Projects
![Thumbnail image for- Update in Progress](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/3dc0194afa2fb427e17a126822169b0dc88fb253-2560x1920.png?w=100)
This website has been revamped and is undergoing a gradual updated in terms of content. Over the next while various projects will be added (when I get the chance) until its eventual, and official, launch at an indeterminant date in the near(ish) future.
![Thumbnail image for- A Funeral for a Funeral Home: An Incorruptible Relic, and an Architectural Death-Mask](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/c5abd518decd9450bb81ace6ff7764befc88f2df-750x443.jpg?w=100)
A Funeral for a Funeral Home: An Incorruptible Relic, and an Architectural Death-Mask was commissioned to be part of Nuit Blanche East Danforth, which occurred overnight Saturday September 23 – 7pm – 7 am (https://eastendarts.ca/nbed2023/). The work was commissioned to activate the space around the now derelict Trull Funeral Home, and the St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church.
For the activation, a video eulogy (along with illustrative animations) was produced to acknowledge the history and significance of both of these institutions/structures as well as critique their demolition and "preservation" strategies that involve only retaining the façade of an original structure becoming, in essence, an architectural death mask.
For the Nuit Blanche event, the video was projected onto both the walls of the Trull Funeral Home and the St. Catherine of Siena church. Additionally, the video included custom music, composed by Dr. Owen Lyons (TMU, Image Arts), and a vintage hearse was rented and dramatically lite to add some additional ambience to the environment.
![Thumbnail image for- HELL](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/6f0f785035ae9c05ce162940b5699ecfa75aa845-750x577.jpg?w=100)
I can now legitimately say that I have literally both gone through Hell, and that I have been to Hell and back.
![Thumbnail image for- Canoeing the Black Creek](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/7bd351b6ca893fa195a47a89cbddfb14e861af05-3840x2160.jpg?w=100)
As an absurd gesture, myself and two of my colleagues (Risa Horowitz, and Alex Kurina) canoed the Black Creek in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Starting from a location near Jane Street and the 401, where the concrete embankments begin, we traversed this very urban waterway until the point where it merges with the Humber River (near Dundas Street and Royal York Road). Black Creek, like many other “lost” waterways in the Greater Toronto Area, has been drastically altered by humans: transformed from a natural watershed to a utilitarian and polluted concrete runoff basin.
For the duration of our 8-hour journey by canoe, I captured interval images of this Brutalist landscape that were later assembled into an intentionally rough and distorted 3D model through photogrammetry software. This produced a surreal, and unsettling digital model of this very unusual and historically complicated creek – and the video presented here depicts an extended traversal through that model.
Canoeing the Black Creek takes-on an experimental approach through playing with the inherent aesthetic nuances of photogrammetric processes, which are generally considered flaws and to be poor-quality results: holes, distortions, and an overall "goopy-ness" of the imagery/models.
Duration: 1:07:00
Format(s): 360 video (8000 x 4000px) or 2D 4K video (3840 x 2160px)
![Thumbnail image for- Urban Canoe Exploration: Negotiating the Black Creek (a hyperlapse experiment)](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/391b652f3906bb671dd66d92f7745bc35420ec23-1200x880.jpg?w=100)
A hyper-lapse experiment performed prior to producing the photogrammetry-based model from the same journey (see a,[object Object],Canoeing the Black Creek, aria-label="External link." /a>, 2023)
Exhibited as part of A Small and Quiet Winter Screen (2023). Curated by Risa Horowitz, University of Regina, Regina, SK a,[object Object],https://risahorowitz.com/projects/winter-screen/winter-screen.php, aria-label="External link." /a>
![Thumbnail image for- !Toronto A Non-linear and Generative Exploration of Toronto in Film](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/f2ef07012c0a3dafaeafc94a31f13814718fa5cc-750x422.jpg?w=100)
!Toronto is a multi-screen, video-wall installation, which acts as a collaborative extension of a documentary film project initiated by filmmaker Alexandra Anderson (Ryerson, School of Image Arts). During the research phase for her documentary, a database was constructed of films shot in Toronto from early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on this vast collection of fictional film clips, her documentary maps, in a linear fashion, key landmarks and more quotidian settings that are often used to depict Toronto as “somewhere else”. The documentary explores what this means within the discourse of Canadian national cinema and Canadian identity. The title of the documentary, Toronto Hides Itself references the 2003 film Los Angeles Plays Itself, directed by Thom Anderson, which served as a source of inspiration.
