Happiness - Part 1: Otino Corsano Solo Exhibition @ p|m Gallery

Image Credit: "Happiness - Part 1, Video (Still)" Otino Corsano, 2011  Directors: Caroline Ryan & Paul Weeks, Video 0:35 Otino Corsano Happiness - Part 1 Solo Exhibition November 3 - 26, 2011 p|m Gallery 1518 Dundas Street West Toronto, Ontario M6K1T9 http://pmgallery.ca/exhibitions/2011/otino-corsano-happiness Opening Reception: Thursday, November 3, 6-9pm   A collection of images culled from online social media sites was the starting point for Otino Corsano’s latest project: Happiness - Part 1. To further study these found, frozen images, Corsano carefully rendered these moments of repose as ink drawings. His experience as a freelance storyboarder influenced the decision to reproduce the original images as quick ink sketches, preparing them for further expansion into video. The storyboard drawings are organized into three sets of sixteen images each. Prominent commercial film directors were each provided with one set of drawings in order to reproduce the art stills as moving scenes. The three 30-second “commercials” were produced by: Caroline Ryan, Paul Weeks and Peter Darley Miller (Editor: Ting Poo). Composer John Mark Sherlock provided the supernatural, ambient score for each video. Accordingly, the work comprising Happiness Part - 1 progresses Corsano’s practice of collaborating with professional, commercial creatives to produce his art. The first digital source material is transformed through a double process of interpretation. Drawn as light pictures of enjoyment, they are suspended further as lingering moving images. The resulting art videos have the look and feel of contemporary lifestyle advertising without a visible product. Happiness is freed from purchase. An accompanying essay "The Pursuit of Happiness: Corinna Ghaznavi on the Personal Ad Art of Otino Corsano" is available at the gallery and online at: http://pmgallery.ca/exhibitions/2011/otino-corsano-happiness/statement This is Otino Corsano’s third solo exhibition with p|m Gallery. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art, University of Toronto and Otis College of Art (Los Angeles), Corsano describes his visual art practice as neo-conceptualist, new genre work since he explores areas of meaning production in a variety of media. His art writings and artist interviews are published in artUS magazine and can also be found online at ARTPOST and Akimblog. Corsano has taught at the University of Toronto and is a Sessional Instructor at OCAD University. He has exhibited in Toronto and abroad. Visit the Facebook Event Page to RSVP & for more info:  https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=208749325862696 Image Credit: "Happiness - Part 1, Video 1 Frame 10"  Otino Corsano, 2011 Ink on Paper

Copyright © 2011 Otino Corsano  All rights reserved.

The Pursuit of Happiness by Corinna Ghaznavi

The Pursuit of Happiness:

Corinna Ghaznavi on the social ad art of Otino Corsano

“Happiness Part 1, Video 3 (Still)” Otino Corsano, 2011 Directors: Caroline Ryan and Paul Weeks, Video 0:35

In this age of information and new technologies, images often get flattened. The sheer mass of blogs, tweets and emails alongside short media bursts and endless postings of images culled from everyday life, makes it difficult to discern particularities and ascertain the individual life represented. Advertising imagery, once reserved for billboards, television, newspapers and magazines, is now everywhere, including prominently in our homes. By necessity we filter and sift content quickly, understanding familiar commercial signifiers and passing over personal images because we cannot afford to slow down enough to absorb their deeper meanings.

Using conceptual art sensibilities, Otino Corsano collects subtly rich, yet tranquil images found through social media and employs these personal photos to counter the overflow of media information by recuperating the integrity of the subjective visual experience. Struck by the individuality of certain images, he found himself responding to what he simply summarizes as “happiness”: a fleeting impression and tender response culled from everyday life. His curatorial process of image selection is based on the spontaneous reactions any particular image may generate through a variety of ways, including framing and light, or a hidden narrative invoked in a scene.

Working from these references, Corsano creates storyboards by rendering the found stills into ink drawings. Taken from a vast range of sources, reinterpreted in ink, and arranged into an arbitrary narrative, the artist transforms these random pictures into an unexpected new order. These readily available images are choreographed into a coherent, albeit non-linear story centering on serene moments. Corsano then invited three film directors, each in a different professional phase of their careers, to use the storyboards as a matrix for the making of a thirty second spot. This format of a standard television commercial is utilized to reconstruct the lifestyle genre offered by advertising – this time solely as art.

