SYLVIA MATAS

Winter Institute

I will be participating in Plug In ICA's Winter Institute
February 20th-24th, 2024

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Armour for Living: A Celebration of Women's Moving Image
Video screening in celebration of MAWA’s 40th anniversary, Dave Barber Cinematheque, 100 Arthur St, Winnipeg, MB
Presented in partnership with the Winnipeg Film Group
7pm, March 1st, 2024

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Lights on the Exchange
My video There Was a City will be projected at 214 McDermot Ave, Winnipeg, MB
curated by Manufacturing Entertainment
February 3rd- March 31st, 2024

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Oneirophyte
Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba
group exhibition curated by Lucie Lederhendler
September 21 - November 11, 2023

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Memories of the Sun
Art Gallery of Regina, Canada
Two person exhibition with Anne Brochu Lambert
curated by Sandee Moore
March 10 – April 30, 2023
opening reception: March 10, 7-9 PM

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All Flourishing is Mutual
December 2th, 2022- February 24th, 2023
curated by Katie Lawson and Jaclyn Quaresma
Images Festival, Toronto, Canada

All Flourishing Is Mutual introduces a glitch to the network of Commerce Court as an exhibition within the sprawling underground pedestrian tunnels of the PATH in so-called
Toronto. The exhibition proposes alternative values in place of the dominance of capitalism, prioritizing exchanges based on gratitude, reciprocity, and relationship. Logan MacDonald, Odeimin Runners Club, Patricia Domínguez, sophia bartholomew, Sylvia Matas, each in their distinct way, explore ways of sustaining connection to the non-human world.
These relationships are mediated by ancient and future technologies, enabling the meeting of bodies and material through the warp and weft of textile, augmented reality, belief systems, surveillance footage, or the scrap heap.
All Flourishing Is Mutual is indebted to the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose recent text “The Serviceberry” provides both the title and a framework to shift our understanding of abundance and scarcity, together and apart. Working across a wide range of mediums, the works of Logan MacDonald, Odeiman Runners Club, Patricia Domínguez, sophia bartholomew, and Sylvia Matas provide nuance to considerations of belonging, bodies, plants, and public space.

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Control Mode
September 10th-12th, 2022
curated by Tereza Davtyan and Lilit Antonyan
Sensor Festival, Armenia

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Sylvia Matas: There Was a City
School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada)
December 9th, 2021- April 29th, 2022
Curated by Blair Fornwald, Director/Curator

About the exhibition: Sylvia Matas’ silent three-minute video, There Was a City was created from satellite photographs taken from Google Earth. Drawing from a vast archive, the artist selected images where nature and the built environment ambiguously converge, where it’s often difficult to tell if we are looking at a construction site, or a site that has been abandoned. The overlaid text describes a group of people living in similar circumstances, adjusting to cycles of order and entropy, plenitude and lack, certainty and unknowing. This spare and disquieting science fiction film was created in 2021; spending so much time inside prompted the artist’s consideration of time, the built environment, decay and regeneration.

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Back and Forth
Group Exhibition at HayArt Cultural Centre (Yerevan, Armenia)
October 11th - 18th, 2021

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Vancouver Art Book Fair
(Vancouver, Canada)
October 18th - 26th, 2021

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Sujets à Risques/ Risky subjects
Screening at La Bande Vidéo (Québec, Canada)
January 25th - February 19th, 2021

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Prairie Art Book Fair
Plug In ICA, (Winnipeg, Canada)
September 11th - 13th, 2020

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Photophobia
Contemporary Moving Image Festival, Art Gallery of Hamilton & Hamilton Art Inc, Canada
August 6th - 8th, 2020

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Suddenly, no, at long last
Group Exhibition at Platform Centre (Winnipeg, Canada)
May 1st - July 31st, 2020

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Stop the Clock and Open Every Window
Solo Exhibition at YYZ Artists' Outlet (Toronto, Canada)
January 18th - March 14th, 2020

About the Exhibition: Stop the Clock and Open Every Window brings together Sylvia Matas' work in drawing, video, and bookworks. The works in this exhibition present foreboding fragmentary narratives that question the limits of perception and what lies beyond those limits. The presence of people is indirect: a distant vehicle, billows of smoke, tracks left in the snow. In these landscapes partially emptied of human presence there is a palpable sense of uncertainty. Something has happened or is about to happen. Images hover between existence and disappearance, past and future, emergence and disintegration. There is a suggestion of something impending that is perhaps right around the corner. They sky is about to grow dark, buildings get consumed by plants or fall apart, a distant car approaches, but is perpetually out of reach. Suspended moments intersect, expand and contract, blurring the boundaries between places and times, between the mind and the external world.

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Behind the Sun
Exhibition at Gallery 44 (Toronto, Canada)
November 1, 2019 - January 4, 2020

About the Exhibition: Sylvia Matas' work collapses physiological and psychological realms. Her drawings, writing, and videos exist within thresholds – the edges of lakes, forests and roads, when dusk transitions day into night, autumn to winter, when the conscious and unconscious mind briefly collide, when sleepwalking takes over. It is within these in-between regions that Matas' lone narrator speaks, blurring the space between the mind and the external world. An ominous atmosphere prevails as the narrator – and viewer – wait. Memories are recounted, distorted, questioned. Time passes but has stopped. (text by Heather Rigg, curator)

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Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs
Group Exhibition at Plug In ICA (Winnipeg, Canada)
September 30th - December 30th, 2018

Shannon Bool, Natalie Czech, Fabiola Carranza, Raven Chacon (with Laura Ortman and Suzanne Kite), Leah Decter, Sameer Farooq & Jared Stanley, Theaster Gates, Hassan Khan, Ken Lum, Sylvia Matas, Jeanne Randolph.
Curated by Sarah Nesbitt and Jenifer Papararo

Structured around general notions of indexing, collecting, cloaking and the reveal with a focus on material and an overlay of poetry – the exhibition is grounded in the use of text, often found, poetry, and the everyday, with historical and political narratives interwoven as material.

