Christine Swintak
Canada | interdisciplinary
Alumni New Works Program 2012, Artist in Residence Program 2011
Project Description
During her Fall 2012 Return Visit, multimedia installation and performance artist Christine Swintak will undergo a rigourous schedule of napping and dreaming within Headlands’ bunkers—local architectural remnants & ghostly artifacts of another era. Headlands will be one of three international bunker sites in her larger project “Sleeping in Bunkers,” that uses the dream recall technique MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams) to explore the disparity between expired war architectures and current cultural concerns. Swintak will create video vignettes of the dreams, to be exhibited within corresponding installations at CAFKA Biennial, Kitchener, Ontario, among other venues.
The Alumni New Works program awards project-based, month-long return residencies to six noteworthy alumni each year. To enhance the impact of the award, Headlands has partnered with the crowdfunding platform USA Projects to provide these artists with access to additional funds.
Artist Statement
Christine Swintak is a Canadian artist working in variety of media including sculpture, installation, performance and drawing. Approaching the world as her studio, her large-scale commission-based practice has included building the most banal rollercoaster ever made in a corporate office building, moving almost an entire cottage by hand without the aid of machinery, building a full-size ship through collective improvisation, running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld, transforming a city-issued dumpster into a fully-operational luxury boutique hotel, attempting to give a shed consciousness and producing a series of impossible project proposals. Her projects have been exhibited in various contexts, including HMK Mariakapel (Holland), Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Khyber Institute of Contemporary Art (Halifax) and Rockefeller Centre (New York). She has also exhibited alongside Lawrence Weiner and Sol Le Witt at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), with Reverse Pedagogy at The Model (Ireland), Banff Centre (Alberta), and the Venice Biennale (Italy). Swintak is the Artistic Co-Director and Founder of Don Blanche, an experimental off-the-grid artist residency in rural Ontario. Swintak graduated from NSCAD University in 2003, and was awarded the prestigious Canada Council International Residency at Cite Internationale Des Arts in Paris, 2011.