Corsano is interested in this revision of media as a new genres artist and particularly how commercial art formats can become personalized. Accordingly, while we are given thirty-second films aesthetically akin to lifestyle ads liberated from any selling pitch. In these realms we can imagine happiness, calm and even bliss without the marketed aftertaste. Whereas contemporary advertising offers a promise of fleeting fulfillment through consumption, the interest of Corsano and his film directors lies in creative freedom for greater fulfillment. Corsano recognizes the techniques of advertising as not only effective, yet also desirous when liberated from a product focal point. The artist redistributes these moments of bliss to the viewer who is free to receive stylized recreations of calm without the anxiety of having to consume the predictable message of a targeted campaign.

By attempting to pinpoint a fluctuating peacefulness in the images attracting him, Corsano offers this same gain of focus and calm to the viewer. Images once hardly noticed in a web of endless quantities and postings are isolated from online spaces and then recuperated into the art gallery to reside in a more sensitive, reflective context. Every captured digital still once highlighted a poignant moment in an individual’s experience. Remixed as art, these personal photos are expanded in their meaning through their connection to other recreated images: first as a collection of ink drawings and subsequently lengthened into moving images and scenes. While the integrity of the original snapshot is mostly honored, each artist – first Corsano, then the film directors – stretches these subjective moments through creative interpretation and reenactment. Each image is especially transformed by the new sequences the stills are placed in relation to one another. Corsano subsumes the original images, with his particular drawing style and the references are further personalized by each of the directors. Offering the directors storyboards as per traditional guidelines, Corsano essentially acts as a producer of the films. He affords his colleagues a maximum amount of freedom to align with the theme of creative liberation, happiness and choice. And since happiness is personal and subjective, his inclusion of several different creators (including the source photographer, Corsano as storyboarder, directors, editors, soundtrack composer, myself as writer and finally the viewers) allows for a range of different representations and perspectives regarding this pursuit of happiness.

The ambient soundtrack composed by John Mark Sherlock adds to the abstracted visual culture found, interpreted, and recreated in Happiness - Part 1. The fusing of creative sources – all familiar but made strange – works towards inviting the viewer into a space at once recognizable and open to further interpretation. The real and the fantasy come into contact when these found photographs become animated: each filmic interpretation expands the time and the location of the original image. Corsano maintains recreating reality is what art is best capable of, and in this case, the reality in art is the process of isolating a moment of reflection. Moreover, this conceptual process triggers happiness in both the artist creating the art and connects the viewer around a new experience of satisfaction. This ad hoc digital curating highlights the potential magic and personal secrets lying within ubiquitous and liquid images. Corsano empowers the unknown creator of these fantastic web-finds by respecting the photo’s integrity, focusing more closely on possible meanings, and foregrounding the image’s creative potential. Ideas unfurl from a single still into a parallel reality filled with fantasy and possibility. Happiness – Part 1 reveals the first step towards personal clarity – always, already accessible in the everyday.

“She’s so young. She’s got the answers. She doesn’t need to question the world like I do.” – Moe Berg, 1988

TAAC "Speed Art Criticisim II" Nuit Blanche 2011

Dare to claim your 15 minutes of fame?

The TAAC's "Speed Art Criticisim II" launches LEITMOTIF at 

The Gladstone Cafe at Queen Street West and Gladstone Avenue.

For one night only, visual artists are invited to bring their artwork to a cube van/mobile gallery parked in the northwest corner of the Gladstone Cafe's parking lot. Artists’ work will be critiqued by the country’s leading art critics during the all-night project who will provide “speed reviews” of up to 15 minutes in duration. Artists can bring an original work or two, prints or even a digital portfolio on a laptop. 

Saturday Oct. 1st, 7pm (Sunset) - Sunday Oct. 2nd, 7am (Surise)

Gladstone Cafe, 1181 Queen Street West

Parking Lot: South East corner of Queen St. W. & Gladstone Ave.

LEITMOTIF: An Independent Project of ScotiaBank Nuit Blanche and hosted by the Parkdale Village Bia begins at Gladstone Avenue and stretches along Queen Street West to Roncesvalles Avenue.

Participating TAAC Members:

Otino Corsano 

(artUS Magazine LA, ARTPOST)

Katherine Dennis 

(OCADU CCP)

Sky Goodden 

(ONE HOUR EMPIRE, Canadian Art, C Magazine)

David Jager 

(NOW)

Mary MacDonald 

(OCADU CCP)

Amish Morrell 

(C Magazine)

Elena Potter 

(Canadian Art, BlogTO)

Leah Sandals 

(National Post, NOW, Canadian Art) 

Fran Schechter

(NOW)

Murray Whyte 

(Toronto Star)


www.scotiabanknuitblanche.com

www.parkdalevillagebia.com

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