Summer Camp at SPAO

In consultation with a wide range of Canadian curators and artists, the Creative Director at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), Jonathan Hobin and I co-curated the 2019 CANADIANA exhibition, Summer Camp. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada, the exhibition features lens-based artworks produced over the last five decades by LGBTQ2+ artists from across the country. 

Highlighting camp as both a sensibility and a site in the Canadian landscape, the exhibition features works by Steven Beckly, David Buchan, Colin Campbell, Dayna Danger, Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan, B.G-Osborne, Michelle Mohabeer, Kent Monkman and Paul Wong. A text by art writer and curator Daniella Sanader accompanies the exhibition.

Paul Harfleet's Pansy Project installation for the Photo-Synthesis Garden

In conjunction with the exhibition, SPAO partnered with Qu’ART and the Ottawa International Writers Festival to host the London-based artist, writer and designer Paul Harfleet and The Pansy Project, an important international anti-homophobia initiative. Harfleet has planted almost 300 individual pansies at sites of homophobic abuse around the world. The Ottawa component of the project premiered in SPAO’s Photo-Synthesis Garden on May 10.

SPAO is an Official Event Partner with the Canadian Tulip Festival - Festival canadien des tulipes in recognition of the fact that the festival was created by the photographer Malak Karsh. Summer Camp continues until Canada Day, Monday July 1. 

Book Marks: A Selection of Publications by Ottawa Members of the RCA

For the Annual General Meeting of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts at the Ottawa Art Gallery on May 19, I organized a small exhibition of publications featuring Ottawa-based members of the RCA. The number of books displayed (thirty) roughly corresponds with the number of the current members based in Ottawa. Robert Tombs designed and produced a bilingual catalogue for the exhibition which included my curatorial essay, which follows:

Photo: Michael Davidge

On the side of a building on the corner of Sussex Drive and George Street in the Byward Market in Ottawa, there is a plaque that commemorates the 100th anniversary of the first exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA). The building at that address, 541 Sussex Drive, has a complex history. It started out as a tavern in 1827 and over the years it has been a number of hotels; a military barracks; the Geological Survey of Canada; the Department of Mines; and a dental clinic for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Since 1998 it has housed an advertising agency. Although the architecture is of an era, the social history of the building is not visible to the eye from its façade, save for the plaque, which was put up in 1980. Marking the centenary of the date 1880 when the RCA was founded, the plaque only refers to that brief moment in the building’s existence when it was used for the exhibition. It was an early “pop-up” exhibition, really, since the Geological Survey of Canada would move in soon after the event. And though the exhibition might have been ephemeral, its legacy encompasses far more than just this one historical marker. Any reader of the plaque would know that the works in that first exhibition, donated by the first academicians as a condition of their membership, would form the initial collection of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). Of course there is a long history to be told here, not just of the building but of the RCA and the NGC. Undoubtedly that history would reflect the attitudes of Canadian society from its colonialist beginnings.  However, it is important to emphasize that the RCA has had the mandate to support and promote contemporary art in Canada from the start. Today the honourary organization counts over 790 members and is comprised of professional artists, architects and designers from all across Canada, with approximately 30 of them living in the Ottawa area. Book Marks is a pop-up exhibition that brings together recent and notable publications featuring Ottawa members of the RCA. The RCA has made an indelible mark on the history of the cultural landscape in Ottawa, and the exhibition provides a glimpse of the ways that the current Ottawa-based members have been actively contributing to its future.

Like the historical marker that brings the activities of the RCA 138 years ago into the present, the publications on view in Book Marks index the activities of the current Ottawa membership of the RCA. An index is a handy tool that makes certain content visible, accessible, and easy to find, isolating it from a mass of other information. If you look at the index at the back of a book, you find an alphabetical list of names and subjects and the page numbers on which they appear.  An index is literally a sign that points to something, like an index finger, to make it known. This exhibition acts as index of the current membership of the Ottawa-based RCA members. Although it isn’t comprehensive, it offers an opportunity to reflect on how the practices of the Ottawa members of the RCA, in multiple ways, create their own indexical relationships with the world. 

My focus on the notion of indexicality in the works of the Ottawa members of the RCA is inspired by a canonical text in art criticism, Rosalind Krauss’s two-part essay “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” first published in the journal October in the late 1970s. Krauss takes the concept of the index from Charles S. Pierce’s theory of semiotics, especially with reference to its description of the indexicality of photographs, and applies it to come to an understanding of then current trends in contemporary art. For Pierce, an index is a sign that has an existential relationship with the thing it represents, a physical trace that is directly connected to the person or thing making it, such as a footprint, or a fingerprint. Photographs are understood to have this connection due to the process by which they are made, the registration of light reflecting off of the subjects depicted. Krauss’s essay doesn’t dwell too long on this aspect before it transfers the notion of the indexicality of photography to sculptural installations. The examples she provides work as indexical signs in terms of their self-referentiality because they point to themselves as the very thing that they signify. For example, in East/West Wall Memory Relocated, the artist Michelle Stuart took rubbings of sections of a corridor wall on floor-to-ceiling sheets of paper, tracing the wainscoting, cracked plaster, and other surface elements. She then installed each finished sheet on the facing wall. In this instance the work refers directly to the location from which it has been taken, but it has been slightly displaced, temporally and physically, thereby opening up a space for contemplation. By transposing the notion of indexicality from photography to sculpture, Krauss transforms sculptural installation into a kind of cinema, or a series of indices (still images) that viewers activate into a narrative as they walk through the space in which it is situated, such as the corridor in which Stuart’s rubbings are located. I’m not sure if this is a rigorously logical application of the concept, but it works for me as a metaphor for the sequence in which viewers of a work of art interpret its meaning. As Martin Lefebvre reminds us in his essay “The Art of Pointing,” art writers tend to be the worst abusers of the concept of indexicality in photography because they obscure the fact that in Peirce’s semiotics every sign contains the characteristics of index, icon and symbol. It’s just easier to see the indexical relationship or imprint between the photograph and the thing it represents. Drawing from various instances of photography, architecture, public art, and publications produced by the Ottawa members of the RCA, I will explore the manner in which indexicality plays a part in just a few selections from the “Book Marks” exhibition.

