Sharon Hayes at CUAG in Ottawa

In her exhibition Loudspeakers and Other Forms of Listening at the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) between 3 February and 27 April 2014, the American artist Sharon Hayes does not simply re-enact the political past but re-fashions it with dry humour, a sense of the absurd, and empathy, by marking our historical differences and making them materially present. For example, in the four-channel video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, one of her signature works on display, Hayes is coached by an audience as she falteringly recites partially memorized transcripts of the four taped statements made by Patty Hearst during her captivity with the SLA in the 1970s. Each work in the exhibition contains a similar, interior structural spacing, like a broadcast delay that suspends the immediate reception of its address.

Sharon Hayes, We Knew We Would Go to Jail, still, two-channel video installation, 2003-2012.

Reflexive aspects of the exhibition are doubled by the fact that it is being presented at CUAG, as several of the works consider the university as a crucible for political activism and the formation of political and personal identity. As an apocryphal preamble to the exhibition, there is a video monitor displaying archival photographs of protests by Carleton students through the 1960s. An undergraduate on campus might even identify with the twenty-something interlocutors of the video installation We Knew We Would Go to Jail if he or she didn't get the sense that they were putting on an act. The exhibition offers a study in how politics are represented, performed, and taught.

I wrote about the exhibition for the Akimblog on March 25, and you can read the review in its entirety by clicking on this link.

Josée Dubeau at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau

L'Occupation des sols is the title of an ongoing project initiated by Jonathan Demers at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau, just across the river from Ottawa. In the spirit of open-ended experimentation and artistic research promoted at the gallery, Demers invited a number of artists to respond to a text with the same title by the French writer Jean Echenoz's as well as to the site itself. Josée Dubeau was the first artist to participate in the project that, ultimately, stages the act of reading, implicating each reader, both artists and viewers, in a performance that gives body to the meaning of the text. Dubeau's intervention in the space, drawn directly on the wall in non-photo blue pencil, offers a sensitive and economical reading of the text, matching both its emotional weight and its slightness of form.

Josée Dubeau, L'Occupation des sols (installation view), 2014, wall drawing in non-photo blue pencil

I wrote about the exhibition for Akimblog on March 11. To read the complete review, click here.

"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.