April 2010

Circuit Gallery is pleased to feature new limited edition works by Toronto-based media artist Sharon Switzer.

Sharon Switzer, Still #1 from Experience Hope, 2009

Continuing to experiment and push at the boundaries between media, Sharon Switzer’s series of new “digital video drawings” is an exploration, in the artist’s words, of “the possibilities of ‘creation’ within a digital compositing program. They are not traditional drawing, video, or animation—but something unique born from within this medium.”

Sharon Switzer, Still #1 from Dreaming of Butterflies, 2010

In these works Switzer isolates moments from her animated digital video series—I Should Be Dreaming of Butterflies—and recreates them at a much higher-resolution. The resulting images posses a remarkable quality. Crisp, delicate, almost luminous lines create small events in an otherwise devoid space. Visually their precision is strangely comforting—perfect, clean, demarcated. Yet in the text based pieces, as is the case in so much of Switzer’s work, this aspect is held in an effective tension with the work’s disconcerting and often darkly humorous message(s).

As the artist explains: “I am thinking about what it means to search for happiness—balancing an undercurrent of worry with a sense of hope.”

The original video series, I Should Be Dreaming of Butterflies, is represented by Corkin Gallery in Toronto.

Sharon Switzer, Still #1 from Happy Strangers, 2010

As an artist Sharon Switzer has exhibited her media art in Canada and the U.S. since the early 1990’s. Her work toured throughout Canada in 2007 as part of the exhibition 18 Illuminations: Contemporary Art and Light, that originated by the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery. Her solo exhibitions include shows at the McMaster Museum of Art, The Koffler Gallery, Artcite, The University of Rochester, AKA Gallery and Corkin Gallery, Toronto, where she is represented.

As a curator, Sharon Switzer founded Art for Commuters in 2007 in response to an opportunity to showcase the work of artists and filmmakers to over 1.3 million people on the network of TTC subway platform screens. Switzer is the Director of the Toronto Urban Film Festival, curator of a month-long photo exhibition as part of Contact, and a program for Nuit Blanche—all annual projects on the TTC screens.

Switzer holds an MFA from the University of Western Ontario and in 2005-2006 participated in the Canadian Film Centre’s Habitat Interactive Art and Entertainment Program. As an instructor she has lectured extensively at the University of Western Ontario, Brock University and the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Sharon Switzer, Still #2 from the series Desert, 2008

See more photographic work from this series by Sharon Switzer available through Circuit Gallery.

March 2010

Circuit Gallery is very pleased to present work by Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena from his award winning Lost Rivers series.

Untitled Lost River #10, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008

Coming from a deeply felt love and concern for the landscape, Cartagena’s Lost Rivers series presents exquisite images of dried-up streams and river beds, visually rich in detail, colour, and light. While aesthetically alluring, these photographs simultaneously offer a poignant social commentary on the ecological and environmental effects of untempered urban expansion.

Lost Rivers is one part of a larger project entitled Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect, which seeks to tell a complex story of contemporary Mexican urban development and expansion: from urban gentrification and inner-city ‘ghettoization,’ to the seemingly unplanned and unhampered suburban sprawl emanating from many of its fast growing cities.

from Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities

In Lost Rivers, Cartagena turns his attention specifically to the unintended environmental consequences of such rapid and unplanned growth, in this case in the region surrounding the northern city of Monterrey. (Monterrey, the third largest city in Mexico, has witnessed explosive growth over the past two decades with a current estimated population of 5.1 million in the metropolitan region). In order to meet increased demand for water from the fast expanding suburbs of Monterrey, many of the region’s rivers were re-routed and dammed, and as a consequence many of the rivers and streams have dried out, or are in the process of drying up.

Untitled Lost River #9, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008

The images in this series subtly document the direct effects of “wrongly implemented economical strategies” on the local ecosystem, all the while exposing a beauty that, despite this, inheres in the landscape. As the river beds become scars, and trash and graffiti punctuate quasi-picturesque scenes, Cartagena gives us a poignant yet ambivalent testament to the absolute interdependence of humans and our environment.

Untitled Lost River #2, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008

Untitled Lost River #4, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008

Untitled Lost River #3, from the Suburbia Mexicana series

Untitled Lost River #7, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008