Thinking of indexicality in the practices of the artists in “Book Marks,” it makes sense to begin with the photographers. There are a good number of them in the current members of the RCA in the Ottawa area, and these include Robert Bourdeau, Rosalie Favell, Lorraine Gilbert, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Jeff Thomas, Justin Wonnacott, and Andrew Wright. Through their practices, these artists continue the long history of photography in Ottawa. Since Canada is a relatively young political construct, the invention of photography actually predates confederation by 28 years. The Canadian government was quick to recognize the value of documentary photography as a nation-building tool. In 1861 Samuel McLauglin became the first official government photographer in the Department of Public Works for what was then still the Province of Canada, when he was commissioned to photograph the construction of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. In “Another Place, at the Same Time,” Gabrielle Moser writes eloquently about how the evolution of colonialism and photography has been intertwined. She writes, “However different their stylization and subject matter, colonial photographic projects shared the same all-encompassing world view: a belief that space could be objectively captured by the camera, sorted into filing systems, and archived as empirical knowledge”(59).  A similar argument could be made about the way that photography has been used by the Canadian government, reflected in the activities of institutions such as the National Gallery, the National Film Board and the National Archives, whereby a territory has been claimed through its representation. In “Notes on the Index,” Krauss makes reference to Roland Barthes’ notion that the indexical photograph is a “message without a code” in order to show how photographs invite supplementary captions to fix their meaning and their use. The artists in Book Marks are surely aware of this history of the use and abuse of photography, as they have actively engaged in dialogue with it. As shown in the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition, Canadian Landscapes, Lorraine Gilbert has made a career out of photographing landscapes in order to question colonial exploitation and occupation of the land in Canada. Her work, Eagle’s Nest, Bancroft (2012), through subtle digital manipulation, shows the ongoing commercial and colonial encroachment on the land, as Tim Hortons become fixtures in the picturesque wilderness of Algonquin Park. Similarly, Rosalie Favell has undertaken the massive and ongoing photography project, Facing the Camera, which is comprised of portraits of Native American and Indigenous artists and arts professionals, as a means of making visible the community with which she identifies. Writing about Favell’s project, Steven Loft argues that it comprises “a visual repudiation of colonialist histories” and is “what Jolene Rickard has called ‘the documentation of our sovereignty’”(9). These two examples show how contemporary artists in Canada have been working to produce narratives that question the processes and the outcomes of the colonial project. 

Detail of Duncan de Kergommeaux installation. Photo: Michael Davidge

Although photographs have done much to shape our perception of the cultural landscape in Canada, architecture and public art installations comprise actual physical interventions in it. The Ottawa membership of the RCA has certainly made a distinct contribution to the built environment or cityscape of Ottawa, and there would be another long history to tell that definitely falls outside the parameters of this essay. Current member architects include Tony Griffiths, Barry Padolsky, John Cook and Douglas Cardinal. Thomas Fuller, architect of the original Parliament Buildings, was one of the first members of the RCA. Another RCA member, John A. Pearson, redesigned the Centre Block after a devastating fire in 1916. The juxtaposition of this iconic building with another in the National Capital Region reveals a contrast in visions. On the other side of the Ottawa River, directly opposite that iconic seat of government that has been referred to as “Westminster in the wilderness,” lies Douglas Cardinal’s Canadian Museum of History. As detailed in his book, Design Principles: Canadian Museum of History, Cardinal proposes that the building, completed in 1989, represents a vision of a later era in Canadian history that redefines, in dialogue with Parliament Hill, what can be achieved when everyone in Canada works together to attain a common goal. With the contribution of colleagues in his architectural firm he writes, “The Museum organically harmonizes the Canadian landscape with its cultural heritage and represents the uniqueness of Canada as a place where emigrant nations from all over the world meet, blend and learn to thrive with the Aboriginal inhabitants.”(83). Krauss’s essay offers an intriguing model for the interpretation of sculptural installation – and by extension, the architecture it activates –through its indexicality.  My reading of these two buildings has probably more to do with their symbolism, but each does act as an index of an historical era. Side by side, they are like still images in a time-lapse film narrating the construction of a capital city. The sense of two time periods that arises through their proximity suggests to me that the sense of indexicality results from a physical disruption that prompts awareness and leads to an interpretive act.

The sense of discontinuity the index inspires may become more apparent through the citation of some examples of public art by Ottawa members of the RCA Members in Ottawa. Jerry Grey’s first public mural commission, The Great Canadian Equalizer (1979), as described by Susan Crean in her catalogue essay for On the Grid, can be seen as an interpretive gloss on the activities of Statistics Canada. Located in the very building which houses that government agency, the mural articulates the artist’s vision for a society that promises “equality built on difference”(59). Adrian Gollner’s project Modern U (2003) installed temporary signs featuring abstract symbolism on buildings throughout Carleton University’s campus in order to inspire the viewer to learn more about the architectural history there. In both works, the art installation leads the viewer from a physical encounter with its site to a meta-narrative or interpretation of its meaning, in a process by which unapparent aspects of it are made known. 

Anyone who wishes to learn more about the installation of public art in Ottawa has a great resource in Justin Wonnacott’s Pictures of Art (2017). In a seemingly quixotic undertaking, Wonnacott has obsessively photographed hundreds of instances of public art in the National Capital Region. The empirical or encyclopedic impetus of the project is undercut by the partial views and idiosyncratic choices Wonnacott makes, but it is perhaps the most categorically indexical example I have listed yet. Indeed, the publication, which is the most readily accessible element of the project, does include an alphabetized index of the artists whose works are featured. Each instance is photographed in situ and supplemented by the artist(s) name(s), title, date, materials and location of each work so that a reader could track it down if so inspired. The same questions that drive him to make these pictures, such as “What is it for? Why does it look like that?” are likely to be asked the readers of the book (7). A thorough perusal of the series is revelatory, particularly for anyone who has walked around Ottawa and wondered about the public art, both good and bad, that is in full view. For example, I’ve often wondered about the piece “Canadian Shield” that adorns the Ottawa Courthouse and didn’t know that it was made by the artist collective General Idea until I saw Wonnacott’s book.  I’ve also passed by a mysterious building on Durocher Street in Vanier without ever noticing or guessing that current RCA member Duncan De Kergommeaux had contributed a brick mural to it, employing a minimalist aesthetic similar to his more well known paintings. These disruptions of my environment, aided by Wonnacott’s indexing them, contribute to a deepening of the narrative that I can make out of it, like a movie in my mind. 

