Openings

Opening Reception:
Sat. Sept. 29 8pm – Midnight
(in conjunction with Nuit Blanche Regina)

Featuring: The Bar
A sound performance by Brendon Ehinger

Lisa Wood Artist Talk: Sunday September 30th 1 – 2pm

Lisa Wood: Openings

In October 2017 Lisa Wood documented the opening of the exhibition Canada’s Rectangle at Neutral Ground. Using time lapse photography she captured Regina’s art community from the perspective of the bar and snack table. From the resulting hundreds of source images she has created layered paintings on Mylar that look at the relationships and behaviours of the subjects.

The art opening is a celebration of art and community, a place to see one’s peers, to emerge from the solitary studio life and talk art. Conversely it is a social obligation that can induce dread, awkwardness and puffed up persona. For Openings, art is the meeting place, and food and drink provide the familiar reprieve.

Wood exposes tension between what we hide and what we flaunt, what is socially acceptable and what is taboo, what is attractive and what is repulsive through the frameworks of ritual and social norms. She has been drawn to acts of eating and drinking because of the specific social expectations they evoke, and the contradictory nature of consuming food and drink in public – we eat and drink to be relaxed or soothed, yet we leave ourselves open to exposing pleasure and the grotesque.

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LISA WOOD is a visual artist and Assistant Professor at Brandon University’s Department of Visual and Aboriginal Art, with an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the University of Manitoba. Her painting practice investigates the intersection between the singular, private inner space of the individual and the shared public exterior space. Wood has been the recipient of many awards and scholarships and exhibits her artwork nationally and internationally. Prior to teaching at Brandon University she worked in various roles in Winnipeg including: Director at PLATFORM Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Instructor at the University of Manitoba, and Program Coordinator at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA).

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THE BAR:
Brendon Ehinger will improvise an audio response to Lisa Wood’s Openings at Neutral Ground Contemporary Art. He will capture and re-interpret the sound of the environment through a process of random selection, repetition and manipulation in order to amplify and reflect the ebs and flows of “the bar” – one of awkward tensions, merriment, loss of inhibition, and intense interactions. Contact and ambient microphones will be positioned around the bar area to capture the ambient sounds in real-time, which will be routed across the gallery where the incoming stream of audio will be dissected and rearranged using a system of various audio samplers, looping pedals and modular synthesizers. Spontaneous interjections of activation and manipulation by Brendon throughout the evening will respond to the incoming signal, morphing and twisting it into intense cacophonic noise-scapes or jubilant tribalistic undulations.

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BRENDON EHINGER is a Brandon, MB based multi-instrumentalist who occasionally performs under the moniker MoonShapeNoise. Having played in a variety of bands and musical genres since 1991, his interest in experimental electronic music and sound art has flourished since 2016. Utilizing field recordings, samples and unconventional instrumentation through methods of improvisation, his approach to sound art explores the way in which we process sound and information, internally and externally, through conscious recollection and the subconscious dream state. He has performed solo and collaboratively in alternative spaces, galleries and venues in Canada and Europe.