Been a busy busy Autumn – two exhibitions. travel to Lethbridge & Nova Scotia, Board work with CARFAC and Copyright Visual Arts
… and now, I get to seriously “dig in” in the studio in the coming months, and revisit Boundary|Time|Surface! Very excited to be looking at this body of work again with fresh eyes, and to being to create new work for it, in anticipation of exhibition in the Fall of 2019 at the Art Gallery of St Albert.
Projection-mapped Video
Photo-based installation
At Sunset
Four poles
View from cliff top
Tide coming in, farthest point of installation on beach
I was also surfing through the EGU website today – the call for new abstracts for 2019 just hit my inbox.
In browsing the EGU site, I also came across this – a lovely blog post about the session convenor’s response to our project. It brought back the very lively discussions we had with so many people at our poster – about scientific discourse, about place and memory, about the ways in which human definitions and descriptions of things and places can create (and erase!!) different kinds of understanding. Different ways of seeing.
Looking forward to investigating this gloriously complicated place and all my ideas about it.
Stunning work by Jenine Shereos. I am struck by the sensitivity & delicacy of this work. To me it speaks to a deep understanding of the materials, and the ephemeral nature of beauty.
Of All Things. I am looking forward to the book she is publishing on this body of work!
I’m sitting in the airport, waiting to board … and pondering what the next weeks will bring. I’m off to a residency in Parrsboro Nova Scotia for the next month.
Heading back to Main & Station to work with Scott Smallwood on our Macromareal project! Feels a bit odd, actually – after the year’s worth of planning and thinking – to actually be on the verge of doing.
Excited, and a little nervous, and really really happy and grateful for the opportunity.
Wound up in the course of my day’s work wandering through the interwebs, and came across this:
It made me quite pleased that I allowed myself a little digression, a little roam through unintended places. Finding unexpected things can be pleasant.
A lovely piece on history, time, change – and sense of place. What place means when it is rendered in the first person, and intimately connected to the sights and sounds in a landscape? We are each responsible for the reality we inhabit, in all ways.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
My father was born and raised in Montreal in the first half of the last century. He served in the RCAF (briefly) and the Royal Canadian Navy (less briefly) during World War II. In the ’60s he…
I’ve been invited to speak on my work as part of the Visiting Artist series at MacEwan University. My thanks to MacEwan for hosting me, and to Bruce Montcombroux for the kind invitation!
Make:Believe, in four seasons
I’ll be discussing some of the ideas that have informed recent work, and (some) of the many questions I ponder in presenting work in various locales (galleries, ‘natural’ environments, domesticated landscapes), and how those works and spaces connect (or don’t).
Looking forward very much to hearing what the students have to say, and discussing their questions & ideas with them!
After a two-year hiatus due to numerous scheduling conflicts, I was at last able to revisit an ongoing project this weekend – one that is dear to my heart.
Spent an all-too-brief 24 hours out near Smoky Lake on “The Farm,” working on getting reacquainted with Make:Believe. I’ve written about this project several times, as it’s developed: 2011, a and several times in 2013 (1) (2) (3) … and every time I have the opportunity to work on this installation, I learn more.
It was fascinating to come back to this work, to begin the dialogue with it again. I had so many questions – I didn’t know what I would find, or even how to gauge the “success” of the work after being away from it for two years. We also spent some time on Friday night revisiting the original proposal and ideas around the work, to see if the still rung true.
A tremendously rich process.
The work was at least partially as I expected it – but it did need some serious attention. After so long, some of the branches had ‘sprung’ from their places the weaving, as they were held in place with linen cord, which had rotted away in place. So I had some weaving to do!
Fortunately, the tunnels between the spaces were in pretty good shape, so there wasn’t too much that had to be done there ….
But I also wanted to add to the work on this trip, so I started in on a new tunnel and a couple of new spaces.
It was amazing to see the new height on much of the caragana after the time away – which made some of the new construction really quite easy. The extra reach afforded by the new growth allowed me to quickly connect and weave branches that I wasn’t able to before, without the need of cord to hold them. Remains to be seen if this is a more effective method of working than tying things together, but it felt really satisfying to be able to just work with the branches with no cord at all.
It had been so damp from the rain, there were mushrooms and fungus of all sorts everywhere in the stand! Made me think I was working in a Fairy Ring!