Finally, it is important to remember that first and foremost, language is comprised of signs too, so books also bear the qualities of indexicality. I’ve been talking about photographs and architecture and public art for the most part, but I’ve also made reference to the publications in Book Marks that document these items and make them public. I should also mention that several of the RCA members are graphic designers who work on the production of such books.  This exhibition provided the opportunity to exhibit the rare and coveted Donald Judd catalogue designed by Eiko Emori for the National Gallery of Canada. At a public talk that she gave about her design work, I also saw the invitation that Emori designed for the exhibition, which made reference to the fact that a bagpiper formally opened the reception. Through this bit of ephemera, I discovered that Judd was a bagpipe enthusiast and hired them for such occasions after first encountering them on a trip to Canada. In Index, a retrospective look at artist and designer Robert Tombs’ work, I made the observation that a comprehensive history of contemporary art in Canada has been written, and that it resides in the innumerable little publications that have been produced to tell it. Given that it is within the mandate of the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) to focus on and support the Ottawa art community, it is not surprising that many OAG catalogues can be found in this exhibition. Nor is it surprising that a good number of the current Ottawa-based RCA members can be found in the grand opening survey show at the new OAG, Àdisòkàmagan / Nous connaître un peu nousmêmes / We’ll all become stories. Publishing is an important way that artists can have their work made public and institutional support is a crucial aspect of the sustenance of their careers.  This is not to say that artists don’t advocate for themselves when there is a lack of institutional support or interest. In fact the OAG came into being as the result of the advocacy of local artists.

Taken together, the publications on view in “Book Marks” tell a story about contemporary art in Ottawa. It is not complete by far, but it does indicate the significant contribution made by local members of the RCA. With reference to Krauss’s essay and her evocation of Roland Barthes’ theories about photography, I am compelled to apply a sense of the future-orientation of the sign to the items I have discussed and those that are on view in the exhibition.  In Barthes, there is an immediate slippage in the snapshot of a scene from the sense of its being there to its having been there, or as Krauss puts it, the indexicality of the works she describes achieve “the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote”(65). This is generally understood as an evocation of the past, even in the present. Through an artist’s architectural intervention, such as Stuart’s wall rubbings, a building is brought into the viewer’s consciousness almost as if in the form of a ghost of itself (Krauss 65). However, I would say that this uncanny feeling arises from that fact that it is not the building that becomes a ghost in that moment of awareness, but the viewer.  There is an element in the sign, be it a photograph, a work of art, a book, or an historical plaque, that remains sealed like a time capsule, intended only for a future audience. 

Works Cited

Cardinal, Douglas. Design Principles: Canadian Museum of History. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of History, 2016.

Crean, Susan. “Journey to the End of Art.” Jerry Grey: On the Grid 1968-1978. Ottawa: Ottawa Art Gallery, 2016. 54-60.

Davidge, Michael. “The Telling Detail: Robert Tombs by Design.” Robert Tombs: Index – Graphic Works 1985 – 2015. Sackville: Owens Art Gallery, 2015. 121-126.

Gilbert, Lorraine. Paysages Canadiens / Canadian Landscapes. Saint-Hyacinthe: EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, 2017.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America.” October, Vol. 3 (Spring 1977). 68-81.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2.” October, Vol. 4 (Autumn 1977). 58-67.

Lefebvre, Martin. “The Art of Pointing. On Pierce, Indexicality, and Photographic Images.” Photography Theory. Ed. James Elkins. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. 220-244.

Loft, Steven. “Looking at Me, Looking at You.” Facing the Camera. Winnipeg: Urban Shaman, 2012. 8-9.

Moser, Gabrielle. “In Another Place, at the Same Time” In Another Place, and Here. Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2015. 54-74.

Cultural Engineering: Addenda

After nine quarterly issues of an online video magazine (www.culturalengineering.ca), the Cultural Engineering project comes to a close with the opening of the exhibition, Addenda, in SAW Video's new project space The Knot from January 25 until March 3, 2018.

The artists participating in the project have eloquently borne witness to the historic infrastructural investment at Arts Court that has substantially transformed the downtown of Ottawa and given a significant boost to the stature of local arts organizations. Stationed as critical observers more so than cheerleaders of the undertaking, the two stalwarts of the project, Meredith Snider and Tim I. Smith, have contributed videos to each issue of the magazine since its launch in February 2015. A number of guest artists have also contributed videos, expanding the points of view and adding to the diverse range of topics addressed, including city planning, social justice, Indigenous issues, transgender rights, labour, and the conservation of built history, among others. With the exhibition, the first in The Knot, the Cultural Engineering artists have been given an opportunity to go offline and make a physical intervention at Arts Court.

Meredith Snider, Communal Artifact (reused), mixed media, 2018

Each artist in Addenda is contributing work that incorporates and transforms materials that have been salvaged during the demolition phase of the Arts Court renovation. In keeping with the structure of the previous online installments of the project, the exhibition includes new work by Snider and Smith, as well as work by guest artist, Mélanie Myers.

Addenda is fittingly titled since the catalogue for the Cultural Engineering project was produced over a year ago. Information about the exhibition will actually be found in an addendum to the publication. The title of the exhibition is in the plural form to suggest there are many instances within the exhibition (not to speak of the Arts Court redevelopment itself) where things have been added with an aim towards improvement. One could say that it applies to SAW Video too, since it is only now after 35 years that it has added an exhibition space to its operations. The Cultural Engineering project has demonstrated that city building (and the growth of arts organizations) is an unfinished project that is always open to the redress of historical omissions and to an update in plans.

