On the Subject of Ghosts

Curated by Irene Loughlin

Reception: October 10, 2013, 7:00-9:30pm
Art Crawl: Friday, October 11, 2013, 7:00-11:00pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, October 12, 2013, 2:00 pm

The new media installations of Cindy Mochizuki and Ed Pien reference the emotive trace of past inhabitants in relation to social and material geographies which haunt our collective ideological present. “What constitutes the ghosts in these works, and who constructs this presence of ‘another’ other? How do we define ourselves in relation to the ghost?” Ed Pien suggests that a ghostly presence forces us into a fearful confrontation with ourselves. The human tendency to destroy what it does not understand becomes useless when confronted with ghosts. As a result, we must engage in new possibilities of communication with both ourselves and the unknown. 

Pien’s installation Revel is at once a poetic and meaningful response to the experience of working with immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the UK as they explored past experiences and future aspirations related to concepts of home. Mochizuki’s work Yokai and Other Spirits invites us into a conversation constructed through a confluence of new media, anime, sculpture and drawing. The materiality of hauntology present in the work emphasizes a destabilized negotiation between past and present, heightened by the liminal space of diasporic adolescence, and phantasmagoric representations of home. Pien’s and Mochizuki’s work contain references to the circular past which ‘haunts’ both the present and future image, where, as Pien states, “As any experience is structured like a network of traces that return to something other than itself… the present traces, as it is being traced. We are haunted by the previous and always arriving at the present image.”

Click here to access the bilingual publication for this exhibition.

Cindy Mochizuki is an interdisciplinary artist who works across several different disciplines including drawing, animation, multi-media, and performance. Her works deal with the subject of history and memory and works through the place of both the documentary and the imagined.  Her short films have been screened in Holland, Korea, Toronto, Los Angeles and Montreal. She holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Simon Fraser University.

Ed Pienhas exhibited work at the Draing Centre; the V&A, London; The Goethe Institute, Berlin; AGO, Toronto; Musée des Beaux Rrts and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; Songzhuang Art Centre, Beijing; and the National Art Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.  He recently participated in the Sydney Biennale and “Oh Canada,” at MASS MoCA. This fall Pien will be presenting a new installation at the Moscow Biennale.

Irene Loughlin is an artist and an independent curator.  She is the author of numerous essays, articles, and conference proceedings on the subjects of sculpture/installation, social practice, video/performance and disability theory in relation to contemporary art.

Hamilton Artists Inc. would like to thank the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and LIFT for their partnership with this project.

Yokai and Other Spirits by Cindy Mochizuki features Programming and Electronics by Bobbi Kozinuk, and Sound Design by Antoine Bédard.  The work was first presented through The Lost Secrets of the Royal project, a commissioning initiative of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) and the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.