HIGHER GROUND update:

THANK-YOU ALL FOR COMING OUT AND SUPPORTING PLATFORM AT OUR FUNDRAISER THIS YEAR!!! Auction winners have all been contacted, and the delivery of prints will take place soon. Special thanks to all the artists who donated work for our event, as well as to: The Loft Gastropub DesignType The Labworks Colours PLATFORM offices will be closed until January 10th 2012.

The 2011 PLATFORM Art Auction / Fundraiser, Higher Ground, will take place Saturday 10 December from 7PM - 2AM @ The Loft Gastropub [774 Corydon Avenue]. Entrance is $20.00 each! Check out the work you can bid on [cash, cheque, credit card accepted]. Email in your bid or call us [info@platformgallery.org 204.942.8183] ::

• Auction Group 1: 10:30pm call

1. Brendan Fernandes
2. Larry Glawson
3. Dominique Rey
4. Collin Zipp

• Brendan Fernandes
• Artifact, 2010
• digital print, edition 4/6
• 12" x 8"

Born in Kenya of Indian heritage, BRENDAN FERNANDES immigrated to Canada in 1989. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from The University of Western Ontario and his BFA (2002) from York University in Canada. He has exhibited internationally and nationally including exhibitions at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Art and Design New York, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Art Gallery of York University, Manif d’Art: The Quebec City Biennial, The Third Guangzhou Triennial and the Western New York Biennial through The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Fernandes has participated in numerous residency programs including The Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Trinidad and Tobago (2006), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Work Space (2008) and Swing Space (2009) programs, the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum (2009), The New Work Residency at Harvestwork, NY (2009), the Gyeonggi Creation Center Residency at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea (2009) and ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. He held the position of Artist in Residence at The School of Visual Arts, NY, in the graduate program for computer arts (2008). He was the recipient of a New Commissions Project through Art in General, NY (2010) and was the Ontario representative for the 2010 Sobey Art Award. In 2012 he will be featured in “Oh Canada” the largest survey of contemporary Canadian art ever produced outside Canada at the MASS MoCa. Fernandes’ work was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. He is based between Toronto and New York.

• Larry Glawson
• Untitled (diptych with wasps), from the home bodies series, 2011
• chromira print
• 20" x 34"

LARRY GLAWSON has worked out of Winnipeg as a photo-artist for nearly thirty years. His work has been shown locally, nationally and internationally including exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, Edinburgh, New York, Helsinki, and Belgrade. He first taught photography at the University of Manitoba School of Art in 1990 and yearly since 1995, except while obtaining his MFA at the University of Western Ontario from 2000 – 2002. Glawson’s work over the last fifteen years has been largely involved with queer identities, politics and aesthetics. In June 2008, a major exhibition of his home bodies series was presented in Winnipeg. The survey exhibition of his work, 27 x Doug: Portraits by Larry Glawson, debuted at the University of Manitoba's Gallery One One One, and toured to Concordia University's FoFA Gallery in Montreal and Saint Mary's University Art Gallery in Halifax this past year.

• Dominique Rey
• Cottontail, 2011
• c-print
• 24" x 36"

DOMINIQUE REY has had a dozen one-person shows and has participated in an equal number of group exhibitions in both French and English Canada. She has also done residencies in Manitoba, Quebec and New Brunswick. Dominique Rey has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and the Ricard Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in the Globe & Mail, Frieze, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and the Winnipeg Free Press. Dominique Rey was named Winnipeg’s Visual Arts Ambassador for the 2010 Cultural Capital of Canada. She has recently been nominated to the 2011 Sobey Art Award Long List.

• Collin Zipp
• A Modern Community with Family Quarters, 2010
• digital print
• 16" x 20"

COLLIN ZIPP is a multidisciplinary artist whose work and research centers around notions of storytelling and contemporary myth making. He received his BFA from the University of Manitoba`s School of Art and his MFA from the University of Lethbridge. Zipp has been awarded grants from the Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Arts Council and from the Canada Council for the Arts for his artistic work.