100 Years of Art in 100 Minutes

100 Years of Art was a collaborative celebration of the Agnes Etheringthon Art Centre and the Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre and a combination of their milestone anniversaries. Taking place in the Agnes Atrium, the “100 Minutes for 100 Years” forum marked both galleries’ respective 60th and 40th anniversaries of championing visual art. Invited presenters represented each decade of both organization's existence and offered anecdotes and insights in ten dynamic 10-minute slots, conjuring the highlights and turning points within the history of each organization.

I was responsible for summarizing the years at Modern Fuel between 2007 and 2017. The text of my presentation, which I had to deliver quickly so that I could squeeze it all in, was as follows:

Modern Fuel : A Work in Progress, 2017.

It is a real honor for me to be here and to have been asked to speak about the last ten years of activity at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. I was only there for the first five out of the ten, and though I’ve followed the gallery since I moved away from Kingston at the end of 2012, I can only speak more knowledgeably about the time I was here, and so there may be a number of gaps in my presentation.

Preparing for this talk, I was reminded of how the task of organizing a 30^th Anniversary event and exhibition fell to me soon after I started working as the Artistic Director in 2007. The exhibition came to have the title Instances: 30 Years of Modern Fuel and the K.A.A.I. and it was based on the collection of KAAI/MFARC documents stored in the Queen’s University Archives. [Note: K.A.A.I. or the Kingston Artist’s Association, Incorporated, was the original name of the organization. I think staff changed it to Modern Fuel because they got tired of answering the phone, “Hello, K.A.A.I., how can I help you?”] The exhibition addressed the need to preserve and document the histories of alternative art practices and politics in Kingston at the same time that it questioned the accessibility of that past, the reliability of memory, and the very impossibility of presenting a total account, that any history will be partial, selective, and subjective. These themes were underscored by presenting an oral history of the centre with a memorable event from each year of its existence recalled by an individual involved with the gallery at that time. These memories were recorded for an audio guide and then were printed in Braille on white sheets and displayed at eye level in the white-walled gallery, giving it the appearance at first glance of being empty. (Of course, soon after we installed those sheets we had a sweaty dance party in the gallery and they all buckled from the humidity. The floor too was a disaster, scuffed and dirtied by the dancers). At that time, as I do now, I also thought it was important to stress that that gallery was a space of potential that generated the future as much as the past.

So with Instances in mind I feel obligated to stress that my account of the last decade will be partial, selective and subjective, especially since I have ten minutes to sum it all up. And in the course of doing so I won’t be able to name all the staff, board members, volunteers and community members who have made Modern Fuel such a special place. Instead I’ll have to cut to the chase: The single most important decision and outcome in that time, I think, has been the move to the Tett Centre, for better or for worse. Many of us who were involved with the decision and planning for it left town before it happened, so we didn’t have to deal with the consequences. But I do think that we made the right decision, not merely for the improvements to its infrastructure and most importantly its accessibility, but also because I think that in order for Modern Fuel to move forward it had to move.  It was literally stuck in the same place for over thirty years and its location was increasingly becoming a liability for the organization.

The move to the Tett is linked in my mind to a term that had great currency in artist-run culture at the time and probably still does: Professionalization. This word was often met with distrust if not hostility, but I don’t believe that it is a bad thing. I’ve been trying to become a professional my entire life and I’m still not there yet. And we have certainly made some advances in terms of professionalizing the gallery in the past few years, with additional staff positions, salaries and benefits. Of course the mandate of the gallery is the professional development of emerging artists (and you could also say curators). I sometimes wonder how long it can take for an artist to emerge. What I mean to say is that “professionalization” should be understood as an ongoing process. Indeed, it often felt like we were just making it up as we were going along.

I like to recall how the first cast members of the television show Saturday Night Live were called the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. The phrase suggested that there was an element of danger, or risk and uncertainty in their performances. It still retains a sense of the unaccomplished, of the yet to be accomplished, which I think is applicable to Modern Fuel.

This is not to say that Modern Fuel hasn’t accomplished some great things. We’ve had too many excellent exhibitions over the years to mention here, with many of the artists going on win or be nominated for the Sobey Awards or the Polaris awards (and some of them from previous decades have gone on to win Governor General’s Awards). [Catch ’em first at Modern Fuel folks, that’s my tip for you today.] For me the really memorable occasions are the ones where we collaborated with the community to make something happen, such as the time that we screened videos documenting the social practice of the Cuban artist René Francisco during the harvest celebration in what was then called the FRILL community garden (Friends Revitalizing Industrial Lands Lovingly) adjacent to the No Frills grocery store that was in the Swamp Ward neighbourhood (2008); or when Adrian Stimson in the guise of Buffalo Boy, wearing fishnet stockings, rode a coin-operated horse through the streets of Kingston in the Pride Parade in 2008. We’ve had so many successful and impactful collaborations with so many organizations: the Multicultural Arts Festival and the Film Festival and Cubafest. I haven’t even mentioned the Agnes and the Union Gallery. When we presented a series of Indigenous performance art called Acting Out, Claiming Space in 2011 we probably had our longest list of collaborators and sponsors for an event yet. This took place right after the repairs to damages from a second floor flood had been completed and the walls and the floor in the gallery had never looked better. Of course, right then the artist Jordan Bennett chose to present a durational skateboarding performance in the gallery, placing the floors in peril once again. Such is the way it goes. I just wanted to mention that Board Member Carla Taunton was instrumental to connecting us with many of the Indigenous artists and curators that we worked with over this time. One of my favourite memories is of the Voice Off workshops that we ran in 2009, where Indigenous video artists worked with youth at the Katarokwi Native Friendship Centre to produce videos which we screened in Market Square for one of the Art After Dark gallery crawls.

And another outstanding event was a performance that was part of an exhibition titled I Can Only Make It Up Once by the Kingston artist Lisa Figge. It was one of the last exhibitions at the gallery while I was still here. Exploring disability as a location of knowledge, Figge makes artworks in order to renegotiate the terms of living in a body that is no longer able-bodied. In a moving and powerful performance, Figge traversed the two flights of stairs that were necessary to get into the old Modern Fuel, flights of stairs which had curtailed her involvement with the gallery. I have looked at spaces in terms of their accessibility ever since.

