Jul 17 2025
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:04:00.
Conference Presentation, “Guarding the Past: Memory Securitization and Museum Collections,” Museums and Memory Working Group, Memory Studies Association, University of Southern California Los Angeles, January 24 - 25, 2025.
Dec 19 2024
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:20:00.
Aug 15 2024
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:13:00.
Conference Attendance, “Violence and Repair” at the 2024 Mnemonic Summer School, University of California Los Angeles, July 9 - 11, 2024.
Conference Attendance, “Cultural Heterologies and Democracy: Transitions and Transformations in Post-Socialist Cultures in the 1980s and 1990s” at the Estonian Academy of Art, Tallinn, June 26 - 28, 2024.
Conference Attendance, “Bridge-Building through Art Exhibitions: the Cold War Divide, the Fall of the Wall, and Beyond” at Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden, March 21 - 22, 2024.
Jan 25 2024
Radio Vilnius
Interview starts at 00:09:00.
Event Curator, “Another Year, Wishes” featuring Evaldas Jansas, at Joys, Toronto, on view January 1, 2024.
Still from Evaldas Jansas’ "Linkejimai/Wishes" (1998) Digital Video. 23:01 duration.
One of the earliest Lithuanian video works was Evaldas Jansas’ “Linkejimai/Wishes,” which was filmed in 1998, on the days leading up to New Year’s Eve. In ‘Linkejimai’ Jansas asks passersby in various locales, on the street; in bars; and at the contemporary art centre, what they wish for themselves and for others. Jansas invites strangers to articulate their values, fantasies, anxieties and epistemologies.
Since 2018, I’ve organized annual screenings of this work on New Years Eve and New Years Day in partnership with various contemporary art institutions.
A screening of Jansas’ "Linkejimai/Wishes" at Crutch Contemporary, on view December 31, 2017.
Exhibition Curator, “Really Really Real” featuring A.J. Medland, Sarai Stephens, at Crutch Contemporary, on view Nov 08—Dec 09, 2019.
Installation view.
Often when I am drawing in the subway in New York City an observer will patiently
stand by and watch until I have finished drawing and then, quickly, as I attempt to walk away, will shout out, “But what does it mean?” I usually answer: “That's your part, I only do the drawings.”
So, when I was asked to write something for Flash Art, I found myself in a similar situation. I still maintain that an artist is not the best spokesman for his work. For myself, I find that my attitude towards, and understanding of my work is in a constant state of flux. I am continually learning move of what my work is about from other people and other sources. An actively working artist is usually (hopefully) so involved in what he is doing that there isn't a chance to get outside of the work and look at it with any real perspective. A real artist is only a vehicle for those things that are passing through him. Sometimes the sources of information can be revealed and sometimes the effects can be located, but the desired state is one of total commitment and abandon that requires only confidence and not definition. The explanation is left to the observer (and supposedly the critics). However, in the past two years I have done dozens of interviews and frequently talk about what I think I am doing. Still, I have read very little real critical inquiry into my work, besides the ongoing obsession with the phenomena of money and success. For this reason I decided to note a few of the things that nobody ever talks about, but which are central (I feel) to my work.
One of the things I have been most interested in is the role of chance in situations - letting things happen by themselves. My drawings are never preplanned. I never sketch a plan for a drawing, even for huge wall murals. My early drawings, which were always abstract, were filled with references to images, but never had specific images. They are more like automatic writing or gestural abstraction. This was my prime attraction to the CoBrA group (primarily Pierre Alechinsky) and Eastern calligraphy. Total control with no control at all. The work of William Burroughs and Brian Gysin (The Third Mind) came the closest in literature to what I saw as the artistic vision in painting. The artist becomes a vessel to let the world pour through him. We only get glimpses of this spirit in the physical results laid down in paint.
This openness to “chance” situations necessitates a level of performance in the artist. The artist, if he is a vessel, is also a performer. I find the most interesting situation for me is when there is no turning back. Many times I put myself in situations where I am drawing in public. Whatever marks I make are immediately recorded and immediately on view. There are no “mistakes” because nothing can be erased. Similar to the graffiti “tags” on the insides of subway cars and the brush paintings of Japanese masters, the image comes directly from the mind to the hand. The expression exists only in that moment. The artist's performance is supreme.