Working with a variety of media including video, photography, sculpture and installation, Zipp has exhibited his work widely both nationally and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions and screenings. Selected exhibiting venues include Saskatoon’s Paved New Media, Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, Wynick/Tuck in Toronto, Gatineau’s Daimon, the Boston Underground Film Festival, Halifax`s eyelevelgallery, the Kelowna Art Gallery, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and Exchange Square in Manchester UK.

• Auction Group 2: 11:00pm Call

1. Suzy Lake
2. William Eakin
3. Sarah Crawley
4. Richard Hines

• Suzy Lake
• Dance to Life, 2010 / 1986
• c-print
• 11 1/2" x 16 1/8"

SUZY LAKE’s rigorous and challenging approach to art-making has earned her recognition as a decisive figure in Canadian visual art. Over the past 40 years, she has captured the experience and expression of female identity within contemporary political, social, and media milieus. Widely regarded as a pioneer in body-based work, her photographic and performative explorations offer a powerful and nuanced investigation of embodiment, femininity, and beauty. Her work opens up the fraught figure-ground relationship between image and identity, a central concern in late 20th and early 21st century art practice. The recent exhibition organized by the University of Toronto Art Centre, Political Poetics, showcased Lake’s most recent time-based works, framing them within the broader context of a career long exploration of embodied subjectivity. Examining an underappreciated aspect of Lake’s practice, the exhibition contends that the poetics of Lake’s work—their formal aesthetic—provides a space for understanding their political intent.

• William Eakin
• 24 HOURS, 2011
• pigment print
• 17" x 22"

WILLIAM EAKIN is a photographer living and working in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he was born in 1952. He studied art at the Vancouver School of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. Eakin's photographs draw upon the cultural iconography of the West. Often depicting vintage cowboy figurines and Western collectibles, his photographs stage insight into the manufacturing of the Western image and cowboy culture. Eakin is the recipient of numerous awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council, including the Duke and Duchess of York Prize for Photography, and his work can be found in numerous public and private collections across the country.

• Sarah Crawley
• untitled (from the Belgrade series), 2006
• colour photograph
• 20" x 24"

SARAH CRAWLEY is a visual artist who has exhibited across Canada in solo and group exhibitions as well as internationally. By using multiple processes, she creates images that reveal the photographic technologies she employs in her work. Sarah’s art practice explores aspects of memory, identity, and communication. She is interested in how memory has an impact on identity and the non-verbal ways that identity is communicated. As an active member of the visual art community in Winnipeg Sarah enjoys sharing her passion for photography. She has worked as an arts administrator and teacher, has volunteered on several boards, and is currently involved in a community art project through Winnipeg Arts Council’s With Art program.

• Richard Hines
• Elbows, Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, 2011
• c-print, edition 1/10
• 24" x 30"

RICHARD HINES was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario. He currently lives and works in Winnipeg. He has earned a MFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, a BFA from the University of Manitoba, and a BA from the University of Winnipeg. He has taught fine arts at the University of Saskatchewan, NSCAD University, and Mount Allison University. His work has been published and exhibited in Canada and the USA. In 2010, Richard and his work will be featured in Blackflash Magazine and enRoute Magazine. richardhinesphotography.com

• Auction Group 3: 11:30pm call

1. Elaine Stocki
2. Guy Maddin
3. Sarah Anne Johnson
4. Lisa Stinner-Kun

• Elaine Stocki
• Salter, 2009
• platinum print
• 15" x 15"

ELAINE STOCKI was raised in Winnipeg, Canada. She earned two undergraduate degrees from the University of Manitoba (Bachelor of Science and Fine Arts) before completing her Master’s degree in Photography at Yale University (2009). Elaine has exhibited at the Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin) and Zach Feuer (New York). She divides her time between Brooklyn, New York and Winnipeg, Canada. Stocki was shortlisted for the prestigious Grange Prize 2011, whose jury noted: Elaine Stocki’s photographs began drawing critical attention when she was still an undergraduate student at the University of Manitoba. Now based in Brooklyn, she continues to hone a practice that challenges the expected limits of documentary photography by infusing its conventions with a constructed theatricality expressed in a voice uniquely her own. Working with subjects from a range of social standings – some of whom are strangers she meets by placing classified ads – Stocki creates compositions that explore the pressing issues of race, class and gender. While her themes are age-old, her language is remarkable in its seamless merging of reality and fantasy, order and disorder, humour and tragedy. Stocki roots herself in the history of photography, but has devised an approach to the medium which allows her to create images that are consistently unexpected and unconventional and always provocative.

