The Western Front

Saturday May 31, 2008, 12-7 pm
Public Viewing & Reception: Saturday May 31, 2008, 5:30-7 pm
Location: Western Front, Luxe Hall (303 East 8th Ave, Vancouver)

Fee: $30.00 for the workshop general admission; $20.00 for students; $15.00 for Western Front members
Reservations: exhibitions@front.bc.ca or call 604 876 9343

Facilitated by Max Goldfarb (US), Joanne Bristol (CAN), Marisa Jahn (US), dancers & musicians TBA

Accompanying the exhibition Kits for an Encounter on view at Western Front Exhibitions from April 26 to June 31, 2008, Volume Drawings: Invisible Structures, Movement-Triggered Boundaries is a workshop and installation inspired by the notion of “kit bashing,” in which a kit is appropriated or repurposed for an alternate use. Participants attending the workshop will solder and assemble a basic kit consisting of a trip-sensor and laser used in domestic and commercial surveillance (no prior electronics experience necessary). The group will subsequently experiment with this infrared drawing tool, its bearing on the body and movement, then build/choreograph a score of triggers and responses. Throughout this experiment, participants will experiment with sound, feedback, and delays in collaboration with a Vancouver-based electronic musician (TBA). The workshop culminates in an hour-long installation open to the public where the invisible architecture will be performed and experienced.

BIOS
Joanne Bristol is an artist and writer who has presented installations, performances and single-channel videos across North America for the past 15 years. Current projects include bentaerial.net, a work for the web about technology, obsolescence and invention, and the Institute for Feline & Human Collaboration (IFHC), a site for ongoing projects in interspecies communication and interaction. Joanne has taught intermedia, sculpture and performance art at universities and art colleges in western Canada for the past seven years. She also curates and writes about contemporary art.

Max Goldfarb’s work intersects many disciplines. His public works projects enjoining radio transmissions and urban infrastructure reveal the convergence of communications technology with the built environment. The resulting themes in his work concern the precariously narrow margin between safety and danger, order and instability. Goldfarb graduated from the MIT Visual Arts Program in 2006 and currently teaches at Parsons (New York). Goldfarb has exhibited his work at such venues as the Mjellby Art Center in Halmstad Sweden, Art & Idea, Mexico City, De Stadgalerij, NL, Fringe Exhibitions Space in Los Angeles, CA, and SculptureCenter, NY. He recently completed, QSL Serial, a dispatch project, with Free103Point9 Transmissionsion Arts. His work can presently be seen in the exhibition, Off the Grid at the Neuberger Museum of Art in New York.

Artist and Pond Co-Founder Marisa Jahn is a lover of kits and performer of drawings. She has presented and exhibited work in public places, galleries, and museums most recently at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Eyebeam (NY), ISEA/Zero One 2004, the Moore Space (Miami), the Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami), the Sonoma County Museum of Art (CA), in public places in Tokyo, Estonia, Istanbul, Honduras, and in San Francisco at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, the Asian Art Museum. Forthcoming exhibitions with her main collaborator Steve Shada include solo exhibitions at Camac (France), the MIT Museum, Samson Projects (Boston), and Jenny Jaskey Gallery. Forthcoming publications include ByProducts (YYZ Books) and Recipes for an Encounter (Western Front). Jahn received an MS from MIT Visual Art Department (2007) and is currently an artist-in-residence in the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Pond: art, activism, and ideas (www.mucketymuck.org) is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a forum through which experimental artists may share ideas and foster a mutually beneficial relationship with the larger community.