Message to Japan

“Light tomorrow with today.”

Artist information

Dean Baldwin is a visual artist who lives and works in Montreal. His work often takes the form of temporary architectures which function (pragmatically) as immersive social environments where food and drink are commonly consumed. Recent projects include; Oh Canada! at the MASS MoCA, The Quebec Triennial, Le Travail Qui Nous Attend. Musee D’art Contemporaine, Montreal, Bunk Bed City at Centre Clark, Montreal; The Dork Porch, curated by Michelle Jacques for the AGO; Fattening Frogs for Snakes, for No. 9: Contemporary Art & the Environment, (2009); Minibar, at Space Studios, London, UK and Volta, Markhalle, Basel, Switzerland (2009); Sweet Dreams, curated by Barbara Fischer for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, Toronto (2008); Exit Poll Cocktail Toll, curated by Chen Tamir at WhiteBox, NYC.

In 2009 he was awarded the Canada Council Residency at Space Studios, London, UK and in 2010 he was awarded the Artist in Residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. In 2009, he and a group of 22 friends (Reverse Pedagogy) brought their own canoes from Toronto to the Venice Biennale.

Artist information

Creating fantastical structures from commonplace appliances, Toronto based photographer David Trautrimas unlocks the mind from a state of static recognition as his photographic compositions reveal an alternative take on architecture & landscape. His digital constructions of buildings made from abject and dismantled housewares at once announce the limits of industrial proliferation as they bring levity to the possibility of recycled innovation.

Trautrimas’s fictitious documentation of buildings that never were glean the look of a post apocalyptic world where larger than life structures loom over the surrounding landscape, but they also breath fresh air into architecture’s infinite promise of pushing the boundaries of physics in order to renovate the way we live. Safe to say, Trautrimas’s work serves as both catalyst for creativity as it does cautionary tale for what we ultimately do with it.

His work has appeared in both group and solo exhibitions around the world, including Toronto’s The Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art,The Korean Arts Center in Seoul, Toronto’s LE Gallery, Brooklyn’s KlompChing Gallery, the Photo Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, Oakland’s Johannson Projects, Queensland Center for Photography Australia, and Eckhart Gallery in the Hague, Netherlands. He has received international acclaim from publications such as ArtNews, The Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine, Germany’s Immobilien Zeitung, China’s Can Magazine and the New York Times, and has been featured on major online websites such as Designboom, Dezeen, and Gizmodo. He is represented by LE Gallery in Toronto, Photoeye Gallery in Santa Fe NewMexico, and Eckhart Gallery in the Hague Netherlands.

Official Website: trautrimas.ca

Message to Japan

There is a message in this drawing which is a secret from me to you.  It contains my most personal thoughts about imagination and transforming reality. I hope it gives you license to see things the way you want without accountability to anything but your own inclinations.  That’s what I’m sending you in the form of this backpack.

Artist information

Camilla Singh is a visual artist and curator who builds things faithfully to her ideas and not always to a recurrent medium or form. She shares Catherine Opie’s view that “…it’s transgressive just to try to live your life the way you actually want to live it.” Singh left her role as curator of Toronto’s MOCCA to experiment with materials in her studio and probe the questions that had formed around the experience of working in an office for a decade. She is currently researching and producing a series of uniforms for curators called Uniforms for Non-Uniform Work which will comprise a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University in 2014, curated by Emelie Chhangur.

Official Website: Camilla Singh