Past Exhibitions
Creative Commons
Spirit House, Level 1
May 1 to 31, 2010
A simple search on flickr® returns 5,000 images of the Royal Ontario Museum filed under Creative Commons Licence allowing anyone to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work. By relocating thousands of these images of the ROM from their virtual space to a public site-specific installation, Guillaume Cailleau constructs a double mirror. The installation assembles, organizes and exhibits the public’s photographic interpretation of the Museum as a new ‘objective’ public artwork. In turn the exhibition becomes the object of visitor experiences and interpretations, no doubt some of which will be turned into another set of publicly available images.
In accordance with the Creative Commons License, the photographers names are listed opening the question of authorship, and potentially creating a situation where visitors may find their name and recognize (or not) their own pictures.
Creating a site-specific artwork, Cailleau’s installation loosely reconstructs the surroundings and structure of the Museum’s architecture, the focus of his project. He nets an amalgamation of data and substance, animating images to transpose them into dynamic form.
Curated by Mark Andre Pennock.
Presented by the Institute for Contemporary Culture in partnership with the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival.
Guillaume Cailleau (b. 1978 in France)
A Berlin-based artist, Guillaume Cailleau’s work ranges from 16mm film and HD video to multimedia installations and performances. He is interested in researching common everyday processes and occurrences, trying to expose details that tend to be overlooked. But it is these details that can be very revealing if isolated and transposed into another context, such as a gallery, a museum or a theatre. His artistic credo is to focus and bring to attention what is just next to what everyone is looking at.
Cailleau is an active member of the collective LaborBerlin, devoted to preserving and developing the creative possibilities of the celluloid film format and DIY processing. He is an active member of Hanna’s Atelier for Sonorous Arts from Ljubljana (Slovenia), an institution promoting and researching sound based art forms. He also collaborates with several choreographers and performers, creating video for the stage.
Cailleaus’ latest works include: Wer A sagt, muss auch B sagen, an intervention at the Berlin International Film Festival 2010 Forum Expanded; H(i)J, a16mm experimental film featured at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde 2009, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010, and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2010; Through, a 16mm loop installation, shown among others at the Berlin International Film Festival 2009 and at the Contact Photography Festival Toronto 2008; BlitzKrieg, a short film, featured at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2008.
