Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art in Border Crossings

My review of "Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art" appears in issue 128 of Border Crossings. I wish I could have been in Winnipeg, my old stomping ground, for the Holiday Launch Party.

“Sakahàn, International Indigenous Art” was the first in what is planned to be a quinquennial exhibition devoted to contemporary art by Indigenous artists from around the globe. Its title is an Algonquin word that means “to light a fire,” marking an auspicious beginning to an admirable and ambitious project undertaken by the National Gallery of Canada, which resides in traditional Algonquin territory. The largest ever exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art, it is also the largest art show the gallery has done, period. Featuring over 150 works by 80 artists from 16 countries, with events and exhibitions coordinated with multiple partnering institutions, the exhibition was so sprawling that the handy and much-needed map given to visitors could not even include all the territory it covered. The exhibition confirmed and amplified the institution’s commitment to the collection, study and exhibition of Indigenous art. With the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a touchstone text for the exhibition, the forward thinking on display in Sakahàn provided multiple tools for a general audience to think critically about the issues presented.  

For the complete review, check out Border Crossings 128, available at the finest bookstores, newsstands, and libraries near you.

Homework II Panel #5: Electronic Dance Music

I was invited by The Broken City Lab to curate and moderate a panel presentation for their second conference on collaborative and socially-engaged art practices, Homework II: Long Forms/Short Utopias. The conference built on their previous conference held two years earlier, Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices. Once again, in Windsor, Ontario, they brought together multidisciplinary artists and creative practitioners enacting and articulating the complexities of working in practices driven by curiosities about utopian collaboration, community, infrastructures, locality, and long-form social practice.

For the event, I brought together a group of creative practitioners whose work addressed the themes of the conference through their engagement with electronic dance music. The panelists include Bambitchell (Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell) (Toronto) who presented on their project, Border Sounds; Michael Caffrey and Kerry Campbell (Gatineau) who discussed their “GhettoBlast Sound System;” and Chris McNamara (Windsor) presented on his experience with the Windsor/Detroit techno music scene and described his involvement with the audio collective “Nospectacle.” The panelists’ projects employ electronic dance music in various ways that construct, articulate, and practice ideas of micro-utopias, pop-up ideals, and long-term social engagement. The event was live-streamed and recorded and remains accessible online. Press play.

The Artist Book Now!

My artist book Empirer is featured in the exhibition "The Artist Book Now" at La Fab - Chelsea Arts, Culture and Heritage Centre from the November 2nd to November 30th, 2013. Curated by Margit Hideg, the exhibition asks if the the Artist’s Book can evolve into the 21st century. It includes a kaleidoscope of works from all disciplines and mediums as well a community-based interactive installation.

Empirer is an unauthorized translation of Hardt and Negri’s Empire into Unicode text in a unique edition that binds in hardcover with gold text and red ribbon the printed text of a book made available in electronic form. Published at the turn of the new millennium, Empire is a work of political philosophy about the spread of globalization that was so popular at the time of its release it was allegedly hard to keep on the shelves at bookstores. I found a pdf version on-line that unfortunately was locked for printing. In my feeble attempts to “hack” and print the pdf, I generated a Unicode version of the text that gained in aesthetic appeal what it lost in meaning. It serves not only as a signifier for technology and its built-in obsolescence but also as a code book for cracking the mysterious global forces at work today.

In English, Empirer is the title of the book; In French, it is a verb, “to worsen.” Empire gets empirered.

Of Interest in BlackFlash 30.3

BlackFlash 30.3 is now available to order online. It features, in its "Of Interest" section, a text I wrote about a recent exhibition by the Ottawa artist Cheryl Pagurek.

My text is a review of the exhibition by Pagurek entitled “State of Flux” which was at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery from January 9 to February 9, 2013. In the review I explore the manner in which the subject matter of Pagurek’s images, a series of still and moving images that capture a river’s flows and reflections, is paralleled by her choice of medium, digital photography, underscoring dichotomies between the natural and the artificial as well as the analog and the digital. Pagurek states that through the deployment of water imagery she intends to conflate the natural and the artificial as the fluidity of the material spills over the boundaries of a strict duality. The exhibition achieves this goal through a sequence of three components: “State of Flux,” a series of digital prints featuring close-ups of bodies of water flowing and reflecting coloured lights and architectural surfaces; “River Suite,” a print that presents twelve selected close-up views of the water in a gridded composition that contains multiple viewpoints; and “Wave Patterns,” a dynamic twelve channel video that activates a variation on the “River Suite” with motion and sound. “Wave Patterns” was screened in 2012 at Modern Fuel in Kingston and the AKA Gallery in Saskatoon as part of a program that investigated regional difference, and it was also featured in a screening called “Videos of Canada” in Toulouse, France on March 16 as part of the festival Traverse Vidéo 2013. With these new works, Pagurek is continuing a previous trajectory of work that underscored environmental concerns at the same time that she shifts the perspective towards the abstract and metaphysical. With reference to the philosophy of Heraclitus, one can’t step into the same “State of Flux” twice.

For the complete review, check out the pdf uploaded by Pagurek on her website, or get the whole issue of BlackFlash 30.3, available online and at the finest bookstores, newsstands, and libraries near you.

Happiness is...

I was both intimidated and honored by the fact that I performed as Happiness is... on the same bill with some of my favourite musicians in the Ensemble SuperMusique and Kingdom Shore for the 12th edition of Tone Deaf, Kingston, Ontario's Festival of Adventurous Sound Performance.

My Happiness Is... project takes inspiration from the Jeffersonian principle of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," underscored by Hannah Arendt as happiness derived from participation in the public sphere. Happiness is... satisfies my desire for such participation through public performances in front of an audience as well as through dialogue with the source material I have selected for distortion and improvisation. Noise elements indicate my neurotic discontent with the status quo, yet register as a salvo of oppositional discourse in a performative dialectic inspired by the tradition of jazz.

