The Power Plant

For The Power Plant's Summer 2012 Art After Hours event, the gallery will host a performance by Tools for Conviviality participating artist Swintak and Jiva Mackay.

The Water Banquet is a lavish feast exclusively serving the greatest of all luxuries: water. Exploring the material essence of H20, the banquet will provide a sampling of dishes intended to expand the sensory possibilities of water. Through the ceremonious pageantry of a royal feast, the Water Banquet will ride the tension between hedonism and activism.

Christine Swintak (b. 1977 in Vancouver) is a Toronto-based artist who works with sculpture, installation, performance and drawing. Her projects have included building a banal rollercoaster in a corporate office building; moving an entire cottage without the aid of machinery; building a full-size ship through collective improvisation; running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld; transforming a city-issued dumpster into a fully-operational luxury boutique hotel; attempting to give a shed consciousness; and producing impossible project proposals. Her work has been exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art (New York), HMK Mariakapel (Hoorn, Holland), Model Niland (Sligo), Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga) Khyber Institute of Contemporary Art (Halifax), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), YYZ Artist’s Outlet (Toronto), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax) and Rockefeller Centre (New York City). She has presented independent public interventions and relational happenings in Shelburne, Amsterdam, Banff, Vancouver, Teslin, New York, Salt Lake City, Death Valley and Los Angeles. Swintak is the Artistic co-director and founder of Don Blanche, an experimental off-the-grid artist residency in rural Ontario.

Jiva MacKay is a Toronto-based artist and trained chef. From 2004-2011 she was based in Los Angeles and catered art world events with her edible multiples. During this period she would return to Canada at intervals to study at the Stratford Chefs School (2008) and undertake apprenticeships with chef Jamie Kennedy in Toronto, the organic farm Vicki’s Veggies in Prince Edward County, the SookeHarbour House on Vancouver Island and at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. MacKay creates single evening performative culinary experiences for small groups and collaborates on projects at the annual Don Blanche, a rural summer artist residency near Shelburne, Ontario. She has lectured at the Mountain School of Art in Los Angeles and is currently teaching a cooking course to help empower artists in the kitchen.

This event is open to all levels of Membership. For more information and to RSVP please contact sheim@thepowerplant.org or 416.973.4926.