Please note the writings about me and my work in the latest newsletter sent by my distributor Videographe. This includes information about the inclusion of my videos in festivals in the context of Vidoegraphe's distribution over the past year, as well as summaries of my work in general by both Denis Vaillancourt of Videographe and myself. They also posted a video of my performance of Parallel, present at the Society for Arts and Technology in May, 2010.

Read the article by Denis Vaillancourt

Watch the performance of Parallel

Read the article by Owen Eric Wood

The 19th Visionaria International Video Festival announced today the winner of its special section dedicated to video art, awarding the Vision Art Prize to Owen Eric Wood's video Parallel (Canada, 2009). The piece tells the story of an artist struggling to recreate his own image in an attempt to understand his identity. Caught in a perpetual cycle of artistic expression that merges photography, drawing and video, it becomes difficult to distinguish between reality and the artist's perception of reality.

With his art works having already appeared in more than 60 international festivals and exhibitions in 21 countries, Owen Eric Wood's videos find a place among both experimental new media works as well as more traditional narrative films. He has established a signature style through his video self portraits that challenge concepts of identity whereby individuals must constantly reinvent or appropriate their own image. As an interdisciplinary artist, he incorporates drawing, sculpture, photography and installation in his videos to reflect existential themes, and to blur the line between reality and fiction.

"Parallel" has shown at a number of festivals, notably the FILE Electronic Language International Festival (Sao Paulo, Brazil), the Nabi Art Center (Seoul, Korea), the International Festival of Films on Art (Montreal, Canada), the Media Forum of the Moscow International Film Festival (Russia) and the Japan Media Arts Festival (Tokyo), where it received a jury mention. Parallel will also appear as an official selection in the upcoming Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (Germany) in November 2010.

The jury of the Vision Art Prize consists of historian and art critic Francesca Franco; critic, curator and professor of art history Patrizia Ferri; curator and writer Marco Rossi Lecce; and artist Pino Modica, whose work has exhibited at such prestigious international art festivals as the Venice Biennale. A separate jury awarded the Jury Prize for the International Competition to Paolo Sassanelli's "Uerra - War" (Italy, 2009), and the FuoriClasse Prize of the Italian Panorama went to Massimo Cappelli's "41" (Italy, 2010). The recipient of a fourth prize has yet to be announced.

Owen Eric Wood was born in Toronto, Canada (1977) and holds a B.F.A. in Studio Arts from Concordia University (Montreal) and B.A.A. in Journalism from Ryerson University (Toronto). His videos are distributed by Videographe, based in Montreal.

For more information about the 19th Visionaria International Video Festival, go to:

www.visionaria.eu

For more information about Owen Eric Wood and his video Parallel, go to:

www.owenericwood.com/parallel

To contact Owen Eric Wood, e-mail:

info @ owenericwood.com

Once more, the Avanca Film Festival was a great success.

After deliberation, the jury has come to its decision and the festival organisation is glad to announce that Holobomo has been awarded the Best Video at the AVANCA 2010.

Congratulations on your outstanding work.

Kind regards,

Eunice Castro
AVANCA 2010

For more information about the Avanca Film Festival, go to:
www.avanca.com

VIDEOGRAPHE* is pleased to announce the launch of the VITHEQUE platform on Friday May 28, 2010 at 6:00 p.m. at the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT), 1195 Saint-Laurent Blvd. in Montreal.

A launch and a happening where live art events and video meet.

This launch is your opportunity to discover VITHEQUE in a friendly atmosphere in the company of many guest artists. Three of the artists whose work is distributed by VITHEQUE and who have been a part of Videographe's history will be our special guests this evening: Robert Morin, Nathalie Bujold and Marie-Josee St-Pierre. Artists and live events will take centre stage with performances throughout the evening: Sylvie Laliberte will sing, Aurelie Pedron will dance, Manon Oligny will present video-dance and Owen Eric Wood and David Manseau will present performances. The SAT will be transformed for the occasion into an deambulatory space with surprises around every corner. The evening will continue with music from 9:00 p.m. on.

This is also an opportunity to discover the platform in action. A complimentary drink awaits you on your arrival. We invite you to share this artistic and technological event in our company.

Accompanying this message you'll find the official press release for this launch-happening and a pass to the event. We invite you to forward this invitation to your colleagues and friends.

