Past Residents
Past Resident2015: Manitoba Arts Council
Theo Sims
Theo Sims is a visual artist whose installations often focus on the juxtaposition of the familiar and the everyday with a contextual subversion. Sims’ projects play with space as a conceptual tool. Theo fuses wit and humor with the emotional, the ephemeral and the personal. Several of his recent activities as both artist and curator lend themselves to participatory projects or collaborations with other artists, curators, musicians, writers and even politicians.
Theo Sims has exhibited across Canada with solo exhibitions at The Rooms, Newfoundland; Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; and Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary. His group exhibitions include the Montreal Biennale; Pretend: Theatre and Video, PlugIn ICA; and Ghost Dance, Ryerson Image Centre. This year Sims installed an outdoor installation in Lethbridge, Albert; a solo exhibition at the Tom Thomson Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario; and a site-specific installation for WINDOW, Winnipeg. He has exhibited in numerous exhibitions internationally and his work is reviewed or featured in publications such as Canadian Art; Abridged; C Magazine; Circa; The Irish Times; The Sunday Times; The Globe & Mail, Border Crossings; BlackFlash; The New York Times and Maclean’s Magazine.
Theo Sims, Car Park, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of Paola Bernardelli.
Residents from Canada
Past Resident2015: Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt
Anne Sommer
Specializing in the design of play and educational objects, Anne Sommer has devoted her research to the world of children. Her label, Spielmode, was inspired while Sommer was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room watching a five-year old boy playing with a colored wooden tower; the only available toy in the kid’s corner. Sommer thought that there ought to be individual toys for children. Every child should have the opportunity to keep a toy, appropriate to his or her age, on hand at any time. She subsequently launched a fashion line with integrated toys for children.
Anne Sommer (born 1983 in Berlin, Germany) moved to Halle to study Design of Playing and Learning and later studied fashion design at the Escuela de Arte y Superior de Diseño Valencia, Spain. Sommer graduated from the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle in 2013. Recent presentations and exhibitions include Interactive Kidsfotos, Designhaus Halle, 2014; spielhochvier, Designhaus Halle, 2013; Fantitastisch, Kunststiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle, 2013; Brücke-Catwalk, Lange Nacht der Kultur, Kleinmachnow, 2013. Awards include Hugo Junkers Prize, 2013 and Scidea Ideenwettbewerb, 2013.
Anne Sommer, Spielmode master collection, 2013, Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.
Residents from Germany
Past Resident2015: Canada Council for the Arts
Elizabeth McIntosh
Elizabeth McIntosh continually re-envisions her work through shifts in her painterly approaches- shifts that pose new questions about the history of abstraction. In doing so, McIntosh unapologetically refuses to let herself, or her viewer, be fully at ease with her canvases. Enacting a kind of call-and-response, McIntosh’s paintings sit anachronistically between history and the present. Her work acknowledges specific structural inclinations in the history of painting. In reiterating and modulating found forms, McIntosh utilizes devices that render them strange and allow for reconsideration. Using loose structures as starting points for her investigations, she questions how improvisation can move the field of painting beyond the cliché of the tasteful resolution of compositions. McIntosh sets out, not so much to establish an iconic vocabulary, but to bring awareness to the complex processes and decisions involved in painting through formal invention. Ultimately, the results are aesthetically varied, generated by the elaboration of form.
Elizabeth McIntosh’s recent exhibitions include Szalon, University of Chicago, 2014; Fairy Bread, Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, 2014; Persian Rose Chartreuse Muse, Equinox, 2014; and Two Women at Model, Vancouver, 2014. She is the recipient the VIVA Award, Vancouver, 2013. Her works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. McIntosh is currently based in Vancouver, where she is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University.
Elizabeth McIntosh, The Leaves, 2014, Oil on canvas, 75 × 85 in. (190.5 × 215.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist.