Studio visit with:

INSTANT COFFEE

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Instant Coffee is a service oriented artist collective based in Toronto and Vancouver. Through formal installations and event based activities, it builds a public place to practice, where ideas, materials and actions can be explored outside of the isolated studio and in a manner that renegotiates traditional exhibition structures, but is still supported by them. Instant Coffee\’s frequent practice is to build architectural installations, which become venues for a series of organized events from formal lectures and screenings to informal gatherings and workshops. Each installation requires hosts who initiate some form of social interaction. Past projects include: Urban Disco Trailer, Get Social or Get Lost, One is Never Enough, and Nooks: Wish You Were Here all involved a redesign or reconfiguration of a domestic social space within an institutional framework. It is through these saccharine, and at times ironic reconstructions, of spaces (for example, a sunken living room, a bedroom and kitchen) that we highlight the relationship between form and social interactions. These social sculptures are both inclusive and exclusionary. From the beginning Instant Coffee invited other artists, designers, musicians and other producers to work with us. With our last few projects we examine tighter social spaces that bring the issue of inclusion and exclusion to the forefront.

In 2009 Instant Coffee exhibited the Disco Fallout Shelter, at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, and as part of Subvision, Hamburg; Nooks as part of How Soon is Now, Vancouver Art Gallery; Light Bar as part of Assume Nothing, New Social Practice, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Bright Future as part of 88 Blocks Art on Main a Public Art Commission by Translink and Come In: Disco Fallout Shelter as part of LIVE 2009, Vancouver and Instant Coffee, Sølyst, Denmark. Other recent residencies and exhibitions include Light Bar Research and Residency, Kuenstlerhaeuser Worpswede, Germany and Flaggfabrikken/Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Say Nothing in Bright Colours, MKG 127, Gallery, Toronto, and Rum 46 Gallery, School of Non-Productive Learning, Aarhus, Denmark; Instant Coffee Nooks + Everyone, Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto; If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Wish You Were Here, Casa del Encuentro MDE07 encuentro internacional, Medellin, Colombia. Instant Coffee\’s most consistent members are Cecilia Berkovic, Jinhan Ko, Kelly Lycan, Jenifer Papararo, Kate Monro, and Khan Lee.