Message to Japan

Grow.

Artist information

The work of Brett Despotovich (b.1982) draws from the liminal space between the physical and metaphysical. Brett is a multidisciplinary artist living in Toronto. He studied at OCAD before leaving to work on the multi-award winning feature documentary FLicKeR (NFB/Bravo! 2008). He organized Toronto’s seminal alternative figure drawing event ‘Dr Sketchy’s Toronto’ from 2007-2011. Brett currently works as the ‘Head of Visitor Services and Gallery Operations’ at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

Official Website: Brett Despotovich

Message to Japan

Thank you for welcoming the “Field Trip Project” and providing us with a platform to connect and dialogue. The project’s intentions are good and genuine. People care, they haven’t forgotten. They want to help the way they know best—through art. I hope my work can provide, even briefly, moments of optimism, beauty, wonder, and play.

Artist information

Atanas Bozdarov is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who focuses on deconstructing the ways in which we read and interpret systems and structures. From quoting fragments of architectural blueprints or game sequences, to generating musical motifs from non-musical sources, he constructs incomplete and surprising structures in order to question our understanding of the working systems around us. He has exhibited at the Athens Institute for ContemporaryArt, AGYU, XPACE, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, as part of “Art School (Dismissed),” and “Wade” co-presented by YYZ Artists’ Outlet. Bozdarov holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, and currently lives and works between Toronto and Brampton.

Official Website: Atanas Bozdarov

Artist information

Alex McLeod

Alex McLeod constructs hyperrealistic 3D environments filled with crystalline mountains, fiery lakes, and rotund clouds, all rendered in a sickly sweet and gooey candy-colored palette. Recalling the wide-open vistas of Romantic landscape painting while at the same time staging otherworldly dystopias, McLeod’s CGI prints act as hybrid spaces that imply an almost infinite recombination of the past and present, the real and virtual. Beneath their seductively polished surfaces, of glimmering fortresses and floating geometric abstractions, lies a haunting stillness that comes forth in the aftermath of cataclysmic events. The cause of destruction remains unknown in these depopulated spaces -there are no people in these images, however much human traces remain in the rickety railways and empty fortresses.

And yet, from the twilight of devastation shown in these strange dioramas lies possibilities for hope and rebirth in our own digital milieu through the artist’s new approaches to concepts as varied as ecological responsibility and the shared intersections between photography and painting.

Official Website: Alex McLeod