Finally, I wanted to say that working at Modern Fuel was a very rewarding time for me and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to be involved and be one of the many who have overseen this great project since its inception in 1977. I am heartened to see some of the initiatives I undertook as Artistic Director continuing to this day, such as the Vapours experimental music concerts, the Syphon newspaper, Square Pegs video art screenings, and even Your Own Grad School. (The Your Own Grad School proposal was a submission that was turned down by the selection committee (perhaps because it was too nebulous) but I brought it forward as a personal project.) It was hard to know what would come of it, but that is the nature of the unanticipated or the untested. This reminds me of the time in 2007 that the artist Jess MacCormack totally changed at the last minute the project she did in Kingston from the one that she had proposed. It was okay though because the new and unexpected project was better: in a residency with Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre at The Artel, she worked on an art project with the women in The Isabel MacNeil House (the only low security federal prison for women in Canada) that resulted in an animated film. I’m still astounded by this achievement. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without the Artel, where MacCormack was in residence for a month and where her exhibition was held.

Unfortunately there is no time to outline the vibrant and brief history of The Artel arts residence that was launched with Modern Fuel’s support during this time, but I did want to mention one of the Artel’s founding residents, Lisa Visser, who sadly passed away, much too young, in 2013. Lisa was the kind of artist (and curator) – critical, courageous and kind – that Modern Fuel needs, and of course she was involved. If people like her continue to be involved, Modern Fuel will remain relevant and alive, open to new ideas, new directions, the unknown, and the yet to be accomplished.

Writer-in-Residence at Est-Nord-Est

I was the Writer-in-Residence for the fall residency at Est-Nord-Est (ENE), an artist-run centre in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec that hosts an international community of artists and authors in contemporary art. Situated in a small village on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, the residency offers a great opportunity for artistic experimentation and research in a unique setting with a rich history.

ENE began with the idea of facilitating encounters between contemporary artists and the traditional artisans of the region, and now ENE welcomes contemporary visual-arts artists from all disciplines. It also encourages writing about contemporary art through its writer's residency. There are three residency periods, offered in the spring, summer, and fall, and they usually bring together four artists and one author in contemporary art. 

For my residency, the artists were: Jennifer Belair, a printmaker from Detroit; Sophie Jaillet, a conceptual artist from Montréal; Christoph Mügge, an installation artist from Malmö; and Céline Struger, a sculptor from Vienna. 

L-R: Sophie Jaillet, Jennifer Belair, Christoph Mügge, Céline Struger, Michael Davidge

During my time in Saint-Jean-Port Joli, I conducted studio visits with the artists-in-residence and prepared a text on the residency for a future issue of Est-Nord-Est's publication, Mémento. I was also working on my own research project, entitled “Further to an Aesthetic Education.” The project is an exploration of the relationship between aesthetics, education, and politics that takes Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man as a source of inspiration. My residency ran from October 9 to November 3, 2017, and I gave an artist talk during the open house on the night of October 26, 2017.

A Herstory of Punk in Ottawa

As part of the She Wants an Output exhibition, I organized a series of events that included a panel discussion on October 5th and a night of performances on October 6th, 2017.

The panel discussion took place in the Alumni Association Reading Room at the MacOdrum Library on campus in conjunction with a reception for the exhibition. The panel was comprised of artist and musician Mary Anne Barkhouse, musician and arts administrator Keltie Duncan, and writer and curator Julia Pine, while I acted as a moderator. Prominently featured in the exhibition, Barkhouse and Pine spoke about their experiences in the punk rock scene in Ottawa in the late '70s and early '80s, while Duncan, who is currently in the band Bonnie Doon, brought the panel up to the present.

Similarly, on the following night, a series of performances established a continuity between the spirit of the past with today's practitioners. Setting the mood, DJ Jas Nasty played a selection of records featuring punk women throughout the night.

Steve Bates and jake moore presented Trilogy x:y:z, a performance consisting of three sound-based works drawing from their histories in punk and post-punk music, art, DIY culture, anarchist and leftist politics. Steve Bates is an artist and musician living in Montréal, His work has been exhibited and performed in Canada, the United States, Europe and Senegal. jake moore is an intermedia artist whose primary medium is space. She works at the intersections of material, text, and vocality to make exhibitions, events and other kinds of public interventions. She gained early art and life experience as the singer in the all-female punk rock band, The Ruggedy Annes, out of Winnipeg. The Ruggedy Annes are featured in the MATRAX compilation, a key document in the She Wants an Output exhibition.

Bonnie Doon closed the night with a fiery set. They are an Ottawa-based post-punk foursome drawing inspiration from spooky beaches and pizza joints. Dooner Nooner, their debut LP, is out now and available at finer record stores. Bonnie Doon melts faces with waves of controlled dissonance and unabashed wolf calls to the moon.

She Wants an Output

For Carleton University Art Gallery's fall programming, I curated an exhibition running from September 1 to October 29, 2017 in Carleton University's MacOdrum Library entitled She Wants an Output. The exhibition looks back at the history of the 1980s punk music scene in Ottawa, through the work of two women who were involved in it: Mary Anne Barkhouse and Julia Pine. The oppositional shout of punk rock was sounding throughout the world at that time, including in Ottawa. A small but vibrant community sprang up here, inspired by the DIY attitude and political consciousness of the movement. Women were key players in the scene, but their story has seldom been told.

Mary Anne Barkhouse, pelage II, mixed media, 1999. 

Restless Virgins were a first-wave punk rock band active in the Ottawa music scene in the early ‘80s. Notably, its bass player, Mary Anne Barkhouse, went on to a celebrated career as an artist. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Barkhouse’s pelage (1999-2000), a work composed of four appliquéd blankets, reminiscent of the button blankets used by First Nations of the Northwest Coast for ceremonial purposes. Each blanket represents a stage in Barkhouse’s life and her development as an artist. Three of the four blankets are on display. The pelage II blanket makes reference to the ten years between 1975 and 1985 when she played, toured and recorded with bands like Restless Virgins.

A selection of items in the She Wants an Output exhibition.