• Guy Maddin
• St Mary's Academy and College, 2007
• collage
• 6 1/2" x 6 1/2"

GUY MADDIN is a Winnipeg-based filmmaker with ten features to his credit, including cult-classic Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988); and Archangel (1990), which won the U.S. National Film Critics Award for best experimental film of the year. Since then he has won many other awards – including the Telluride Silver Medal for life achievement in 1995; an Emmy for his ballet movie Dracula -- Pages from a Virgin's Diary; the San Francisco International Film Festival's prestigious Persistence of Vision Award in 2006, and others – and created dozens of beguiling films in his unique personal style. These include such celebrated feature works as The Saddest Music in the World (2003), Brand upon the Brain! (2006), and My Winnipeg (2007), winner of the TIFF City TV Prize for Best Canadian Feature. His latest feature, Keyhole, premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in 2011. Maddin is also a writer and teacher, and occupies the position of Distinguished Filmmaker in Residence at the University of Manitoba.

• Sarah Anne Johnson
• Sharks (working print) 2005
• b+w print
• 11" x 14"

SARAH ANNE JOHNSON received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 2002, and completed her MFA at the Yale School of the Art in 2004. Johnson’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Grange Prize, granted by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Aeroplan, and a Major Grant from the Manitoba Arts Council. She has received numerous positive reviews in many publications including the New York Times, Village Voice, New York Magazine, Frieze, Modern Painters, Canadian Art, Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Winnipeg Free Press, Art Forum, American Art Magazine, and Art on Paper. Three of her exhibitions were purchased in their entirety by major museums; namely, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and Art Gallery of Ontario. Other institutions who collect her work are the New York Library, the Spencer Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Bank of Montreal. She remains an active presence in Winnipeg where she lives and works. For the last few years and ongoing, she participates in thesis committees at the University of Manitoba and last year she was a mentor for MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Woman’s Art). Johnson was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award 2011, representing the Prairies and the North.

• Lisa Stinner-Kun
• Hydro (floor boards), 2009
• digital c-print
• 34" x 44"

Since graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Photography, LISA STINNER-KUN's work has also been featured in several exhibitions, locally, nationally and internationally among them solo exhibition at Winnipeg's PLATFORM Centre (2007), and Gallery 803 (2008). She has received numerous grants and scholarships, and most recently was awarded a Visual Arts grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has been written about in Border Crossings Magazine, the exhibition monograph vague terrain published by PLATFORM, the Winnipeg Free Press, and Warehouse, a journal of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba. Stinner’s photographs have also been highlighted in several juried publications including Carte Blanche (2006) and Flash Forward (2006, 2007). Stinner obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Manitoba where she has been teaching photography as a sessional instructor. www.lisastinnerkun.com

• Auction Group 4: 12:00am call

1. Diana Thorneycroft
2. Scott Benesiinaabandan
3. Karen Asher
4. Paul Robles

• Diana Thorneycroft
• Forest Tabernacle Choir, 2011
• c-print
• 17" x 21"

DIANA THORNEYCROFT is a Winnipeg artist who has exhibited various bodies of work across Canada, the United States and Europe, as well as in Moscow, Tokyo and Sydney. She is the recipient of numerous awards including an Assistance to Visual Arts Long-term Grant from the Canada Council, several Senior Arts Grants from the Manitoba Arts Council and a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her work has been the subject of national radio documentaries and a CBC national documentary for television. Thorneycroft's photo-based exhibition, The Body, its lesson and camouflage was on an eight city tour from 2000 to 2002. A book by the same name was published. Thorneycroft's work has been included in the 2002 released Phaidon Press publication Blink, which presents the work of 100 rising stars in photography. They have been selected by 10 world-class curators, each proposing 10 photographers who they consider to have emerged and broken new ground in the last five years.

