Struts brings L'Ambiance to Sappyfest

August 1 - 3

All over town

Struts is happy to present L’Ambiance, a series of artist projects running contemporaneous to everyone’s favourite music festival Sappyfest.  L’Ambiance includes work by artists Bomi Yook, Alexis O’Hara and Andrew Maize. Read on for more details.

K-COSMOSIS

by Bomi Yook

Struts Gallery

10am -  5pm Friday, Saturday, Sunday

K-COSMOSIS explores the blended nature of cosmologies within Korean metaphysics. Weaving an intricate tale of relationality, the piece brings together multiple narratives across time and space, celebrating a multifaceted understanding of history, identity, ideology, and mythology. Informed by the Feminist and Queer philosophies of quantum physics, the piece uses procedurally generated particle systems to imagine the world through an ongoing blending. The piece invites viewers to see the world through osmosis rather than duality to reveal a profound sharedness and connection. Presented as part of L'Ambiance, our partnership with Struts Gallery.

Bomi Yook is a media artist based in Calgary, working with immersive media, experimental animation, and video performance. Yook holds an MFA from UCLA and a BFA from Alberta University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally—including Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Calgary. She is the winner of the 2023 Emerging Digital Artist Award in Toronto, Elaine Klown Klein Fellowship in Los Angeles, Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead New Media Caucus Award, and a Beyond Future Art Award Finalist. Her projects have been supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Commissioned by the City of West Hollywood, her video art was showcased at MIMA (Moving Image Media Art) Netflix owned public art screen on Los Angeles's iconic Sunset Boulevard.

In her ongoing research on colonial trauma and intergenerational memory, Yook has collaborated with prominent museums, archives, and activist groups, including the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum, the Justice Memory Solidarity Foundation, the Museum of Forced Mobilization History, the Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization, and the People’s Archive of Japanese Colonial History.

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SQUEEEQUE

Sound installation by Alexis O'Hara

Location: Autonomous Scrap Yard (7 Lorne St.)

Ongoing

This lo-tech media artwork engages in a playful reconfiguring of recycled objects collected from flea markets, recycling centres and a local network*, reflecting an encyclopaedia of the home stereo, spanning decades of design trends. A chronology of the home entertainment system, each building block is imbued with the energy of the living room it once enlivened. Inspired by the architectural marvel that is the igloo, this installation also pays homage to the geodesic domes of the great thinker and architect, Buckminster Fuller.

But more than anything, this project owes a debt to the art, long forgotten by most adults, of fort-building: stretching a bed sheet over two chairs, digging a grotto in the snow that fell last night, erecting a dome home from old speakerboxes...

BUT, WHAT IS IT, EXACTLY?

A stereophonic fort. A sonic cocoon.

Alexis O’Hara is an undisciplined artist who has toured internationally with her spoken-noise performances and installations. She has released four albums, a few chapbooks and zines and enough helium balloons to get her dress caught in a Belgrade chandelier. She is a recipient of the Powerhouse Prize, awarded by La Centrale, Canada's longest-running feminist art gallery. Alexis and her drag king alterego, Guizo LaNuit, are mainstays of the Montreal cabaret scene. Her blood type is O+ which means she is a giver.

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It is a small sphere and a heavy sphere

Installation by Andrew Maize

Location: Memorial Park Gazebo and perhaps elsewhere

What have we here? it is a small sphere and a heavy sphere (SSHS) is an homage to Alexander Calder’s seminal mobile, Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932/33), which consisted of a heavy lead ball, a small wooden ball and 7 found objects which he called impedimenta (a wooden crate, a symbol, 4 glass bottles, a tin can.) 
 By pushing the heavy sphere, the small sphere is sent flying through a series of engagements and avoidances with the impedimenta, playing with expectations as we try to anticipate it’s complex and unpredictable interactions. It’s not Rube Goldberg, nor is it Fischli and Weiss. It is the way things go. 

It is a small sphere and a heavy sphere will be shifting its form and location throughout Sappyfest. Come and give it a try.

Andrew Maize makes art that is often playful, collaborative and improvised, its form is contingent on the relationships of environmental, technological, social, and material situations.  As an educator and organizer, he has been involved in collaborative projects that engage communities with art, both in traditional and non-traditional spaces. He has been meaning to make a list of all the different jobs he had over the years, but it would be a lot of work. He has taught and hopes to teach again in Expanded Media and Fine Arts at NSCAD University.