Art NOW - Brian D. McKenna (BFA '02)

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Art NOW - Brian D. McKenna
12 pm, March 11, 2016
University Recital Hall

Brian D. McKenna was born in Ottawa in 1975, he grew up in Scotland and England and settled in Lethbridge in 1985. From 1995 until 2002 he studied Music and Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge where he achieved a multi-disciplinary BFA. In 2002 he relocated to Amsterdam, Netherlands and followed an MFA at the Sandberg Institute. Since then he continues to live and work in Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited and performed in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Canada, the United States, England, and China.

Through the use of mostly time-based media, McKenna’s work explores intersections between hearing and vision; the visual arts and music; the processes of translating information from one medium to another and their by-products. This work takes on the form of single and multichannel audiovisual installations of fixed media, reactive environments, and live performance. McKenna works both individually and collaboratively with an emphasis on experimental investigations.

A recurring theme in McKenna’s work deals with the politics of perception and the power of various media over the formation of collective and individual experience. His early video works, for example, explored notions of advertising, brainwashing, and mind-control through the use of hypnotic audio-visual abstractions and repetitive trance-inducing temporal structures. In a similar vein, his more recent works investigate the foundational nature of ideologies and political narratives in affecting perception and the creative role of art and technology (artists and technologists) in defining who we are and the world we live in.

Image caption: Brian D. McKenna, 60Hz Resonant Frequencies for Analogue Audio Video Synthesis, oscillators and custom electronics, screenshot, 2007.

Free Admission, Everyone Welcome


Contact:

finearts | finearts@uleth.ca