!Toronto makes use of custom software and Geographic Information System (GIS) map data to produce an emergent and generative journey through this same database of clips making use of various keywords which have been applied to the clips (such as “Yonge Street”, “Nathan Philips Square”, “Little Italy”, “CN Tower”, “TTC Streetcar”, etc.). Through combining over 1700 clips from narrative cinema, with locative map data, interviews with various filmmakers (Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, and Bruce McDonald to name but a few), and original footage showing the locations as they actually appear outside of fictional film, the project works present a new way of visualizing and understanding the depiction of Toronto on film. The title, !Toronto, stems from commonly used coding syntax where the “!” denotes a negation, or a logical “not”.
![Thumbnail image for- One Pixel Sunset, Tommy Thompson Park (Leslie Street Spit)](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/8dcc2300243cede8ec14feba588b59caec93b1a4-1577x1041.jpg?w=100)
An extension of the a,[object Object],One Pixel Camera Project, aria-label="External link." /a>: a one pixel video of a sunset was produced using a video enabled variant of the original One Pixel Camera.
Format: 4K video with audio, 48 minutes duration
Exhibited, along with a,[object Object],The One Pixel Camera: Copy Work, aria-label="External link." /a> (2019) as part of Small Squares: The Pixel as Material and Metaphor (2020). Curated by Matthew Ryan Smith, Glenhyrst Art Gallery,
Brantford, ON
![Thumbnail image for- The One Pixel Camera: Copy Work](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/02a2eeda7c6612f869c43a5117380de0e673819a-750x527.jpg?w=100)
An extension of the original One Pixel Camera project commissioned for Small Squares: The Pixel as Material and Metaphor (2020) curated by Matthew Ryan Smith at the Glenhyrst Gallery in Brantford, Ontario.
In this case The One Pixel Camera was used to produce photographic duplications of various artwork in the Glenhyrst's collection. The One Pixel Camera: Copy Work works with the initial ideas behind The One Pixel Camera Project, while also connecting it to a questioning about the fidelity of artwork reproduction and potential issues of copyright. For instance, in this very redacted, pixelated form, is it still a photograph/reproduction of Warhol’s painting of Wayne Gretzky, and if not, at what resolution does it become an actual legitimate copy of the work.
The One Pixel Camera: Copy Work was also featured in Prefix Photo (41 Spring/Summer) 2022.
![Thumbnail image for- Floating Points](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/33c76afcbb7be34a882fd12e08402d6772dd57d5-750x513.jpg?w=100)
Produced in collaboration with Jonathon Anderson for the ArtSci Salon's a,[object Object],Cabinet Project, aria-label="External link." /a>, making use of one of the many empty display cases at the University of Toronto.
Floating Points is part of a series of moiré inspired works that make use of a combination of motion parallax effects and line-moiré interference patterns to produce a perceptual amplification of the viewer’s movement: with the intent of drawing greater attention to their own embodied and active perception.
Because this perceived effect is initiated through motion parallax, if the viewer stops moving, the interference patterns will also stop moving, so in order to experience the artwork, one must be in motion. Even though this Moiré effect produces a visual illusion of accelerated motion, the structure itself has no moving parts.
![Thumbnail image for- Interference](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/610ba88d96506fa646adffa6565e73f293c3e3e2-750x513.jpg?w=100)
Produced in collaboration with a,[object Object],Jonathon Anderson, aria-label="External link." /a>, Interference, 2016 consists of three monolithic structures, each with a double layer of carefully sized and positioned lines. The project makes use of a combination of motion parallax effects and line-moiré interference patterns to produce a perceptual amplification of the viewer’s movement: with the intent of drawing greater attention to their own embodied and active perception.
