Public Program

Panel Discussion: Artists, Couples, Families and Collaborations

Saturday, October 22, 2016 | 12 pm – 4 pm

Artists, Couples, Families and Collaborations
Join us for a discussion about the ways in which artists, couples, and families collaborate and challenge one another inside and outside of the studio.
Moderated by Paul Wong with panelists Brenda Pelkey, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, artist-writer Ann Beam and artist-writer Nadja Pelkey.

Lunch: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm (Registration Required)
Panel: 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm
AGW Members $20, Non-Members $25 

Panel Only: 
AGW Members $5
Non-Members $10 + Gallery Admission $10

Ann Beam is a Visionary Multi-Media Artist, living and working on Manitoulin Island, in the middle of the Great Lakes. She works in painting, ceramics, sculpture, watercolour, printmaking, and writes illustrated books. She is currently working with surfaces of recycled corrugated boxes, birch bark, cedar bark, acrylic and photo transfer on panel or canvas sometimes adding found objects into her paintings, such as a window or a wheel. The textures and the semiotic glyphs from the card board boxes, along with the bark and photo transfer, are all elements that raise the intuitive connection of the work. Described as archetypal in nature, Beam`s images of horses, the earth as seen from space, waterfalls and windows all embody and represent energy in the work. 

Ann Beam opened Neon Raven Art Gallery in 2002 and her work is in public and private collections around the world. 

Brenda Francis Pelkey was born in Kingston, Ontario. She moved to Saskatchewan in 1980, and became involved with the art community through venues such as Blackflash and the Photographers Gallery. In 1994, she completed her MFA at the University of Saskatchewan where she worked as an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History until 2003. Brenda Francis Pelkey is an Associate Professor with the University of Windsor. Francis Pelkey has exhibited throughout Canada as well as Scotland, France, Germany, Checzkoslovakia, Finland and England. Her works appear in numerous collections such as the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Dunlop Art Gallery, Confederation Centre for the Arts, and The National Gallery of Canada.  Since completing "...the great effect of the imagination on the world," in 1989 she has had a number of solo exhibitions: "dreams of life and death" (1994), Momento Mori (1996), Oblivion (1999), As if there were grace (2000), Haunts (2001), Hierophony (2003) and Spaces of Transformation (2004) and Threshold (2005) and most recently is represented in her career-first retrospective, Brenda Francis Pelkey: A Retrospective at the Art Gallery of Windsor. 

Nadja Pelkey is an artist, writer and cultural worker based in Windsor, Ontario. She completed her post-secondary education in Ontario, earning a BFA from the University of Windsor (2008), and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2010). From 2013 to 2015, she coordinated the Neighbourhood Spaces Artist-in-Residence program, culminating in the Neighbourhood Spaces Community and Socially Engaged Art Symposium and subsequent publication Neighbourhood Spaces, which she edited. She has contributed catalogue essays, reviews and criticism to both regional and national publications, including an essay entitled “Reserving the Light: Steps to an Ecology of Painting” for The Angle of the Sun’s Rays, Laura Madera's recent exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario. In 2014 she was nominated for the Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts by senior artist nominee Iain Baxter&. She is the former Executive Director of the Arts Council Windsor & Region and sits on the City of Windsor Public Art Committee.

Pelkey’s artwork has been exhibited in Canada, the United States and Finland. She is currently examining the nature of social and collaborative gestures with her partner Joey Stewart. Nadja is now at the University of Windsor, where she works as a Photo Technician, Sessional Instructor and Director of the Emerging Artist Research Residency. 

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have worked exclusively in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. In 2009, Steele + Tomczak were awarded an Honourary Doctorate by the University of British Columbia (Okanagan); in 2005, a Governor General's Award for Lifetime Achievement in Visual & Media Arts; in 1994 they received both a Toronto Arts Award and the Bell Canada prize for excellence in Video Art.

They are co-founders of Vtape, an award-winning media arts centre established in 1983 in Toronto. Currently Steele is Artistic Director and Tomczak is Restoration and Collections Management Director. Both teach at the University of Toronto in The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

In September 2012, a major survey of their work The Long Time: The 21st Century Work of Steele + Tomczak curated by Paul Wong (with a 84 page catalogue), opened at On Main Gallery and VIVO, Vancouver; the exhibition traveled to A Space Gallery (2013) and will open on October 21, 2016, at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

Recent solo exhibitions of their works have taken place at Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, NS (2014); Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal (2011); WHARF Centre D'art contemporain, Herouxville-St. Clair, France (2010); Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2009); Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, (2009); Dazibao, Montreal (2008); the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2003).

Selected group exhibitions and screenings of their work include:
La Biennale de Montréal, Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal (2014); Carbon 14:Climate is Culture, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2013); STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward, Workshop, Toronto (2011); Empire of Dreams: phenomenology of the built environment at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); a focus screening at EXIS: Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, Korea (2010); the Berlin Film Festival, Forum Expanded (2009); Akbank Sanat, Istanbul (2009); TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Future Projections (2009); Sophia, Bulgaria at the Central Bath House (2008); a focus screening at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2006); Beyond/In Western New York, organized by Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2005); Trivandrum Video Festival, New Delhi (2003); City of York Public Gallery, York, England (2000). 

Programming, curating and facilitating the work of artists is a strong parallel activity to Paul Wong’s own artistic practice. He has collaborated with hundreds of artists to produce exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the ground breaking Living Art Performance Festival (1979) and Yellow Peril: Reconsidered (1990). He is a co-founding director of VIVO (Satellite Video Exchange Society, est. 1973) and On Main Gallery (On The Cutting Edge Productions Society, est. 1985). In 2014, he was the guest curator for the Vancouver Art Gallery Fuse: Revolution Counter Revolution and he is currently the president of VAL (Vancouver Art and Leisure Society), an interdisciplinary organization for emerging practices. 

Paul Wong is the recipient of the 14th Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts