Opening Reception

Co-presented by the Images Festival, YYZ is pleased to present Emily Wardill, and Sarah Jane Gorlitz & Wojciech Olejnik.

EMILY WARDILL | SEA OAK

EMILY WARDILL‘s Sea Oak was developed from a series of interviews conducted with the The Rockridge Institute, a left-orientated think tank located in Berkeley, California. From 2001 until its closure in April 2008, the Institute researched contemporary political rhetoric with special emphasis on the employment of metaphor and framing.

EMILY WARDILL (b.1977) is a London-based British filmmaker. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including at the ICA, London (2008), Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London (2005 and 2006), STANDARD (OSLO) (2008) Grizedale, Lake District, and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York (2004). Her work has been screened at the Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain; the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam, MOCA, Miami and the London Film Festival. She is currently working towards solo shows at de Appel, Amsterdam and The Showroom, London.

SARAH JANE GORLITZ & WOJCIECH OLEJNIK | YYreZidency

YYZ, which turned thirty this year, responds to contemporary discourse about the breadth of artist support at artist-run centres by working beyond the crate and offering SARAH JANE GORLITZ & WOJCIECH OLEJNIK a six-week residency this spring.

In their collaborative videos, Gorlitz and Olejnik present fictional, fabricated environments, with the help of models, sets and stop-motion animation. These invented spaces are constructed intuitively with materials at hand, and refer to generic and familiar, yet emptied social spaces. These videos present a reality that is never stable but in the process of becoming: like a book, where with every turning page the interworking of the whole is re-framed and restructured. In this way, reality can be discussed as something reworked, as something incomplete, and as something with active potentiality.

SARAH JANE GORLITZ & WOJCIECH OLEJNIK‘s collaborative work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax), Struts Gallery (Sackville), Neutral Ground (Regina), Optica, Centre D’Art Contemporain (Montreal), and Kapitalisitischer Realismus (Berlin), and in recent group exhibitions at The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), 6 Picoles Cycliques (Lyon), Kunstverein INGAN (Berlin), and Truck (Calgary). They have received funding from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Arts Council and in 2008 were awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer prize for emerging artists.

The artists gratefully acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Opening Reception
Saturday, April 3, 2010
2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
YYZ