About

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Cheryl Pagurek is a Canadian photo-based, video, and digital media artist. Her early training in sculpture and printmaking is key to her constructive and layered approach to artmaking. Her path to photography originated in the documentation of her ephemeral installations; these explorations continued in video, eventually leading to the embodied experience of interactive media, where movement guides navigation through the artwork. Based in Ottawa, Pagurek’s artistic practice now highlights the constructed nature of lens-based media, while embracing the creative expression offered by computing and technology.

Since receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Victoria, her work has been shown widely across Canada from Victoria to St. John’s, including exhibits at Patrick Mikhail Gallery (Ottawa and Montreal), Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (Halifax), Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Vu (Québec City), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), and internationally with numerous video screenings in France, Brazil, Colombia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Netherlands, Norway and the USA. She was commissioned by the City of Ottawa Public Art Program to create Currents, a permanent outdoor LED video display for the Marketplace Transit Station. Her videos have appeared in public art events in several cities, including Nuit Blanche Ottawa Gatineau, Kamloops Art Gallery’s Luminocity program, Toulouse’s Rencontres Traverse Vidéo, and Kingston’s Next Door public art exhibit. Her solo exhibit Connect/Connexion at the Ottawa Art Gallery in 2019 featured an interactive video and audio installation. In 2020, she received a Canada Council for the Arts Digital Originals grant for an online browser-based project. Also in 2020, she was the recipient of the Corel Endowment for the Arts Award celebrating the integration of technology and the arts, to create a new interactive installation, States of Being. Her work is in several collections including Global Affairs Canada (three works in Canada House, London), the Canada Council Art Bank, the Library of the National Gallery of Canada, Cenovus Energy Inc., the Ottawa Art Gallery and the City of Ottawa, and her work has been written about in Canadian, American, British and French publications, including The Globe and Mail, Esse, Ciel Variable, BlackFlash, Vie des Arts, Canadian Art online, Next Level (UK), Turbulences Vidéo, and Afterimage. She is the recipient of grants from the City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and is represented by Patrick Mikhail Gallery. Her videos are distributed by Groupe Intervention Vidéo and Vtape.

Artist’s Statement

I interweave contrasting streams of imagery and sound from many sources, while accentuating the abstract qualities of colour, form and movement to create a dynamic, cohesive whole. Works in video, photography, digital and interactive media, feature interconnections and tensions between public and private, past and present, representation and abstraction, urban and natural spaces, the many facets of contemporary life. Ongoing learning and exploration are vital to my process. I integrate technology into my practice in service to the artistic content, while prioritizing the continuity of my visual vocabulary and the aesthetics of the work. I welcome the exciting possibilities of ‘controlled randomness’, introduced into my work through coding and interaction.  The invitation to engage in the ongoing evolution of the artworks brings participants into the creative triad of artist, viewer, and technology.

Earlier work

Early explorations resulted in objects sculpted out of photographic images, photographs with shapes physically cut out of them, digitally constructed photo-based images and multi-layered videos. Home and family life were central themes, situated within a broader framework of social, historical, commercial and political contexts. Subsequent works recorded my own observations of natural phenomena in photography and video, often combining them with found imagery and footage, such as old family snapshots and movies, archival films and photographs, and contemporary military tracking footage. Several series investigate the interrelated concepts of time, memory and history. The ephemeral quality of many of my works in video evokes the ‘present-ness’ of the disappearing past. Relationships of presence and absence are already intrinsic to photography and video in the framing of the subject and in their indexical nature; in many works these ideas are further emphasized by the selective removal of some visual information. Other works, like the State of Flux photographs, and the Wave Patterns, Bodies of Water, and Currents videos, dwell in the liminal spaces between natural and built environments, between abstraction and representation, and between lens-based media and painting, with water imagery embodying the idea of continual transformation.

Recent work

More recent works probe our relationships to the world around us in a digitally networked, global society, encouraging a sense of engagement.

In Connect, an interactive video and audio installation, participants discover local and global video imagery and sound through the moving shapes of their own bodies. Connect contrasts the agency, embodiment, and immediacy felt within the installation, with the mediation that pervades much of our digital connections in everyday life, where the content we consume and create is framed and formatted by the medium of its transmission.

The Tea Cups series of videos and photo-based digital prints were made by projecting contemporary news imagery into vintage tea cups, and recording the results. The contextualizing frame of the tea cup brings worldwide events closer to home, evoking human fragility, and acknowledging the filter of individual experience through which our perceptions are shaped as we try to comprehend far-reaching events around us.

The Untitled Moments prints are a contemporary take on the aesthetic of Matisse’s Cut-Outs. By exploring my personal archive of cell phone photos as source material, I examine these ubiquitous devices as interface between the individual and their surroundings. The prints in this series are amplified by Untitled Moments: Contemplate, Animate, Generate, Participate, an online project featuring animations of the creative process leading to the finished prints, and browser-based generative and interactive artworks.

Most recently, States of Being reimagines expressive self-representation in the internet age. The interactive installation’s video and music components are mapped spatially to respond to peoples’ movements.  Instead of the online identities that we craft and perform via social media platforms, avatars, and video calls, States of Being offers an alternative, experiential and experimental mode to enact virtual creations of ourselves. Straddling both real and digital worlds, the installation expands the artistic potential of interactivity by inviting dancers and the public to engage with it. The resulting immersive video and sound compositions they create uniquely express our precarious human condition amidst the fluctuating states of being we strive to balance.

Please see the individual galleries of images and videos in the Works section for more detailed statements about each body of work.

Acknowledgements

Cheryl Pagurek gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Website design by David Pagurek van Mossel