From the vibe out is a solo exhibition by Kingston-based artist and curator Neven Lochhead featuring an installation of video and sound. Bringing together his language-propelled approach to the moving image with his curatorial “space-making” practice, Lochhead’s new project summons a semi-fictional, artist-led research institute as its interlocutor. Borrowing and bending the grammars of group-visioning exercises, a restless chorus of spectral art workers plot from their nascent organisational position. Utterances find a sense of traction by tethering themselves to a concrete, local referent: an empty art space in downtown Kingston. With this room as its anchor, Lochhead’s exhibition spins out an active “instituting” process that constructs not from the top down, nor the bottom up, but laterally, from the vibe out. Occupying two additional neighbouring rooms at Agnes, the exhibition’s “spatial stereoscopy” conjures an operative image by taking up two senses of projection: as the sculptural display of the moving image, and as a mode for inferring a future course by extrapolating from the dynamics of an immediate locale.
Neven Lochhead is an artist and curator working with video, sound, music, performance and installation. His own artistic work draws from traditions of durational moving image and performance practices, the employment and conventions of text-on-screen in video art and cinema, and compositional strategies of minimal music. From 2017–2019, Lochhead developed his exhibition-making practice as curator of Knot Project Space, a venue in Ottawa he established as part of his role as Director of Programming at SAW Video Media Art Centre. Through this discursively operated space, Lochhead produced exhibitions and performances while working closely with local, national and international artists, as well as a series of lectures, learning contexts, residency platforms and off-site public art projects. Residencies as an artist include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2015) the Artist Research Laboratory in Como, Italy (2014). He received an MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University in 2016.