,” a project that began in 2006 and will be completed in 2020. He explores 21st century views on utopianism in its broadest sense. The theme of humanity’s relentless hope, as dramatized by the continuous renewal found in nature, runs throughout the project. So far, “Chapters” and individual elements of the project have been exhibited at the Toronto International Film Festival; Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke; Light Industry film series, Brooklyn; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Images Festival, Toronto; Platform Centre for Photographic + digital arts, Winnipeg; and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax.
Holden’s installation, “UNAMERICAN UNFAMOUS”, curated by Gaëlle Morel, is also on view on the Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall at the Ryerson Image Centre until April 14, 2013. Holden asks, “Is it un-American to be unfamous? Are Americans failures if they die without fame?” Drawing from the Black Star Collection at Ryerson University, he uses the “unfamous” as an organizing principle in this selection of one hundred image details and faces in an innovative new media work that balances time-based and non-time based art forms.