I was really happy with the results of the work out there, and I’m hopeful that I will be able to get out to the site a couple of times this autumn to continue expanding the project. I also set up a motion-triggered camera in the installation, which I am hoping will begin to capture the movements of animals though the spaces. When people aren’t around, it’s apparent that they use the spaces and tunnels between them to move from one part of the farm to another – so with a little luck, I’ll have a record of these travellers, just as they have something of a record of me in the place.
It’s good to pick up the conversation here. A quiet and productive time in a place that feels like it remembers me.
My first full day in Nova Scotia – overnighted at the airport hotel, and will be heading to Day 1 of my residency at Main & Station in Parrsboro shortly!
Excited to get there, get settled, and get to work … .
Planning and researching, in order to make work that bridges disciplines and methods of articulating ideas: through sound, in sculpture, talking with and about scientific explorations, drawing as a meditation and as a performance … and all of this engaged to one degree or another with the public realm.
Both in and of the community. Rooted in landscape as place and as source of natural phenomena.
All kinds of conversations here, but they are at base conversationsbetween things and people.
And coincidentally, what should come to my inbox, but an article about Christo’s piers, and all the complicated things about this kind of work.
I was particularly struck by Hoy’s observations on the idealism of the work – particularly as it pertains to the recent Brexit, mobility, and migration (bodies in space) – and how this idealism comes up against the reality of work in public space, and that asks for public engagement directly.
(as a sidenote: I also find it interesting that Hoy mentions her Canadian roots, and the relative isolation of our huge country in relation to borders, boundaries, and movement … more food for thought here … does this explain my fascination with edges/boundaries, and with breaking them down or exposing them? is that a “terribly Canadian” thing I do?).
Hoy notes:
I doubt Brexit was on the minds of any of the thousands of people experiencing Christo’s magnanimous installation that Thursday. We were all too busy frolicking across the water, marveling at the scenery, and snapping selfies. And I’m sure any such symbolism was the furthest thing from the artist’s intentions—he and his late wife Jeanne-Claude first hatched the idea for the piers in the 1970s. “All the artwork Jeanne-Claude and I do is work of joy and beauty. They don’t serve anything except to be a work of art,” he said in an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in April.
and that
By a coincidence of timing, Christo’s Floating Piers became a symbol of how art can (quite literally) bring people together, but also how these connections are fraught. Soon, the piers will disappear and life on Lake Iseo will go back to normal. The EU will go back to normal, too, though we already know it won’t quite be the same.
At the risk of stating the obvious: context, scale, location … and fame … are markers that thoroughly differentiate my plans from this work entirely!
That being said: what has struck a chord for me is Hoy’s insights about both the impulse behind the work, and the potential for its lasting impact. I make work to speak about things in ways that (for me) defy the use of words exclusively; there are ideas I try to embody in the act of making and in the presentation of finished work that I hope people respond to viscerally.
A building, and a tearing down, simultaneously. Not without complications. A process that changes everyone involved and (hopefully) allows us all to see and experience things in the world – and ourselves – a little differently.
Idealistic, yes. Unabashedly so – there’s more than enough in this world, including Brexit, to make us jaded and cynical.
I have been thinking about a series of related concepts/ideas in the last little while … having the luxury of a little time to allow things to percolate through my brain, see where they take me. The swirl of idea(l)s has caught me up in the last 48 hours, and has insinuated itself in the nooks and crannies of the concepts I am beginning toward with for a new project …
I will perhaps post updates here as my thinking evolves and revolves …
Bodies in space.
from Maria Takeuchi, on Vimeo: https://player.vimeo.com/video/121436114
The way a single movement occurs in time, changes space, changes everything forever.
The fine line and inextricable link between order an chaos.
What can be built can collapse at any time.
2016 AICP Sponsor Reel – Dir Cut, from Method Studios on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/169599296
The Lorenz Attractor.
The difference between being active and reactive, in all things.
Rivals thoughts come at a particularly opportune moment, as I am heading to the CARFAC National conference and AGM in Montreal.
The problematic nature of the gallery-as-institution has direct implications for the ability of artists to have the opportunity to show work, to experiment, as Riva so eloquently discusses.
There’s also this … Who gets to show, where, and why also has direct economic implications on an umber of levels (including the ability of artists to earn a copyright-based licensing fee for the exhibition of their work in public galleries, artist-runs, and museums).
Much food for thought here …
… and no doubt, much more to come over the next few days …
