EMBASSY CULTURAL HOUSE
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V I D E O S


Paul Collins

Berlin Vent, 2015
Black and white, with sound
Duration 4:52
Courtesy and copyright of the artist

Drifting through the city as an art student, on the constant look-out for meaning and motifs, I one day noticed an air vent of painted wood, fitted into the walI of a building on Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto. It felt not as though I had simply “noticed" it, but as though the vent itself had come looming, glowing out of the noise of the city and of my experience. The form and fabrication of that slatted object seemed to embody so many of the elements and complexities that, I was discovering, were necessary for the construction of a work of art - essentials of surface and depth, composition, aura, and most especially the gridded x and y axes intrinsic to much art, be it the written word, notated music, the painted, printed or projected image. Much, if not most of my work since then has flowed and flown out of this object and this form. But the air vent is not a mere metaphor. That it is and was an air vent is not important. It could have been a tree, a mountain, a glass of water, a face, a word or a square. Its 'is-ness', that thing that makes a stone stony and an air vent an event is what matters. Russian writer and critic, Victor Shklovsky (1893 –1984) identifies this process as Ostranenie, or defamiliarization - the rendering or imbuing of something with strangeness.

Paul Collins bookwork VENT ■ Photographs 1977 - 2017
General Hardware Contemporary, Toronto and Care Not Care editions, Paris.  Printed at Coach House Printing, Toronto in a limited edition of 100

“In Berlin recently, I came upon this articulated air vent fitted into the bullet-ridden wall of the Martin Gropius Bau. The birds’ chirping from the adjacent trees seemed to emanate from the vent’s yapping slats, like the creaking of metal.”

Collins participated in a Duchamp colloquium held in Paris in 1994.

Brad Isaacs

On Exactitude in Science, 2016
Colour, with sound
Duration 6:35
Courtesy and copyright of the artist

​My current photographic and video work operates around themes of invisibility and simulation, as well as European and colonial imaginings of nature. I seek to illustrate connections within a complex array of relationships between animal research, hunting, colonialism, and masculinity, demonstrating a concern with how the scientific study of nature serves as the foundation for larger social structures and systems of domination, and how the methods and technologies we use to visualize animals create their own meaning.

- Brad Isaacs

The video was shot in an animal furs cold storage vault at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and first presented in the exhibition Brad Isaacs: The Map of the Empire at the Queen’s University’s Centre for Indigenous Research Creation in 2016.

Guest curator Carina Magazzeni’s related MA thesis is available at: https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/14960

Jinny Yu

Not Even Silence Gets Us Out of the Circle, 2017
HD video, colour, silent
Duration indefinite
Courtesy and copyright of the artist

So many ills in this world
I write my wishes and burn them up to the sky
And I hope.

I made this work when I felt powerless facing all the ills of this world.
“Not Even Silence Gets Us Out of the Circle” is a quote from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics
The motif of the burning paper is taken Korean shamanistic ritual.

- Jinny Yu, 2021

Jinny Yu: Not Even Silence Gets Us Out of the Circle, 2017 from Jinny Yu on Vimeo.


Lois Andison

threading water, 2014
Duration: 6:12
Courtesy and copyright of the artist, and Olga Korper Gallery

In threading water, a solitary swimmer moves through a body of water with a giant comb, much like the one that Andison has realized as a sculpture. Balancing agility and stamina, the swimmer performs a surrealist gesture shaped by a subtle play on words between a grooming technique to remove hair (threading) and the act of staying afloat in water through constant movement (treading). At once humorous and poetic, these works allow us to see a swimmer as both a stylus and an agent of change.

Crystal Mowry, from Lois Andison: all the world began with a yes, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, 2019

David Merritt

wahditty, 2008
Duration: 10:40
Courtesy and copyright of the artist

On a black screen words such as da, hey, doo, zip, la, ba, boom, and hidi fade in from black, to red, to grey, and to black again in what appears to be a series of syncopated beats across the screen. But gradually the words start to become familiar. Our mind starts to make sense of them. There is a pop song rhythm to the video, and we realize that Merritt might be playing or performing for us because these “words” that appear on the screen are not just “words” but nonsense song titles from the hit parade: Boom She Boom, Boom Shak a Lak, and Boom Chica Boom. And as soon as these words are read as song titles, they cease to be silent. In fact, they become quite audible. We hear these words as the songs they reference. We mouth the titles as we would Karaoke text. And our experience is similar to that of Jefferson and the gramophone in The Purple Cloud. Our silent reading is fractured, and we are haunted by a collage of recorded voices from popular music's past.