Contact

Bernard Claret
Director
Vidéographe
(514) 521-2116 # 12
bclaret@videographe.qc.ca

Annick Laporte
(514) 866-4720 # 231
info@vitheque.com


For more information, go to:
www.vitheque.com

Owen Eric Wood's short video Holobomo received a jury mention at Videoformes International Manifestation of Video Art and Digital Cultures in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The annual competition offers a space for young creation, presenting a selection of original and imaginative videos, often produced independently.

Go to the Web site for Holobomo.

For more information about Videoformes, go to:
www.videoformes-fest-engl.com

Here is a picture of my the video installation Quality Time with the Family, which I performed as part of the Visionaria Video Festival in Piombino, Italy (October 24-31). The project went over very well with the general public because it comments on the importance of using meals as opportunities to gather with those we love and reconnect, which is a practice that remains at the heart of Italian culture.

My participation in this exhibition was made possible through support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Find out more about Quality Time with the Family

For more information about Visionaria, go to:
www.visionaria.eu

I have added my interdisciplinary art project Parallel to this site. Parallel merges photography, drawing and video in a poetic offering on what it means to create. On the Web site you will find detailed information about how the field of theoretical physics influenced the script.

Go to the Web site for Parallel

Owen Eric Wood's video won the category award for Best in Urban Diversity at the Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF), which ran on monitors on the Toronto subway system form Sept. 11-21, 2009.

Wood was in Toronto for the awards presentation and closing party. His award was presented by filmmaker Ali Kazimi, who juried the films under the urban diversity category and ultimately chose the winner.

Each day during the course of the Toronto Urban Film Festival, a fresh selection of one-minute films under different themes. It is an excellent forum for emerging filmmakers looking to get mass exposure to a public audience. The festival is the only one of its kind in North America, and only one of three similar film festivals in the world.

TUFF is produced by Art for Commuters (A4C), a non-profit organization dedicated to assisting contemporary artists by offering them an opportunity to show in the public spaces frequented by urban travelers.

Find out more about The Clothes Make the Man
For more about the Toronto Urban Film Festival, go to:
www.torontourbanfilmfestival.com

I have added information about my video Holobomo to this site. In Holobomo, I use video projection on sculpture to express a desperation as I attempt to insert myself into scenes taken from black-and-white movies. This is an exercise of "re-appropriation" as I have taken all the imagery (and some of the sounds) from Imitations of Life by video artist Mike Hoolboom.

Go to the Web site for Holobomo.

Owen Eric Wood's video installation Quality Time with the Family will be presented as part of the Visionaria International Video Festival. The festival, in its 18th year, will take place in Piombino, Italy from October 24-31, 2009.

Quality Time with the Family is a visual art installation that combines recorded video and live performance to explore identity through familial roots. The artist recreates the experience of eating dinner with his family by setting up a mock dining table where each of his family members are replaced by television monitors playing looped videos of them eating a meal. Wood then performs his role by sitting at the table and eating a meal with the TV monitors, which are incapable of interacting.

Although Wood performs as though he is actually sitting in his parents' dining room with his family, the artificiality of the experience is unavoidable. Instead of connectedness, notions of disconnection are expressed. Instead of family bonding, there are feelings of isolation and alienation. The piece raises issues of the effects of geographical separation from family, and the mental distance caused when communication breaks down.

"I am extremely excited to have the opportunity to exhibit this piece," says Wood. "This work has particularly personal meaning since it expresses, in no uncertain terms, an emotional experience that has weighed heavily on my mind."

Wood says he feels there has been a denigration of the importance of the family unit in societies where media, technology and fast-paced lifestyles inhibit people from taking the time to connect to each other. Television, computers and hand-held devices are supplanting physical contact, yet they are poor replacements for the subtle interactions that occur in the simplest forms of face-to-face conversation. Quality Time with the Family reasserts the family meal as an opportunity for familial bonding, for people to get together and reconnect.

"The fact that an international art forum such as Visionaria sees the value in this work signifies to me that I have produced an art work that touches an audience beyond my own community, family and personal psyche."

The Visionaria Film Festival chooses a very select array of works to fill its four components: an international competition of single-channel videos, an Italian panorama showcasing video works produced in Italy, the Second Life Special Prize category, and, lastly, an exhibition of video art works and video installations called Visual Arts in Movement, within which Quality Time with the Family will be included this year.

Although the single-channel version of Quality Time with the Family has been screened at such festivals as the Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival in Toronto and Rendez-Vous du Cinema Quebecois in Montreal, this will be the first time the installation has been exhibited to the public.

Read more about Quality Time with the Family

For more information about Visionaria, go to:
www.visionaria.eu

photo: Vincent Chine

On July 2 and 3, I presented the installation version of at the Festival International Montreal en Arts (FIMA). I adapted this project to allow for audience participation for the first time.

Viewers were allowed to join me in the activity of dressing up paper dolls, and taking them away as souvenirs if they wanted. I also incorporated a life-size sculpture of myself dressed in a random clothing items from the pile of clothes beside it.

More about the project The Clothes Make the Man

CKUT's John Custodio interviews Owen Eric Wood for the radio program QueerCorps, February 16, 2009. In part one of the interview, they discuss Wood's video Made Up and the concept of masculinity in relation to queer identity. In part two of the interview, former QueerCorps technical director Paul N. joins the conversation to discuss gay chat sites and Wood's video 'Lost.'

Interview: Part 1

Interview: Part 2

EVENTS @ ARTICULE PRESENTS:

BEHIND THE OBJECT
catalogue launch

Thursday, November 27, 2008, 7 p.m.
at articule, 262 Fairmount O.

articule will be hosting the official book launch of BEHIND THE OBJECT: The role of action in contemporary sculptural practice. With an introduction essay by artist Trevor Gould, BEHIND THE OBJECT presents a group of emerging Quebec-based artists whose work includes interdisciplinary activities such as video, performance and viewer interaction.

"Although we work separately, we all tap into a shared desire to make sculptural work that is more than just a physical object," says Owen Eric Wood, one of the artists featured in the book. "Some of us see the environment in which our work is placed to be equally important as the work itself, while others seek to animate immobile material by merging it with video or incorporating it in performance."

The artists are Andréanne Abbondanza-Bergeron, Guillaume Allyson, Marilyne Barbe, Kim Cummins, Jean-Sébastien Gauthier, Allysha Larsen, Christian Ravenelle, Myriam Van Neste and Owen Eric Wood. The group has held collaborative exhibitions in both Frankfurt, Germany and Montreal, Quebec. Individually, these artists have exhibited internationally in such countries as Belgium, Spain, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

The featured artists will be in attendance.

Wine will be served at 7:30 p.m., with speeches to follow. A screening of the video works featured on the catalogue's DVD will start at 8 p.m.

For more information, contact:
Andréanne Abbondanza-Bergeron
514 303.6236
andreanne@abbondanzabergeron.com

articule
262, Fairmount ouest
Montréal (Québec) H2V 2G3
T 514 842 9686

info@articule.org
http://www.articule.org

Heures d'ouverture: mer - ven 12h -18h, sam/dim 12h -17h
Opening hours: wed - fri 12 - 6 pm, sat/sun 12 - 5 pm

Click here to find out more about the catalogue.

Owen Eric Wood's Momentum: a video series in four movements has been selected for the competition section of the 13th Canariasmediafest, which will take place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain from October 28 to November 1, 2008. This will be the world premiere for Momentum, which will be presented in the video art category of the festival.

Momentum is a series of four videos that explore synesthesia — the concept that stimuli experienced by one human sense can invoke another, such as a sight invoking a smell.  In the case of these videos, relationships between sights and sounds are created by carefully manipulating and matching visuals and audio from different sources.

These formal experiments compare the reality captured by recording technologies such as video with the reality experienced by the human senses.  Unlike the human brain, which filters information, the video camera records indiscriminately.  Where the brain grabs still images of a landscape speeding by and then processes these images to makes sense of it, the camera only captures a constant flow of blurred shapes, colours and textures.

These videos not only mimic the human brain's desire to make sense of external stimuli (seeing images in clouds so to speak), but also raise questions about our limited perception of the physical world.  Despite the constant movement and unclear meaning, this video series creates a meditative experience that is serene not disconcerting, focused not random, organized not chaotic.

Find out more information about Momentum

For more information about Canariasmediafest, go to:
www.canariasmediafest.org

In January 2008, I was among a group of Montreal-based artists who traveled to Frankfurt, Germany for a collaborative exhibition with local German artists. I performed my piece The Clothes Make the Man. Seen above is the Gutleut 15 Gallery, including the material that I left behind as the exhibition continued into February.

I have mixed feelings towards the success of the experience. On the one hand, it was my first international exhibition; that alone is enough validation. But I learned a lot. One mistake I made was to performed a piece that prevented the audience from interacting with me (The Clothes Make the Man is about having to rely on two-dimensional imagery of a person despite the fact that the real person is right infront of you). I think I lost an opportunity to interact with an international audience. I will keep that in mind in the future.

Find out more about The Clothes Make the Man