September 26-November 22, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, September 26th, 8pm

Special Nuit Blanche Performance by Evan Tapper, October 4th from 7pm-7am at InterAccess. Presented by the Koffler Gallery in partnership with InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre

Special Artist Talk, Daniel Barrow
Thursday, October 16, 8pm

Juicy Couture Panel Discussion, Saturday, October 18, 2-5pm
 

"For nearly a decade, my mother, Beatrice, has tried to lure me back home with newspaper clippings of people 'making it' in the arts in Winnipeg. It hasn't worked, but it has given me an abandonment complex, and kept me curious about the prairies as an arts hub."
-Jennifer Cherniack, Exhibition Curator

Read Cherniack's essay here.

Beatrice's Centre for Student Affairs examines a small group of artists who graduated from the University of Manitoba in the early nineties as a microcosm for art school and art making. A research-based project that is part stalking, part talking and lots of third-hand information, Beatrice's Centre for Student Affairs gets to the bottom of the art community experience. It speaks to everything we learned, both inside and outside of the classroom. Curator Cherniack tries to unravel the yarn and peel away at the stories therein.

The shared experiences of these artists, and the artworks they have created since graduating around 1994, have common threads - whether a result of their education, generation, by chance, or simply by a figment of the curator's imagination. Their works are shameless, no-holds barred narratives telling stories about stories, about gossip, about drama, about relationships.

Jo-Anne Balcaen's videos, audio works and conceptual installations speak to the commercialization of desire through popular culture, with her most recent works relating her experiences as a fan of a rock band who carries her excitement a little too far, while Daniel Barrow tells tragic, beautiful stories of lonely isolated outcasts. Evan Tapper's raw and embarrassing first-person narratives are hilariously sorrowful, and beautifully DIY - encapsulating the humanity and contradiction of the prairie experience.

Jo-Anne Balcaen is Manitoban born, Montreal-based artist who works primarily in video, sculpture and installation. She graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1994 and went on to complete her MFA at Concordia University in 2000. Her work examines the commercialization of desire through popular culture, and how this creates an inflated sense of expectation. Her recent focus has been the relationship between popular music and obsessive female fandom. Since 1995, Balcaen has exhibited her work in venues throughout Quebec, Canada, Europe, and the US.

Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Specifically, he creates and adapts comic book narratives to "manual" forms of animation by projecting, layering or manipulating drawings on overhead projectors or, more recently, antiquated digital paint programs. Since 1993, Barrow has used an overhead projector to relay ideas and short narratives. He variously refers to this practice as "graphic performance or manual animation." Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), New Langton Arts (San Francisco), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Barrow is the 2007 winner of the Canada Council's Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival's Images Prize. Barrow is currently a finalist, in competition for the 2008 Sobey Art Award.

Evan Tapper was born in Winnipeg and is currently based in Toronto. He received a BFA from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. His multimedia work has been exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, South America, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, China, and Japan. Recent residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu Japan, and Charles Street Video. He has received grants and awards from such organizations as the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, New York State Council on the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba. Evan has held academic appointments at the State University of New York Fredonia, Ontario College of Art and Design, and McMaster University.

Jennifer Cherniack is the Assistant Curator and Public Programmes Manager at InterAccess. She has exhibited her artwork in Toronto, London, Ontario, Winnipeg, Quebec City and in Venice Italy. Originally from Winnipeg, Jennifer brings several years' experience in curating, outreach, education and installation at the National Film Board of Canada's Toronto Mediatheque, Gallery 44, Sketch and Regent Park Focus in Toronto, the ArtLab Gallery in London, Ontario and numerous independent projects in both Toronto and Winnipeg.

Beatrice Cherniack is the curator's mother.

Special Nuit Blanche Performance by Evan Tapper

October 4th from 7pm-7am at InterAccess.
Presented by the Koffler Gallery in partnership with InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre

This interactive performance by Toronto artist Evan Tapper offers the timely opportunity to converse with God. Nuit Blanche 2008 falls during the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). According to tradition, on Rosh Hashanah the righteous and the wicked receive their judgment; on Yom Kippur this ruling is sealed. The intermediary days offer a time of introspection and atonement. For one night only, the Almighty Creator of the Universe will set up a heavenly office to receive visitors. Supplicants will sign in with Sheila, God�s secretary. (She hates her job and cannot wait to retire.) Also meet Brad, God�s intern. (He is a Communications student, thrilled to be here because it is going to look great on his resume.) Sheila and Brad will assist the public to meet with God, make their case, and atone for their sins.

Special Artist Talk: Daniel Barrow

Thursday, October 16, 8pm
Fee: $5, free for InterAccess members
Seating is limited, so come early to get one!

Join featured artist in Beatrice's Centre for Student Affairs and Sobey award finalist Daniel Barrow for an intimate night of performance, discussion and demonstration. Unlike other talks and performances, Barrow will not only talk about, and show examples of his work, he will also perform excerpts from his wide repertoire of overhead projector performances and share with the audience some of his quirky collections and inspirations. A talk that will turn any newcomer to Barrow's work an instant fan, and appeal to the Barrow aficionados everywhere, this casual, informative and downright entertaining evening is not to be missed.

Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Specifically, he creates and adapts comic book narratives to "manual" forms of animation by projecting, layering or manipulating drawings on overhead projectors or, more recently, antiquated digital paint programs. Since 1993, Barrow has used an overhead projector to relay ideas and short narratives. He variously refers to this practice as "graphic performance or manual animation." Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), New Langton Arts (San Francisco), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Barrow is the 2007 winner of the Canada Council's Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival's Images Prize. Barrow was also a finalist in competition for the 2008 Sobey Art Award.

For more information on Barrow's work, please go to: http://danielbarrow.com
For more information on the exhibition, please click here.

Juicy Couture Panel Discussion

Saturday, October 18, 2008 2-5pm.

Keynote Speaker: Sharon Alward, Professor, University of Manitoba.

With presentations by:
Rosemary Donegan, Independent Curator, Professor and administrator, Ontario College of Art & Design
Nicholas Brown, MA Art History, York University
Jennifer Slauenwhite, Digital Media Techinican, University of Western Ontario
Tejpal S. Ajji,(Adjunct Curator, Outreach) Justina M. Barnicke, Toronto

Moderators: Jennifer Cherniack, Assistant Curator/Public Programmes Manager and Curator of Beatrice's Centre for Student Affairs
Beatrice Cherniack, Social worker, and the Curator's mother.

When I set out to conduct research for this curatorial project, Beatrice's Centre for Student Affairs, or, How I learned that my mother was right about making art in a prairie town during the rise and fall of grunge music, I anticipated a rigorous academic endeavour, as this would be my first major curatorial effort in a public gallery. However, upon meeting and talking to people who were present in Winnipeg in the early 90s, I quickly realized that the most relevant information I encountered came from my interviewees-- personal accounts and oral histories of that time period. These first-, second-, and even third-hand accounts of situations, events, stories and mishaps provided a personal and human context to these educational experiences that are often quantified through grades, course calendars and class lists. These stories filled in the gaps, explaining why artists make and act like they do, using both the formalized, taught knowledge, and the acquired smarts to navigate their way into the larger, "real" world of artist-culture.

Juicy Couture is a panel discussion accompanying the InterAccess Exhibition Beatrice's Centre for Student Affairs, discussing this type of art school culture: the politics and the spaces in-between learning about and making art. The exhibition examines a small group of artists who graduated from the University of Manitoba in the early nineties as a microcosm for art school in general, speaking to the lessons learned both within the formalized structure of the classroom and in those informal exchanges and activities that occur outside of this space.

This panel seeks to broaden the discussion, bringing together professors, students and art school alumni from various institutions to engage in a frank discussion about teaching, learning, and talking their way through art school. This panel discussion speaks to the interactions that make, and/or break the people involved.

About the panelists and the topics discussed:

Keynote Speaker: Sharon Alward, Professor, University of Manitoba

Keynote address Sensei: The one who comes before (meditations on the art of teaching in the place without masters.)

He who learns but does not think is lost; he who thinks but does not learn is in great danger. -Confucius.

Suzi Gablik claims that one of the peculiar developments in our Western world is the loss of our sense of the divine side of life, of the power of imagination, myth, dream and vision. Rational and ego based, we have lost the ability to perceive other realities, to move between the worlds, as ancient shamans did. The image of the artist as a maker of objects circulated in a network of art-related institutions like galleries and museums is still the predominant art school paradigm. To encourage emerging artists to blur distinctions between art and life, work outside the gallery system and live a "magical life" is not without risk.

"My research into the bodily dimension of knowledge has led me to explore ritual gestures in an attempt to reassert the connectedness of things. Interested in expanding my experiences of art and mysticism beyond the predominantly Western ideas explored in my earlier works, I began exploiting other cultural practices to challenge ethics, meaning and the role of the artist in the current plural realities. As part of my interest in retrieving cultural practices to reconstitute and redefine ritual and searching for metaphors for the new cultural realities of artists, I began my journey into the traditional martial arts,. From my experiences training in the martial arts I bring to my teaching the certainty that ritual invites the sacred and that in art, martial or otherwise, thousands of techniques become useless in the absence of spirit."

Sharon Alward is a Canadian video/performance artist. Her creative works reference performance art and religious ritual as potential sites for creativity and transformation. She is interested in the feminist investigation of the bodily dimension of knowledge, beauty, awe, ethics, activism and the role of the artist. Sharon's commitment to performance stems from her conviction that an encounter is always more than its description. Her works have been exhibited in Canada, the U.S., U.K., France, Spain and the Netherlands, including the Liverpool Biennial, LACE in Los Angeles, Western Front, the American Film Institute and the National Screen Institute. Sharon has been nominated for an Art Pace Fellowship and a Blizzard Award for best Experimental Film. The recipient of numerous teaching awards, Sharon has been teaching for 23 years at the University of Manitoba, School of Art. She is a Full Professor and a Senior Fellow of St. John's College

Rosemary Donegan, Independent Curator, Professor and administrator, Ontario College of Art & Design

Speaking from her experience as a professor and administrator at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Rosemary Donegan will discuss some of the ideas and issues that exist within art and design schools and the complex relationship between studio education and the notion of a broad Liberal Arts education.