Accompanying Barkhouse’s work is an eclectic selection from Julia Pine’s collection of zines, flyers, records and other ephemera from her “punk days,” when she was involved in the small but vibrant scene as a musician, producer, writer and community organizer, from about 1978 until 1985. The selection will include documents from a project that Pine co-produced with Colleen Howe in 1985: the MATRAX compilation cassette, which featured thirteen all-female bands from Canada, the US and the UK.

Pine’s collection points to the central role women played in the exceptionally diverse local scene and highlights their strong commitment to progressive ideas that were, and continue to be, far from the mainstream.

Cultural Engineering: Flow Chart

The Cultural Engineering project was launched over two years ago, and each issue has showcased artworks that were commissioned by SAW Video as way to chart the Arts Court redevelopment and document its transformation. Each issue has also offered artists a chance look at the Arts Court from new perspectives. It’s easy to imagine that flow charts were used for project management on this ambitious infrastructure development. If a flow chart is a diagram of the sequence of actions in a complex activity that helps to illustrate a process, then one that traced the course of the Cultural Engineering project in retrospect would undoubtedly reveal a complicated and perhaps contradictory trajectory: one that might double back on itself just as much as it might pursue an oblique angle down an unfinished path. Like all endeavors that are meant to be democratic, Cultural Engineering has been subject to change, depending upon the individuals who have been invited to contribute to it.

Cara Tierney, Melt in. To Spring, digital video, 2017.

Going with the flow of the previous issues of Cultural Engineering, the final online installment features two new videos by Meredith Snider and Timothy Smith, as well as a third video by a guest artist. In her video for this issue, “Culture Lives Where?” Snider poses two questions to people in the vicinity of the Arts Court (“What is culture?” and “Where does culture live?”) and the results are as diverse as the people who participate. In “Past & Present,” Smith animates archival photographs in order to propel the viewer back to the earliest years of the building’s history, capturing the flow of time and offering fascinating glimpses of the transformation of the site, and you might say its political fortunes. The guest artist for the ninth issue, Cara Tierney, connects and mixes several separate events into one powerful montage that suggests positive change is going to come for transgender rights, but only because of persistent pressure. Tierney and the other artists in this issue offer evidence that we can effect change as much as we are affected by it. Link to the ninth issue here.

Research Residency at Artexte

In the spring of 2017 I am beginning a research residency at Artexte in Montreal on the work of Jayce Salloum as alternative media. Jayce Salloum has made a career out of interrogating the complicated nature of representation and the power of images and text. His career has also intersected in an extraordinary way with the history of artist-run centres and arts collectives. Salloum has continuously and ingeniously addressed the public through various channels, including performances, photographs, installations, postcards, stencils, mail art, bookworks, magazine projects, and videos.

A page of Jayce Salloum slides in the Artexte archives.

Considering Salloum’s work as a form of alternative media, I will be particularly interested in studying Salloum’s publishing activities in artist’s books and magazines, which offer a unique lens through which to bring the history of artist-run centres and artists’ publishing into focus. One goal of this residency is to underscore the manner in which Salloum’s work presents an alternative to the mainstream media’s representation of war, the nation state, and the nature of conflict, while highlighting the importance of artist-run centres as platforms for alternative views. Link to the Artexte page about my residency here.

Cultural Engineering: Wayfinding

Wayfinding is a term that is used to designate various architectural features or design elements within a building or a built environment that help people to navigate their way through a space. Such items, including signs that lead you to the washrooms or to an information kiosk or map, are especially important in large complicated environments like the Arts Court.  In the second issue of the Cultural Engineering project, Rachel Kalpana James humorously invoked through a series of guided meditations the labyrinthine nature of the Arts Court building and the myriad organizations it houses. The redevelopment will give everyone involved another crack at designing a wayfinding system.

Meredith Snider, Hard To Let Go: I Put My Blindfold Back On, 2017, digital video.

In their own way, the three videos in the eighth issue of the Cultural Engineering project offer signposts to the redevelopment of Arts Court. Meredith Snider’s video, “Hard to let go: I put my blindfold back on,” documents a performance by Lily Koltun that functions metaphorically as a guided tour of the Arts Court in the midst of its renovation.  Tim Smith’s video “SAW Video January 2017” provides a portrait of the physical space of SAW Video contemporaneous with the date in its title. In a different vein, guest artist Awar Obab’s video is an important reminder that with success artists can lose sight of their original intentions and ultimately lose their way. It also serves as a caveat that arts organizations can lose their way too, as they grow into institutions and become less flexible and less responsive to the immediate needs of their communities. Link to the eighth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Blank Slate

The title for Cultural Engineering’s seventh issue is inspired by the video contributed by the guest artists Adam Brown and Geneviève Cloutier, “Summerhill on Major’s Hill.” It documents the project they ran this summer out of the BLINK Gallery, which they modelled after the Summerhill School and other experimental education initiatives. That the Library of Parliament can be seen as a backdrop to their activities resonates with the fact that Summerhill is a democratic project, wherein the school’s curriculum is determined at meetings in which everyone, teacher and student included, has an equal vote. The “blank slate” or tabula rasa is a very old philosophical concept that is linked to education, but I would simply like to think of it as a kind of “reset” button that is forward thinking rather than fixated on the past. A surface on which you can write, erase what you’ve written, and write again, the blank slate provides an inclusive, permissive environment for everyone’s contributions since nothing is permanent. Over the course of two weeks, the participants in Brown and Cloutier’s project built a space marked by imagination and play, which is exactly what the Arts Court aspires to be.

Adam Brown and Geneviève Cloutier, Summerhill on Major’s Hill, 2016, digital video.

Other videos in the issue are also associated with the theme. The activities of the children in “Summerhill on Major’s Hill” are echoed in Timothy Smith’s video, “Vertical,” where the makeshift play structures are replaced by heavy duty construction equipment. With her video “The Courtyard,” Meredith Snider continues to look at spaces around Arts Court, gathering an informal history of places that will cease to exist or be transformed into something else over the course of the redevelopment. While the concept of the blank slate connotes erasure, I would rather it suggest revision, according to Alexander Sutherland Neill’s principle “Freedom, not Licence.” The founder of Summerhill, Neill intended for those at the school to be free to do as they pleased as long as they did no harm to others. The blank slate, while unable to deny its pre-existing conditions, allows for the necessary interventions in them. Link to the seventh issue here.

