WORKSHOP & ONE EVENING INSTALLATION:
Volume Drawings: Invisible Structures, Movement-Triggered Boundaries
Saturday May 31, 2008, 12-7 pm
Public Viewing & Reception: Saturday May 31, 2008, 5:30-7 pm
Location: Western Front, Luxe Hall (303 East 8th Ave, Vancouver)

Fee: $30.00 for the workshop general admission; $20.00 for students; $15.00 for Western Front members.
RSVP to exhibitions@front.bc.ca or call + 1 604 876 9343

Facilitated by Max Goldfarb (US), Joanne Bristol (CAN), Marisa Jahn (US), dancer/musicians TBA
with support from NEXMAP: New Experimental Music, Art, Performance

Accompanying the exhibition Kit for an Encounter on view at the Western Front (April 25 - June 31, 2008), Volume Drawings: Invisible Structures, Movement-Triggered Boundaries is a workshop and installation inspired by the notion of "kit bashing" in which a kit is appropriated or repurposed for an alternate use. Participants attending the workshop will solder and assemble a basic kit consisting of a trip-sensor and laser used in domestic and commercial surveillance (no prior electronics experience necessary). The group will subsequently experiment with this infrared drawing tool, its bearing on the body and movement, then build/choreograph a score of triggers and responses. Throughout this experiment, participants will experiment with sound, feedback, and delays in collaboration with a Vancouver-based electronic musician (TBA). The workshop culminates in an hour-long installation open to the public where the invisible architecture will be performed and experienced.

BIOS
Joanne Bristol is an artist and writer who has presented installations, performances and single-channel videos across North America for the past 15 years. Current projects include bentaerial.net, a work for the web about technology, obsolescence and invention, and the Institute for Feline & Human Collaboration (IFHC), a site for ongoing projects in interspecies communication and interaction. Joanne has taught intermedia, sculpture and performance art at universities and art colleges in western Canada for the past seven years. She also curates and writes about contemporary art.

Max Goldfarb's work intersects many disciplines. His public works projects enjoining radio transmissions and urban infrastructure reveal the convergence of communications technology with the built environment. The resulting themes in his work concern the precariously narrow margin between safety and danger, order and instability. Goldfarb graduated from the MIT Visual Arts Program in 2006 and currently teaches at Parsons (New York). Goldfarb has exhibited his work at such venues as the Mjellby Art Center in Halmstad Sweden, Art & Idea, Mexico City, De Stadgalerij, NL, Fringe Exhibitions Space in Los Angeles, CA, and SculptureCenter, NY. He recently completed, 'QSL Serial', a dispatch project, with Free103Point9 Transmissionsion Arts. His work can presently be seen in the exhibition, Off the Grid at the Neuberger Museum of Art in New York.

Artist and Pond Co-Founder Marisa Jahn is a lover of kits and performer of drawings. She has presented and exhibited work in public places, galleries, and museums most recently at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Eyebeam (NY), ISEA/Zero One 2004, the Moore Space (Miami), the Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami), the Sonoma County Museum of Art ( CA), in public places in Tokyo, Estonia, Istanbul, Honduras, and in San Francisco at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, the Asian Art Museum. Forthcoming exhibitions with her main collaborator Steve Shada include solo exhibitions at Camac (France), the MIT Museum, Samson Projects (Boston), and Jenny Jaskey Gallery. Forthcoming publications include ByProducts (YYZ Books) and Recipes for an Encounter (Western Front). Jahn received a MS from MIT Visual Art Department (2007) and is currently an artist in resident in the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.

THANKS
This exhibition, workshop, and book are made possible by many people. Pond wishes to thank Luke Lozier/Bibliopolis, and Hiroshi Ishii and the Tangible Media Group (TMG) at the MIT Media Lab, NEXMAP: New Experimental Music, Art, Performance. Western Front wishes to thank The Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, City of Vancouver, Best Western, and WF patrons and volunteers.

ABOUT
Western Front (www.front.bc.ca) - Promoting the role of the artist in determining the cultural ecology. Located in Vancouver, The Western Front Society is one of Canada's first artist-run-centres. For over 30 years, it has developed an international reputation as a centre for experimental art practice and performance.

Pond: art, activism, and ideas (www.mucketymuck.org) Pond is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a forum through which experimental artists may share ideas and foster a mutually beneficial relationship with the larger community.