Retroflective Video Installation: Hands and Faces
1979-1985-2023
10″x10″x12″
video, mixed media
$3500 contact steev@steev.ca
On view at Gallery 1313, Toronto, October 11 to 22, 2023
Article in ARToronto
Catalogue of The 40×40 Show at 1313 Gallery
Retroflective Video Installation: Hands and Faces is a literal reflection of OCA students from the early 80s. It is a concatenation of several works spanning four decades. The 10” internally mirrored cube was built in 1979, but never exhibited for technical reasons. One surface of the box is a partial mirror, revealing an interior view that gives the impression of a tesseract, or hypercube. Modified consumer electronics provide a display and a point of view. Viewers can look through their own reflections to view the interior, or control the camera’s point of view, using a touch screen outside the box. Glimpses of the users’ hands and faces are mingled with the layers of mirrored video.
For this exhibition, the video playing is Hands and Faces, a portrait of a group of students taped in the halls of OCA’s Stewart building in 1985. Music by Peter Gmehling and Steev Morgan. Depicted in no particular order are Bruce Hefler, Ania Szado, Lynda Surjik, Roxanna Bikadoroff, Jane Huggard, Catherine Orfald, Alex Mascus, Mariela Borello, Dada Axis (Ix Uad), France Boucher, Guy Lafayette, Mai Gulbrantson, Oliver Kellhammer, Jan Levis, Anne Cooper, Ken Vincent, and George Van Bussel.
The purchaser of the piece can choose any number of videos from the artist’s collection to display in the box.
Steev Morgan is a multiple scholarship recipient and graduated with honours from both Algonquin College Fine Arts (’80) and Ontario College of Art, Photo Electric Arts Department (’85) as an inter-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, interactive multimedia, and performance.
He went on to work as a technician in the Film and Animation Departments. By 1992 Steev was teaching a number of courses at OCA including Film and Video Production, and Basic Multimedia Production, while continuing to make films, videos and interactive multimedia installation works. In 1997 Steev advocated for, and taught, the first Web Design courses at OCAD.
His videos have screened in Canada, Japan and several European festivals. They have also been broadcast on Japanese television, as well as the CBC and TVO. In the 1990s Morgan exhibited a number of interactive installations, both solo and in collaboration with other artists. He participated in Welcome to the Electric Skin and Toronto Cybercity, two intercontinental telepresence installations with his pieces Iterative Environment for Video Robot and CyberCity Hall. In 1995 and 1997 he curated and exhibited in two group shows of Canadian new media artists at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City (Net@Works and A Life of Its Own – Una Vida por su Cuenta).
Often using iterative techniques such as looping, rescanning and feedback, Steev Morgan’s work frequently explores the reflexive nature of reality; the cybernetic bootstrapping process whereby consciousness emerges from mere perceptions and thoughts, which in turn begets reality.
Steev is represented by V-tape and he continues to make physical and digital works in various media. His most recent projects can be seen here at steev.ca
Catalogue of The 40×40 Show at 1313 Gallery
“We are establishing a network of collaborators and gathering a body of pictures and sounds which depict people and places in their social contexts. The participants were solicited from all quarters in and outside of the arts community.