News

Alter Ego Workshop by Jean Borbridge

Sunday, May 19 12-3pm

According to Julia Kristeva the abject refers to what “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”. This workshop will guide the participants in a series of exercises that examine the “in between and the ambiguous” within ourselves. We will focus on ideas of repulsion and desire that reside “outside” of our identities and what we consider to be the self. An alter ego will form through a series of guided exercises; such as automatic writing and mask making. This workshop is beneficial to those who desire new methods of self-reflection and new tools to build ideas and conceptual frameworks for art making.

Snacks Provided.

FREE! This is a free workshop associated with AceArtInc’s Cartae Open School.

No experience required! This workshop is for people of all ages.

Cover photo by: SH Sadler
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/sh-sadler-fresh-meat-photography-300119

Sparks | Artist Talk by Sharon Alward

May 3, 2019 
7pm

Join us on the First Friday of May for an evening with Sharon Alward.

Alward is a Canadian video and performance artist. Cited as one of the 100 most influential and innovative Canadians in MacLean’s magazine for her work as a Canadian artist, her creative works reference performance, installation and ritual as potential sites for creativity and transformation. Actively involved in both art and social justice issues in the Winnipeg Community since 1986, Alward is also a Full Professor at the University of Manitoba, School of Art. 

After a teaching and artistic career that spans over 35 years Alward is retiring from the School of Art. Her artist talk Sparks will look back over the past three and a half decades of her teaching and creative works and she will share her reflections.

“I have always been interested in art as a healing agent and believe through performance, ritual and witnessing we have the opportunity to tell our stories and initiate healing. Performing ritual allows us the opportunity to transcend suffering and dehumanizing experiences, open ourselves up for healing and journey towards wholeness.”  – Sharon Alward

Artist Talk by Alyssa Bornn

7 pm, Thursday, 16 May 2019

Alyssa Bornn is an interdisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and organizer based in Winnipeg, MB. Her practice regularly utilizes traditional photographic methods alongside alternative and outdated digital modes of image capturing, writing, and constructed spaces to explore the act of image building as well as our relationships to images.

She holds a BFA (Hons.) from the University of Maniotba and is a member of Open City Cinema, a co-programmer for the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, and is an active member of Light Terrors- a loose collective showcasing moving image and audio works as live performance. She has run workshops for Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, PAVED Arts, and independently as Professional Development.

In 2018, Bornn was curated into the aceartinc. student exhibition and subsequently awarded the Scott Wachal Memorial Bursary. As part of this, recipients are invited to give a public talk about their work. We hope you can join us to hear Alyssa Bornn talk about her practice and recent bodies of work.

Image: in either words or images (resampled). Alyssa Bornn. inkjet print on Tyvek, 24″ x 16″. 2019.

The Scott Wachal Memorial Bursary
This bursary is available to art students who have been curated into the Annual Student Exhibition. The bursary is intended to support a  project or an opportunity (such as a workshop or residency) that will positively impact the artist’s practice. In 2013 the youngest artist  curated into our Annual Student Exhibition passed away. In his memory aceartinc. created the Scott Wachal Memorial Student Bursary.

UNDERWORLD: A QPOC Ball

In the spring time, spirits from the underworld will begin to reappear. They can be good and bad. 

On April 18, let’s harness this energy and have a magical ball.

There will be a runway show competition with the following categories:

Ladies who Brunch…on Patios (high femme realness)
Sow the Seeds (Butch realness) 
Fantastic and Fanciful Face (Open to all)
Metamorphose (Walk celebrating your body and it’s changes)
Queer on a beach (Swimwear) 
Spring time in Paris (Fashion Walk)
Mystical Creatures (Couture)
Team/House Walk (short team routine)
Twister Vogue (Dips/spins/twists/drops)

Party with your favourite QPOC DJs.
Suggested donation $10. 
Program begins at 11:30pm

Unfortunately this venue is not super accessible. 🙁

A Portrait With Your Pet

Saturday, May 25, 9am – 5pm

Grafitti Gallery, 109 Higgins Ave. (please enter through side door)

Join us for aceartinc.’s fundraiser “A Portrait With Your Pet” happening on Saturday, May 25, 2019 at Grafitti Gallery! Chronicle you and your fur babies with an exciting lineup of photographers in fun sets designed by local artists.

