New exhibit to open at Factory 163

Manipulate This, a new exhibit featuring the work of 10 Stratford-area artists, is opening at Factory 163 next weekend.

The opening reception will be held on Sept. 6 at 8 p.m. and will feature electronic music by Nick Storring.

The exhibit will run until Sept. 14, with a special Manipulate That workshop taking place on Sept. 13 where the public will have a chance to manipulate materials to create new artworks, both visual and musical.

Manipulate This expresses the artists’ vision of hybrid art and explores the digital arts from the perspective of traditionally artistic backgrounds such as painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and printmaking.

The featured artists had a chance to combine their traditional art forms with new media by participating in several workshops on computer graphics sponsored by Gallery 96 and the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

Glenn Elliott combines clay sculpture with animation to produce a playful work called living water while photographer Elisabeth Feryn layers images from nature to create a rich tapestry of line and form.

Graphic artist and painter Nancy Groenestege creates fanciful and colourful abstracts from unlikely source materials and Gloria Kagawa takes one of her early prints and transforms it into a completely unexpected work.

Wendy O’Brien manipulates an image of her fibre art, prints this and then embellishes the print, to bring the piece full circle: an art quilt to a digital canvas to a new fibre work.

Valerie O’Flynn layers images from past paintings to create a complex and thought provoking image that speaks to today’s issues in society and Michelle Salter explores the intricacies of a sculptural piece, expanding and playing with line, colour and composition, to create new two-dimensional artworks.  

Published illustrator and cartoonist Erik Sansom photographs the gallery space at Factory 163, enhancing the complexity of line in his image to produce a unique vision. Painter and sculptor Bonnie Steinman’s latest exploration of clay sculpture has morphed into a series of beautiful and mysterious two-dimensional images.

Lesley Walker-FitzPatrick creates a strong message within a collage of photographs, demonstrating the potential of manipulation in conveying content.

Storring, whose music will be featured at the opening, is a traditionally trained cellist who uses manipulation to compose “his own feral version of beatboxing, gibberish rapping, and crude vocoder histrionics”. He is involved in a diverse cross-section of bands and projects including of I Have Eaten The City, Picastro, The Knot and the backing ensemble for soulful singer Saidah Baba Talibah. He has also appeared live and on recordings with many artists and orchestras and is a recent winner of the 2008 Jeux de Temps/ Times Play competition.
Factory 163 is located at 163 King St.