January 18 - March 4, 2017
Curated by Christine Shaw
Click here to download the micropublication featuring the commissioned essay, The New Graphic Method, by Julien Prévieux, an introduction and exhibition texts by Christine Shaw, and full colour illustrations throughout.
Gaze Recording Workshops
Tuesday, January 10–Friday, January 13
Blackwood Gallery and e|gallery
In preparation for the exhibition The Elements of Influence (and a Ghost), Julien Prévieux and the Blackwood Gallery organized a series of workshops with students, staff, faculty, researchers, campus police, and the administration at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Using an infrared camera, Prévieux recorded the movements of participants’ pupils while they were looking at his work in the Blackwood Gallery. Eye-tracking software was then used to produce diagrams that visualize the eye movements across the exhibition, with the final sketches reproduced in wool on the walls of the e|gallery. The exhibition in the Blackwood is therefore also visible in the e|gallery as a translation or transformation made by the vision of members of the local community at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The following members of the UTM community participated in the workshops, contributing their interests and expertise in a range of fields:
Lee Bailey Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Department of Economics
Ronny Cruz Service Worker Caretaker, Facilities Management & Planning
Lauren Diez D’Aux Senior Development Officer, Office of Advancement
Cpl. Bobbi-Jo Duff Corporal, UTM Campus Police
Ogonna Jideobi Student, Department of Economics
Adrian Owczarczuk Mathematical and Computation Student Society (MCSS)
Jeremy Packer Associate Professor, Communication, Culture, Information and Technology
Brian Price Associate Professor, Cinema Studies, Department of Visual Studies
Sarah Sharma Associate Professor, Communication, Culture, Information and Technology
Opening Reception & Peformance
Wednesday, January 18, 5–8pm
A FREE shuttle bus will depart from Jackman Humanities Institute (170 St. George Street) at 5:30pm and return for 8:30pm.
Performances of What Shall We Do Next? 4:30pm, 5:30pm, 6:30pm, 7:30pm
Innovation Complex Rotunda (next to the Blackwood Gallery)
Featuring Allie Hankins, Syreeta Hector, Bee Pallomina, and Kaitlin Standeven
For more about What Shall We Do Next? click here.
Lunchtime Talks: Gaze Recordings
12:00–12:30pm
Please join us for a series of conversations with UTM students and faculty as they discuss their experiences participating in gaze recording workshops for Julien Prévieux’s exhibition The Elements of Influence (and a Ghost). Come and hear the thoughts and responses of the participants as they discuss how they contributed to this unique exhibition.
Wednesday, February 15, 12:00pm
Ogonna Jideobi, Student, Department of Economics
Adrian Owczarczuk, Mathematical and Computational Sciences Student Society (MCSS)
Wednesday, March 1, 12:00pm
Cpl. Bobbi-Jo Duff, Corporal, UTM Campus Police
Brian Price, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies, Department of Visual Studies
Sarah Sharma, Associate Professor, Communication, Culture, Information and Technology
Please meet at the Blackwood Gallery in the Kaneff Centre at 12:00pm to briefly tour the exhibition.
The talks will then continue in the e|gallery, CCT building from 12–12:30pm.
The e|gallery is located on the ground floor of the CCT building, beside the Circuit Cafe.
You are welcome to bring a bag lunch with you to eat in the gallery.
Free Contemporary Art Bus Tours
Sunday, February 5, 12–5pm
The tour starts at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (15 King's College Circle) and then departs for Gallery TPW, Blackwood Gallery, and Oakville Galleries. To RSVP: email blackwoodgallery@utoronto.ca or call 905-828-3789 by Friday, February 3 at 5pm.
Sunday, February 26, 12–5pm
The tour starts at Koffler Centre of the Arts at Artscape Youngplace (180 Shaw Street) and then departs for Blackwood Gallery, Art Gallery of York University, and Doris McCarthy Gallery. To RSVP: email dmg@utsc.utoronto.ca or call 416-287-7007 by Friday, February 24 at 5pm.
Don't Forget the Money! Working with Dancers in Contemporary Art Spaces
Saturday, March 4, 2–5pm
Don’t Forget The Money! is a half-day, professional development forum to discuss best practices for the presentation of dance, choreography, and live performance in various contemporary art contexts.
For more about this forum, click here.
Work, management, economics, politics, control systems, state-of-the-art technologies, and the culture industry are the many “worlds” that Prix Marcel Duchamp winning artist Julien Prévieux’s activities interrogate. The methods of recording movement and gesture developed over the last century and a half led to aesthetic results that recall the formal explorations of modernist art. Playing on this resemblance, Julien Prévieux transforms these records—originally produced for the sake of productivity, profit or surveillance—into pure form. Using map-making, dance, theatre, sculpture, video, and drawing, his work appropriates the vocabulary, mechanisms, and modus operandi of the sectors by which it is informed to highlight their dogmas and excesses. In this solo exhibition presented across both galleries, Prévieux highlights each mechanism’s potential for play, creativity, productivity, and counter-productivity.
In the Blackwood Gallery, The Elements of Influence (and a Ghost) brings together four projects: Patterns of Life (2015), which explores the history of the technological capture of human movement from George Demenÿ’s chronophotography to the “activity-based intelligence” generated by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; What Shall We Do Next? (2014), a video work on patented and copyrighted gestures such as Apple’s “slide-to unlock” movement; Drawing Workshop – B.A.C. of 14th district of Paris (2011–2015), drawings of crime maps made by Paris police officers; and Forget the Money (2011 & 2017),an installation centered around Bernie Madoff’s personal library with their premonitory titles.
The Elements of Influence (Modulation) (2017) translates these four works by tracking the eye-movements of viewers and reproducing them in wool on the walls of the e|gallery as an echo or ghostly trace. The exhibition in the Blackwood is therefore also visible in the e|gallery as a translation or transformation made by the vision of the local community at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The artist would like to thank Daniel Lebard and Galerie Jousse Entreprise.
Gaze drawings were made by Alison Cooley, Manpreet Hayer, Sam Holmes, Maleeha Iqbal, Christina Morden, Jae Ng, Petrina Ng, Dax Morrison, Julien Prévieux, Doaa Shaikh, Christine Shaw, Jayne Wilkinson, and Vanessa Zeoli.
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The Elements of Influence (and a Ghost) is supported by the Consulate General of France in Toronto, the Institut français, the Department of English and Drama (UTM), and the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts.
The Blackwood Gallery’s 2016–2017 exhibition and program season is sponsored by the University of Toronto Affinity Partners Manulife, MBNA and TD Insurance.