Because this perceived effect is initiated through motion parallax, if the viewer stops moving, the interference patterns will also stop moving, so in order to experience the artwork, one must be in motion. Even though this Moiré effect produces a visual illusion of accelerated motion, the structure itself has no moving parts.
![Thumbnail image for- Either/or … and Both](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/5584ac1c19543e8ea9775fed6d99571e6d6e1b1d-750x677.jpg?w=100)
Produced in collaboration with a,[object Object],Jonathon Anderson, aria-label="External link." /a>.
Either/or … and Both is part of a series of moiré inspired works that make use of a combination of motion parallax effects and line-moiré interference patterns to produce a perceptual amplification of the viewer’s movement: with the intent of drawing greater attention to their own embodied and active perception.
Because this perceived effect is initiated through motion parallax, if the viewer stops moving, the interference patterns will also stop moving, so in order to experience the artwork, one must be in motion. Even though this Moiré effect produces a visual illusion of accelerated motion, the structure itself has no moving parts.
![Thumbnail image for- The One Pixel Camera](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/de55399b659d8990ea5783ff5b9654f579446856-843x600.jpg?w=100)
The One Pixel Camera is a conceptual project involving aspects of photography, sculpture, electronic design and performance serving as an inquiry into the nature of the digital photographic medium: specifically questioning the connection between the digital photographic image and the reality that the camera records.
Taking a first principles approach, The One Pixel Camera reduces the camera’s function down to its primary essence: a mere capture (index) of light. For the project, a camera was specifically designed and constructed so that it can perform no more than this essential function. Nothing but a quantifiable, data-point (pixel) of light information is recorded, and the operator has almost no subjective control in terms of the quality, framing or content of the image. The resultant captures in no way depict the details of the reality recorded, yet they still serve as images, and as documents, on some level.
Additionally, the absurd design magnifies, and makes obvious, the design limitations and rules by which one is bound through the design (program) of the camera. This works to reveal the hidden politics, as described by theorist such as Bruno Latour, Vilém Flusser and Langdon Winner, inherent to technological design and the ways in which design tacitly prescribes and dictates certain behaviours while restricting others.
The project exists as three main components: 1) The camera itself, which functions as a sculptural object or potentially an interactive artwork; 2) The images produced by the camera, labelled with explicit captions indicating their subject matter; and 3) Photographs of the camera in use as documentation of my “performing” the program of the camera. To date, I have been using the camera to produce a series of images depicting clichéd and conventional photographic subject matter, essentially “Kodak Moments”, such as sunsets, family events, outdoor activities, portraits, personal belongings, weddings, and tourist locations.
![Thumbnail image for- A Series of Boring Videos](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/5fc40806fa7f1bd16de8072207aef04fe5a86472-889x500.jpg?w=100)
A Series of Boring Videos consists of three videos, Watched (2011), Watching (2012) and Watch (2014), where each video pertains to a specific idiom of boredom: “a watched pot never boils”, “watching paint dry” and “to watch grass grow”, respectively. Beyond a simple tongue-in-cheek literalization of these adages, the videos are meant to encourage the viewer to engage in a close and considered look at what, in actual fact, are very complex physical, chemical, biological and psychological phenomena.
![Thumbnail image for- Images of Men](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/d603bf98e6c346d0a99f158c03a8c068d0efff9b-401x600.jpg?w=100)
Watching the emergent gender of my three-year-old daughter as she develops into a little girl, I wonder about the factors that have contributed to her progression. In particular, I am curious about how her toys and her way of playing with them (which is essentially a form of practice for adult life), shape her now and how they might influence the type of adult she eventually becomes.
This has also caused me to reflect on the development of my own gendering and the toys of my childhood. In many ways, my toys presented the masculine role-models and ideals for me to look up to and to model myself after. Going through a box of my old toys, which had remained in storage under the stairs at my parent’s house, I attempted to photograph these toys as I once saw them in order to try to understand what sort of influence they might have had on me.
