Cheryl Pagurek
Cheryl Pagurek is a photo, video, and digital media artist, based in Ottawa. Her practice highlights the constructed nature of lens-based media, while embracing the creative expression offered by computing and technology. She interweaves contrasting streams of imagery and sound from many sources, while accentuating the abstract qualities of colour, form and movement to create a dynamic, cohesive whole. Works in photography, video, digital and interactive media feature interconnections and tensions between public/private, past/present, representation/abstraction, and urban/natural spaces, the many facets of contemporary life. Several projects from recent years probe our relationships to the world around us in a digitally networked society. In the Connect interactive installation (Ottawa Art Gallery, 2019), participants explored the camera’s sensor area to discover local and global video imagery and sound through the moving shapes of their own bodies. States of Being expands the expressive potential of interactive video and audio installation by inviting dancers to engage with it, creating a poetics of our present experience when meanings shift around concepts of distance/togetherness, safety/threat, inside/outside, individual/collectivity. Each dancer brings their unique movement vocabulary when synthesizing the videos and rhythmic soundscape.
Since receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Victoria, Pagurek’s work has been shown widely across Canada from Victoria to St. John’s, including exhibits at Patrick Mikhail Gallery (Ottawa and Montreal), Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (Halifax), Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Vu (Québec City), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Carleton University Art Gallery, and internationally with numerous video screenings in France, Brazil, Columbia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the USA. She was commissioned by the City of Ottawa Public Art Program to create Currents, a permanent outdoor LED video display for the Marketplace Transit Station. Her works have appeared in public art events in several cities, including Nuit Blanche Ottawa Gatineau, Kamloops Art Gallery’s Luminocity program, Toulouse’s Rencontres Traverse Vidéo, and Kingston’s Next Door public art exhibit. In 2020, she received the Corel Endowment for the Arts Award celebrating the integration of technology and the arts, and a Canada Council Digital Originals grant for an online project. Her work is in several collections including Global Affairs Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Library of the National Gallery of Canada, Cenovus Energy Inc., the Ottawa Art Gallery and the City of Ottawa, and has been written about in international publications, including The Globe and Mail, Esse, Ciel Variable, BlackFlash, Vie des Arts, Canadian Art online, Next Level (UK), Turbulences Vidéo (FR), and Afterimage (USA). More information and documentation of her work can be found at cherylpagurek.com.
Artist Code: 939
Videography
2009, 22:53 minutes, Colour, English
2008, 04:39 minutes, colour, English
2007, 08:23 minutes, colour, English (with Yiddish)
Critical Writing
by . Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, Dec. 3, 2007.