Excerpt from David Poolman “Silence / Debris / Duration” for David Merritt, shim/sham/shimmy, a coproduction of Museum London, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the MacLaren Art Centre and Art Gallery of Windsor, 2010.

wahditty, 2008 from davidmerritt on Vimeo.


Richard Grayson

Cosmic Joke, 2015
Single screen HD Video, stereo sound
Duration: 19:40 mins
Courtesy and copyright of the artist.

The work is formed from the texts of jokes that refer to ways of understanding and modelling immaterial or abstract forces, drawn from scientific, religious, philosophical, psychological or political systems. The sections of the jokes are articulated and animated by a 3D modelling animation programme. The soundtrack is based on the section of the Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss used by Stanley Kubrick in the famous extended space station docking section of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is mixed with sounds derived from the NASA recordings of the electromagnetic activity of the rings of Saturn.

 - Richard Grayson

Cosmic Joke. 2014 from richard grayson on Vimeo.


Gary Pearson

The Waiter Joke, 2011
Colour, with sound
Duration: 7:24
Courtesy and copyright of the artist.

“Comprised of a five-language performance cycle The Waiter Joke is an exploration of the entertaining nuances of the waiter – customer relationship.”

- Gary Pearson

Alexander Pilis

Opening_Closing_Time_São_Paulo, 2019-2021
Duration: 1:59
Courtesy and copyright of the artist

A short film that, through architecture, explores the collapse of interior and exterior worlds through a moving plane, the glass door of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. This film is part of a series that articulates the parallax. Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight seen from different viewing positions (at one given moment) can appear differently placed against the background of moving and fixed structures. “Sure, the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.”   Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

 - Alexander Pilis

Awarded the Playtime Prize in the 2021 ArchiShorts 2-minute film contest, Winnipeg


EDITORIAL TEAM

ONLINE FOUNDER
Tariq Hassan Gordon

COFOUNDERS & CURATORIAL ADVISORS 
 
Jamelie Hassan 
& Ron Benner

ADVISORY CIRCLE
Samer Abdelnour, Marnie Fleming, Wyn Geleynse, Fern Helfand, S F Ho, Lorraine Klaasen, Judith Rodger, Ruth Skinner, Mary Lou Smoke, and Lucas Stenning 

COORDINATING EDITORS
Tariq Hassan Gordon & 
Olivia Mossuto

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Blessy Augustine, Anahí González, Jared Hendricks-Polack, Jessica Irene Joyce, Ira Kazi, 
Shelley Kopp, Jenna Rose Sands, Mireya Seymour, Venus Tsao, Diana Tamblyn, and Michelle Wilson. 

VIRTUAL TOUR
Andreas Buchwaldt

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OUR STORY
Artists Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner and jazz musician Eric Stach founded the Embassy Cultural House (1983-1990) located in the restaurant portion of the Embassy Hotel at 732 Dundas Street in East London. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Embassy Cultural House was re-envisioned as a virtual artist-run space and website. 

The Embassy Cultural House gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the London Arts Council through the City of London's Community Arts Investment Program.
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The Embassy Cultural House is thankful for the mentorship program established by Western University's Visual Arts department and the continued support of the students and Faculty of Arts & Humanities.
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Our Partners

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E M B A S S Y  C U L T U R A L  H O U S E . C A

The Embassy Cultural House (ECH) is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Chonnonton peoples, at the forks of Deshkan Ziibi (Antler River), an area subject to the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum and other treaties, colonized as London, Ontario. The ECH strives to create meaningful relationships between the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and our contributors. The ECH honours the stewardship of the many Indigenous peoples who have resided on these lands since time immemorial.

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  • Home
  • Recent News
  • Community
    • Advisors & Editorial Team
    • Contributors
    • Governor General Laureates
    • In Memoriam
  • Exhibitions
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Background
    • Past Programming >
      • Exhibitions 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Curators
        • Index of Photographers
        • Index of Visual Artists
      • Film 1983-1990
      • Music 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Musicians
      • Performances 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Performers
    • Embassy Hotel History
  • About