Quinn Hopkins, Gabriel Masewich, MEDIAH, SJ Okemow, Uii Savage, and Quentin VerCetty
On view from October 21-December 31, 2023
Factory Media Centre is thrilled to launch AR Activations, a project featuring new augmented reality works by Quinn Hopkins, Gabriel Masewich, MEDIAH, SJ Okemow, Uii Savage, and Quentin VerCetty. The works in AR Activations were created in response to Factory Media Centre’s new home in a historical hydro building and investigates relationships to the land, nature, and cosmos.
Future Ancestral Site Excavation # 1
Future Ancestral Site Excavation #1 is a glimpse into the future where art, science and the unexplainable are integrated to create a landmark that describes the original inhabitants of this place in time.
Inspired by innovation and spirit, Quinn Hopkins finds new ways to channel ancestral stories woven with contemporary issues and technology.
Quinn Hopkins (he/him), aka Noodin Studio, is a multidisciplinary artist from Tkaronto, Treaty 13 territory. His Ojibwe-Métis and English heritage guides his art practices, inspired as a kid by the works of Norval Morrisseau and pictographs found around Ontario. Hopkins finds excitement in bringing fusing technology with tradition to help raise awareness of the presence of Indigenous people in the 21 st Century and onwards.
Entangled Gateway
Entangled Gateway plays energetically with the abstraction of physics simulation, time, and zero gravity to catalyze a sense of movement and alien rhythm. Experimenting with a sense of time and atmosphere outside the human experience, this 3D artwork captivates the viewer with its explosive
energy and reconstructive intelligence. A hypnotic entrance into another sense of physical reality. Entangled in another dimensional space that is unknown and merely glimpsed into. What mysteries lie past the veil which cannot be seen past? One can only begin to imagine.
In this augmented activation experience an explosive portal within the facade of 366 Victoria Ave. You will witness the gateway performing a time-shifting detonation as it explodes and reconstructs itself in an infinite loop of broken spacetime. Entangled Gateway plays with the energetic abstraction
of physics, playfully expanding and contracting its form as if breathing. Experimenting with three-dimensional qualities outside the human experience, this AR experience uses physics simulation, animated time signatures, and zero gravity to create an imaginative sense of movement and tactile rhythm. Playfully exploring the mystery of physics and the infinitely larger universe of space.
Gabriel Masewich is an artist whose works span animated images, cinematography, film, and installation. Their work emphasizes the dialog between the digital and physical worlds by creating imaginative 3D illusions that celebrate the impossible. Gabriel playfully brings fine-art flare to the industrialized tools of VFX.
CHLOROSYPH
CHLOROSYPH is an experimental 3D animated AR piece that merges the artistic aesthetic of graffiti abstraction and fine art with natural plant and nature elements. The artwork is comprised of multiple animated components that together resemble a unique, vibrant, mechanical green plant moving
dynamically within 3D space. the visual treatment of CHLOROSYPH uses tones of green, grey, black and white along with various tones of each colour due to the amount of surface reflection, shadow, ambient occlusion and global illumination. CHLOROSYPH feels electrically powered while still giving the sense of being a product of nature.
Evond Blake (aka MEDIAH) is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist who weaves contemporary graffiti/street art forms with painterly techniques and digital media to create large-scale, immersive cinematic environments. Heavily inspired by avionics, mechanical engineering and schematics, MEDIAH’s abstract work utilises speed, motion, dynamism, and force to depict otherworldly dimensions through an abstract lens.
Mycelial Tessellations
Developing from the intersections of my personal identity, my art practice explores how western science and Indigenous knowledge differ from one another in their perspectives on the world and our relationship to others, but also how these two ways of knowing and being can come together. The fruiting fungal bodies are the visible element of this project and the viewer can then imagine the mycelium below. I see mycelial networks as communicative interfaces between more-than-human beings and environmental structures, as well as a metaphor for knowledge held by more-than-human kin.
SJ Okemow is a multidisciplinary artist of Nehiyaw and Eastern European descent. She holds a BSc in Physiology and an MSc in Medical Art. She currently teaches Advanced Animation at OCAD University and is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, working remotely in the 3D Visual Aesthetics Lab.
Celestial Passage
Celestial Passage is a dystopian augmented reality that simulates the Factory Media Centre as an observation site for viewing captured North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) satellite data. The work addresses the colonizing forces and complexity of space politics while navigating a data portrait of orbiting traffic as a vestige of the past amongst artificially-generated Meta Malakh. This augmented reality re-presents information to audiences as phantasms ghosting the interface while recollecting the intensifying forces that occupy the public domain of space.
Uii Savage is an emerging artist and writer who studied art at Coleg Sir Gar (Wales) and received a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts (2020) in Mohkinstsís (Calgary). Their work takes form in augmented reality, virtual reality, video, and sound to extend queer feminist fantasy into reality. She has recently shown work with Something Special Studios (NYC), NFT.NYC, Viviane Art Gallery, Arts Commons, Contemporary Calgary and written for Luma Quarterly and Public Parking. Her work has been supported through the Calgary Arts Development and Alberta Media Arts Alliance.
Honouring 2 FIAs Made In Hamilton
Exploring a conceptual Afrofuturism theme the artwork highlights two trailblazing Black women of Hamilton, Evelyn Myrie and Esie Mensah. The concept is inspired by an early 1900s poster for the Hamilton Hydro Electric Commission which was part of the building that is now the Factory Media Centre.The art feature a woman masquerader as a bronze statue on top of debris from the construction of the centre.She is wearing a symbolic hybrid futuristic Chief ancestral mask referred to as “Fia” from the Ewe people of West African while dressed in a futuristic attire to suggest that the subject is a time traveler. Hovering over her left and right shoulders is an image of the trailblazing Hamilton Black women while at the base are inscribed the words “From Julia Washinton Berry and all the Black Hamilton women who were toll keepers that history can no longer ignore”.
Quentin VerCetty is multi-award winning, multidisciplinary storyteller, an ever-growing interstellar tree and one of the world’s leading Afrofuturist. He is the first artist to be commissioned by Carnegie Hall creating a multi-purpose digital art asset for their 2021-2022 festival season branding. He coedited Canada’s first contemporary art book on Afrofuturism.
The Factory Media Centre is a not-for-profit artist-run resource centre located in Hamilton, Ontario. FMC is dedicated to the production and promotion of creatively diverse forms of independent films, videos, and other streaming multimedia art forms.
Our mission is to develop and support a vibrant, sustainable, creative, and diverse community of Members within Hamilton and its surrounding region, who are involved or interested in the art, the craft, and the technologies, of motion picture media. In addition to our mission, we also provide access to facilities, equipment, peer resources and educational initiatives to the community of time-based visual artists, as well as to the community at large. Through our programming we hope to encourage the development and appreciation of all related visual art forms through an ongoing program of screenings and events.
The renovation of FMC’s new home was made possible through an Ontario Trillium Foundation Capital Grant of $150,000 to build an accessible, affordable, and modernized media arts community space for local artists. FMC is infinitely grateful for the years of stability this relocation will provide.
Factory Media Centre gratefully acknowledges that AR Activations was made possible through the financial support from the Government of Canada and FedDev Ontario and Hamilton Halton Brant Regional Tourism Association
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