My Dear Friends First Curatorial Project! "Cake on the Icing"

CAKE ON THE ICING

8th Annual InterAccess Emerging Artists Exhibition
Featuring Serena Lee, Robert Lendrum, Melanie Lowe, Petrina Ng, Freya Björg Olafson and Scott Saunders

Curated by Shaun Dacey
July 11- August 9, 2008

Opening Reception with artists talk and performance by Freya Björg Olafson, Friday, July 11, 7pm
Emerging Artists expose their deepest personal thoughts...well not really...
InterAccess is pleased to present Cake on the Icing, the 8th Annual Emerging Artists Exhibition. Since 2001, InterAccess has mounted an annual Emerging Artists' Exhibition showcasing new media works by post-secondary students and/or recent graduates. This initiative aims to offer young artists professional experience and exposure.

Please join us on Friday July 11 at 7pm for Cake on the Artists: Talk with your mouth full. We invite you for fluffy cake and rich discussion as the curator leads an informal talk with the artists about their works. Followed by an opening reception and Björg Olafson's performance at 8pm

Curator Shaun Dacey brings together six artists who are about to take a bite out of the art world, Serena Lee, Robert Lendrum, Melanie Lowe, Petrina Ng, Freya Björg Olafson, and Scott Saunders in this delicious display.

With the emergence of various communication technologies we are forced into a constant game of keeping up appearances. With online social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, and the ease of digital photography individuals can seamlessly recreate and re-imagine personal experience for consumption by a voyeuristic public. The artists in the 8th annual Emerging Artists Exhibition at InterAccess question the ways we share and process personal experience by using personal and private information and images to create dynamic and complex works through the use of everyday media. The artists are not exposing personal secrets but instead present works deliberately planned, styled and embellished for public consumption much like a freshly iced wedding cake.

These works from across Canada confront the urge to relate our intimate experiences publicly for debate, acceptance and validation. Serena Lee's musical installations playfully mediate the awkward and confusing experience of learning classical piano. Robert Lendrum uses images from his family album as a source for quirky re-enactments casting himself as his father and grandfather, while Petrina Ng animates and appropriates family images producing objective studies of intimate moments. Melanie Lowe's installation continuously collects and projects Facebook 'Status Updates' turning textual representations of self into a nonsensical, ephemeral, and surreal take on online identity and surveillance. Freya Björg Olafson weaves a compelling duet with her laptop in a multimedia dance performance using found audio from YouTube at the opening reception, while Scott Saunders' video installation distorts an intense private conversation into incoherent and confusing sound bytes between two television sets.

Cake on the Icing focuses on the power media offers individuals in creating and developing new and ever-changing identities in a public context.

Source: www.interaccess.org- link in title