McMaster Museum of Art presents:

About the Mind

Wyn Geleynse, Shaun Gladwell, Mischa Kuball & Paulette Phillips
January 24 – March 30, 2013
Curated by Ihor Holubizky
and presenting my kultureBOT 1.0 a robotic reviewer by Dr. David Harris Smith, McMaster University and Dr. Frauke Zeller, University College London

Opening Reception with Artist Talk by Mischa Kuball

January 24, 6 – 8 pm

Artist Mischa Kuball in conversation with McMaster Museum of Art Senior Curator Ihor Holubizky at Goethe-Institut Toronto

January 25, 5 – 6 pm

Artist Talks by Wyn Geleynse and Paulette Phillips

January 31, 6 – 8 pm

About the Mind explores the concept of “mind” through the work of four internationally acclaimed visual artists: Wyn Geleynse and Paulette Phillips (both from Canada), Shaun Gladwell (Australia) and Mischa Kuball (Germany).

As a group exhibition, About the Mind mirrors the complexity and continuing debate on theories of how we may think, including philosophical, psychoanalytical and forensic approaches.

For Mischa Kuball, Plato’s allegory of the cave presented an artistic challenge—how to create a “philosophical environment” — and an opportunity to engage the problem of reality at a time when it is viewed almost exclusively in sociological and political terms.

Wyn Geleynse has revisited an earlier-made gallery space model that will host a new video and, in miniature, a “modeled experience” that presents the potential of narrative through images in the “cave of the mind.”

Paulette Phillips trained and was licenced in lie detector operation for her video work The Directed Lie. Using her interrogation and testing skills, she has conducted more than 230 interviews, creating an archive of the art world. Phillips wrote “The body betrays the mind; through actions that subsequently require lying to cover up and through tremors that belie denial.”

Shaun Gladwell’s kinetic-video sculpture Endoscopic Vanitas incorporates a live endoscopic camera that probes a rotating human skull (first shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale). Curator Blair French wrote: “Here literally sits the now empty site of consciousness and subjectivity—the space of Plato’s cave upon which surfaces we may project traces of our own ideal forms.”

David Harris Smith, an artist and assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University, has been invited into the exhibition mix. Dr. Smith will introduce a roving, non-intrusive small robot titled mykulturbot 1.0, developed in collaboration with Dr. Frauke Zeller, Marie Curie Research Fellow, Dept. of Information Studies, University College London, UK. The robot will “review” the exhibition works, relaying text-captioned photos of its point-of-view on the displayed works via Facebook and Twitter.