Artist Talks - Master Exhibition

Right after the new exhibition at the New Media Gallery closes for the day (4 pm), two of the artists featured on “Master” are going to be doing an “artist talk” at the Anvil Centre Theatre.

The artists speaking that afternoon are Daniele Puppi from Rome (Italy), and Scott Billings from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Scott Billings is a visual artist and designer based in Vancouver. His art practice centres on issues of animality, mobility, and cinematic spectatorship. Billings’s sculptures and video installations examine the ways in which the apparatus itself reveals the mechanisms of causality and its own dormant animality.

Billings holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and a BASc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Waterloo. His art practice looks at the mimetic relationship between the apparatus of cinema and the language of movement it articulates. Centering on issues of animality, roboethics, and spectatorship, his sculptures and video installations mix the spatial spectacle of long takes with the materiality of kineticism.

Scott Billings also works as a mechanical engineer and industrial designer in Vancouver, focusing on wearable exoskeletons and custom camera rigs. He has participated in multiple residencies, has been awarded Public Art Projects and maintains a teaching practice. His work has been presented in Canada, USA, Europe and China ; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, Audain Gallery, Vancouver, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, Burrard Arts Foundation to name a few.

Daniele Puppi is a visual artist and designer who works to unhinge the idea of space that is still perceived and revolves around Euclidean parameters. With an emphasis on video installation, he has manifested a new attitude towards this medium, emphasizing and radically subverting the use of sound and visual-architectonic reconfigurations that are constantly reinvented.

Puppi conceives of his work as authentic “works in regress”. He experiences the environment, assesses its limits and its potential. The technologies used – video projectors, synchronizers, amplifiers, sub woofers, speakers and microphones – serve to activate and amplify our powers of perception, especially visual and auditory. An integral part of the work is that the viewer is called upon to enter a new and de- familiarized spatial and sensory dimension.

Puppi’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions around the world ; at MAXXI, GNAM museum, and Quadriennale in Rome, HangarBicocca and Triennale in Milan, MART in Rovereto, GAMEC in Bergamo, the Melbourne International Arts Festival and MAMBA in Buenos Aires among many others. He lives and works between Rome and London. He lectures and gives workshops worldwide.