Paul Wong

Type of Art:  Media Arts

Dates: Artist Talk – August 21 @ 5:45pm

Location: Craig Gallery and Alderney Landing – Outdoor Mainstage

Paul Wong is a media-maestro making art for site specific spaces and screens of all sizes. He is an award-winning artist and curator who is known for: pioneering early video art in Canada, founding several artist-run groups, leading public arts policy, and organizing events, conferences and public interventions since the 1970s.

DisOriental (Outdoor Video Screen)

Is he here or there, in China, Canada, or France? The ‘other’ being in and out of place. Dressed in white, wearing a bamboo sun hat and barefoot, and in dark glasses, Wong materializes himself at the entrance of the Saint-Etienne Bridge in Limognes France on a clear summers day. Walking seemingly disorientated he navigates using an iPad screen as a spatiotemporal window on his digital journey.

#LLL, Looking, Listening, Looping (Craig Gallery)

“Looking, Looping, Listening is a wall-to-wall installation of 10, 10″ x 12″ screens dominating the darkened exhibition space. Each screen flickers a glowing series of different animated GIFs (a one or two second moving image file on perpetual loop). The content varies from selfies to abstraction, blurring the shapes and patterns of capture and existence. As individual screens are placed in close proximity to each other, it is nearly impossible to focus for long on any single screen. Taking a step back, it becomes clear that the multitude of content viewed as a whole is meant to captivate our full attention.” Amy Fung Akimblog, January 28, 2014.

Flash Memory (Outside the Craig Gallery)

20,323 pictures are mashed into an intense viewing experience. Photographs flash on and off at 15 pictures per second, 900 frames per minute. It is a chronology of three years of incessant picture taking of people, places and things: part journal, diary, sketchbook, research and documents of the everyday at home, studio, streets, art events, travels, weddings, funerals, birthdays, gatherings with friends and family, celebrations, and festivals.