Past Events

Exhibition Opening : Nov 20 12:00 pm CST (2:00 pm EST, 8:00 pm CEST)

Presenting Change Language Resource Pack, a solo exhibition by Travess Smalley. During his residency, Smalley has been developing a texture pack where the images and textures present in the game are replaced with randomly generated language. The result is a surreal reading experience, reminiscent of a concrete poem, that turns the familiar Minecraft world into an abstract, austere, and newly dangerous place (be careful identifying lava!). As a companion to the exhibition, Smalley will also be releasing the full resource pack for at-home players as well

Closing the Open Studio: a Minecraft performance by Huidi Xiang

Oct 16th 12-1pm CST (Regina time) 2-3 pm EST (Toronto time) 8-9 pm CEST (Berlin time)

In “How to Be an Artist in Minecraft,” Ender Gallery artist-in-residence Huidi Xiang @huidixiang considered what it means to be a working artist within a game designed for play. Examining the affordances, limitations and expectations of creative work on the Minecraft platform, Xiang has developed the persona of the “artist villager.” Inside the exhibition on October 16th, from 12-1pm CST, Xiang will interact with audience members as the artist villager persona, proposing a model for a non-player character that challenges the creative supremacy of the player. In this “closing studio” event, Xiang will initiate the process of deconstructing her studio/exhibition on the Ender Gallery server and start to restore the server back to its original state. Through the performance of the very act of de-installation, Xiang invites the audience to contemplate the idea of maintenance, deconstruction, and restoration in a digital context.

In order to experience the performance first-hand on the Minecraft platform, you will require a licensed copy of the Java edition of the game and a corresponding Minecraft account to join the server. Please contact cbluemke@mackenzie.art if you would like to join in-server but do not have an account. Instruction on how to join are available at www.ender.gallery/howtojoin

The performance will also be livestreamed to the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s social media, including its Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch accounts, which are viewable without a Minecraft account.

Exhibition Opening : Sept 11 12:00 pm CST (2:00 pm EST, 8:00 pm CEST)

Please join us Saturday for our third exhibition opening, on livestream and on the server!

Presenting How to be an artist in Minecraft, a solo exhibition by Huidi Xiang. During her residency time, Xiang created replicas of her artist studio (both physically and in Animal Crossing) and attempted to live a parallel artist life in Minecraft. Taking on the role of an artist-labourer in the game, she also kept a detailed log of her every activity on the server for the residency period, creating a visual data record or ledger for the increasingly overlapping contexts of play and labour in video games - as well as serving to concretize her labour as an artist.

Ender Gallery x Mutek : Jane’s Walk Minecraft : Aug 27 1:30 pm CST (2:30 pm EST, 8:30 pm CEST)

Considering the role of a server as “place,” this workshop will be a Jane’s Walk through the expansive procedurally generated world of Minecraft. Ender Gallery curators Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, and Sarah Friend will begin in an NPC village, meeting the residents and studying their built environment to consider how they are affected by the player’s interventions. The tour then moves into the biomes of the Minecraft server and examines the colonialist and extractive concepts lurking behind the game’s mechanics. The tour will expand beyond the edges of Minecraft gameplay, travelling to its farthest corners to pry into the bits and backend of the server.

The project is informed by Jane Jacob’s approach to considering spaces and the bodies that dwell within them. It is inspired by the application of this approach into digital spaces and their representations—notably, by Leonhard Müllner and Robin Klengel’s 2018 Operation Jane Walk. Minecraft Jane’s Walk will investigate Minecraft as a material artifact and social space, and its potential for artistic interventions.

Ender Gallery x Mutek : CASE STUDY: Ender Gallery: Artistic Investigations of the Game Minecraft : Sept 2 1:45 pm CST (2:45 pm EST, 8:45 pm CEST)

Join Huidi Xiang and Travess Smalley — the third and fourth artists-in-residence at Ender Gallery — for a tour through their projects, in conversation with curators Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll. Ender Gallery is an exhibition space and artist residency that exists inside the game Minecraft, established in January 2021 in partnership with the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan. As many festivals and art institutions moved their programming online over the last year, Ender Gallery is an experiment in taking the idea of online “places” and their unique affordance seriously.

Cat Haines x Interaccess x Vector Festival : Cyborg Bodies // Minecraft Creations : Aug 2 1:00 pm CST (2:00 pm EST, 8:00 pm CEST)

Part feminist theory, part artist talk, and part technical workshop—this session explores how we can use Minecraft to transform our social and material realities to create new bodily possibilities. This workshop will specifically explore how to create a resource pack in Minecraft that renames and retextures a block to create new possibilities within the game as an artistic medium. We will explore how we can use this technique to (literally) re-skin blocks with textures from our own bodies, and name or rename these body parts as a form of social and linguistic intervention and to signal our lived realities.

Ender Gallery x Interaccess x Vector Festival : Jane’s Walk Minecraft : July 31 1:00 pm CST (2:00 pm EST, 8:00 pm CEST)

Inspired by Operation Jane Walk, Leonhard Müllner and Robin Klengel’s 2018 machinima that took participants on a Jane’s Walk through New York via the video game ‘Tom Clancy’s The Division’, this workshop will be a walk through the expansive procedurally generated world of Minecraft. Taking seriously the idea of server as “place”, Ender Gallery curators Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, and Sarah Friend will begin in a village, meeting the resident NPCs and examining their built environment, considering how they are affected by the player’s interventions. The tour then moves into the biomes of the Minecraft server, examining colonialist and extractive concepts that lurk behind the game’s mechanics. But this tour won’t stop at the edges of gameplay: eventually, we will travel to the farthest corners of Minecraft’s seemingly infinite space, and then past it, to look directly at the bits of the world and backend of the server.

