CO-LAB

CO-LAB: A Workshop + Exhibition Project
Co-presented by Centre A and Vancouver New Music

Exhibition: July 16 – August 20 at Centre A
Opening: Friday, July 15, 8pm
Closing potluck and catalogue launch: Saturday, August 20, 3-7pm

Artists: Julie Gendron & Emma Hendrix, Germaine Koh & Gillian Jerome, Andrew Lee & Jennifer Schine

Curator: Debra Zhou

Centre A is pleased to present the exhibition component of CO-LAB.

CO-LAB is a cross-disciplinary workshop and exhibition project that focuses on sound, collaboration and the gallery’s physical location. The project brings together a group of Vancouver-based artists from diverse backgrounds to design four projects that incorporate the workshop format and invite public participation. The workshops took place from May to July 2011. The artists/workshop leaders developed experimental models of collaboration with more than seventy participants in total. Each workshop offered an introduction of the project and background research, followed by hands on practice and a collective art making process. The participants not only shared the innovative learning experience but also contributed recorded material for the artwork. The initiation of the workshops is inspired by Jaques Attali’s notion that sound, the organization of noise, is more than an object of study. It is a way of perceiving the world and it reflects the manufacture of society.

The exhibition features the three new works based on the workshop: Noise/De-noise by Julie Gendron and Emma Hendrix, Map Sense by Germaine Koh and Gillian Jerome, and Vertical City by Andrew Lee and Jennifer Schine.

Julie Gendron and Emma Hendrix

NOISE/DE-NOISE

The original workshop, led by artist/composer Giorgio Magnanensi, focused on the use of noise-reduction-algorithms in a creative and compositional manner. Instead of utilizing denoising-techniques for the restoration of damaged audio signals, these processes were applied to field recordings of Vancouver China Town. Sound artist duo Julie Gendron and Emma Hendrix then manipulated and transferred the recorded material to analogue tapes to be played throughout the exhibition. The deterioration of sound resulted from the repeated plays is expected to reveal multiple layers of sound reality. Audience will be able to experience the result of audio-erasement-processes while lying on a waterbed in the gallery space. This inquisitive approach interrogates what counts as sound when it can be used to explore the dynamic relationships between its complex structures and the original environment.

Germaine Koh and Gillian Jerome

MAP SENSE  www.map-sense.com

Artist Germaine Koh and writer Gillian Jerome bring together their mutual interests in community work, urban space, and the sound of words to create this interactive field map. With website designers Julie Gendron and Brady Marks, they developed a system for geotagging images, recorded text fragments and audio field recordings onto an interactive map that gives a multi-sensory view of a neighbourhood. The project is guided by a belief in the need for local knowledge, opinions, images, poetry, sounds, and stories in the official record of a place. This mapping also makes room for sensual, poetic and politicized content within reference material, and possibilities for alternative stories to emerge. The first version begins with Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown. The website welcomes contribution from everyone throughout the exhibition. To add to the map, post images, videos and words on the project’s facebook page, or email your still images, audio, text, or video about specific places to[email protected]. Tell us the location on the map for your content. By contributing material, you confirm that you have the rights to it and agree to have it appear on line as part of the map sense project.

Andrew Lee and Jennifer Schine

Vertical City

At the Vertical City workshop, artist Andrew Lee and Jennifer Schine incorporated soundwalk as a way to navigate concepts of place and imaginability through the political and economic climate of Vancouver, with a specific emphasis on the site of SFU’s Woodward’s building. The idea of “vertical city” was explored by extending Michel deCerteau’s notion of “Walking in the City” to experience the neighbourhood as both walkers and listeners and the power dynamics of being above, below and on the ground. The artists constructed a sound chamber to house a composition made from recorded soundscapes by the participants as well as artists’ own material, where the notion of verticality is incorporated into the structure.

Special Thanks to the following workshop participants who contributed sound recordings, and without whom the exhibition couldn’t have been completed.

Noise/De-noise: Yi Xin Tong, Jodie Mak, Robyn Jacob, Judy Cheung, Jason Derr, Anakana Schofield, David Leith, John Oliver, Dan Kibke, Emily Thacker, Constantine Katsiris, Rob Birdwise

Map Sense: Jacquie Leggatt, Christine Stewart, Hyung Min Yoon, Andrew Clark, Diego Maranan, Aerlyn Weissman, Debbie Blair, Jamie Griffith, Anakana Schofield, Yi Xin Tong, Donna Dykeman, Vanessa Kam

Vertical City: Katy Churche, Randy Lee Cutler, Brady Marks, Lara Szabo Greisman, Hua Phoebe Jin, Mhenowah Meyhar, Ian Lyle, Debbie Blair, Rene Baert, Joni Low, Benny Xu, Andy Liu, Cornelia Wyngaarden, Jacquelyn Ross

Biographies:

Julie Gendron

Julie has led numerous art and design projects that consider interactivity, accessibility, playfulness and change. Her main inspiration is to design experiences that allow people to explore and create their own point of view, culture and communities. Julie currently works independently under the guise of desiringproductions.com as a user experience designer, writer and multidisciplinary artist.

Emma Hendrix

Emma is a multi-disciplinary artist and sound designer with an interest in the emotive qualities of sound and the complex relationship we have to our sonic environment. His work has been presented across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, including several awards locally and internationally.  He is also half of the sound art duo coin gutter.

Germaine Koh
Based in Vancouver, Germaine Koh is an internationally active artist recognized for her wide breadth of artistic practice concerned with the significance of everyday actions and familiar objects. Koh was a recipient of the 2010 VIVA Award, and a finalist for the 2004 Sobey Art Award. Formerly an Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, she is also an independent curator and partner in the independent record label weewerk.

Gillian Jerome
Gillian Jerome is a Vancouver based writer and poet. Her first book of non-fiction Hope In Shadows, Stories and Photographs from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (with Brad Cran) won the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award and was shortlisted for a BC Book Prize. She teaches literature at UBC, poetry to kids at inner-city schools in Vancouver and runs workshops with Geist magazine.

Andrew Lee
Andrew Lee is a Vancouver-based visual artist, writer, and musician. His installations, sculptures, video and photography have explored attitudes of disavowed culture, interlanguage in Canadian families. Lee has a B.A. from Simon Fraser University majoring in Art and Culture. He was a part of the exhibition First Nations/Second Nature at the Michael Audain gallery. He is the lead singer of the highly acclaimed indie rock band In Media Res.

Jennifer Schine
Jennifer Schine is a Masters student in the School of Communication at SFU and an active sound artist. Her research investigates concepts of identity, memory, and movement within the field of acoustic communication and soundscape studies. She was the recipient of the inaugural R. Murray Schafer Soundscape Award (2010) for her work exploring the practice of the soundwalk as a potential tool for memory retrieval.

Media Contact: Debra Zhou
604-683-8326, [email protected]

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Debra Zhou gratefully acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts through Assistance to Culturally Diverse Curators for Residencies in the Visual Arts.

Centre A gratefully acknowledges the support of all its patrons, sponsors, members, partners, private foundations, and government funding agencies, including the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver through the Office of Cultural Affairs.

Special thanks to
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Jeff Mettlewsky (Sound design for new media) www.jmsoundmedia.com