Thursday February 13 – Sunday February 16, 2025
5:30 – 9:30PM
26 James St N. Hamilton ON (corner of James St N and King William St)
Public Works is a large-scale outdoor art exhibit featuring experimental new media works presented in the core of downtown Hamilton. Each night, works that are dedicated to the people, wildlife, and history of Hamilton playfully activate the outer facade of 26 James Street North. Featuring works from Gary Barwin, Lesley Loksi Chan, Marcella Driver-Moliner, and the Sari-Sari Xchange.
This is a free event for all ages produced by Factory Media Centre and presented by the City of Hamilton.
About the Works
THE AMBITIOUS SKY, Gary Barwin
On view Thursday, February 13th
THE AMBITIOUS SKY is a projection featuring a poem that appears to be being typed as the viewer watches. Words are added letter by letter, typos are corrected, spelling and grammar mistakes are underlined just as occurs in a word processor. In addition to the text, clouds, shooting stars, comets, and birds fly across the screen, changing the colours of the text as they pass over it so that the text itself appears as a landscape.
The work explores how Hamiltonians’ lives intersect with urban wildlife and specifically birds. How can we re-encounter bird life and be open to their often surprising, joyful, beautiful presence around us in the downtown area? How can a wall be a screen for writing? A sky for birds? How can a wall, rather being the trace of what’s not there, be instead a canvas for a moving living artwork?
Desire to Grow, Marcella Driver-Moliner
On view Friday, February 14th
Desire to Grow is a looping computer-generated animation rendered in Blender. It represents flowers that reflect Hamilton’s native flora, such as purple-stemmed aster, milkweed, and wild strawberries. These digital blooms symbolize growth during the hibernating season and remind us to let the wildflowers grow in the warm weather. This work merges natural elements with unnatural mediums to remind us that our tools and surroundings are gifts of the environment. These plants are our past and need to be a part of our future.
For Now (Bubble Town Operetta), Lesley Loksi Chan
On view Saturday, February 15th
A woman working at a car wash is visited by an apparition, who inspires her to write a long overdue letter. But as distractions creep in and life moves on, the moment dissolves into the ordinary rhythm of existence. For Now (Dispatch from Bubble Town) draws on years of scanning gloves worn by friends and relatives and listening to gossip about their workplaces. Gloves as symbols of labor, care, and service, evoke their use in hospitals, kitchens, construction sites, and other spaces tied to human effort. Combining scanned gloves with personal objects and AI-generated imagery, this experiment questions the proximities of human touch and AI technologies. This video is one woman’s tired finger scrawling on a dirty windshield about art, work, and the gross cycles of gross power we long to challenge.
Looking In, The Sari-Sari Xchange: Serena Zena, Arturo Jimenez, Taien Ng-Chan, Haoran Chang, Sana Akram, Carmela Laganse, and Jet Coghlan
On view Sunday, February 16th
This large-scale projection immerses viewers in dynamic, digitally rendered 3D scans of interior spaces, brought to life by shifting, vibrant light. As light flows and shifts across the surfaces, it reveals hidden nuances of the scans, inviting the audience to explore the evolving relationship between domestic spaces and technology in a captivating visual journey.
About the Artists
Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 32 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 and, with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Muttertongue. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His most recent novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was the Hamilton Reads choice for 2023-2024. His art and media works have been exhibited internationally. His interactive installation, Bird Fiction, created with Sarah Imrisek, was part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2024 and his interactive multimedia poetry exhibition (created with Elee Kraljii Gardiner) was exhibited at Massy Arts (Vancouver.) Living Room, a year-long room-sized interactive installation was exhibited at the AGH. He lives in Hamilton.
Marcella Driver-Moliner is a Toronto-based bilingual new media artist who hails from the Eastern Townships of Quebec. They create 3D experimental animations and fabricated projects to re-interpret nature into personified emotions. They implement software such as Blender, Adobe Suite, 3D printing, laser cutting, UV printing and other fabrication methods to realize their projects.
Following foundational training in Graphic Design at Dawson College in Montreal, they pursued an undergraduate degree in IMXA (Integrated Media: Expanded Animation) at OCAD University. Since graduating in 2022, their projects have been featured at Denver Digerati, the Aga Khan Light up the Dark, Experimental awards in London UK, Santa Fe CURRENTS new media, and Toronto festivals such as TAFF, Tais, Pleasure Dome, Design To and Insomniac.
Lesley Loksi Chan is concerned with questions of invisibility, believability and resistibility. Shaped by the histories of anthropology and cinema, her work asks how material culture and image culture affect the particular ways we think, remember, and live together. Through experimental, handmade and process-based filmmaking, she creates moving-images as mementos. She is a member of Automates, bb house and Dandelion Film Collective. Chan was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada which is situated upon the traditional territories of the Eerie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally including at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Textile Museum of Canada, Images Festival (Toronto), International Festival of Films on Art (Montreal), Anthology Film Archives (New York City), National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), British Film Institute (London, UK), and Berlin International Film Festival.
The Sari Sari Xchange is a community-building research & creation project using Extended Reality (XR) (ie. Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Realities) to foster new works by artists from the Asian diaspora. We undertake exploration in emergent XR technologies and new storytelling techniques, address under-representation and issues of systemic racism as well as inaccessibility of these new technologies for both creators and users with disabilities.
About Factory Media Centre
Factory Media Centre is Hamilton’s not-for-profit artist-driven resource centre for film, video, new media, installation, sound art, and other multimedia art forms. Our mission is to develop and support a vibrant, sustainable, creative, and diverse community of Members and non-Members within Hamilton and its surrounding region.
This event is produced by Factory Media Centre and presented by the City of Hamilton.
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