Felix Kalmenson
(Canada)
Felix Kalmenson is a Russian born, Toronto based artist, with a personal artistic practice in experimental architecture, installation, film, photography, performance and sound art. He completed his Bachelors of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Toronto in 2011.
Kalmensons’ practice began in creating work in public space, sparking discourse on issues ranging from the geographies of exclusion constructed by rampant condominium development, to the demolition of memory and critical publicness in dying suburban malls. Kalmenson has also exhibited solo and in curated group shows in galleries, artist-run centres, and arts festivals in Canada and internationally, including; The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Aaran Gallery (Iran), Shudder Gallery, Gallery 44, The National Film Board of Canada Mediatheque, XPACE Cultural Centre, Critical Mass: A Centre for Contemporary Art, Non-Fiction Gallery (Savannah), and Whippersnapper Gallery. Kalmenson is a recipient of a Toronto Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant, as well as, a Ontario Arts Council National and Internationally Residency Grant for a residency at ZK/U Centre for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin. His work engages publicness, systems of exchange, memory, and myth, and how these topics are mediated by complex social, economic, and urban landscapes. Most recently his work has focused on discourses surrounding the changing relationship between public space and society and how architectures can both structure social relations and also be reconfigured to establish new ones.
As a curator and facilitator Kalmenson has presented four exhibits at Water Walk Sky Artist Residency and Exhibition Space, a crowd-source funded, 8’x8’ floating room, which inhabited and migrated through the waters of the Toronto Islands from July-October of 2012. Kalmenson also curated a digital micro-residency Apertures at Gallery 44 in March of 2013.