contact@art4commuters.com

ART FOR COMMUTERS ... PUTTING ART ON URBAN SCREENS

Mandate and History
Art for Commuters (A4C) is dedicated to assisting contemporary artists by offering them an opportunity to show in the public spaces frequented by urban travelers. We are equally dedicated to engaging a general, urban populace with contemporary art by initiating outstanding, thought-provoking projects that address the unique qualities of these public spaces. 

Sharon Switzer founded Art for Commuters in February 2007, in response to an opportunity to form a partnership with ONESTOP Media Group (OMG), the company that owns and operates the network of over 190 LCD screens on the subway platforms of the TTC. As our partner, they supply free screen time, as well as administrative, creative and technical support.

Our First Year
Our projects on the network of TTC subway screens include Words Travel Fast, an anual curated project mixing urban poetry and motion graphics that screened throughout the night of Nuit Blanche 2007; TUFF 2007, a 7-day long public film festival featuring a different urban-themed program of 1-minute films each day (Sept 8 - 14, 2007), which will run annually; a month-long photographic exhibition (May 1st – June 3rd, 2007); an ongoing series of photogragraphs of the TTC called Station Portraits (starting Nov. 2007), which will run annually as Contacting Toronto; a twice yearly series of student shorts called Ideas for a Living City (February 2008). Other projects in development are a weekly animated comic strip, and a set of serial mysteries that commuters can follow throughout the workweek.

Art for Commuters Collective Member Bios

Sharon Switzer – Executive Director / Curator
Sharon Switzer was born in Lethbridge, Alberta in 1966. An artist and curator, she has been exhibiting her media art in Canada and the U.S. since the early 1990’s. The first curatorial collective that she formed, Clamorous Intentions, was active in Toronto during the early 1990’s, producing 3 large-scale, multi-media public events in 2 years. Sharon taught new media and visual art in Ontario Universities for 8 years, and is actively involved in the Toronto arts community, presently serving as Vice President of Gallery TPW’s Board of Directors. Her video work is currently traveling to museums across Canada as part of ‘18 Illuminations,’ and a catalogue of her work was just produced by McMaster Museum of Art. Sharon is a Graduate of the CFC Media Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, and is represented by Corkin Gallery in Toronto. Her video work can be seen at www.corkingallery.com and www.sharonswitzer.com. She is presently teaching a course on digital compositing at O.C.A.D, and recently formed the not-for-profit curatorial organization Art for Commuters. www.sharonswitzer.com

Jean-Paul Kelly – Administrative Assistant & Assistant Curator
Jean-Paul Kelly is an artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His practice includes video, drawing, and photo-based work. Kelly's videos examine anticipation, anxiety, and loss in storytelling through a hybrid vernacular of digitally composited animations, onscreen performance, and home movies. His work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in North America, Japan, and Europe, most recently as part of art-action: rencontres internationales 2006 in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid.  Gallery TPW (Toronto) will present a solo exhibition of Kelly's work in the fall of 2008.  He is member of the Pleasure Dome experimental film and video programming collective, and curated "Drawn In From Without" as part of Vtape's Curatorial Incubator project in 2007. Kelly received a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2005, where he is currently an instructor.  Jean-Paul Kelly’s video works are distributed through Vtape.  www.jeanpaulkelly.com

Lori Newdick – Assistant Artistic Director
Lori Newdick specialized in Philosophy and Contemporary English Literature at the University of Toronto from 1988-89 and graduated with Honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto in 1999, winning the Medal of Excellence in Photography as well as many other awards and scholarships for graduate studies. She graduated from the Master of Fine Art Program at the University of Guelph in 2001, having been awarded several scholarships during her 2-year degree. Newdick’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally since 1999, garnering attention early on in her career with reproductions in Italian Photo in 2000. Museum venues include the Centre for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Kamloops Art Gallery in Kamloops, B.C. Her work can be found in the collections of the Macdonald Stewart Art Gallery, Guelph, ON, the National Portrait Gallery, Ottawa, ON, the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Photography Collection, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Newdick presently lives and works in Toronto and is represented by Corkin Gallery.

Patricia Griffith – Coordinative Liaise to Onestop Media Group
Patricia Griffith has worked in the film and television industry since graduating from York University in 2001 with a BA in Fine Arts Cultural Studies.  Kal Ho Na Ho, a Yash Johar production, was the first feature film Patricia worked on as an office coordinator, followed by several children’s television shows.  Patricia has participated in the 48-hour film challenge and the 24-hour film challenge; both are team based film competitions in which she co-wrote the scripts and designed the sets.   In 2005 Patricia also shot and edited a short film for Toronto’s Dog Film Festival.  Currently Patricia is working for ONESTOP Media Group as a Network Coordinator for various digital out-of-home networks.  Part of her role is helping to develop arts related content for the networks, the first of which was assisting in the collaboration between Art for Commuters, ONESTOP and Contact, Toronto’s annual photography festival, to allow photographers to exhibit their work on the TTC network of screens.