Commonolithic & Olivia Mc Gilchrist^{UK/QC + JM/FR/QC}

Born in England and based in Montréal, Commonolithic considers how images become objects, bridging the gap between lens-based practices and a sculptural concern with the imaginative dimension of materiality. Through sculpture, print and VR, the artist develops spatial and material experiences from digital image sources, continually developing outcomes using photogrammetry. His work addresses the contemporary moment as one of a politics-of-time bleeding into a politics-of-space. Commonolithic has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Medellin (Colombia), Aarhus (Denmark) and throughout Canada, and online at Laval Virtual, the Wrong Biennale and Symposium IX. Commonolithic was the recipient of a Research and Creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts and a Grant for the arts from Arts Council England.

Olivia Mc Gilchrist is an artist and educator engaged in questions about identity, feminist performance and “other” (non-Western) futures in embodied virtual spaces within North America and the Caribbean. Her Individualized (INDI) PhD research-creation project investigates how contemporary iterations of virtual reality experiences, as a part of a continuum of screen based and multimedia installation art practices, may trouble postcolonial and hybrid identities through the portrayal and performance of the self and the other. Mc Gilchrist approaches VR as a submersive masking device within an installation, concerned with the tension occurring between the two modes of physical presence when one user is wearing a VR headset and another user is not. She has exhibited VR, film-based and photographic art works in Canada, Jamaica, across the Caribbean, the USA, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Austria, France and the UK.