For Tone Deaf 12, I highlighted the political dimension of my performance by taking as its source material Prime Minister Stephen Harper's performance of the Beatle's "With a Little Help from My Friends." Through music, political antagonism is shifted to the field of agonism or play.

Pilgrimages Redux

Vincent Perez and I, working collaboratively under the name Catalog, presented “Pilgrimages Redux,” an illustrated tour of our respective pilgrimages to Mount Rushmore and Santiago de Compostela. Through spoken word and printed matter, this performance reflects a dialogue about our travels and the themes which drove our pilgrimages in the first place: curiousity, community, communication and context.

Following “Pilgrimages Redux,” Laura Kelly orchestrated another edition of the “Mouthy” series, an open-mic session inviting speakers and audience members alike to share short personal stories. The theme for this edition was "journeys." In the era of global travel, we all have a tale to tell.

The free event was presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Déjà déjà visité: Mike Bayne, Jocelyn Purdie, Maayke Schurer,” curated by Sunny Kerr at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario as part of Culture Days. Light refreshments were provided.

A podcast of the event is available online.

Nova Express

Presented by the City of Ottawa’s Art Centres, “Nova Express” is a project I curated for Nuit Blanche Ottawa + Gatineau 2013. Connecting the theme of this year’s Nuit Blanche (Supernova!) to the ongoing acceleration of the information explosion, “Nova Express” presents artists whose work reconfigures and relays quotations and data in varying and idiosyncratic forms of public address. Works by Gerald and Maas, Allison Rowe, Dominique Sirois, the Think Tank that has yet to be named, and Guillermo Trejo make good company with the novel by William Burroughs whose title and cut-up composition inspired the name of this project. Emanating from the Nova Express Kiosk in the Byward Market at the corner of George and William, the project sought to deliver discrete packets of information throughout a noisy night.

John Bart Gerald and Julie Maas, in Ottawa since 1996, began as “Author & Artist, Gerald & Maas” in New York City in 1978, publishing their books, artworks, and suppressed work by others. In 1996 they opened in Ottawa. Their political posters began appearing in the early 1980s. Their website nightslantern.ca has carried the U.N. Convention on Genocide (print published, with permission in 1989 and 1996) since 2001, with related suppressed information and artwork. Maas is an artist of drawings, etchings, paintings, as well as the art director of nightslantern.ca. Gerald’s poems and journalism appear internationally and on nightlsantern.ca where he’s the writer, editor, and webmaster. A selection of Gerald and Maas’s work was available for viewing at the Nova Express Kiosk.

An interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Allison Rowe probes the intersections between aggressive protest and care giving, the factual and the personal. Her “Tar Sands Exploration Station” is an interactive sculpture and performance piece housed in a 1982 Dodge RAM camper van. This work contains objects, video, 2D, audio and food based artworks that address the Canadian tar sand deposits located in Alberta, Canada. Merging art, performance, domesticity, and science the work provides an alternative to the didactic, argumentative discourse around oil sand and creates a public space for conversation and personalization of this massive topic.

Based in Montreal, Dominique Sirois works in installation with a multidisciplinary approach including sound, performance, video and public intervention. Her reflexive approach revolves around work, consumption, art and fashion. Siroishas been collecting music samples featuring siren sounds found in a wide variety of genres from musiqueconrète to rap, R & B and techno. By overlaying the different historical and cultural contexts specific to these samples a sound mapping takes shape. Her ongoing iterations of “Alarm Songs” installations blur the space between surveillance and cultural entertainment.Sirois set up a special Nuit Blanche “Alarm Songs” installation,"We are a human alarm system," in the Nova Express Kiosk.

Jeremy Beaudry and Meredith Warner in Philadelphia and Katie Hargrave in Minneapolis comprise the core group of the Think Tank that has yet to be named, initiating research, conversations, and actions that explore contemporary sociopolitical issues in the places where they are encountered. They create generative spaces where strategic questions are invitations to others to consider their relationship to the places, structures, and systems which shape individual and collective experiences of the world. For Nuit Blanche, the Think Tank produced “Radical Orations on the Structures of Support.” Drawing upon the idea of the radical oration and the history of the street corner soapbox, a newsprint broadsheet containing the orations and instructions to construct a lo-fi megaphone were made available in the Nova Express Kiosk. These orations are combinations of various political and theoretical texts, remixed and placed into a performative, educational, and site-specific context. The broadsheet functioned not only as a published take-away for visitors but as a prompt for a distributed performance.

Originally from Mexico, Guillermo Trejo now lives in Ottawa, exploring the relation of the public to the printmaking process. He studied at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Etching in Mexico City, where he specialized in contemporary printmaking. In 2012, he completed his MFA at the University of Ottawa. In his prints and installations, Trejo explores how the printmaking process is related to a public understanding of politics and social issues. Often employing political slogans and imagery, Trejo’s works reuse information in a critical way to question how knowledge is developed. For Nuit Blanche, at the Nova Express Kiosk, Trejo installed his “Enciclopedia Universal,” a constellation of an encyclopedic amount of information.

Information about the “Nova Express” project, including the Nova Express Newspaper, One-Night Only Edition with layout and design by Gatineau-based artist Simon Guibord, was distributed from the Nova Express Kiosk and throughout the zones of Nuit Blanche Ottawa + Gatineau 2013. In Burroughs’ novel, language acts as a virus causing mutations that blur boundaries between scientific and artistic research. The artists in the Nova Express project venture into similar territory. They offer unique interpretations of their findings and field reports that are both inviting and perplexing. Their import will sustain far more than one sleepless night.