Taking the almanac as a point of departure artists Colin Miner, Maggie Groat and Lili Huston-Herterich’s vitrines installations consider almanac-related themes, visually tracing the discursive possibilities of collapsing expert and informal knowledge, informational patterns, and alternative research collections. Data Mine considers what possibilities might emerge when linear knowledge is recast as ambiguous, unstable and unofficial. As with the almanac, in which the scientific is not necessarily privileged over the intuited or anecdotal, the artworks within this exhibition point to an informational and image transience.
Essay by Noa Bronstein:
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Colin Miner is currently based in Toronto, Ontario. He completed a PhD at Western University and holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Miner’s solo exhibitions include Album Gallery, Toronto and the McIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario. Selected group exhibitions include Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Gallery 44, Toronto, Beijing Center of Art, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, and Postdamer Platz Gallery, Germany. Miner’s art practice includes writing, facilitating exhibitions, and the artist project Moiré.
Lili Huston- Herterich was born and raised in Chicago and lives and works in Toronto. Most recently, she has exhibited a solo exhibition The Pleasure of A Lazy Laity at XPACE Cultural Centre in Toronto, and co-curated Don't Call it a Breakdown, Call it a Breakthrough !, a site-specific one day exhibition with collaborator Nadia Belerique. Forthcoming projects in 2014 include exhibitions at Birch Contemporary (Toronto) and OCAD University (Toronto). With a background in photography and image making, her studio practice is rooted in everyday forms and their inherent connotations, and often takes a multidisciplinary form.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Huston-Herterich’s most recent body of ceramic work, Shards, sources online instructional websites with user generated content and forum-based information databases. These contemporary platforms fill the role of the artisans’ knowledge passed on through familial generations, or the geographically specific farmer’s almanac of communal, experience-based predictions of weather – the forum is a new space for inherited and nuanced knowledge. As much of the artist’s work is produced with the collected technical guidance of strangers’ posts, the broken ceramic shards serve as an homage to these resources. Imagery, text and graphics sourced from these sites are used to embellish the ceramic surfaces, synchronizing in a constellation of information honouring these evolving, living resources.
Maggie Groat is a visual artist working in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, artists’ books, site-specific interventions, and field studies. Forming an ongoing research-based practice, Groat's work explores studies for possible futures, salvage practices, relationships and reconnections to place and ancient knowledge systems from an indigenous perspective. Through reconfiguring and recontextualizing found materials, she assembles collages, sculptures and tools that enable moments of envisioning and the potential for action. Maggie studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She is represented by Erin Stump Projects in Toronto.
Earlier this year, Groat curated and edited an alternative collection of research published by Art Metropole entitled The Lake, and was included in A Problem So Big it Needs Other People curated by cheyanne turions at SBC galerie d'art contemporain in Montreal. In the coming months, her work will be a part of shows at Republic Gallery in Vancouver, the Elora Centre for the Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. Solo shows at ESP, YYZ and a site-specific project and self-directed residency at Brock University’s Rodman Hall in St. Catharines will follow in 2015. Her work has been included or reviewed in Front Magazine, Kolaj Magazine, Cmagazine, The Toronto Star, Akimblog and Canadian Art. Maggie currently lives on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, but will spend Fall 2014 in Vancouver as the Visiting Artist-Scholar-in-Residence at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