• Scott Benesiinaabandan
• KISSKISSSHAKESHAKE, 2011
• digital print
• 24" x 44"

SCOTT BENESIINAABANDAN is an Anishinabe artist based in Winnipeg who works in photography, printmaking and video, among other media. Scott has recently completed an international residency at Context Gallery in Derry, North of Ireland (2010) and in Oklahoma with photographer Rita Leistner (2009). In the past four years, Benesiinaabandan has been awarded grants from the Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Arts Council for his artistic work. Benesiinaabandan has taken part in several group exhibitions across Canada and in the United States, most notably in Subconscious City at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2008, Harbourfont’s Flatter the Land/Bigger the Ruckus in 2006 and recently presented his first solo exhibition, unSacred, at Gallery 1C03 this past January. He is currently preparing to do an arts project with the Roma/Traveller community in Europe in June. benesiinaabandan.com

• Karen Asher
• Erik the Great, 2010
• c-print
• 24" x 24"

KAREN ASHER is a lens-based artist from Winnipeg. She received her BFA Thesis in photography from the University of Manitoba in 2009. Asher is the recipient of numerous grants and awards and is featured in Flash Forward 2010 - Emerging Photographers from Canada, United Kingdom and the United States as well as the recently published book Front Line: Interviews with International Contemporary Photo-Based Artists. She had her first solo exhibition last year at Platform and was written up in several publications including The National Post, Canadian Art, BlackFlash and Border Crossings Magazine. Asher recently exhibited work at Toronto's Contact Photography Festival, the Gimli Film Festival, and the 2011 Pingyao International Photography Festival in Beijing. She is currently preparing for her upcoming solo exhibition at Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary. www.karenasher.ca

• Paul Robles
• Red River White Trainers, 2011
• Collage / Cut Origami on Vellum
• 18" x 15"

PAUL ROBLES is a Canadian artist based in Winnipeg. Born in the Philippines; he immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of four. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (First Class- Gold Medal) from University of Manitoba and Bachelor of Arts degree (Sociology) from the University of Winnipeg. Robles has exhibited nationally and internationally including Outpost Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Keza, Paris, France; Malaspina, Vancouver, BC: The New Gallery, Calgary, AB: Rideau Hall (Governor General Selected), Ottawa, ON; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto, ON; as well as Plug In ICA and The Winnipeg Art Gallery. His work is featured as a CBC ArtSpots; published in Border Crossings Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Walrus, G.Love Magazines; and is a public artist bike rack on Broadway - commissioned by the City of Winnipeg/The Winnipeg Arts Council. In 2011, his work was showcased as part of the My Winnipeg group exhibition in Paris and Sete, France; at the Drake Hotel in Toronto and at Julia Saul Gallery in New York City this December. Robles is represented by Galerie Keza (Paris, France).

Film Screening, Thursday 08 December, 7PM followed by a discussion. Free Admission. In the gallery.

• In partnership with Alliance Française, PLATFORM presents:

• Barcelona or die by Idrissa Guiro

• In conjunction with our current exhibition, Always Moving Forward Contemporary African Photography from the Wedge Collection(up until December 10th), PLATFORM is very excited to be working with Alliance Française in the presentation of this documentary film. Barcelona or die by Idrissa Guiro (2007), received in 2008 the Best Documentary Award from the Trophées des Arts afro-caribéen Festivaland the Prix Louis Marcorelles from Cinema du Reel Festival.

• The documentary discusses the mass exodus of young Africans to the European continent: “In a suburb of Dakar, passengers are waiting to reach Europe in fragile boats, dealing with the risk of dissappearing under the waters of the Atlantic. The local fishing is in bankrupt or in jeopardy, and the country can’t provide a future for its youth. In every family, someone dreams of going oversea”.

• The discussion will be led by Mamadou Ka, professor of political science at the University of St. Boniface.

• For a preview of the film, please follow the link.

Mamadou Ka holds a BA in Politics, LLB, MA (International Relations and Comparative Politics) and has completed his Ph.D course work in Political Science, which he teaches at the Collège Universitaire de St. Boniface in Winnipeg. He also teaches African Development issues at the Menno Simon College/The University of Winnipeg. Mamadou is also a Political Analyst on French CBC radio and television.