This attitude toward working seems particularly relevant in a world increasingly dominated by purely rational thought and money-motivated action. The rise of technology has necessitated a return to ritual. Computers and word processors operate only in the world of numbers and rationality. The human experience is basically irrational.
In 1978 I came to New York City and attended the School of Visual Arts. I was keeping a diary when I first got to New York and was surprised when, re-reading it recently, I came across various notations about a conflict I was having over the role of the contemporary artist. It seemed to me that with minimal and conceptual art the role of the artist was increasingly helping to usher in the acceptance of the cooly-calculated, verifiable, computer-dominated, plastic “reality.” A comparison between a human worker and a computer would inevitably prove that (from an efficiency standpoint) the human was being surpassed and maybe even replaced by the capabilities of the microchip. The possibility of evolution evolving beyond the human level was a frightening realization.
Although this is exaggerated, I think the contemporary artist has a responsibility to humanity to continue celebrating humanity and opposing the dehumanization of our culture. This doesn't mean that technology shouldn't be utilized by the artist, only that it should be at the service of humanity and not vice versa. Living in 1984, the role of the artist has to be different from what it was fifty, or even twenty years ago. I am continually amazed at the number of artists who continue working as if the camera were never invented, as if Andy Warhol never existed, as if airplanes and computers and videotape were never heard of.
Think of the responsibility of an artist now who is thrust into an international culture and expected to have exhibitions in every country in the world. It is impossible to go backwards. It is imperative that an artist now, if he wants to communicate to the world. be capable of being interviewed, photographed, and videotaped at ease. The graphic arts of reproduction have to be utilized. It is physically impossible to be in more than one place at one time (at least for the moment). The artist has his own image as well as the image he creates. It is important that through all these permutations the artist retains a vision which is true to the world he lives in, as well as to the world his imagination lives in.
This delicate balance between ritual and technology is applied to every aspect of my work. Whether I draw with a stick in the sand or use animated computer graphics, the same level of concentration exists. There is no difference for me between a drawing I do in the subway and a piece to be sold for thousands of dollars. There are obvious differences in context and medium, but the intention remains the same. The structure of the art “market” was established long before I was involved in it. It is my least favorite aspect of the role of the contemporary artist, however, it cannot be ignored. The use of galleries and commercial projects has enabled me to reach millions of people whom I would not have reached by remaining an unknown artist. I assumed, after all, that the point of making art was to communicate and contribute to a culture.
Art lives through the imaginations of the people who are seeing it. Without that contact, there is no art. I have made myself a role as an image-maker of the seventieth century and I daily try to understand the responsibilities and implications of that position. It has become increasingly clear to me that art is not an elitist activity reserved for the appreciation of a few, but for everyone, and chat is the end toward which I will continue to work.
Keith Harring for Flash Art Magazine 116, March 1984: 20-28.
Sarai Stephens, “The Swamp,” (2019) oil on canvas, 54 x 84 in.
AJ Medland and Sarai Stephens, “OUTstanding Figure” (2019) newspaper pulp, drywall compound, glue, flour, recycled plastics, 68 x 42 x 16 in.
AJ Medland and Sarai Stephens, Studies for OUTstanding Figure (2019) newspaper pulp, drywall compound, glue, flour, wire, dimensions variable.
AJ Medland, “Teaser (Mimico September Afternoon)” oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.
The question still gets asked ‘what is art?’ But the subtext of that question seems to be, ‘is it real?’ Is art capable of being a medium of truth? Well, if art cannot be a medium of truth then art would only be a matter of taste; and if art was only a matter of taste, then the art spectator becomes more important than the art producer. Imagine the implications of this. Imagine an individual that cannot experience the possibilities of her own actions, the pleasure, or the limitations of them. The aesthetic relies entirely on the assumption that the individual is capable of responsibility, for producing this work, by undertaking that artistic action. Otherwise, if art is not a medium of truth, we are only made real by a Panopticon with no one sitting at the well. Art is a medium of truth when it is personal responsibility.