Ender Gallery x Amaze : July 24 11:30 am CST (12:30 am EST, 5:30 pm CEST)

Ender Gallery is pleased to join the livestream with friends at A MAZE. / Berlin! The conversation will feature short presentations from the first and third artists-in-residence, Cat Haines, and Huidi Xiang, in dialogue with the Ender Gallery curators, Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, and Sarah Friend.

Exhibition Opening : July 10 1:00 pm CST (3:00 pm EST, 9:00 pm CEST)

Presenting Odanak - At the Village, a solo exhibition by Simon M. Benedict.

In recent years, Simon’s video work has focused on the depiction of Indigenous people in media made by and intended for non-Indigenous people. After spending much time and energy researching these harmful portrayals, he was relieved and excited to be working on something more positive and potentially healing within the context of Ender Gallery. At the beginning of this residency, he planned to make an installation inspired by his sister Evelyne Benedict’s work in their family’s ancestral community of Odanak. He initially set out to create a medicinal garden based on a guide Evelyne co-authored with Donna O’Bomsawin entitled “Kinaw8la – She Takes Care of You”, an educational booklet on medicinal plants – both native and non-native – currently present on Odanak Abenaki territory. In the wake of recent conversations and news stories regarding the Canadian residential school system, Simon’s residency project, titled Odanak – At the Village, also attempts to reckon with the country’s ongoing colonial project as it pertains to the Abenaki people. It now includes architectural elements that echo this history, as well as contemporary buildings that serve to educate and heal.

Open Studio : June 19 1:00 pm CST (3:00 pm EST, 9:00 pm CEST)

Join Simon M. Benedict for an hour of conversation inside his evolving body of work. Benedict’s current project customizes the Minecraft platform to reflect a contemporary Abenaki experience. Referencing real world sites and traditions, Benedict’s projects reflect upon connection, community, and representation in the digital sphere.

Pack the Pussy : June 09 7:00-10:00 pm CST (8:00-11:00 pm EST, 2:00-5:00 am CEST)

Join us, Cat Haines, the Mackenzie Art Gallery, and Queen City Pride this Thursday, June 10 from 7PM-9PM CST (Regina time) for Pack the Pussy, a virtual dance party inside the (g)Ender Gallery Exhibition!

Music by:

Ariana Giroux is your local angry trans woman out there making waves and throwing bricks! Working out of a home studio on Treaty 4 Territory, Ariana works every day to carve out a better world for people of many intersections. She uses her music to celebrate queerness and provide catharsis for those members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community who need it. Her music spans topics from “its rad to be queer” to describing how it feels to be victimized by complex transphobia and queerphobia. Working with a dizzying array of hardware synthesizers and samplers, her work is almost entirely improvisational house and downbeat electronica meant to groove and find yourself in. bandcamp

Using spectral analysis, various forms of synthesis, computer assisted composition techniques, and a penchant for chaos, Mutable Body constructs hyper-real soundscapes. These otherworldly planes exist as bridges between the realms of acousmatic perception, simulation, and parallel realities. bandcamp

Exhibition Walk Through : May 22 1:00 pm CST (3:00 pm EST, 9:00 pm CEST)

Join artist Cat Haines, Saturday, May 22 1:00 pm CST (3:00 pm EST, 9:00 pm CEST), for an artist talk and tour of her exhibition (g)Ender Gallery.

Exhibition Opening : May 8 1:00 pm CST (3:00 pm EST, 9:00 pm CEST)

Please join us for our first exhibition opening, as well as our first live event on the server!

(g)Ender Gallery is a solo exhibition of the work of Cat Haines, developed during her residency on the Ender Gallery Minecraft server. Combining photography, poetry, and monumental Minecraft builds, (g)Ender Gallery explores the platform’s potential for queer and trans intimacies. The exhibition is a playful transfeminist intervention into yonic art canon that uses worldbuilding as a means of trans agency. The body of work features a colossal reconstruction of the artist’s surgically-constructed vagina that contains a gallery of text and images that reflect upon moments of her transition. The project investigates the affordances of the Minecraft platform to reject a cisgender reading of transition, through recentering narratives of trans joy.

On Saturday May 8, at 1:00 pm Regina-time and 9:00 pm Berlin-time, we will stream simulataneously to Haines’s personal twitch, and the Mackenzie Art Gallery’s social media, including its Facebook, YouTube and Twitch accounts. It will also be open for live guests to join us in Minecraft. In order to join in-game, attendees will need a licensed copy of Minecraft (Java edition)

Open Studio : April 15 7:00 pm CST (6:00 pm EST, 3:00 am CEST)

On April 15, join Cat Haines and a special guest, Evie Ruddy, for a livestreamed open studio event where they will engage in an intimate conversation inside Haines’ Minecraft exhibit. Drawing on their art practices and scholarly work, Cat Haines and Evie Ruddy will discuss transfeminist and bodily interventions into second wave feminist theory, how each conceives of audience in their work, ways of disrupting cisnormative visual logics, and the role of affect in relation to desire.

Evie Ruddy (they/them) (@eviejohnny) is a socially engaged digital storyteller and PhD student in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University. As a PhD Fellow with Carleton’s Transgender Media Lab, Evie is helping to develop an online database of audiovisual works made by transgender, non-binary, Two Spirit, intersex, and gender non-conforming filmmakers. Evie is also researching the ethics of documenting trans bodies. They are particularly interested in the role of improvisation for fostering productive spaces for trans collaborators to exercise agency over how they are represented.

Open Studio : March 31 7:00 pm CST (6:00 pm EST, 3:00 am CEST)

Ender Gallery is pleased to invite you to join our first public event! On International Trans Day of Visibility (Wednesday, March 31), join current resident Cat Haines and the Ender curators for a livestreamed open studio event where Haines will discuss her work in progress.