Cultural Engineering Book Launch and Panel Discussion

On September 29th, SAW Video is celebrating the launch of its new publication, Cultural Engineering, a limited edition art book which both documents and reflects upon the ongoing, long-term project of the same name. I have been excited to be involved not only as the project coordinator but also the publication coordinator, and I am happy to see this come to fruition. Since early 2015, Ottawa-based artists have been responding both critically and artistically to the Arts Court Redevelopment Project as it unfolds from 2015-2017, engaging the community in an open public dialogue and exchange of ideas. To date, six distinct issues have been published online, each featuring original media art produced by the artists with an accompanying essay by yours truly.

Cultural Engineering. Ottawa: SAW Video, 2016.

The launch event also marks the online publication of the project’s seventh issue. Meredith Snider and Tim I. Smith (the project’s resident artists) gave presentations on their work to date, and the guest artists for the seventh issue, Adam Brown and Genevieve Cloutier, also gave presentations on their work. After these presentations, I moderated a panel discussion with the artists, which was followed by a Q+A period.

The Cultural Engineering publication, designed by Simon Guibord, is an art book that features images and texts that engage with the project from a variety of vantage points. The publication includes an essay by me as well as engaging contributions by artist and writer Tom Sherman, writer Zoe Todd, a visual poem by poet Vera Wabegijig, images and texts by participating artists Tim I. Smith and Meredith Snider, and an introduction by SAW Video director Penny McCann.

The publication is available to purchase through SAW Video. An excerpt of the publication, including my essay, is available online here.

Cultural Engineering: On the Level

If someone says they are being “on the level” with you, it means that they are being honest with you. The idiomatic expression implies more than mere honesty, however. It shows a kind of camaraderie. You can tell someone you’re on the level, you can ask if someone is on the level, and you can request someone to level with you: in each case you discard whatever differences there might be between the two of you and speak as equals. Apparently, the expression has its root in the Freemasons, an organization that takes the tools of the building trade for their symbols. In the Masonic Order, the level is a symbol for equality. Ironically, the Masons are known in popular culture for being secretive and conspiring for world domination. A parallel could be drawn between the Masons’ activities and the Arts Court redevelopment: the building is being engineered as an inclusive public space for cultural expression and yet the arts are often characterized as being esoteric and elitist. If arts organizations are seen to be operating in secret, it probably has more to do with their limited advertising budgets than with any orchestrated attempt to shut people out.

Guillermo Trejo, Eclipsing Justice, 2016, digital video.

The phrase “on the level” provides a lens through which to examine the contributions of the artists in Issue Six of the Cultural Engineering project. Timothy Smith once again brings his incisive focus to bear on the site of the OAG expansion and the actions of the construction workers therein. Another new video by Meredith Snider goes behind the scenes at Arts Court to get some candid reflections on the impact of the Arts Court redevelopment on the lives of the people who work there. And finally Guillermo Trejo, this issue’s guest artist, brings attention to level of a different kind, the balance scale of Justice. His video focuses on a detail of the Arts Court complex leftover from its previous incarnation as a courthouse: a bas-relief of the mythic figure of Justice (blindfolded, holding a sword and a balance scale) that was added as ornamentation to an architectural expansion of the courthouse in 1964. The artists in the Cultural Engineering project have been steadfastly producing work that takes steps to demystify at least some of the goings on at the Arts Court. Link to the sixth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Action Items

The contents of Issue 5, "Action Items," broaden the scope of the Cultural Engineering project beyond the walls of the Arts Court. However, their interconnectedness suggests that a pattern could be perceived no matter what level of magnification you took to look at this city. It is perhaps unsurprising that the exhortation to think globally and act locally is attributed to an urban planner. The artists in this issue are also thinking locally to act globally.

Meredith Snider, Acts of Decolonization in Space & Time, 2016, digital video.

Action items, in management lingo, are specific tasks assigned to individuals at the end of a meeting. These actions are intended to advance the cause of the group, whatever that may be, and each person is expected to report back about the end result. One video in this issue, Tim Smith’s “Scale,” astonishingly illustrates the manner in which large undertakings are actually the end result of many people accomplishing numerous particular tasks. One uninterrupted take zooms out from a single construction worker and shows his place in the larger construction site and its orchestrated activities. Meredith Snider's contributions reflect the ways that the dominant colonial culture is embedded in the very landscape of the country, down to the “micro-spaces” of the city. This issue’s guest artist, Eric Archambault, presents his video “Autopia,” a meditation on transportation infrastructure and the impact of private development.

As passersby, we tend to focus only on the outsized items, such as construction cranes, and lose sight of the specific part that individuals play. From a variety of perspectives, the artists in this issue reveal the singular actions that in varying degrees constitute the warp and weft of the city. Link to the fifth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Cement Mix

For the fourth issue of SAW Video's Cultural Engineering project, both Tim I. Smith and Meredith Snider bring their focus to bear on the deep pit that will soon provide the foundation for the new Arts Court tower. If you have been watching the videos from the previous issues, you will note that a lot has changed at this location at the corner of Daly and Waller. Cityscapes act as impressive records of history that appear to be cemented in place. Still, the fixed properties of concrete, stone and rock can also be made malleable through action and erosion. The artists in this issue overtly manipulate their source material, through time-lapses, cuts, jumps, and the addition of electronic sounds, suggesting that intervention in the course of history is always possible. You could say that the artists are remixing the events of the Arts Court reconstruction as it unfolds. Each remix has been constructed to draw your attention to the elements highlighted by the artists.

Timothy I. Smith, The Pit, November 28th, 2015, 2015, digital video.

In Tim I. Smith’s work, The Pit, November 28th, 2015, we witness the end of the excavation stage for the Arts Court redevelopment and the removal of the heavy machinery in preparation for the next stage. Smith has compressed the events of an entire workday into one two-minute video using long exposure photography to record the action. Smith has stated that the main theme in his work is photography, a medium that also once had the property of being fixed. In the digital era, new connotations for “fixed” arise in photography, both positive and pejorative. Smith’s composition reveals itself to be as constructed as the site that is his subject.

