Ice Follies 2010

Andy Fabo, Van LaPointe and Kevin O’Byrne, Luv Shack, 2010

On one side viewers will see a digital mosaic of people in the North Bay art scene that have been stitched together from portraits by kevin from 2 nights of openings at the W.K.P Kennedy Gallery & the White Water Gallery.

Artist Bio:

Andy Fabo is an artist, art critic, independent curator and art educator. In 2005 he was given a retrospective at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, an exhibition that featured his work over thirty years in a diverse range of media. The art ranged from the first mixed media paintings that he showed in his 1979 A Space exhibition that was a landmark for Queer Art in Toronto, to the work he was making as a founding member of the influential ChromaZone Gallery (1981-85), to his collaborative videos work created with Michael Balser, to his current evolution into the digital media.
Their early collaboration, Survival of the Delirious (1988), won numerous awards including Best New Narrative at the Atlanta Film Festival and Kijkhuis Festival in Holland and it is included in the Art Against AIDS anthology that VTape and Video Data Bank in Chicago co-produced.

Of late, he has shifted the content of his work lately to create series that document art communities (Hamilton, North Bay) and the tangle of friendships within those communities. Working in collaboration with Kevin O’Byrne, a friend of twenty years, the series will be shown at b contemporary in Hamilton and Skew Gallery in Calgary.

Van LaPointe is a graduate of the Ryerson Polytechnical University and a digital artist based in Toronto. In 1991 he produced an innovative media work titled fz-976. The tape used early digital effects and complex layering to generate an alternate world defined by an apocalyptic image barrage of movie and archival footage. Rapid editing, repetition and meshing of imagery and sound are the identifying factors of LaPointe’s work.

Developing his skills as an online editor, LaPointe continued to work in both alternative and mainstream media throughout the 1990’s. He was an active board member of Trinity Square Video and was a key played in bringing that organization to a new technological level from 1993-1996. He has also completed ouvre for the new millenium: a short super-8 project, fz-978 – Apollo 2000. This film is a lament for the future that failed to materialize from the promise of the space program.

Kevin O’Byrne has his own practice as a sculptor, photographer,artist assistant and colour consultant. He also has an extensive history in residential and commercial projects. This includes folly and contemporary environmental installations, furniture design and fabrication, wall and ornamental plaster restorations, colour consulting and full spectrum paint colour mixing. He also has extensive knowledge in mold making techniques and casting in various mediums. Kevin has worked on large and small scaled projects. His involvement in projects include George Brown Mansion for the Ontario Heritage Foundation, the Gladstone Hotel restoration in 2005 and several large scale residential design projects in Toronto.