Set #1: by Kelly Campbell & Megumi Kinata
Photography 9am – 1pm by Mahlet Cuff
Photography 1pm – 5pm by Christine St. Martin
About the set: Cruise down Portage Avenue in a cardboard mint-coloured Jeep with pink flames.

Set #2: by Peatr Thomas
Photography 9am –1pm by Kelechi Asagwara
Photography 1pm – 5pm by Laura Darnbrough
About the set: Float on pillowy, illuminated clouds in a bright blue sky. 

Set #2: by Rachael Thorleifson
Photography 9am – 1pm by Mike Peters
Photography 1pm – 5pm by Shaneela Boodoo
About the set: Envelop yourself in luxurious satin as an ’80’s horror-inspired font dedication to TRUE LOVE floats above you and your loved one.

Please note the change of the original date and location from April 13 at aceartinc. 

Unable to attend? You can support the event by making a DONATION

Sponsored by Assiniboine Credit Union & Parlour Coffee

Tickets are now on sale via Eventbrite.

Group computing experimental improv workshop

Saturday, March 16

5-7pm

* A free CARTAE Open School event hosted by Davis Plett *

My recent intermedia performance work has used simple technology and computing tasks to explore what it feels like to be a body living in a world of other bodies – bodies made of flesh, text, code, and knowledge. In this experimental workshop we will embark on an adventurous intuitive emotional performative critical hilarious devastating delicious boring intellectual shallow dire bitchy EXPERIMENTAL GROUP EXPLORATION of these themes.

We will sit at our computers – in the same room but each in our own space. We will congregate on a shared Google doc. I will guide us through a number of simple computing and search-engine games and tasks. We will commit acts of administration, perform feats of pix-elation, sink into quiet doubt, climb over each other in a digital junglegym, babble bark garble and guffaw. We will see what can be made when a group of people gather twice: as bodies in a room and as bodies on the web.

NO PRIOR PERFORMANCE EXPERIENCE REQUIRED. If you’ve ever visited the internet you’re more than qualified to participate. This not a traditional performance workshop and you WON’T be asked to “create a short and humiliating solo work that you will then share with the class.”

PLEASE RSVP. Email (davisplett@gmail.com) or DM me if you want to come so I have an idea of numbers (or if you have any questions!).

PLEASE BRING:
– laptop and charger
– basic working knowledge of Google Docs

Annual General Meeting

Thursday, January 31, 2019

7-8:30 pm

All are welcome!

Become a member or renew your membership!

Reg price: $25.00 (online or in person)
AGM special, up to and night of: Pay what you can (in person or contact chantel@aceart.org)

Members receive voting privileges at AGMs and other benefits, as outlined on our website. aceart.org/membership

We’ll be approving our new anti-oppression policy. Read it online at aceart.org/mandate

hannah_g, aceartinc.’s Director to pursue Canada Council funded writing project

 

We are delighted to share the wonderful news that hannah_g has been awarded a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to work on an experimental art writing project, Critical Fictions. To support her work, the Board Directors of aceartinc. have given hannah a twelve month sabbatical, commencing November 2018.

In addition to implementing the superb annual juried exhibition program of five exhibitions , among other related activities, hannah champions emerging art writers through the Critical Distance writing program. She has been instrumental in directing transformational initiatives at ace such as: The Cartae Open School (co-founded with Jamie Wright and Helga Jakobson), The Flux Gallery (co-founded with Hannah Doucet), the Indigenous Curatorial Residency (with support from Jaimie Isaac, Nikki Little, Jenny Western, ACC-CCA, and NIMAC), and the BIPOC art & culture writing workshop series (with Creative Manitoba Indigenous Programs and the University of Winnipeg’s Institute of Women & Gender Studies, Noor Bhangu.) The board and staff will miss working with her but enthusiastically await what she fills the next twelve months with…

Plug In ICA’s Prairie Art Book Fair

ace is participating with a table holding some merch and publications by as and associated artists…

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art’s PRAIRIE ART BOOK FAIR
September 7-9, 2018
• book fair • book launches • artist multiples • periodicals • workshops • readings •
FREE ENTRY

image caption: Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, Acrylic on panel, 2018.

