CD
Mercer Union presents MERCERSOUND, a compilation disk of 18 audio works by 15 artists. Spanning spoken word, sound poetry, soundscapes, noise, conceptual works, little ditties, found & homemade instruments, mash-ups, bird calls, free-jazz and body works, the disk features classics and never before heard tracks by Dave Allen, Christian Bok, Martin Creed, David Cunningham, Peter Gazendam, Kelly Mark, Jonathan Monk, Janet Morton, Thurston Moore, Daniel Olson, Yoko Ono, Dominique Petitgand, Mathew Sawyer, Michael Snow, and Laurel Woodcock.
Dave Allen (Glasgow, UK) currently lives and works in Berlin, where he co-edits the Berlin art fanzine Neue Review and plays in the Berlin-based pop band Dominique. Allen received his MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1994, attended Cal Arts in 1993, and has exhibited internationally since 1989. Past exhibitions include Hee-Haw Cries the Young Komponist Dave Allen at The Showroom, London UK, 2001; Jammed at Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, 2003; and Club Transmediale 05, Berlin.
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (2002). Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), his first book of poetry, has also earned a nomination for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1995). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry. His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s Cubes and Lego Bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök currently teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.
Martin Creed was born in 1968 in Wakefield, England. From the age of three he lived in Glasgow, Scotland. Between 1986 and 1990 he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. After art school he lived and worked in London until 2001, when he moved to Alicudi, Italy. In 2001 he was the winner of the Turner Prize.
He currently lives and works in London and Alicudi.
Kelly Mark completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (w/ a Minor in Art History) in 1994 at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (N.S.C.A.D.). Since then she has exhibited widely across Canada, and internationally (including the United States, Australia, & Europe). Such venues include: Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The Power Plant (Toronto), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Saidye Bronfman Art Center (Montreal), ZieherSmith Gallery (NY), Leadbased (NY), Museum of New Art (Detroit), University of Houston (Texas), Real Art Ways (Hartford), Ikon Gallery (UK), & the Physics Room (NZ) to name a few.
She was also one of the artists chosen to represent Canada in the Sydney Biennale in Australia in 1998 and is a recipient of Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council & Toronto Arts Council grants. She has also been honored with the KM Hunter Artist Award (2002), a Chalmers Art Fellowship (2002) and was regionally short-listed for the prestigious Sobey’s Prize (2004).
Her work has been reviewed in such periodicals as: Artforum, Canadian Art, C-Magazine, Border Crossings, Fuse Magazine, Lola, Broken Pencil and such newspapers as The Globe & Mail, National Post, & New York Times.
Kelly works in a variety of media including: drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, sound, video & performance.
She is currently represented by Wynick/Tuck Gallery (Toronto) and Tracey Lawrence Gallery (Vancouver).
Jonathan Monk is a multimedia, conceptual, and video artist born in Leicester, England who lives and works in Berlin and Glasgow. His work has been shown internationally since the early 90s in both solo and group exhibitions.
A member of the critically acclaimed art/punk rock band Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore has been involved in numerous side projects including the Dim Stars and Even Worse.
Michael Snow was born in 1929 in Toronto. A multidisciplinary artist, Snow is a painter, photographer, filmmaker and musician. He is considered among Canada"s most important artists living today. Snow produced his first film in 1956. His 1967 film Wavelength proved him to be among the key filmmakers
of the North American avant-garde. In the late sixties, he collaborated with a Canadian engineer on developing a mechanical arm that enabled the camera to turn in every direction and at rotary speeds controlled by the artist. This mechanical arm was used in his film La Région Centrale (1971). In the past decade, Snow has participated in every major exhibition exploring images in the modern world. These include Passages de l"image (organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou), Projections, les transports de l"image (first presented at the studio national des arts contemporains Le Fresnoy) and the Biennale d"art contemporain de Lyon (which in 1995 celebrated the hundred years of cinema). The Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant teamed up for a major retrospective, Michael Snow Project, incorporating all the media
Snow has worked in. Recently, in Europe, his films and photographs were the object of the exhibition Panoramique: oeuvres photographiques et films=Photographic Works and Films: 1962-1999, and in 2001, the Arnolfini Gallery presented the exhibition Michael Snow: almost Cover to Cover. Michael Snow is a member of the Order of Canada and a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. In March 2000, he won the Governor General"s Award in visual and media arts.
Please check back for more information including additional bios, descriptions of the work and audio clips.