There Should Be Gardens
curated by Amber Christensen
September 2-26, 2015

Opening reception: Wednesday, September 2, 2015, 7-9pm at InterAccess.

In its 14th year, the InterAccess Emerging Artists Exhibition features new media work from local and national early career artists, artists transitioning to new media/technology practices and upper year post-secondary and graduate students. InterAccess is a leading voice on the international new media arts stage and this exhibition offers artists a platform for early professional development. Former participating artists and curators have gone on to work and exhibit at such institutions as the Doris McCarthy Gallery, The Walter Phillips Gallery, Western Front, Trinity Square Video, Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art, Space Media Arts in London UK, FACT, Liverpool, and Transmediale in Berlin.

The 2015 selected curator is Amber Christensen, a researcher and curator who studies feminist/queer curatorial and media arts practices. She has recently curated film/video for Vtape and Neutral Ground and is a member of the Pleasure Dome Film and Video Curatorial Collective, and an organizer with the Feminist Art Conference. This exhibition was curated based on over 90 submissions received through an open call for submissions.

There Should Be Gardens brings together five Canadian emerging and early career new media artists whose work addresses the interconnectedness of technologies, ecologies, botanies, gender and the cosmos. The exhibition explores the materiality and affectivity of matter, blurring the focus of feminism and queer feminism between the human and non-human. Featuring Alana Bartol (Calgary), Adrienne Crossman (Toronto), Anna Eyler (Ottawa/Montreal), Kara Stone (Montreal), and Alize Zorlutuna (Toronto).

About the artists

Alana Bartol is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Windsor, Ontario. Her collaborative and individual works explore concepts of visibility, transformation and survival through our relationships with the living non-human world and each other. Bartol's work has been presented and screened nationally and internationally including PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), Karsh-Masson Gallery (Ottawa), Simultan Festival (Romania), Museo de la Ciudad (Mexico) and Media City International Film Festival (Windsor, ON). She holds a MFA from Wayne State University (Detroit), where she developed and taught the first Performance Art course in the Department of Art, co-founded the student-run gallery and received a Rumble Fellowship. She currently lives in Calgary and teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Adrienne Crossman is an artist, educator and curator working and living in Toronto. A graduate of OCAD University, she holds a BFA in Integrated Media and a Minor in Digital and Media Studies. She has completed residencies at Spark Contemporary Art Space in Syracuse, New York and La Baraque in Montréal, Quebec. Her practice explores the manipulation and deconstruction of digital and analogue media in order to create new artifacts through formal re-interpretations. Her curatorial practice involves a strong emphasis on fostering community within the digital new media art world and bridging the gap between virtual and physical space. Adrienne is currently a Programming Coordinator at Xpace Cultural Centre.  

Anna Eyler is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal, QC. Eyler holds a BA in Religious Studies and Art History from Carleton University (2010) and a BFA from the University of Ottawa (2015). She is the recipient of numerous awards, notably the Governor General’s Academic Medal (2010), the Jacqueline Fry Scholarship (2014), and the Artengine New Media Award for her graduate exhibition (2015). 

Kara Stone is an art-maker creating videogames, interactive art and traditional crafts. She achieved an MA in Communication and Culture at a joint program at York and Ryerson University, focusing on mental health, affect, feminism, and videogames. Her work has been featured in Vice, Wired, The Atlantic, and NPR, and consists of feminist art with a focus on gendered perspectives of affect – but it’s much more fun than it sounds.

Alize Zorlutuna is a Turkish-Canadian artist and writer who employs a diverse range of media in her practice. Working in sculpture, performance, audio and video, her work draws upon her experience as an individual living between two cultures. Negotiating multiple perspectives simultaneously, this embodied liminality informs her creative practice, manifesting in explorations of interstices. Her work explores themes of diasporic settler relationships to land and colonial violence, queer identity and Islamic culture, institutional access and historiography, as well as gendered experiences of cultural performance and/or production. The desire to activate interstices where differing perspectives meet, and the meanings created in those meetings rests at the heart of her work.

About the curator

Amber Christensen is a researcher, librarian, organizer and emerging media arts curator. She is currently completing an MA in Cinema and Media Studies at York University and also holds a Masters of Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her research and curatorial practice explores feminist and queer feminist modes of cultural productions and collectives through investigations of the affective experience. She has curated film and video screenings for Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative (Regina, SK), Regional Support Network (Toronto), Vtape (Toronto) and is a member of the Toronto based Pleasure Dome Film and Video Curatorial Collective.

Image: Anna Eyler, Fugue in 3 Steps (2015).