"Primer" at Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa

My Akimblog post for February is about Primer, an exhibition at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery from January 22nd to March 1st 2014, offering a refresher course in the work of four Ottawa artists: Andrew Smith, Amy Schissel, Natasha Mazurka and Colin Muir Dorward. Each explores the elementary concerns of painting in distinct but converging ways.

Amy Schissel, Alto Terra 3, 2014, plaster, acrylic, ink, graphite, paper on wood

To read the complete review, click here.

Elise Rasmussen at Gallery 101 in Ottawa

As of January 2014, I am the Akimbo Akimblog correspondent for the city of Ottawa and area. My first post was a review of Finding Ana, an exhibition of work by Elise Rasmussen at Gallery 101. The exhibition comprises a recent body of fascinating research-based work by the Edmonton-born but New York-based Rasmussen that began with earlier performances exploring the death of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and culminated in a trip to Cuba to see if the site-specific installations she had carved in the porous rock of the caves of Jaruco Park in 1981 still existed. Rasmussen's video, Variations, which explores the circumstances surrounding Mendieta's death, was presented as part of the opening for the exhibition along with a panel discussion including Rasmussen.

                   Elise Rasmussen, Variations, 2013, production still

To read the complete review, click here.

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.