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is extremely excited to present our inaugural Prairie Art Book Fair September 7-9, 2018. As a means to acknowledge the critical relationship between contemporary art and publishing with a regional focus on the Prairies, the weekend will showcase over twenty-nine exhibitors and present numerous events with highlights including collaborative hole punch drawing with Winnipeg born artist Micah Lexier; a talk connecting DIY tattooing and artist multiples by Maxine Proctor (Director and Co-founder of the Toronto Art Book Fair and Managing Editor of BlackFlash Magazine), and a workshop with key presenter Jeff Khonsary (Co-Founding and Artistic Director of Fillip and Director of New Documents) on alternative book fair models, looking at the economics and social space of the book fair model itself.

Explore diverse and accomplished publications from over twenty-five publishers, artists, and galleries ranging from zines, catalogues, artist editions, fiction, poetry, criticism, and periodicals.

A complete list of exhibitors and events are listed below.
For more information contact Erin Josephson-Laidlaw at erin@plugin.org

Exhibitors:

aceartinc. • ARP Books • Association of Manitoba Book Publishers • At Bay Press • Bison Books • BlackFlash Magazine (Saskatoon) • BLINKERS Art and Project Space • Border Crossings • Carnation • Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber • Esker Foundation (Calgary) • Cliff Eyland • Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg • Jeff Khonsary (Fillip and New Documents) (Vancouver/Los Angeles) • MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina) • Martha Street Studio • Micah Lexier (Winnipeg/Toronto) • Parameter Press • Public Parking (Winnipeg/Regina/Calgary/Steinbach) • Red Rising Magazine • Remai Modern (Saskatoon) • The Third Rail (Minneapolis) • University of Calgary Press (Calgary) • Urban Shaman Gallery • Video Pool Media Arts Centre • Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff) • Warehouse Journal • Whiny Femmes

*exhibitor from Winnipeg unless otherwise stated.

Events:

FRIDAY:

4:00pm-8:00pm | Opening
6:00pm-8:00pm | Plug In ICA Book Launches: STAGES: Drawing the Curtain supplementary publications (with Fillip Publishing) & Exhibition Notes: Entering the Landscape

SATURDAY:

11:30pm-12:30pm | Launch and Reading: Whiny Femmes Volume 2
1:30pm-2:30pm | Talk: Jeff Khonsary “How to Buy and Sell Books at Art Book Fairs”
3pm-4pm | Talk: Maxine Proctor, “Body Talk: Reclaiming Community, Identity, and Language with Tattoos, Flash, and Artists’ Multiples”
4:30pm-5:30pm | Hannah Godfrey Reading: “Not For The World Would I Compare It To Anything” presented by Parameter Press
6pm-7pm | aceartinc. Event (details tbd)

SATURDAY & SUNDAY:

12:30pm-1:30pm | Micah Lexier: Collaborative hole punch drawing

We offer our sincere thanks to Paula Mitchell and Arnold Leventhal for their generous support of our book fair. Thank You!

Plug In ICA extends our gratitude to our artists, generous donors, valued members and dedicated volunteers. With special thanks to our Director’s Circle. You make a difference!

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council.

Plug In ICA relies on community support to remain free and accessible to all. Enable us to continue presenting excellent programs! Please consider becoming a member of Plug In ICA and a donor at https://plugin.org/supportor by contacting Angela Forget: angela@plugin.org

For more information or for media inquiries please contact: Erin Josephson-Laidlaw at erin@plugin.org; (204)942-1043.