The human touch: Reva Stone recognized for career of groundbreaking digital art

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When Reva Stone graduated as an artist from the University of Manitoba in 1985, her tools of expression were oil paints and brushes.

Three decades later, her implements are computers and drones, as she explores the impact of cutting-edge biotechnology and robotics on how we interact in the world. The pioneering Winnipeg digital artist was announced today as one of the eight winners of the 2015 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts; the awards recognize outstanding career achievement.

“It is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, being acknowledged by my peers,” a jubilant Stone said over the telephone from Palm Desert, Ca., where she is currently working. “It’s been hard, because I’ve been sworn to secrecy since the middle of October. It has been the happiest secret.”

The honour comes with a $25,000 cash prize, a special exhibition featuring selected works of the eight honorees at the National Gallery of Canada from April 9 to Aug. 30, and an invitation to Rideau Hall April 8, when Gov. Gen. David Johnston will present each with a unique medallion produced by the Canadian Mint.

It was has been a year of milestones for Stone, who turned 70 in her 30th year of practising art and has been accepted into a major exhibition at a symposium in Vancouver in August. The GG is one more big reason to celebrate an uncommon career located at the intersection of art and science.

The jury lauded the winners for profoundly shaping Canada’s cultural identity and called Stone an important presence in Winnipeg.

“Her impressive body of work situates media arts within the community and she is able to create connection with her viewers,” the jury stated. “She also holds significant influence as a female artist in what is often considered a male-dominated arts practice.”

Stone has long been associated with the independent support group Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art; it was board member Yvette Cenerini who nominated her for the award.

“Reva Stone is a mindful and visionary artist who has been bringing her unique perspective to the field of new media for over two decades,” Cenerini wrote. “She examines the complex relationships between humans and their technical inventions and what it means to be human in these times of rapid change…. Her challenging large-scale multimedia installations are beautiful, menacing, technologically complex and intellectually rigorous.”

It has been her enduring interest in the impact of technology — treading the increasingly blurred boundary between what is born and what is manufactured — that has driven her creation of pieces such as Carnevale 3.0, a robot that reflects on the nature of human consciousness, and Portal, a work that combines custom software, media, robotics and mobile-phone technology to create a work that seems to be sentient.

Carnevale 3.0 was a life-size aluminum figure, a surrogate of Stone at the age of nine, placed on a robotic platform that used heat sensors to locate and photograph individuals in the gallery. Those images were either stored or abandoned in the same way as human memory. It is currently in the collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

The longtime Garden City resident, who moved into a Tuxedo condominium last August, said she is alarmed at how rapidly technology outpaces laws, ethics and morality. That concern is behind her new installation Out of the Loo, which will deal with drones.

“There is a disconnect from the human that happens with drones,” she said. “They can be two countries away.”

Stone is motivated to create work that compels the viewer to think of issues in a multiplicity of ways. Her work asks incisive questions that society should be debating: the implications of the widespread availability of 3D printing, for example.

“Most things will be manufactured in that way,” she said. “They are already talking about 3D printers for the home. You will be able to build your own set of dishes.”

She always knows what she wants to do with her art but often isn’t sure it can be done. Some of her prototypes don’t work. Being in over her head is the starting point for most of her art.

“Sometimes my ideas outstrip what the technology is capable of doing,” said the Winnipeg-born, Regina-raised Stone. “There is something so challenging about it that I keep doing it. I work with tough media.”

After graduating from U of M’s School of Art with a bachelor of fine arts degree, she spent 18 years working in artist-in-the-school programs, during which time she began noticing that the attention spans of children were changing with the introduction of computers. She had an idea in 1990 for a piece about children’s toys and video games when Winnipeg colleague Richard Dyck inquired whether she had thought of computerizing her installation.

“That was the beginning of the end for me,” she said. “I haven’t stopped thinking about that since.”

She used an exploration grant from the Canada Council to buy her first computer.

“I didn’t even know how to turn it on,” Stone said. “I never thought then computers would replace my paints and brushes.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca