About
Donna Szoke is a Canadian artist whose practice includes video, animation, media art, installation, drawing, writing and collaboration. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, USA, France, Germany, Turkey, Hungary, Croatia, Cuba, UAE, and South Korea. Szoke’s art practice began in Winnipeg, Manitoba designing for Guy Maddin’s early films, creating performance art and conceptually based drawings. After moving to Vancouver her practice shifted to video art, collaboration, and installation. Her recent work includes interactive animation and printmaking. Her work is informed by critical studies with repeating themes of immanence, embodied perception, and the fluidity of lived experience. She has received numerous awards for her art research from funders including SSHRC, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and Ontario Arts Council. She holds a BA (U of Winnipeg), BFA (SFU), Sculpture Diploma (Capilano U), and an Interdisciplinary MFA from the School for the Contemporary Arts (SFU). Currently based on the south shore of Lake Ontario, on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. This territory is covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and is within the land protected by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum agreement, and is a gathering place that is home to many First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at Brock University where she received the Faculty of Humanities Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity in 2017. She teaches video art, research-creation, and independent studio practice. Her students are glorious creatures of their own invention.
Artists’ Statement
As a contemporary interdisciplinary artist, I use video, animation, writing, installation, collaboration and drawing to investigate immanence, failure, haptic perception and non-visual knowledge in moving images. I’ve been drawn towards animation for its inherent ability to suggest the flight of the imagination, and the rupture between what is ‘actual’ and what can be perceived. My recent work explores site-specific media art in public venues. I create interfaces, artworks and situations in which the public can engage with new media that addresses their physical place in the world. This way of working allows me to connect an art experience to emergent technologies, and our very localized, specific, sensory ways of being in the world. People, technology and the landscape combine in magical surprises.
As an artist it has been vitally important for me to continually shift my practice through mediums, practices, technical challenges and sets of concerns. This has been a welcome instability that has allowed me to continue to innovate through encounters with mediums in which my knowledge and experience is unstable. This approach has shaped my career to date through phases of design for auteur cinema, single channel video poetry, multi-channel video art, installation, media art, animation, and drawing. As a result of these intensive explorations and learning experiences my body of work encompasses many mediums. What is unseen, yet apparent, is often the driving force in my work, and it manifests in different forms, such as invisible animals, missing language in writing, or haptic images (or images that evoke a sense of touch).
We would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
