611 Main Street
on-line exhibition www.citoyennes.net

Curated by Skawennati Tricia Fragnito

THE WORLD WIDE WEB is a boundless territory - a new "final frontier" - filled with every manner of avatars and activists, grrls and geeks, Xenas and xenophobes, all industriously carving out their own corners. Until recently, most Internet users were men, but a recent study reports that women are now "catching up" to our male counterparts. We're no longer a minority, wondering what all the fuss is about. As we gather on-line to find information, exchange stories, play games, imagine, complain and critique, we being to affect the netscape. How are women claiming the territory known as Cyberspace? How is our participation shaping its look & feel? And, significantly, how is our participation in turn affecting the "real" world? The works selected for this exhibition represent examples from a spectrum of cyberactivism undertaken by women.

Myfanwy Ashmore's mario_battle_no.1 (which reads "Mario battle no one"), produced in 2000, is a pacifist version of the 80s classic video game, Super Mario Brothers. Ashmore has hacked it, removing all the architecture, prizes, enemies, performance-enhancing drugs, and obstacles so that all you can do is go for a walk. Myfanwy Ashmore received her M.F.A. from York University in 1998. Based in Toronto, she has exhibited across Canada and internationally. In 2003 she was short-listed for the prestigious K.M. Hunter Award through the Ontario Arts Council. http://www.student.ocad.on.ca/~myfanwyashmore/

Treaty Card by Cheryl L'Hirondelle is a net.artwork questioning the purpose and necessity of assigning identification cards to Aboriginal people. Cheryl L'Hirondelle is an Alberta-born artist of mixed ancestry (Cree, Métis, German, Polish). Since the early 1980s, she has created, performed, and presented work in a variety of disciplines, also working as an arts programmer, cultural strategist/activist, arts consultant, producer, and director - independently and with various artist-run centres, tribal councils, and government agencies.

SimBee, by Rainey Straus and Katherine Isbister, parodies the work of Vanessa Beecroft in a modified Sims video game. The artists have crafted Sim replicas of Beecroft's scantily-clad models, and let them loose to 'live' within a gallery space for the duration of an exhibition, encouraging the viewer to consider how issues of exploitation and voyeurism are shifted when filtered through the lens of simulation.

Rainey Straus is an installation artist and web designer, whose work focuses on the body and technology. Straus received her M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. her work has appeared at ISEA 2006, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Canadian Design Exchange Museum, among others. http://www.raineystraus.com

Dr. Katherine Isbister is a Human-Computer Interface/New Media researcher and designer. She is presently an Associate Professor and Director of the Games Research Laboratory at Rensselaer (RPI) in Troy, NY. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998, and following a post-doctoral year at Japan's NTT Open Laboratory, worked in industry and research settings on social interface design and embodied conversational characters, presenting her work in venues around the world. http://www.katherineinterface.com

Sister Valerie of the Internet, by Valerie Lamontagne, is an on-line confessional to which the public is invited to confess their sins, and also to reflect upon the role of faith and religion in technology. Valerie Lamontagne is a Montréal-based performance/digital media artist, freelance art critic and independent curator. Her works have been showcased across Canada, the United States and Europe. She presently teaches at Concordia University (Montréal) in the Design and Computation Arts Program and is a co-founder with Bradd Todd, of the media arts collective MobileGaze. http://www.mobilegaze.com/valerie

Dollar Hack, by Los Angeles-based artist Cathy Davies, is a set of instructions for a unique form of activisim, in an easy-to-download PDF format. Davies has redesigned familiar corporate logos so that you may print them onto dollar bills, making it appear as if McDonald's, Microsoft, and the like are "paid corporate sponsors...of money!" The artist has created a Canadian version especially for this exhibition.

Cathy Davies is a Los Angeles artist who uses information architecture and interface design to create user friendly propaganda. Her work intelligently circulates on digital networks and centers on art as a "gift economy," graphic design as a service industry, and shoplifting from corporate and marketing culture. http://cathydavies.com/

Curator's Bio

Skawennati Tricia Fragnito is an artist, writer and independent curator whose projects have included CyberPowWow, a virtual gallery and chat space; Imagining Indians in the 25th Century, a web-based paper doll/time-travel journal; and her music video series, 80 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music. She graduated from Concordia University in Montreal with a B.F.A. in 1992, then went on to complete a graduate Diploma in Institutional Administration (Arts Specialization). In 1994, Skawennati co-founded Nation to Nation, a First Nations artist collective, whose exhibitions have included TattooNation and Native Love. As Curatorial Resident at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre for the Arts in 1998-1999, she mounted Blanket Statements, an exhibition of art quilts, and The People's Plastic Princess, a survey of more than thirty years of Barbie art. While living in San Francisco, Skawennati produced Arts Alliance Laboratory's monthly CRIT (Critical Reviews of Interactive Technology) nights and co-curated "New Fangle" for GenArtSF. Her articles have appeared in Fuse, Horizon Zero, and Blackflash, among others. Her artwork has been shown across Canada and the U.S.A. plus in Beijing, and is in the collection of the Art Bank of Canada. Learn even more about her projects at http://www.skawennati.net.