‘What is art?’ Art is Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Or in the words of my favourite poet, “art is a fistfight in the orchestra pit.” ‘What is art?’ Art is writing before you learn how to read. Because before thought, it must have been poetry. If “contemporary art is an art to survive our contemporaneity” then the aesthetic is our integrity of thought outside language. Recall George W. Bush, as the primacy of language, at a podium proclaiming: “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” And if you still maintain that language is the measure of validity, do recall that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Art is a stray dog, following you through a field of lilac trees on the outskirts of Vilnius. An eternal reoccurrence poised like a crossroads, as if our generosity and willingness to engage with that which offers us no utility, instead offers us a mirror to our humanity.
Veronika Ivanova, “Really really real” (2019)
Sarai Stephens, “I’m Real” (2018) newspaper pulp, drywall compound, glue, flour, wire, 24 x 30 x 4 in.
The Proposal by Sarai Stephens and AJ Medland
Exhibition Curator, “An Infinite Loop in the Virtual Plaza,” featuring Sophia Oppel, at Crutch Contemporary, Toronto, on view October 05—27, 2019.
Installation view.
Oppel’s exhibition mapped the parallels between public architecture and ‘user-friendly’ digital interfaces. Centered around an essayistic video work that investigates these ‘invisible’ infrastructures and the logic that underpins their aesthetics, this body of work attempts to unpack the implications of tools that extract information through psychological conditioning.
This exhibition won the Nuit Blanche Independent Project Prize from the City of Toronto, 2019.
Installation view.
Still from “placelessness in parallel" (2019) Digital Video. 10:00 duration.
Installation view.
Installation view.
Hope is a duty from which paleontologists are exempt. Their job is to take the long view, the cold and stony view, of triumphs and catastrophes in the history of life. They study teeth, tree trunks, leaves, pollen, and other biological relics, and from it they attempt to discern the lost secrets of time, the big patterns of stasis and change, the trends of innovation and adaptation and refinement and decline that have blown and evaporated, like sea winds among ancient creatures in ancient ecosystems. Although life is their subject, death and burial supply all their data. This gives to paleontologists a certain distance, a perspective beyond the reach of anxiety over outcomes of the struggles they chronicle. If “hope is the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson said, then it's good to remember that feathers don't generally fossilize well.
Garrett Lockhart, Suzanna Zak, “Lock 'n Key” 2019, Steel fence, found handwritten directions, horseshoe, found keys, charms, wire, plastic, found U-lock, worry stone, 43.5 x 36 x 44.5 in.
Garrett Lockhart, “WASTELAND” (2019) lumber crayon rubbing on found paper, salvaged nails, 18 × 24 in.
Nikki Woolsey, “March-April,” (2019) wood, found glass, found metal, nails, found rope.
Suzanna Zak, “Moss Soak” (2019) weathered c-print, stone, wildflowers, resin, steel.
Installation view.
“Planet of Weeds” was comprised almost entirely of found objects/refuse reappropriated by the artists featured in this exhibition.
Event Curator, “2020” featuring Anton Vidokle, Zeesy Powers, Angus Tarnawsky, at Crutch Contemporary, Toronto, July 7, 2019.
Still from Anton Vidokle’s “Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism” (2014-2017) HD video, color, sound. 96:00 duration. Russian with English subtitles.
Today the philosophy known as Cosmism has been largely forgotten. Its utopian tenets – combining Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy, Russian Orthodox traditions with Marxism – inspired many key Soviet thinkers until they fell victim to Stalinist repression. In this three-part film project, artist Anton Vidokle probes Cosmism’s influence on the twentieth century and suggests its relevance to the present day.
In Zeesy Powers’ virtual reality work “This Could Be You” the viewer inhabited the body of an algorithmically-generated 90-year-old woman, naked and battered by the refuse of the information worker. VR is positioned as a technology of infinity: you can be anyone, anywhere, doing anything; and yet, as Zeesy reminds users, its practices are also those of confinement: where you find yourself trapped in a space limited by sensors, the length of a cable, and the limits of someone else’s imagination.
