Adam Basanta (born 1985) is a Montreal-based artist and experimental composer [1] [2] whose practice investigates manifestations of technology as a meeting point of concurrent and overlapping systems. He uses various media (installation, kinetic sculpture, sound, computational image-making) and creates participatory and multi-sensory performances.
Adam Basanta was born in Tel-Aviv in 1985. He was raised in Vancouver and lives and works in Montreal since 2010. He holds a BFA in music composition from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) and an interdisciplinary Research-Creation Master in fine arts from Concordia University (Montreal). [3]
Since 2015, his works have been exhibited in galleries and institutions internationally. He is represented by ELLEPHANT Gallery, Montreal, and his work can be found in the institutional collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, [4] the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, [5] the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, [6] and the Ville de Montréal, [7] amongst others.
Remaining active as an experimental composer and performer, his concert music, live performances, and sound recordings are presented worldwide. His music has been released on Kohlenstoff Records (Canada), Farmacia901 (Italy), Important Records/Cassauna (USA), and Kasuga Records (Germany). [8]
Adam Basanta is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sobey Art Award in 2020, one of the most prestigious awards in Canadian art. [9] In 2018, he received the Pierre-Ayot Prize for the best contemporary artist under 35 years of age working in Montreal. [10]
Basanta is known for his sound sculptures [11] and sound installation works. [12] His artistic process is intuitive and relies on finding a poetic union between the technical and the conceptual. [13] He focuses on the organisation of changeable choreographies using found technologies, including microphones, speakers, kinetic systems and customised software. [14]
Artist Survival Station is a 60-day performance and a series of YouTube videos created in response to the financial, social, and emotional context of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020. [15] It is a living sculpture that pays tribute to the process of DIY microgreens from building, seeding, harvesting, and even personal bicycle deliveries to members of Montreal’s artistic community. This project, as a long-term performance, is an exercise of “re-commitment to sustainability in an era of late capitalism, knowledge gathering, and sharing in the atmosphere of online saturation, and to care and exchange with people in a moment where physical contact is not possible”. [16] The system uses a capitalistic logic in terms of efficiency, growth, and sustainable production while letting go of profit and power.
Landscape Past Future offers a new perspective to landscape paintings. Each artwork is created from the pixels of existing digitized landscape paintings or photographs sourced from the online permanent collections of major Museums. [17] The collected pixels are then arranged as a mosaic by means of custom software and machine learning to recreate the aura of an artistic period. This process reveals “specific details of historically significant works as well overarching statistical features” in the new image. In an era of overflowing digital images, Landscape Past Future highlights the pressing digital preservation of a disappearing natural world. Basanta’s impressions are summaries of artworks made into art. [18]
All We’d Ever Need is One Another (Trio) is a mixed-media installation composed of three flatbed scanners laid on their side and facing each other. [19] [20] The trio generates digital images independently of human input by scanning each other’s surface. The ambient light and shadows produced by the environment or the audience impacts the scanning result. [21] A software then randomizes contrasts, luminosity, saturation, and colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow). [22]
Every newly generated image is studied by a series of deep-learning algorithms and compared to 1.5 million artworks issued from the database of Artsy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art of New York. [23] When it matches an existing artwork beyond a 80% match, it is uploaded to a Twitter page and a dedicated website. This experimental photographic installation touches on issues of copyright because the protection is granted according to justifications that cannot be applied to machines or AI. [24]
Curtain (White) is a sound installation made of 240 pairs of white earbud headphones arranged as a 3 meters high curtain or waterfall. [25] Patterns of white noise move across the curtain evoking “organic memories of waves, wind, rain, and insects.” In this sound installation Basanta reorganises the ubiquitous earbuds, without altering their materiality, and creates a context where ready-made technologies allow the audience to retreat from the external world into a single sound instance of temporality. [26] [27]
2019
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2021–2022
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2018
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Jean-Paul Riopelle, was a Canadian painter and sculptor from Quebec. He had one of the longest and most important international careers of the sixteen signatories of the Refus Global, the 1948 manifesto that announced the Quebecois artistic community's refusal of clericalism and provincialism. He is best known for his abstract painting style, in particular his "mosaic" works of the 1950s when he famously abandoned the paintbrush, using only a palette knife to apply paint to canvas, giving his works a distinctive sculptural quality. He became the first Canadian painter since James Wilson Morrice to attain widespread international recognition.
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Angela Grauerholz D.F.A. is a German-born Canadian photographer, graphic designer and educator living in Montreal.
Dominique Blain is a Canadian artist living and working in Montreal, Quebec. Her work incorporates photography, installation and sculpture. She explores political themes in her art such as war, racism and slavery.
Raphaëlle de Groot is a Canadian artist and educator living and working in Montreal, Quebec.
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Cynthia Girard-Renard, also known as Cynthia Girard, is a Canadian artist.
Francine Savard is a Canadian artist whose paintings and installations are grounded in the Plasticien tradition. Her practice explores relationships between language and visual art. Besides painting, Savard has a career as a graphic designer.
Manon de Pauw is a Canadian artist known for her work in installation art, performance, video art and photography. De Pauw was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was a shortlist nominee for the 2011 Sobey Art Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
Karen Tam is a Canadian artist and curator who focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities through installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. She is based in Montreal, Quebec.
Nicolas Grenier is a Canadian artist and painter. His paintings, sound recordings, and installations focus heavily on how certain principles in society converge and interact. His goal is to reveal how the individual interacts with the collective body and how the architecture we find ourselves in defines our subconscious and our interactions with each other. The foundation of his work is painting but in recent years he has expanded his practice to encompass a variety of mediums and think tank initiatives. His interest lies in the distorted connections of political, economic, cultural and social principles and how moneyless economies, radical inclusivity, giving up individualism, and other ideas could evoke a paradigm shift in values and beliefs.
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Lorna Bauer is a Canadian artist living and working in Montreal, Quebec.
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