Co-presented with 8-11

Screening of How to improve the World at 6:30-7
BBQ 7-8pm

A radioactive wand is waved, an Olympic flame is beamed across the sky, and a coal mine burns forever beneath the Earth. A history of energy proceeds not just through rational gestures, but through the stuff of magic, of stealing from the gods.

In How to improve the world (you will only make things worse), Craig Fahner and Steve Gurysh draw from the genealogy of energy to enact a magical circuit, transporting a flame across time and space. Referencing such events as the 1976 Montreal Olympic torch relay, this work remystifies technological process into Promethean ritual, highlighting the absurdities of the Modernist spectacle.

After the screening we will serve BBQ prepared on the Olympic flame.

Craig Fahner is an artist and musician from Calgary, Alberta. His electronic, video and sound-based works reimagine electronic systems, generating experiences that reflect on the role of technology in our culture. Fahner’s works have been exhibited in various venues internationally, including the Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto, the Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada, and the Museo de la Ciudad in Queretaro, Mexico. In 2010, he received the Disney Memorial Pausch Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he received his MFA in 2013. Fahner currently leads classes in Media Arts + Digital Technologies at the Alberta College of Art.

Steve Gurysh investigates economies of energy, processes of transformation, and modes of exploring time through objects and events. He explores these themes through the parallel, and often convergent, histories of science, art, and pop cultural trends. While his process employs methods of research, experimentation, and collaboration, illogical premises often drive his work towards inventive and playful scenarios. Here, the act of storytelling becomes activated by a productive process, weaving mythological frameworks, historical narrative, and invented experience into potent objects, public interventions, and temporary experiences.

Gurysh received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the co-founder and director of The Drift, a platform for temporary public art that explores bodies of water as a context and site for presentation. He is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited projects in places such as El Museo de la Ciudad in Queretaro, Mexico; La Societe des arts technologiques in Montreal, Canada; The Engine Room in Wellington, New Zealand; Spaces in Cleveland, OH; Cabinet Magazine’s Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, NY; and the center of the Allegheny River.

From July 14 to August 5, Steve Gurysh and Craig Fahner’s exhibition The Radiant will be on view at 8-11 (233 Spadina Avenue).