(50 images in the series - 17” x 22” archival pigments prints)
![Thumbnail image for- Details](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/b6515ef8d9c5d9175ac13a5a079b95bdf309adce-400x600.jpg?w=100)
Using the bellows from an old slide duplicator, coupled with a collection of extension tubes, a series of paintings made by Kim Neudorf were photographed in detail at an extreme degree of magnification. Due to the nature of her painting technique, which involves very dilute washes and many thin applications, the paintings retain an incredible degree of complexity even on such a small scale. Through traversing the surfaces of these paintings on this level, a new layer of highly intricate texture, pattern and form becomes apparent in an almost fractal-like manner.
(27 images in the series - 17” x 22” archival pigments prints)
![Thumbnail image for- The Moire Corridor (design concept and prototype)](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/27b0b07a2eeeb62d23d9909866730bfa8ae8b817-975x600.jpg?w=100)
The Moiré Corridor consists of a long fabricated structure: either attached to a wall or in the form of an extended fence. This structure, a double layer of carefully sized and positioned metal slats, makes use of a combination of motion parallax effects and line-moiré interference patterns to produce a perceptual amplification of the viewer’s movement: with the intent of drawing greater attention to their own embodied and active perception. Because this perceived effect is initiated through motion parallax, if the viewer stops moving, the interference patterns will also stop moving, so in order to experience the artwork, one must be in motion.
Beyond the basic design and concept, a mathematical system has been developed in order to calculate and precisely predict the perceptual effects resulting from various fence geometries. From this system, the Moiré Corridor can be reconfigured to fit a wide array of specific sites – both interior and exterior. Additionally, a crude prototype was produced in order to confirm that the mathematical calculations translate into predictable and interesting behaviors in reality. This prototype was shown as part of the exhibition, Prototypes, Experiments and Carefully-Considered Observations (2012), in the Artlab Gallery at Western University, and functioned exactly as intended.
![Thumbnail image for- Data Collection](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/0737bdbe0830f1f145653935575602a723bf89c5-556x400.jpg?w=100)
Data Collection was produced for the Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario. The project involved photographing the various identification cards (driver’s licenses, student cards, gym memberships, bankcards, credit cards, etc.) carried by over 100 individuals. The images were exhibited on a 1:1 scale such that all personal information contained on the cards was legible to gallery visitors; however, participants were permitted to remove any cards that they felt uncomfortable with having on display. The removed cards were indicated through replacement with a black “withheld” placeholder card. Beyond functioning as a simple, and very reductive, portrait of these individuals, the project draws attention to the power and risks associated with these cards—and ideally the databases behind the cards as well. Data Collection works to challenge the typical notion of privacy—to keep things secret and hidden away—and instead presents an idea of privacy that allows the individual to retain control over what data is collected, how it is used and who is given access.
(100 images in the series - 12.5” x 9” archival pigments prints mounted on Sintra)
Special thanks to Andrew Clement, Joseph Ferenbok and Karen Smith at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information.
![Thumbnail image for- Wildlife](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/cc67450377e675c9e6e99644a115967e8c22346d-929x600.jpg?w=100)
Wildlife addresses three historic taxidermy collections still on display in the city of Banff, Alberta: The Banff Park Museum, the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum, and the Banff Indian Trading Post souvenir shop. These collections share a common goal of presenting an idealized and romanticized notions of "nature" and "the wild" thus fulfilling tourist desires; however, each has its own agenda in terms of how the artifacts function and what purpose they serve.
The museums are all essentially anachronistic with the Banff Park Museum functioning as a "museum of a museum" presenting a natural history display as it originally appeared 1915; the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum displays a history of the indigenous people of the area as told through a mixture of traditionally garbed mannequins and taxidermy animals dating back to the 1950s; and the Indian Trading Post souvenir shop which originated at the turn of the century is pure spectacle with sagittally severed animal specimens stuck to the wall, and a composite specimen misleadingly labelled as a "The Merman".