A performance by Angus Tarnawsky explored sound through an assembled orchestra of radio frequencies.
Exhibition Curator, “A Worker’s Pantry” featuring Sean Stewart, Crutch Contemporary Art Centre, Toronto, on view May 24—June 30, 2019.
Installation view.
if catastrophe lies before us,
then it flows from what’s come before
deep beside my swim in you
trees, crimson,
haltering,
cast into night, doorways,
beneath the wind,
hand, us
I melt waving
to dawns of terrible swans
sticks drumming in my bone
Veronika Ivanova, “my swim in you” (2019)
Installation view.
Ronan Stewart, “The Shirt Off My Back” (2019) Steel, Shirt, Dried Flora, 16 x 12 in.
Installation view.
Ronan Stewart, “A Reminder” (2019) Steel, Note on Paper, Quail Eggs, 16 x 12 in.
Exhibition Curator, “The Upper Side of the Sky” featuring Jawa El Khash, Crutch Contemporary Art Centre, Toronto, on view April 12—May 11, 2019.
Stills from “The Upper Side of the Sky” (2019) VR, 10:00 duration.
“The Upper Side of the Sky” featured a virtual reality work that resurrected Syrian agriculture and architecture. The digital ecosystem consisted of a greenhouse, courtyard, chrysalis chamber, butterflies and ancient monuments native to the Syrian desert, Palmyra. The monuments rendered in VR have been destroyed, and the species rendered in VR have recently gone endangered or extinct as the collateral damage of the Syrian Civil War. The digitization of these lost architectural sites and plant life allows them to live on unharmed in an XYZ dimension.
Exhibition Curator, “First A Radical, and Second, an Optimist” featuring Grayson Alabiso-Cahill and Tony Cokes, at Crutch Contemporary, Toronto, on view February 08—March 24, 2019.
Installation view.
Using the gallery as an ad-hoc pedagogical site, this project took the form of a transient installation, a series of workshops, and several multiples. Grayson Alabiso-Cahill was interested in radical mythologies, in the unruly birthplaces of popular uprisings, and in the rose-tinted and often troubling nostalgia of young and masculine leftism. The Paris Commune, for Cahill, marked the beginning of a new kind of political action: one that is photographed, performed, propagandistic, celebratory and popular. The transiency of this installation tried to nod to the ways in which any reading of a history is revisionist.
In “Black Celebration,” Tony Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create a counter-reading of rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital; as an attempt to de-fetishize commodity through theft. Tony Cokes’ practice questions how our modes of political and civic articulation are guided and shaped by media image circulation, and how that in turn defines the horizon of emancipatory struggles.
Still from Tony Cokes’ “Black Celebration” (1988) Digital video. 17:11 duration.
Collaged by Kenley Blackwood
In Words and Parades Workshop
Exhibition Curator, “Iron Smirk: Action Art 1976-81” featuring Lumír Hladík, at Bunker 2 Contemporary, Toronto, on view Mar 15—Apr 01, 2018.
Still from "Entering nowhere," Česká Lípa, Czech Republic, 1980.
‘I commenced my piece by walking, blindfolded, down a winding road in the middle of a forest at midnight. I walked alone. Being able to differentiate between the asphalt or grass under my feet helped me to stay within the perimeter of the road. I walked for a long time. When I had completely lost all sense of distance and time, I stopped and, using my finger, I drew an imaginary line across the road. This virtual ”border” divided my personal universe into two universes; where I have been and where I have not. I returned. The next night, around the same time, I undertook the same trip, blindfolded, again. My goal was not to cross the preset line from the previous day. I tried to guess where the exact spot that I had drawn the line was and stopped there, turned around and returned. The most important objective was to drive the Not-knowing about my whereabouts to highest possible intensity; to exist, for a while, nowhere.’
