Koffler Centre of the Arts

Through their distinctive vision and creative processes, artists can carve out a space to ask the most difficult questions and explore our deepest fears.

The anxiety of facing death and the unknown are at the core of human experience, leaving profound marks on the ways in which we construct our reality and shape society, politics and culture. In a conversation moderated by psychoanalyst Dr. David Dorenbaum, visual artists Nicole Collins, Erika DeFreitas and Tim Whiten discuss the role art plays as they grapple with these questions and their psychological weight.

Presented in conjunction with Nicole Collins: Furthest Boundless

Listen to the conversation on SoundCloud here:

Nicole Collins‘ artistic practice focuses on the effect of time, accumulation, force and heat on visceral materials, through painting, drawing, installation, intervention, video and sound. She has exhibited extensively since 1994, including solo exhibitions at The University of Waterloo Art Gallery (2013), The Art Gallery of Ontario (2013) and The Embassy of Canada in Tokyo (2001) and group exhibitions in Toronto, Hamilton, St. Johns, New York, Miami, London and Zurich. Her work has been featured online and in magazines, newspapers and books including the major survey Abstract Painting in Canada (Roald Nasgaard), the 3rd edition of A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Dennis Reid), Carte Blanche, Volume 2: Painting, and The Donovan Collection catalogue. Collins is an Assistant Professor in the Drawing & Painting program at the Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU) and she lives in Toronto with her husband artist Michael Davidson and their daughter. Collins is represented by General Hardware Contemporary in Toronto.

Erika DeFreitas is a Scarborough-based multi-disciplinary, conceptual artist who explores the influence of language, loss and culture on the formation of identity through public interventions, textile-based works and performative actions that are photographed, placing an emphasis on process, gesture and documentation. She mines both personal and cultural histories to investigate the qualities of absence and presence, as well as the forms of loss one can encounter or fear – loss of opportunity, memory, identity, or a loved one. DeFreitas has shown nationally and internationally, including Project Row Houses and Museum of African American Culture, Houston, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg. In 2016, DeFreitas was a Toronto Friends of Visual Arts Award finalist as well as the 2016 Recipient of the John Hartman Award. She was a 2017 nominee for the Sobey Award and part of a residency at Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

David Dorenbaum is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and of the Lacan Clinical Forum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and art has led him to collaborate with various artists. His most recent essays have appeared in Incarnations, with Janieta Eyre, Coach House Press (2017), and Synchrony and Diachrony, with Robert Polidori, Steidl and the J.P. Getty Museum (2018).

Tim Whiten’s artistic pursuits have sought to navigate the human condition and its transformative potential with a body of work encompassing a myriad of forms both two- and three-dimensional, including site specific works, real-time systems, ritual performances and mixed media installations. He perceives expressions of being in the world as markers in a series of passages, while considering mortality itself as a threshold. Media such as adobe, chewing gum, gold and glass, point to transformation – coaxing a consideration of the transcendent moment. Over more than forty years of exhibitions, Whiten’s work has been featured in numerous international venues in Mexico, Brazil, Germany, the United States of America and China, and can be found in the collections of The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, The M.H. De Young Museum of San Francisco, the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and many others. Whiten has also been instrumental in influencing generations of aspiring artists as Professor of Fine Art at York University since 1968. He is represented by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto.

Image: Nicole Collins, Furthest Boundless (installation detail), 2018. Photo: Dahlia Katz.

Boundless Questions

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