The images in the series are of the specimens themselves and printed as cyanotypes in order to evoke a sense of being from a past era. Yet, certain details and slippages complicate these images and their subjects remain in a mixture of present and past, live and dead, idealized and real.
![Thumbnail image for- Taken (a camera obscura van project)](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/8d752d14ac9638f762d38139b8f9e4b9d74bdabc-675x450.jpg?w=100)
A van was converted into a mobile camera obscura in order to replicate aspects of a retinal inversion experiment performed by George Stratton in 1896. Stratton`s experiment worked to question how true and immutable one’s perception of the world actually is. In the experiment, Stratton wore a special pair of glasses that inverted his visual field for an extended period of time: three days for a first test and up to 13 days in later tests. Initially, the glasses were very disorienting for Stratton, but after many hours, he found that he was fully able to adjust to this upside down image of the world. In fact, he adjusted so well that when he eventually removed the glasses, he discovered that his “normal” vision had now become unfamiliar and disorienting.
For , viewers go on a 20 to 30 minute journey, during which they are totally immersed in the inverted, camera obscura, environment within the van. Although, not nearly as long as Stratton’s original experiment, the journey is sufficient to create a transition from a very disorienting (possibly even carsickness inducing) experience, to a state where one can begin to recognize features in the landscape and even figure out their location within the city.
![Thumbnail image for- Image Matter](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/55f4976fdda45a1e4a6bf36942fe9b430c289f55-1000x182.jpg?w=100)
Image Matter was a collaboration with Dr. Kevin Robbie, a physicist at Queen’s University, that made use of a scanning electron microscope to image the edge-on (thickness) view of various photographic media. The resultant images were presented on a very large scale (16 inches by 7.5 feet and in some cases 16 inches x 15 feet wide) thus emphasizing the physicality of the photograph and removing all traces of the actual image content—the image content was only referred through the use of captions.
The goal of the project was to emphasize the physicality of the photograph—separating the photographic object from the photographic image—as a way to question notions of value pertaining to photographic images and to investigate how such notions have been altered by advances in digital technology and the introduction of non-physical, digital property. In addition to physical exhibition of the artworks, the project was extended through the production of an online gallery, which made the artwork freely available through a Creative Commons Non-commercial Attribution License.
![Thumbnail image for- Traffic Islands](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/eb8605b89712c64903eec86e8becc6f1229dfa2b-450x450.jpg?w=100)
Photographs of the small parcels of land occurring between on-ramps at major highway junctions. Although driven past by thousands of commuters daily, these marginal sections of land are rarely visited or even noticed. When photographed at night under the high-powered lights that loom overhead these constructed "natural" environments become transformed into strange liminal landscapes.
![Thumbnail image for- Signs](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/b31acce8d80f3a511719e189c5d6c3cfb46b43e2-450x450.jpg?w=100)
A series of photographs depicting banal, ironic and humorous situations acting as subtle indicators of the state of North American culture (a continuation of the , 2001 series).
![Thumbnail image for- Reconstructed Bodies](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/53a77ef861b56432babdf488604b6fa3e39a7656-354x450.jpg?w=100)
A novel photographic process, involving a pinhole camera with multiple apertures, was developed to replicate aspects of medical imaging technologies, such as MRI and CAT scan, in order to raise questions about how these new technologies alter the way we come to view and understand the human body..
![Thumbnail image for- Out of the Ordinary](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/974e6e3f545f11180a878e71b3015a913ae33ec4-600x387.jpg?w=100)
A series of photographs depicting banal, ironic and humorous situations acting as subtle indicators of the state of North American culture.
![Thumbnail image for- Vague Expressions](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ijjxi0wa/production/d3295ed79a946c4a9ff046895621398b748bdd25-600x445.jpg?w=100)
Ambiguous facial expressions and an example of how an extra bit of information can radically alter the meaning of an image. Vague Expressions was produced by photographing scrambled pornographic television transmissions directly off the screen of a TV and then adding false colour.