Meredith Snider’s Break Ground opens with a “ground breaking” party held in the offices of the Ottawa Art Gallery to celebrate the beginning of the redevelopment project. In her role as a Cultural Engineering artist, Snider has taken a fly-on-the-wall approach, often focusing on overlooked or seemingly peripheral elements of the project. At a training session to gain access to the construction site, she found that the dangerous nature of that environment was something she rarely considered. In response, Snider has created a music video in collaboration with Jésus Tovar to underscore the skillful choreography of the construction work as well as the risk in its undertaking. Her video ends by honoring an often unsung workforce.

Considering the artists’ contributions to this issue as remixes sees them participating in the history of music as well as the history of the Arts Court redevelopment. In the history of music, innovations have almost always at first been dissonant to the ear, only to be later accepted as customary. In that way, new music announces the future. Remixes at least keep the material up to date, reminding us that change is not only a constant but also a main component in the construction of the future. Link to the fourth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Reverse Engineering

The third issue of SAW Video's Cultural Engineering project is online. The artworks in this issue return to similar terrain in order to deepen their impact on it. Timothy Smith’s contribution, a video entitled Truck Route 95 Southbound, August 7th, 2015 offers a great view of the initial stages of the construction, but it also makes a pointed comment about the heavy traffic that is intractable to the area. Meredith Snider’s video, The Green Space, traverses a space that has now disappeared, which will also be the fate of the corridor she documented in her last installment. Though both videos reflect change, they also reveal perennial issues that face larger cities.

Timothy I. Smith, Truck Route 95 Southbound, August 7th, 2015, 2015, digital video

Also in this issue, the photographer and filmmaker Jackson Couse debuts a series of segmented interviews that will comprise an aggregate social portrait of Arts Court. Couse also presents ‘Scuse, a preliminary field recording of the environment at Arts Court.

Reverse engineering is the process of taking an object apart in order to see how it was made and then perhaps to discover ways to improve it. The intention of the Cultural Engineering project is not only to document this historic change to Ottawa’s cultural landscape from the ground up, but also to involve the community and their voices in the process of its transformation. The third issue is being launched as part of the event Desire Lines organized by SAW Video for Nuit Blanche Ottawa+Gatineau 2015. Link to the third issue here.

OSA Downtown Instructors' Exhibition

It was a pleasure to be invited in the Summer of 2015 to curate the annual Instructors' Exhibition for the Downtown campus of the Ottawa School of Art. The exhibition's dates run from August 6, 2015 to September 6, 2015.

Each instructor was asked to submit up to three works. It was up to me to choose one of their works to put in the show. Those who only submitted one work made the decision easy for me. Those who submitted three required a lot more of my deliberation. Some were selected simply on the strength of their proposal and with faith that the work would turn out as proposed. I am happy to say that I was pleased with the results.

As a whole, the exhibition is a concise portrait of the diversity and the talents of the instructors at the OSA. You could view it with an eye towards refining your artistic skills and potentially selecting a teacher to follow in the development of your own practice. Or, you could simply enjoy the show and let the teachers do all the work.

Cultural Engineering: Desire Lines

The second issue of SAW Video’s Cultural Engineering project is online, appearing moments before the construction hoarding is scheduled to go up and the first stage of the physical transformation at Arts Court begins. Meredith Snider and Timothy I. Smith have each produced another installment in their ongoing investigation of the redevelopment process, and guest artist Rachel Kalpana James makes a unique contribution to the latest edition. 

Rachel Kalpana James, Meditations on Cultural Engineering, 2015. digital video

In the process of responding to the Arts Court redevelopment, the artists have added to a broader understanding of what the phrase “cultural engineering” might mean. If it is understood as a method of planning to increase public participation in cultural life, then one would hope for every success in the cultural engineering of Ottawa’s Arts Court. An analogy for a sympathetic type of cultural engineering might be found in the way that some urban planners take into account how people actually use public space before they lay down pathways. These paths can be guided by the “desire lines” cut into the earth by pedestrian traffic. Now that change is underway at Arts Court, the interventions of the artists in the Cultural Engineering project can be considered to be making visible the desire lines within the overarching redevelopment. Link to the second issue here.

Good Afternoon

On Saturday May 9, 2015, Carleton University Art Gallery presented Good Afternoon, a program of performances I curated as part of the National Arts Centre's Ontario Scene. The performers included Christof Migone, MORTIFIED (Camilla Singh and Jenn Goodwin), Bridget Moser, Lisa Myers, and Adam Saikaley.

Christof Migone, Mixer (Ottawa), 2015. Photo: J. Wonnacott - K. McGruer

Ontario Scene is one of a series of biennial festivals produced by the National Arts Centre that have showcased since 2003 the extraordinary diversity of  the artists and cultures of regions across Canada. For Ontario Scene, I selected a number of artists from across Ontario with "Medley" as my guiding theme in order to produce what I described as a "Stars on 45" of contemporary experimental performance.

BioART: Collaborating with Life

I was invited to come up with the layout for the exhibition BioART: Collaborating with Life at the Karsh-Masson Gallery from April 28 to May 31, 2015. Curated by Jennifer Willet and co-presented by Artengine, the City of Ottawa, and the National Arts Centre's Ontario Scene, the exhibition featured works by Karen Abel, Alana Bartol, Philip Beesley, Cass Gardiner, Robert Hengeveld, Andrew Pelling, Johl Ringuette and Jennifer Willet.

Daniel Modulevsky and Andrew Pelling, Re-Purposed 46 (Table Installation), 2015. 

Apples, Human Epithelial and Fibroblast Cells, plastic Petri dishes and epoxy.

An excerpt from the exhibition catalogue reads: "The emerging field of bioart includes a diverse range of practices from the lab, the wilderness, and cities, which use cells, microbes, plants, and bodies (human and otherwise) in the production of art. BioART: Collaborating with Life embraces biological techniques throughout human history as media art and explores complex collaborations between artists and other life forms in the production of cultural expressions. Featuring Ontario artists whose diverse practices merge with life sciences and biotechnology, BioART engages viewers in an evaluation of bioethics that results from the manipulation of life for human and cultural ends."