about:
Fiona Bowie (we/they/us), b. K'emk'emeláy̓ (Vancouver);
interdisciplinary artist, musician/songwriter, lives and works on the stolen, unceded, ancestral and current territories
of the əəθkʷə̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵw̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and sə̓lil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. with acknowledgement
and support for their and all indigenous aeons-long nationhood, cultures, & all their relations.

Fiona variously employs photography, film, video, text, and sound to create immersive gallery installations, evolving public art
and web-based projects, and pursues biodynamic garden and land restoration projects.

Motivated by compassion (and lifelong interests in physics and nature), Fiona identifies as a multi-spēcial, intermolecular being to
normalize that, on a subatomic scale, there is structurally no separation between us and everything else in existence. Respecting that
all beings experience existence in their own way, Fiona's work centres on interconnectivity with other life forms and social equity with
them, therefore suggesting alternative ways of understanding oneself in contrast to ubiquitous hierarchical narratives.

Fiona is motivated to blur and defy old framing habits of commercially available technology and frequently designs and builds unique image
systems and 360 degree/omni-directional projectors for her omni-directional gallery-based works and evolving public artworks.
Writing, archiving practice, and web-based forms of outreach factor into many of Fiona's works to increase public access to and visibility
of the subjects therein.

Fiona has also acted as a curator, and from 2014 to 2021 facilitated collaborations, projects, and research by artists, writers, and curators
at her Órbitas studio/residency in Costa Rica. Fiona is a singer/songwriter/musician for SlōSpinner.

More Detail:

The artworks structurally manifest their subjects/content through their form: Bowie designs unique image systems for each work. Gallery
installations are projected by the artist's own designed and fabricated projectors; each is unique to the particular context. These lightweight,
diminutive 360° or omni-directional projectors produce immersive spaces, while employing as little material as possible to fabricate
them (<Swell,faltering repetition, Slip/Host, and others).
Additionally, due to these work's individualized mechanisms and optics, their dimensions are variable, fitting into various dimensions of space in which they
may be installed.
The impetus for creating these image machines stem from the fact that there are no commercially available technology that can create the realms
key to relay the particular content. While the early works were conceived at a time when the only omni or 360°e projectors were million dollar
systems for Planetariums and while keystoning of multiple, ganged market projectors allowed for seamless 360°e installations, they lack the
elasticity that Bowie's bespoke projector bodies enable.

Her public artworks also have bespoke image delivery design:

Projected onto a 30' x 13.5' (20:9 aspect ratio) bank of
ground floor windows, the mis-en-scene of Flow is designed to 'fail' as the viewer gets closer to the image. In close proximity, portions of the
Switch Glass onto which the work is projected, changes from transluscent (allowing the readible image), to clear transparent glass, suddenly revealing
the street outside, through the fractured image. or conversly for the passerby on the street, opening a portal into the interior of the building.
For this City of Vancouver commissioned public artwork Flow, Fiona shot a thousandfold images over 4 years (backgrounds, portraits and
portraits of animals and birds. These including locals of 1 Kingsway, artists in the area, and birds and animals). The collaboration with computer
scientists Sidney Fels and Morgan Hibert, resulted in (customized open source) software to run the work
24 hours a day, 360 days a year. This coding allowed images to constantly evolve in scale and content. The work, installed at 1 Kingsway, operated
for 13 years until the two 20,000 lumens projectors became unrepairable. The software is still running. This work projected its mis-en-scene, combining
various foregrounds and backgrounds evolved in presence and scale of subject, changing scenes every 2 minutes over its 13 year installation period.


Surface, was another commission by the City of Vancouver, was one of 6 artist initiated projects for 2010 Mapping and Marking, where
artists submitted proposals for their projects set in, and integral to locations of their own choosing. Surface was a 24/7, 365day (3 years) "documentary
of the undersea life of False Creek. With a camera mounted under the ferry Aquabus, utilizing a number of radio relay system dotted along False Creek and utilizing
LiveCasts powerful live video capabilities, people were able to witness the underwater life live via a screen on the ferry, a large LED cinema screen mounted on a
silo at Ocean Concrete and several monitors located at community centers and Science world, simulatiously available on the Surface website any time of day or night
all over the globe.

Shadoworks are created by using screen grabs from Google Earth of various, contested locations manipulated by adding shadows and then reloaded up anonymously to Google Earth.
Land workslandworks, the flats,4,383, (+1) Response are collaborations with other planetary species.

Reflective Form:

Bowie's early work, such as the dynamically orbiting swell(1996) was centered on considering the framing and affirmation of cultural and
visual heirarchies through the representation of others (charactarization; portraiture). Personal, found and well-known portraits were cropped of context and arranged
into a sea of undulating facial expressions (revealing portraits that subtly progress through open mouthed gazes, frowns, smirks, toothy grins and back to gazes),
nullifying the original images' social contexts. Bowie's image machine refuted sustained observation of particular subjects by making them only fleetingly available
to the viewer. Through further experimentation, Bowie developed a desire to create forms of visual experience that would structurally mirror her content, rather than simply
relay it through already established means. Bowie designed hand built the projectors for her smaller works and her 360 degree installations.
Bowie's installations, through their stranger form(s), contrast taken for granted conventions or techniques that still endure, (ubiquitous rectalinear strategies:
from painting through photography and cinematography).

Other 360 degree immersive installations Bowie produced over the years became narrative in structure with bespoke image machines and include, among others:
phenotypes, where we become night walkers observing the indoor activities in a car-centric suburban cul-de-sac;
Slip/Host, an otherworldly place where Alan Cumming plays two roles in an outlandish
narrative examining the excesses of contemporary capital and social order.