Past Residents
Past Resident2012: Canada Council for the Arts
Samina Mansuri
In her recent work, Samina Mansuri uses as a starting point media depictions of war-torn places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the twin towers or places like New Orleans that have been ravaged by natural disasters. Frequently the architecture of these locations, captured from an aerial view, is reduced to ash or rubble. These views tend to provide a detached sense of actual place. Through a transformed language of aerial cartography Mansuri creates subjective mappings of an ambiguous location of trauma. Through this she aims to bring attention to viewers about mediated representations of misery and its impact on individual and public memory.
Samina Mansuri (born Karachi) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute, New York and MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Mansuri has exhibited her work internationally for over two decades. Recent exhibitions include Qualia or the pulse of Steel, Hamilton, Canada 2012; Out of Rubble, Space Gallery, Pittsburgh, 2011; Leaning Towards Collapse, A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2011; Empire of Dreams Phenomenology of the Built Environment, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada; Double Consciousness, Mattress Factory Museum, USA, 2007 and Post-Object, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough, Canada, 2007. Her works are represented in public and private collections and have been extensively featured and reviewed in catalogs, books, newspapers and journals.
Samina Mansuri, Ash 9 Tararatiie, 2008, Giclee print, 44 × 5213/16 in. (111.76 × 134.11 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Samina Mansuri, After Images: Cedibidaee Reconstruction Site 9, 2010, Multimedia installation with video projection, 228 × 180 × 24 in. (579.12 × 457.2 × 60.96 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Samina Mansuri, Ash 5 Olaraaee, 2008, Giclee print, 34 × 34 in. (86.36 × 86.36 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Samina Mansuri, Mukiirati, 2008, Giclee print, 34 × 34 in. (86.36 × 86.36 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Samina Mansuri, After Images: Cedibidaee Reconstruction Site 10, 2009 - 2011, Multimedia installation with video projection, 240 × 228 × 24 in. (609.6 × 579.12 × 60.96 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Residents from Canada
Past Resident2012: American-Scandinavian Foundation
Øystein Aasan
Øystein Aasan’s practice uses architecture, books, collage, sculpture and painting to address memory, the function of images and the place of the viewer. Aasan’s works function as a game of visual contrast and compare. The modernist grid is taken on a play date with images from the leftovers of a visual history associated with popular culture. Aasan picks these images from old magazines or images that are mass-produced and potentially limitless in quantity. As such they are examples of the norm in art post-pop. Both through references and the use of found imagery, post-modernist art keeps seeping through the cracks of the modernist grid. Or perhaps rather the grid is being superimposed over the found image. This could easily be interpreted as an attempt to re-describe the assumed literary, qualities of referentiality that we normally ascribe to post-modern art. The result is a feeling of visual tension that is optically immediate, but also conceptually striking since what is at stake is the very distinction between modernist and post-modernist ways of understanding the image. Aasan’s work makes the connection between grid and multiple obvious by combining them in objects that themselves appear anonymously unique. (Text by Erlend Hammer)
Øystein Aasan (born 1977, Kristiansand, Norway) received his education from the National Collage of Art and Design, Oslo. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Lautom, Oslo; Stenersen Museum, Oslo; Sørlandets Art Museum, Kristiansand; PSM, Berlin; Momentum Biennale, Moss, Norway; Migros Museum, Zürich; Kunstverein Arnsberg, Arnsberg, Germany; and La Vitrine, Paris. He has published texts and essays in several international magazines. Aasan lives and works in Berlin.
Øystein Aasan, Never Ending Memory, 2006, Sculpture/Archive, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Øystein Aasan, Solo Show, 2011, Installation. Courtesy of the artist and PSM Gallery, Berlin.
Øystein Aasan, Solo Show, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and PSM Gallery, Berlin.
Øystein Aasan, Double Trouble, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and La Vitrine, Paris.
Øystein Aasan, Spot On, 2011. Courtesy of the artist, Sørlandets Kunst Museum, Norway.
Past Resident2012: James Wallace Arts Trust
Akiko Diegel
Akiko Diegel’s works deal with existence: things that are consumed, worn, worked, worried, carried, things used as comforts and things used as crutches. Diegel’s practice utilizes and examines the act of collecting, recording, constructing and stitching. She works to balance the works between the corporeal and the behavioral sides of being a person. Diegel’s final artworks often relate to the body and human behaviors. Her practice moves fluidly between the seductively kaleidoscopic and the poised, quiet and contained.
Akiko Diegel (born Japan) lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. She graduated with an MFA in 2008 from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. In 2011, Akiko Diegel was awarded the Paramount Award for her work, Cure, at the 20th Annual Wallace Art Awards. Her work has been included in the Wallace Art Award finalist exhibition every year between 2006 and 2010. Diegel was a finalist in the Waiheke Art Awards (2011), the Waikato Museum National Contemporary Art Award (2007-2010) and the Norsewear Art Award (2007).
Akiko Diegel, Untitled, 2009, Wool blanket.
Akiko Diegel, Up Where We Belong, 2008, C-type print, 151/2 × 151/2 in. (39.37 × 39.37 cm).
Akiko Diegel, Untitled, 2008, Wool blanket, 7 × 10 in. (17.78 × 25.4 cm).