Rosemary Donegan is director of the new graduate program in criticism and curatorial practice at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto and an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Liberal Studies. As an independent curator and writer, her work has focused on modernity and industrial and urban culture in Canada. In her exhibitions and catalogues, including Industrial Images/Images Industrielles (1988); Work, Weather and the Grid (1991); and Ford City: Windsor (1994), a range of archival imagery and installations evoke layering, complexity, and the often contradictory nature of modernism and industrial life. Donegan has researched and curated exhibitions for numerous Canadian galleries. Her catalogue essay, "Sudbury: The Industrial Landscape," (1999) was awarded the Inco Curatorial Writing Award, and her book Spadina Avenue (1985) received the Canadian Historical Association Regional History Award and was nominated for the Toronto Book Awards. Her articles have been published in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Fuse, Prefix Photo, Parallelogram, Public, Canadian Forum, Fireweed, Labour/Le Travail, and Archivaria. Most recently she was a research fellow in the Curating Contemporary Art program at the Royal College of Art, London

Nicholas Brown, MA Art History, York University

Nicholas will discuss the tensions between studying and actively involving oneself in an art community. From the perspective of a writer and curator, he will address the limitations imposed by intense scholarly activity, limited financial means and the absence of institutional support on his attempts to maintain a curatorial practice that harnesses, rather than resists, such limitations. He will discuss his experiences with unconventional forms of curating and publishing that have coincided with practical institutional forms of apprenticeship.

Nicholas Brown is a recent graduate of York University's Graduate Programme in Art History with a curatorial diploma. He has worked with curator Gerald McMaster at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of York University, and currently as a gallery assistant at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. He is the Arts Editor for Color Magazine, is a regular contributor to the AGYU's Studio Blog ( ) and has written for The Fillip Review, Locus Suspectus, and C Magazine. Nicholas recently became the curator of Red Bull 381 Projects.

Jennifer Slauenwhite, Digital Media Techinican, University of Western Ontario

Jennifer will tell anecdotes to illustrate the unique location staff lives in between faculty and students. Jennifer firmly believes that being staff is the ideal position to be in on campus. She will relate her efforts to support students, often in ways that faculty can't and talk about the process of figuring out what are appropriate relationships in her work context.

Jennifer Slauenwhite has an MA in English from UNB, she also has a B'Ed from St. Thomas University; she took courses at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design for one of her employers. In her past she worked in journalism and scholarly publishing, adult education and audio-visual services jobs. Jennifer moved to London 9 years ago and got a job at Western as the computer lab coordinator for the Visual Arts Department

Tejpal S. Ajji, (Adjunct Curator, Outreach) Justina M. Barnicke, Toronto

Tejpal Ajji's presentation will pull from his experience in art school, when, along with his colleagues, he established an autonomous art school during an college faculty strike.

Tejpal Ajji is Adjunct Curator of Outreach at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. His position follows a term as JMB Gallery's Culturally Diverse Curator in Residence. As resident, he curated "Rightfully Yours," that examined artists whose performance work reconsiders the ideological deconstruction of nationality, sexuality, and ethnicity constructs. As part of an Outreach initiative for the exhibition, internationally acclaimed Kosovar-Albanian artist, Sislej Xhafa, was invited as artist-in-residence, to conduct a performance workshop with young artists. Ajji has organized a performance by Jamaican-Canadian artist Camille Turner in the guise of Miss Canadiana, and curated two performance exhibitions titled "Young and Restless" focusing on art students attending the several art institutions of Southern Ontario. In the summer of 2008, he co-curated "Heritage Complex" at the Art Gallery of Peel.

About the Moderators:

Bea Cherniack lives in Winnipeg Manitoba and worked as a social worker for over twenty years. Her special interest in children and families resulted in her work in residential treatment settings and as a school social worker. Her community volunteer work also reflects this interest, plus her ongoing political and advocacy work.

Jennifer Cherniack is an emerging artist, curator and educator. She earned her BFA in 2003 from the University of Western Ontario, and, in 2004, was a Peggy Guggenheim Collection Intern in Venice, Italy. She has exhibited her artwork in Toronto, London (On), Winnipeg, Quebec City and in Venice Italy. Originally from Winnipeg, Jennifer brings several years' experience in curating, outreach, education and installation at the National Film Board of Canada's Toronto Mediatheque, Gallery 44/Regent Park Focus in Toronto, the ArtLab Gallery in London, Ontario and numerous independent projects in both Toronto and Winnipeg.