Artist in Residence

Lecture by Robert Hengeveld & Julie Rene de Cotret: Artist in Residence Past & Present LectureSES Artist in Residence Robert Hengeveld 2012-13

ARTIST STATEMENT:

ROBERT HENGEVELD
My art practice manifests itself in many different forms, but exploring and experimenting with our preconceptions of the world around us would be one way to summarize a given direction of the past several years. This has often taken shape through the manipulation of the familiar environments or common experiences: a rotating tree, a floating shopping cart, or a street lamp that occasionally breaks out into a flickering morse code, only to return to its normal occupation of habitual illuminating. In more recent works this exploration has taken shape in the creation of synthetic environments which both mimic and mock the natural environment which it references.
The works often hover somewhere between reality and artifice, fact and fiction. Though a shift in scale, material, context, giving sound to the silent object, or through the animation of the ordinarily inert, the work takes aspects of the everyday and gives them a subtle kick into the unfamiliar. These subtle shifts create a spectacle similar to the freak  shows of years past where our preconceptions of the real are challenged. We are left to decipher between our memory and understanding of how the world works and an opposing current experience of it.
It is within the proximity to the real, in the blurred boundary between fact and fiction, that these works make their connection, where oneʼs understanding of the world is challenged and their perception is place in juxtaposition to their preconceptions.
BIOGRAPHY
Hengeveld is an installation and multi-media artist whose work explores the boundaries between reality and fiction, and where we find ourselves within that relationship.
He is currently living and working in Toronto, Canada. He completed his MFA at the University of Victoria in 2005 and studied the Ontario College of Art and Design. He began his art practice at Georgian College, where he received a Certificate and Diploma in Fine Arts. Some upcoming exhibitions include Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo), Jè-st', Galerie d'art Louise et Reuben-Cohen (Moncton), and Mulherin Pollard Projects (NYC).
Robert Hengeveld is represented by Katharine Mulherin Contemporary

*CV Attached.

BY ANDREW VOWLES

See AT GUELPH Features Story.

SES Artist in Residence Julie Rene de Cotret

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