Visiting Artists Exhibition: Stephanie Cormier & Jacob Robert Whibley

Artist Talk Time: 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Visiting Artists Exhibition: Stephanie Cormier & Jacob Robert Whibley

Artist Talks: Friday, May 13, 2016, 6:00 – 7:00 PM
Opening Reception: Friday, May 13, 2016, 7:00 – 9:00 PM

Each year Open Studio selects four professional artists with or without printmaking experience to create traditional and/or experimental works in the print medium of their choice, working collaboratively with a print media artist. The Visiting Artist Residency, in operation since 1983, is a popular program that receives applications from artists from around the world. In conjunction with the residency, each artist exhibits the work produced during their period in the Studio and gives an artist talk. These exhibitions are the result of this intensive work period. The first of two Visiting Artist exhibitions will feature work by artists Stephanie Cormier and Jacob Robert Whibley. The accompanying brochure, with essays by Tara Bursey and Alex Bowron, is available below.

Stephanie Cormier: Toolbox In The Head:
Tool to chew your worries and spit them out as shiny stones
Feedback loop device for your heart and your hands…..or someone else’s hands
Tool for smelling a bee’s buzz
Tool to hear weeds pollinate and take over the world

These are some of the descriptions that make up a “toolbox in the head.” They may or may not exist…depending on your take on existence. You can imagine them, you can draw them, you can build them and then, maybe, you can use them.

In the exhibition, Toolbox In The Head, Stephanie Cormier has taken some of her written descriptions and read them to her young daughter, asking if she might draw them as she imagines them. These drawings have served as prototype renderings that Cormier is using to produce a series of screenprints.

The project is inspired by a performance by Dennis Oppenheim in the 1960s, Two Stage Transfer Drawing. He described the work that he performed with his son, “As I run a marker along Eric’s back, he attempts to duplicate the movement on the wall. My activity stimulates a kinetic response from his sensory system. I am, therefore, Drawing Through Him.” By creating objects first in the head and then through words, another being, their hand, and back to the artist’s eyes and hands, there is a collaborative “filtration” system that produces unprecedented and layered forms.

Much of Cormier’s work is project-based and has taken different directions and mediums over the years. She works in sculpture, installation, photography, collage and video. Some things that connect her work and research are the attention to objects and materials as they relate to the human and our perception and phenomena of experiencing the world. There is special attention to wonder, speculation and the limits of human understanding and expression.

Stephanie Cormier was born in Montreal, has lived in Barbados, England and currently resides in Toronto with her six-year-old daughter. She completed her BFA at OCADU and her MFA at The University of Guelph.

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Jacob Robert Whibley: imperfective aspect

Jacob Robert Whibley is an artist focusing on the information and experiences embedded within objects by intuitively blending histories, architectures and infrastructures into formal compositions. As a youth, he was witness to the propagation of accessible/ information technologies—specifically the birth of the ubiquitous network experience. Through this interconnectedness, an intertextual database of images, experiences and objects exist, constantly echoing themselves virtually, temporally and physically. Embracing this notion of multiplicity and contrasting it with singular gestures and found objects, his work explores the negotiation of artifacts within our collective sense of temporality, progress, labour, and accumulation.

A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and a former member (2005-2011) of Toronto collective Team Macho, Jacob Robert Whibley has exhibited locally (Narwhal Contemporary, Oakville Galleries, Harbourfront Centre, Art Toronto), in the US (White Walls Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Pulse, New York, NY; Pulse, Miami, FL; Expo Chicago, Chicago, IL), and in Europe (Bourouina Gallery, Berlin, DE; l’Espace de l’Art Concret, Mouans-Sartoux, FR; Art Brussels, Brussels, BE). His work is in the collections of RBC, BMO and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

For imperfective aspect, created during his Visiting Artist Residency, Whibley will continue to mine his archive of paper ephemera for marks, forms, and textures to blend with a collection of graphic forms generated from interstitial spaces to inform a series of block-printed multiples. The resulting works will further the exploration of using ephemeral moments to showcase that in our networked culture—where copying and distributing information and objects is easy—the perception of what a singular experience/object is has been altered significantly through the possibility of endless unique copies.

Exhibition Brochure: Download Brochure Here