iterations, duplications – Nick Novak Fellowship Exhibition

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

Each year, Open Studio awards two, yearlong residencies to artists of merit. The Nick Novak Fellowship is awarded to an artist currently involved with Open Studio as an artist member. Recipients are provided with rent-free access to Open Studio facilities for a period of one year, materials allowance, professional development assistance, and tuition-free access to Open Studio’s education program. This exhibition is a result of this intensive work period. An artist’s talk accompanies the exhibition. Pudy Tong: In a media landscape where news is fake and facts are alternative, how does one resist? That was the primary question Pudy Tong ruminated upon during the course of his Nick Novak Fellowship at Open Studio. This culminating exhibition offers a collection of pictorial and textual works that prompt viewers to engage in acts of reading and rereading, compare and contrast, micro and macro observation. The central piece of this show is a tabloid booklet entitled The DT Activity Book where readers are asked to spot the differences between two almost identical film stills from the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, a film about the journalists investigating the Watergate scandal. By attempting to solve these visual puzzles, viewers mimic a foundational journalistic ethos for themselves, that of spotting and tracking inconsistencies of between versions of events. Pudy Tong’s memories of his Canadian childhood are punctuated by the images of large stacks of Chinese newspapers landing at his doorstep every two weeks, air-freighted in from Hong Kong to a small rural town in British Columbia. His print-based art practice draws on elements from journalism as the subject through which our experience of contemporary, media-saturated society is refracted, reinterpreted and re-imagined. Based in Toronto, Tong is an instructor and custom printer at Open Studio. An essay by Laura Demers accompanies this exhibition. Please click here to download.