Shereen Soliman is a student from Concordia University’s InterMedia/Cyber Arts (IMCA) program. As part of her studies and her own professional development, she has curated a show for the Art Matters festival that is exclusively media based. On Wednesday, she took some time out of her busy schedule to discuss her upcoming show electric-carnaval-électrique, with Laura Paolini. This conversation is to be posted in four blogs. This blog is the first, contextualizing the presence of New Media in the history of Art Matters.

LPAXON: Firstly, can you introduce yourself, and please explain what Art Matters is, and your involvement with them:
SS: My name is Shereen Soliman, and I am a curator in the Arts Matters festival 2008. It began February 28th and is ending on March 15th. The art matters festival is basically a Student Run Art festival, showcasing everything from New Media Art to Dance to Performance to Photography, Drawing, Painting; Everything under the sun in terms of celebrating art. It’s completely run by Concordia University students and it’s considered to be the largest student run arts festival in Canada, and it’s in it’s eighth year currently, and it seems to be expanding like crazy every time they do it each year! It’s probably twice as big as it was last year and it really takes over Montreal every year. I think there’s something like 42 different curated events happening in different galleries and different spaces all over Montreal so it’s not just within Concordia University. It’s definitely a very interesting festival to take in, and we’re starting to get a lot of people from the Montreal arts community coming out and getting involved in shows, such as this big event that happened during Nuit Blanche, last Saturday March 1st, where there were actually quite a few Concordia art events happening…

LPAXON: Was it snowing?
SS:Yeah…oh yeah. It was interesting, still, to see the whole arts community coming out to see performances by Concordia students in this big arts building called the Belgo building here in Montreal. So, within that context, the show that I’m curating is called electric-carnaval-électrique and it’s a show that basically showcases New Media Art Installation. It was created around the theme of an old style, eighteenth-nineteenth century traveling Carnival. It’s basically done to showcase the artworks of students working in video installation, electronic art, interactive artwork involving sensors and there’s also going to be single channel video installation, as well as computer art, sound art and photography.
So it’s kind of a celebration of Electronic art and artworks that take a large amount of space. In the past, for students such as myself who work in mediums like video installation, it was very difficult to show your art in festivals like Art Matters because the space required for these installations is quite tremendous. A lot of the shows are quite limited in terms of space, limited in budget and limited in the scope of what they can present in terms of the technical capabilities. So, this showcases the kind of art that is coming out of Concordia University that is very much new media based that wouldn’t per say be shown normally due to the limitations in space, and cost, technology, that kind of thing.

LPAXON:As I understand it, this first time curating?
SS:Yes, it is really my first big show. I’ve curated a few small shows, three artists including myself, so this is the first major show that I’ve curated.

LPAXON: You’ve alluded to it already, but how has that been for you?
SS:Well the curating has definitely been a very large challenge. It has been a lot of different phases of planning and there’s going to be a lot of set up involved in our show, and it’s pretty extensive. Just the amount of work involved from a communications standpoint; I must have received close to 400 emails since the planning of the show began in late December. The level of detail that is required to keep track of all the equipment involved in a showcase of 14 artists is pretty tremendous!

LPAXON: I can imagine… that’s a huge show!
SS:For instance, in this show we have the need for 5 different video projectors. Two of the video projections are sensor driven so they also need a computer with MAX/MSP and Jitter. We needed to get that onto our inventory of different machinery and equipment that we needed. We also had to think about video projection screens. There’s sound that needs to be accounted for, and how the audio is going to interfere, say, with other pieces. We had to think about things like audio bleed. And then there’s also the aesthetic issue that’s involved when you have a lot of cables and gear in a space of 5000-6000 Square Feet. Hopefully you want the artwork will take precedent over the amount of gear that’s in that space! So we’re going to take to be looking at putting all our technical gear in the ceiling, the rafter-like area of the space, for two reasons: One is to definitely improve the aesthetic quality of the show without a lot of gear and equipment diddling around the gallery that will get in the way of people, and two, we have a seven foot tall Martyoska doll robot….

LPAXON: Yes! You only have one?
SS:Well it’s actually one seven foot tall Martyoska doll and two smaller dolls that will be basically following the large doll around the space. And there is a risk of the doll crashing into installations, or taking out audio or video equipment. So, it was important to get as much out of the way as possible to allow the robot to freely roam the space, and follow the art gallery visitors around the gallery. So it’s definitely a challenge to involve this robot in our show and the two other little robots that will be following it. That’s one of the other reasons we were trying to keep as much out of the way as possible, to keep the space free.

The Klapisz Issue by Barbara Zemelka

LPAXON: I have a whole slew of questions later about those Martyoska dolls , but I digress. So, you already alluded to some of your more personal motivations for putting on this show together. From what I understand, this is a really good year for New Media in Arts Matters. Can you contextualize this statement a bit? Would it be a fair thing to say?
SS: Yes! Definitely. Joshua Barndt, Harley Smart and Stephanie Hope, the three producers for Art Matters this year, definitely wanted to create an Art Matters Festival that was very much an interdisciplinary festival that showcased more than the traditional painting/drawing/photography, and to a lesser extent Sculpture, that has been showcased in the past. I think they really wanted to put an emphasis on New Media Art and shows that are going to involve new media because of the fact, and I’m finding this as well, most student artists now are working in a very interdisciplinary way. They are branching out from original medias and are working in things like video, either to document their projects or in the traditional ways of making video art, or using video in Installation work as I do. So this year’s the Art Matters festival is basically taking an interdisciplinary approach. They have a number of shows that are going to showcase, well, mainly video is the big new media that a lot of the shows are focusing on. We have a lot of shows that are very video based.

LPAXON: Like V is for Wideo?
SS: That’s right, and that’s going to be at the VAV Gallery [Concordia Gallery] and that one is very much about Video and celebrating that medium. There’s also another show called Intimacy in Public Spaces, curated by John Naccarato and Sarah Nesbitt, and it involves to a large extent video and the video is utilized by performance artists either in the context of their live performance, or in other ways like the fact they are performing within the single chanell video they have presented… So really there’s a lot of video in these shows. To some degree there’s electronic art in some of the other shows as well, because other curators were really interested in showcasing the new media art that’s coming out of the Intermedia/CyberArts program that started at Concordia University, maybe, about two years ago, And also showcasing the work of students from the CART, which is the Computer Art Department at Concordia University as well. Design, they do a lot of computer based type of works as well involving the Internet, and different electronic technologies like that. We actually have one student in our show who is working with Facebook in her computer installation. She is recontextualizing photos of different people that she appropriated and reworked.

LPAXON: That’s Lysanne Picard?
SS: Yes that’s Lysanne Picard’s work.

Tomorrow’s discussion: Consentual Funding bodies.
Special thanks to Luis Hernandez for recording interview.
If you plan to be in Montreal soon, electric-carnaval-électrique, is at The Eastern Bloc, 7240 rue Clark, metro De Castelnau
Show Dates: Tues. March 11th to Sat. March 15th, 2008. 3pm – 9pm
Vernissage: Sat. March 15th 4pm – 8pm

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 8:05 pm and is filed under News and Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.