V/Art Projects

Trinity Square Video, Canada’s oldest media arts artist-run centre, presents V/Art Projects, a mobile virtual reality app gallery, created to help promote new understandings of what the virtual can be, and to ask the questions; What does technology allow us to feel, what are its ethics, and what does it mean to be immersed in an artificial reality in a time of political urgency? Featuring:

· Pelican Rock by Scott Benesiinaabandan This photo- and VR- based work is an inquiry and an experiential look at a very specific site in Obishikokaang Anishinaabe (Lac Seul First Nations, Ontario) territory: A large, grandfather stone left alone in a large clear-cut;

· Algorythms by Trudy Erin Elmore. Drawing heavily on the composition and narrative of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, Algorythms explores the circus of humanity that is our online and digital lives;

· #Mood Exercises by E. Jane employs distorted video vignettes of the artist performing and recording a range of physical and emotional gestures. The performance of these gestures is vital as a Black woman slave descendant, as this recorded or acknowledged range of emotion and action is denied to Black women by the popular imaginary;

· Final Session by Endam Nihan abstracts a sequence of performative gestures and affects distilled from recently documented cases of femicide in Turkey. Reflecting on the notion that resistance begins in the imagination, the work unfolds like a reverie and never quite settles into position of overt critique, narrative catharsis, or public service announcement;

· The Passing by Thousand Stars explores themes of grief, healing, and recovery and allows the user to immerse themselves in these themes in an abstract and fantastical setting;

· Guided Mediation by Tough Guy Mountain encourages viewers to float through the Brandscape, roam free amongst the proto-symbols of corporate aesthetic, ascend and descend through the many levels of the corporation's mysterious HQ;

· Grow by Tommy Truong is a constructed digital cityscape created with 'forgotten' found footage titled -MOV00001, a reflection on our digital obsession, and hoarding tendencies.

· A Very Frustrating Mexican Removal by Fusun Uzun is a work employs the practice of Verbatim Theatre, and techniques and technologies of 360° Cinema to present the events surrounding the 2013 death of migrant Lucia Vega Jimenez while in detention with the Canada Border Services Agency.