When acts of unsanctioned creativity are categorized as treason against the state, every movement, every moment, can become a form of rebellion. Within communist Czechoslovakia artist Lumír Hladík was an integral catalyst for ‘action art,’ a term used to denote public and private performance work. These happenings ranged from the critical to the absurd, but all represented a type of artistic freedom that was suppressed under censorship. “Iron Smirk” was a modest but comprehensive retrospective of Hladik’s work from 1976 to 1981.
Exhibition Curator, “The Bomb Party, or What Goes Up” featuring Grayson Alabiso-Cahill, at Bunker 2 Contemporary, Toronto, on view January 11—February 9, 2018.
Installation view.
This body of work by Grayson Alabiso-Cahill explored the ways in which war is depicted, disseminated, and aestheticized. The exhibition was accompanied by the performace ‘In Honours of a Great Nation’.
Press:
Review of my work by the Ryersonian, “The fine line between spectacle and violence” January 24, 2018.
Exhibition Curator, “long pause” featuring Robert Anthony O’Halloran, at Bunker 2 Contemporary, Toronto, on view September 17—October 8, 2017.
Installation view.
Robert Anthony O’Halloran creates site-specific installations that explore humour, base materiality, and our collective need for pleasure in light of calamity. “long pause” featured a sound performance by Scott Hardware.
Press:
Review of my work by Canadian Art, September 21, 2017.
Exhibition Curator, “Conservatory” featuring Ronan Stewart, Bunker 2 Contemporary, on view May 11 —June 4, 2017.
Installation view.
Ronan Stewart’s practice addresses ecological deterioration through poetry, painting, audio, and sculpture in the expanded field.
Press:
Review of my work by cmagazine, “A New Generation,” Issue 135, 2017.
Review of my work by the Toronto Star, “Have art, will travel” May 14th, 2017.
Event Curator, “Muscle Panic: Dutch Masters House” featuring Hazel Meyer, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, March 2, 2017.
Installation view.
Hazel Meyer’s mutable body of work, ‘Muscle Panic’, considers the performance of the athletic. Evoking the imagery of momentous sports history, the bodily gestures and actions of a drill or warmup and the aesthetics of the gymnasium, Meyer instigates an arena of sweat and desire. Simultaneously an installation and a performance, Muscle Panic transforms the banal and austere white cube into a hot physically charged site for emotional and physical exchange.
Press:
Review of my work by esse magazine, "No Rest for the Wicked," Issue 103, Fall 2021.
v-ivanova@mailbox.org
Education: Cultural Heritage, Museum and Memory Studies
York University
Class of 2024
Master of Fine Arts (EQF level 7)
Art Criticism and Curatorial Practice
Ontario Art and Design University
Class of 2018
Bachelor of Science, with honours (EQF level 6)
Philosophy major, Architecture minor
Portland State University
Class of 2016
Visiting researcher
Wende Museum of the Cold War
08/2024 – 02/2025
Visiting researcher
McGill University
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures; Russian and Slavic Studies
09/2022 – 05/2023
Sessional faculty
York University
Faculty of Education
09/2018 – 05/2023
Sessional faculty
Ontario Art and Design University
Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences
09/2016 – 05/2018
Curatorial experience:
Curatorial Fellowship
Art Gallery of Ontario
09/20 16 - 05/2018
Associate Director
Bunker 2 Contemporary
11/2014 - 06/2018
Curatorial assistant
Gallery TPW
(Internship)
05/2017 - 10/2017
Experience managing, writing, or editing content:
Broadcast Journalist
Radio Vilnius
09/2022 – Current
Managing Editor
Ontario Art and Design University
Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences
09/2019 – 05/2020
Assistant Editor
MOMUS
(Internship)
05/2017 – 10/2017
Administrative experience:
Programming Coordinator
YYZ Artists’ Outlet/YYZ Books
10/2018 – 05/2022
Gallery Assistant
NATIONALE
10/2012 – 07/2014
Executive Administrative Assistant
Portland State University
Graduate School of Social Work
09/2012 – 05/2014
Gallery Assistant
Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts (Internship)
06/2011 – 05/2013
Last Updated 25.07.23