'runaway bunny' May 9 - June 17 2007, an exhibition of digital and analogue works by artists nichola feldman-kiss and Max Dean. As visual artists, Dean and feldman-kiss share a facility for technological and material innovation deeply integrated within a conceptual art making practice. runaway bunny is a relational installation; a story of two artists in conversation; a fusion of private and public.
This first collaborative public exhibition of feldman-kiss and Dean is composed of artifacts from the artists’ blended context of intimate and artistic dialogue and features an exceptional book work by each artist. Dean’s recent interactive video object, 'Blinky' (2004), is an intense and revealing self portrait in the tradition of cinema verité, while feldman-kiss’ massive volume, 'classically bound' (2003-2006), dispenses with the politics of figurative representation in favor of a precise numerical description of her idealized naked body. Among other works on view will be Max Dean’s interactive video object, 'I Snap', from his Niagara Falls series and from nichola feldman-kiss’ mean body database of three dimensional body scans, Projex-Mtl will present the 'chimaera set (torso) and a 'crowd of one self', consisting of 12 small bronze sculptures.
Max Dean has been exhibiting his interactive performance, sculpture and installation works since 1973 and is known internationally for being a pioneer in the machine arts. Dean's works are bound by his own entertainment of risk and choice coupled with his stealth implication of the viewer in his own-risk taking and choice-making. Similarly, nichola feldman-kiss implicates self reflective narratives in her performative exploration of identity, subjectivity and the production of self. feldman-kiss' multidisciplinary installations, performances and objects are characterized by pristine and minimal elegance, subtly and subversively disturbing that which we take for granted, asking us to reconsider basic questions about being bodies and becoming social in an age of digitally enhanced utopias.
Both artists use technology as a slave to ideas, embedding concentrated autobiographical content into form and process – performing the self through the work, mining personal insight, presenting intimate experience as universal example.
Among Max Dean’s noteworthy works of interactive performance and robotics about the nature of trust, control and empathy are autonomous installation, the Robotic Chair (1986-2006, collection of the Robotic Chair consortium), a generic-looking wooden chair with the
capacity to fall apart and put itself back together; the interactive robotic installation, Table (1985-2001, collection of the National Gallery of Canada), in which an aluminum table selects a participant with whom to establish a relationship; As Yet Untitled (1992-1995, collection of As Yet Untitled consortium), in which the participant has the opportunity to control the fate of a found family photograph; and ____ . (sic), through audio intervention, the audience has an opportunity to save the gagged and bound artist from being dragged to suspension by a winch (1978).
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Exhibitions
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