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  • May 10, 2016
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Leslie Supnet, Second Sun (still), 2014. Super 8, colour, sound, 3:04.

 

Do it like the sun, every day is a new day
Scott Benesiinaabandan, Lori Blondeau, Svea Ferguson and Leslie Supnet

Curated by Tarin Hughes

May 26 to May 29, 2016
Art Athina Platforms, Curated by Artemis Potamianou
Faliron Pavilion, Athens, Greece

AKA’s first project at Art Athina, one of the oldest European contemporary art fairs, will feature the diverse practices and mediums of four Canadian artists with a Prairie connection. Scott Benesiinaabandan (Obishikokaang First Nation), Lori Blondeau (Gordon First Nation), Svea Ferguson (Calgary) and Leslie Supnet (Toronto) contemplate colonialism, resistance and spirituality. Benesiinaabandan’s Little Resistances couples personal and found imagery exploring daily and monumental acts of resistance. Blondeau’s Cosmosquaw Vision Quest performance/ photography are a counterpoint to Canada’s “Wild West”, employing pop culture references, challenging colonial stereotypes and the authority of histories. Ferguson’s sculptures of marbled linoleum, recall classical architecture and spectral bodies, forever on the cusp of defined form and spontaneous movement. Supnet’s animated imagery in First Sun and Second Sun play with magical-realism and pre-colonial, Eastern mythologies and cosmology as a way to consider her own identity.

The performance of this work together navigates identity politics, authentic histories and possible futures through appropriated imagery, performance, sculpture, and minimal, magical, post-apocalyptic aesthetics.

Launched in 1993 by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association, Art-Athina stands today as one of the longest lasting contemporary art fairs in Europe and as the largest annual visual arts event in Greece with an average attendance of 40,000. A meeting point for international artistic creation, Art-Athina brings together significant Greek and foreign art galleries, cultural institutions, curators, collectors, art critics and art lovers.

 

Scott Benesiinaabandan is an Anishinabe intermedia artist that works primarily in photography, printmaking and video. Scott has recently completed  international residencies at Parramatta Artist Studios in Australia (2012), Context Gallery in Derry, North of Ireland (2010) and is most recently been awarded the University Lethbridge/Royal Institute of Technology iAIR residency 2013,  along with international collaborative projects in both the U.K and Ireland. He is currently in Montreal, and recently completed a Canada Council New Media Production grant through OBx Labs/Ab-tech and Concordia. He is represented by Lisa Kehler Art + Projects.

Lori Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Metis artist based in Saskatoon. She holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan, and has sat on the Advisory Panel for Visual Arts for the Canada Council for the Arts. She is also a co-founder and the current director of TRIBE, a Canadian aboriginal arts organization. Blondeau’s work, including her stage personas such as the now-famous Belle Sauvage, confronts and co-opts conventional stereotypes of First Nations women.

Svea Ferguson is a Canadian artist with a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary AB. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Stride Gallery and the project space at Esker Foundation in Calgary, and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and Division Gallery in Toronto. She was named the provincial recipient for Alberta for the 2015 BMO 1st Art! Prize, and will be showing in the upcoming Alberta Biennial in 2017. Her work is included in corporate and private collections across Canada and in the United States.

Leslie Supnet is a Toronto-based moving image artist. Supnet utilizes animation, found media, lo-fi and experimental practices to create documents of her personal vision. She teaches animation workshops with various artist-run centres. Her work has screened at microcinemas, galleries and film festivals such as Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Images Festival, Antimatter, Melbourne International Animation Festival, VIDEOEX and various others.


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© Copyright 2017. All Rights Reserved. AKA artist-run would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, SaskCulture, and Saskatchewan Lotteries.

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