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A Huge Space, Largely Empty
Exhibition at Gallery 1C03 (Winnipeg, Canada)
March 1st - July 25th, 2018

Gallery 1C03 is pleased to present a deconstructed bookwork by local interdisciplinary artist Sylvia Matas in its public foyer. A huge space, largely empty is a non-linear narrative of photographs, drawings, and writing that revolves around an unnamed lake. On the first page, a character picks up a stone on a night walk in the country and throws it into a lake. At the end of the book someone approaches a lake where a hole has mysteriously formed in the ice. In between those two pages there are references to sleep, dreams, insomnia, memory, and spatial disorientation.

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Twin Poems
Two Person Exhibition at Lantern Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada)
January 5th - 27th, 2018

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Night, Streets, the Lantern
Group Exhibition at Lantern Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada)
October 6th - October 29th, 2017

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This Must be the Place
Group Exhibition at LKA+P (Winnipeg, Canada)
February 17th - March 17th, 2017

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In Every Direction
Two person exhibition at the Maclaren Art Centre (Barrie, Canada)
December 8th, 2016 - March 12th, 2017
Curator: Renée van der Avoird

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Send+Receive
Nocturne VII will be on display at Parlour as part of Send+Receive (Winnipeg, Canada)
September 16th - October 26th, 2016

Send+Receive is an international festival that investigates the disciplines of experimental music and sound art, and is one of the longest standing media arts festivals in North America focusing exclusively on sound-based work.

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Video Screening at Plug In ICA
Plug In ICA is showing 3 of my recent videos (Winnipeg, Canada)
March 21st - June 5th, 2016

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Papier 16 Contemporary Art Fair
My work will be featured at Papier16 (Montreal, Canada)
with Lisa Kehler Art + Projects booth A03
April 21 - 24, 2016

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Article
An about my bookwork In Every Direction on Artwort. (Italian)
January 20th, 2016

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They Picked it. They Made it.
Group Exhibition LKAP (Winnipeg, Canada)
December 9th - 24th, 2015

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Catalogue
My work is included in Volumes- an anthology of writings on contemporary artists' engagement with sound and music. Released by Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga Ontario, edited by Martin Arnold and Christof Migone. August 19th, 2015

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Exhibition Review
My solo show at LKA+P A Certain Distance was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press
August 6th, 2015

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A Certain Distance
Solo Exhibition at Lisa Kehler Art + Projects (Winnipeg, Canada)
July 25th - August 22nd, 2015
Interview

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Papier 15 Contemporary Art Fair
My video The Window will be featured at Papier15 (Montreal, Canada)
with Lisa Kehler Art + Projects
April 23rd - April 26th, 2015

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vast, constant, irreversible
Exhibition at MKG 127 (Toronto, Canada)
October 18th - November 15th, 2014

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Group Exhibtion
Actual Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada)
July 24th - August 30th, 2014

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Catalogue
The catalogue for Looking Up: Contemporary Connections with Inuit Art now available at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
February 16th, 2014

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Resonant Field
Group Exhibition at TRUCK Contemporary Art (Calgary, Canada)
January 10th - February 8th, 2014

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Press
Review for Looking Up: Contemporary Connnections with Inuit Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press
January 2nd, 2014

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Group Exhibition
Looking Up: Contemporary Connections with Inuit Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada)
December 21st, 2013 - March 16th, 2014

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Press
Review for my solo exhibition A Forest in the Winnipeg Free Press
January 31st, 2013

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Solo Exhibition
A Forest presented by ONENIGHTSTAND (Winnipeg, Canada)
February 1st, 2013

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Press
Volume: Hear Here at the Art Museum reviewed in Art Toronto

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Volume: Hear Here
Group Exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada)
January 17th- March 10th, 2013

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Artist Talk
Friends of the Park (Wasagaming, Canada)
October 6th, 2012

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Artist in Residence
I will be Artist in Residence at Riding Mountain National Park (Manitoba, Canada). September - October, 2012.

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Press
Border Views article on my work in Border Crossings Magazine, Issue 123: Dreams and the Spaces in Between.
Border Crossings Magazine
August 28th, 2012

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Short list
In Every Direction is short-listed for the 'AGYU Artist Book of the Moment'
August 2012

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Nuna (Now)
Group Exhibition at Ace Art (Winnipeg, Canada).
May 17th - 24th, 2012

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Bookwork Launch
Launch and bookwork exhibit with Michael Benjamin Brown of In Every Direction and WINTERHOUSES at Útúrdúr (Reykjavik, Iceland)
May 12th, 2012

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Bookwork Launch
Launch and bookwork exhibit of In Every Direction at Plug In ICA (Winnipeg, Canada)
March 24th, 2012

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Bookwork Launch
Launch and bookwork exhibit with Michael Benjamin Brown of In Every Direction and WINTERHOUSES at AKA Gallery (Saskatoon, Canada)
March 20th, 2012

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Like-Minded
Group Exhibition at Plug-In ICA (Winnipeg, Canada)
January 28th - March 25th, 2012
Curator: Micah Lexier