The Governor General's Awards at the National Gallery in Ottawa

An exhibition featuring the laureates of the 2014 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts is at the National Gallery of Canada from March 28 to August 10, 2014. Rhiannon Vogl, Curatorial Assistant of Contemporary Art at the NGC, had the challenging task of putting together an exhibition with a limited footprint that would highlight not only the careers of the laureates but also the holdings of the gallery’s permanent collection. With economical grace, Vogl selected, in collaboration with the artists, one or a few works by each to represent their accomplishments.

Kim Adams, Minnow Lure, 2004, galvanized steel and mixed media (courtesy: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; photo © NGC)

By concentrating on the thematic relationships established by Vogel, one can discern how each artist in the exhibition (Kim Adams, Angela Grauerholz, Carol Wainio, Sandra Brownlee, Jayce Salloum, Max Dean, and Raymond Gervais) manipulates or creates objects that act as devices for knowledge or memory transmission. Another recipient of the award this year is former National Gallery of Art curator Brydon Smith, whose contribution to the arts in Canada is clearly manifested in the works acquired by the gallery during his tenure, designated by special labels for at least the duration of the exhibition.

I wrote about the exhibition for Akimblog on April 15, 2014. You can read the complete text by clicking on this link.

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.