Gallery TPW is thrilled to announce an upcoming exhibition featuring J\u00e9r\u00f4me Havre, Cauleen Smith, and Camille Turner, a new commission made possible with the generous support of Partners in Art. Created during a year of cross-border conversation on their specific relationships to land and belonging, Havre, Smith, and Turner have collaborated on a new short film that will premiere at TPW. The film features three puppet avatars\u2014performing the selves of Havre, Smith, and Turner\u2014navigating distinct worlds that at once isolate them and offer them the possibility of transformative connection. As they move through their respective landscapes, Havre, Smith, and Turner\u2019s puppets reflect on blackness as a state of becoming, a mode of experience that reaches simultaneously into multiple futures and histories. The film is accompanied by a new multi-channel CCTV video installation developed by Smith that creates feedback loops of seeing and being seen amid an immersive environment.<\/p>\n
Alongside the project, Toronto-based writer Yaniya Lee joins Gallery TPW as a guest curator of public programs for the course of the exhibition. Lee will engage local Black artists and thinkers as a parallel to the ongoing conversations that have prompted Havre, Smith, and Turner\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
In addition to the vital support of Partners in Art, this exhibition is made possible with the assistance of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Biographies<\/h1>\n
J\u00e9r\u00f4me Havre<\/strong>\u2019s practice concentrates on issues of identity, communities, and territories, investigating the political and sociological processes of contemporary life as they relate to nationalism in France and Canada. Havre adopts a multidisciplinary approach in his exploration of these themes and their attending questions; he uses myriad tools and methods to make tangible the conditions of identity within situations of social transformation. Havre completed his studies at l\u2019\u00c9cole Nationale Sup\u00e9rieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris). Since 2001, he has exhibited in Europe, Africa, and North America. Recent shows include \u201cTalking Back, Otherwise,\u201d Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto; \u201cParadis: La fabrique de l\u2019image,\u201d espace d\u2019art contemporain 14\u00b0N 61\u00b0W, Martinique; \u201cLand Marks,\u201d Art Gallery of Peterborough, Ontario;\u202f\u201cLiminal (Necessity and accident),\u201d\u202fThe Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON; \u201cReiteration,\u201d Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto;\u202f and \u201cPoetry of Geopolitics,\u201d Koffler Gallery, Toronto. He is represented by Galerie Donald Browne (Montr\u00e9al) and is currently based in Toronto.<\/p>\nCauleen Smith<\/strong> is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third-world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater, Film, and Television. Smith is currently based in Chicago; she will join the faculty of the studio-art program of California Institute of the Arts in January 2018. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the New Museum, New York; D21, Leipzig; and Decad, Berlin. She has presented solo exhibitions of her films, drawings, and installations at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, Oregon; the Contemporary Arts Center, UC Irvine; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Kitchen, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Threewalls, Chicago. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, a Creative Capital Film\/Video grant, a Chicago 3Arts Grant, a the Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, the Artadia Award, and a Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was a 2016 Recipient of a Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts in Film and Video and is the inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award. She was a Whitney Biennial 2017 participant and currently has a solo show at The Art Institute of Chicago. Smith is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and Kate Werble, New York.<\/p>\nBorn in Jamaica and based in Toronto, Camille Turner<\/strong> is an explorer of race, space, home, and belonging. She is the founder of Outerregion<\/em>, an afrofuturist performance company. Her interventions, installations, and public engagements combine Afrofuturism and historical research and have been presented throughout Canada and internationally, including at Dak\u2019Art African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar Senegal, and the Bamako Biennale in Mali. Miss Canadiana<\/em>, one of her earliest performance works, challenges perceptions of Canadianness and troubles the unspoken binary of \u201creal Canadian\u201d and \u201cdiverse other.\u201d Camille\u2019s most recent works include Wanted<\/em>, a collaboration with Camal Pirbhai that uses the trope of fashion to transform an archive of newspaper posts by Canadian slave owners into a series of contemporary fashion ads. Her collaboration with Cheryl L\u2019Hirondelle on LandMarks2017, commissioned by Parks Canada and Partners In Art, resulted in Freedom Tours<\/em>, an alternative Thousand Islands boat tour and a procession honouring Mother Earth at Rouge National Park. Camille has taught at the University of Toronto, Algoma University, and the Toronto School of Art. She is a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design and York University\u2019s Masters in Environmental Studies program, where she is currently a PhD candidate. Her work has recently been included in More Caught in the Act<\/em>, edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars, Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America\u2019s Frontier Imagination<\/em> by Lee Rodney, and Border Cultures<\/em> by Srimoyee Mitra and Bonnie Devine. camilleturner.com<\/a>.<\/p>\nYaniya Lee<\/strong>\u2019s interdisciplinary research draws on the work of Black Studies scholars to question critical reading practices and reconsider Black art histories in Canada. From 2012-2015 she hosted the Art Talks MTL podcast, a series of long-form interviews with art workers in Montreal. In 2016 she programmed “Labour, Land and Body: geographies of de\/colonialism” for Vtape\u2019s Curatorial Incubator. Last fall, with members of the 4:3 Collective, she organized the MICE Symposium on Transformative Justice in the Arts<\/em>. Lee was previously on the editorial advisory committees for C Magazine<\/em> and FUSE Magazine<\/em>. She is a founding collective member of MICE Magazine<\/em> and a new member of the EMILIA-AMALIA working group. This summer, Lee participated in the Banff Research in Culture: Year 2067<\/em> residency. She is the 2017-2018 writer-in-residence at Gallery 44 and currently works as the associate editor at Canadian Art<\/em> Magazine.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n