Temporary Assignment - New work @ the Richmond Art Gallery

I've just finished installing a new piece called Ingress/Egress @ the Richmond Art Gallery. The exhibition is called Temporary Assignment and it's up from November 19th - 30th, only a short run, but there will be a closing reception on Friday, November 30th from 7-9 PM and you're invited! After 20 years the gallery is re-surfacing their walls, so they've invited 10 artists to create work that goes right onto or in my case, right into the gallery wall. There's some really interesting work in the show, so I hope you get a chance to drop by. Here's the gallery's website for details about getting there: http://www.richmondartgallery.org/ 

And here's some background on my piece from the official statement:

Ingress/Egress explores notions of affect and agency and the roles that language, technology and architecture play in determining identity and defining the limitations or expectations of body and self.

 

 The two text block tableaus incorporate fragments of found language, including case study data, pop song lyrics, confessional diary entries and social media ‘status’ updates. 

 Each tableau can be read as an entry point or an exit, a virtual portal to explore or escape the public dialogues, private monologues and ambient textual noises that envelop our bodies and inform or intrude upon our innermost self.

Ingress/Egress by one definition suggests: “The power or liberty of access” in relation to “the act or right of going out”.

By carving and rendering text directly into the wall of the gallery, Ingress/Egress hopes to lead the viewer into a consideration of the spatial, textual and virtual constructions that support our public meanings and institutions  and perhaps, suggest a way to carve out our own version of self from the wall of information that increasingly defines our media saturated lives. 

                                

So much for strategy, in reality, 20 years of repeated painting made the gallery walls incredibly hard and very resistant to being intruded upon.  

Knuckles bloodied and arm muscles cramping, I persevered and adapted and some unanticipated surface applications developed alongside the more successful incursions below the surface and while my tactics for tackling the wall were severely challenged, in the end, my intentions were perhaps even better served and I'm pretty happy with how the piece turned out.

Hope you can make it to the Gallery for a look at the finished results. 

The Process - video premiere

Hey All, The Process, another video from the Acts of Domestic Terror series is being screened this Friday, November 9th @ VIVO Media arts centre, 1965 Main Street, Vancouver. I'm very happy to be included in the program of In Media Res, curated by The Automatic Message, especially as this will be the very first public screening of the video.  It all starts @ 8:30 PM and goes til 1 AM, not sure what time my piece will be on, but if you can make it down it'd be great to see you and I'd love to hear what you think.

Terminator- new video screenings

' Food is Power, we use it to change behaviour '. That's the opening line from Terminator, a short new video piece that's going to be making it's debut this September, at screenings in the UK, as part of One Minute Volume 6, curated by Kerry Baldry.

On the 27th it'll be at the Horse Hospital in London  in the autumn programme of the London Underground Film Sessions http://www.thehorsehospital.com/now/london-underground-film-sessions-autumn/and on the 30th, it will be screened (via pedal powered cinema) in Alexandra Park in Manchester, as part of an event called One Day Wonder(ment). On October 25th, Aid & Abet in Cambridge will screen it as part of an event called Dark Hours/ Fixed Space and then on November 24th, it will be appearing @ The Museum of Club Culture in Hull.

The video is part of a longer series called Acts of Domestic Terror, which explores issues surrounding food sovereignty, radical gardening and DIY politics. In Terminator, a mysterious figure called 'The Activist' performs a number of Situationist inspired back yard interventions designed to provoke resistance against 'Terminator Seed Technology' and promote the global battle to maintain biodiversity.

I'm very excited that the piece is going to be premiering in the UK with it's long history of horticountercultural politics and I'm busy working on completing the rest of the series, which I hope to show more of soon! If you're in the neighbourhood for either screening and have a chance to have a look, I'd love to hear what you think.

Wasted - new work in progress

Slow, silent, omnipresent, all we could see, ever increasing, more toxic than previously thought, photo degradation, malnutrition, metabolized subsequent to ingestion, particularly damaging, the term debris, manufactured and processed, insidiously and ineluctably formed or imprinted, a system of coding, something discarded, the right or duty of intervention, anywhere in the world and ever growing, in ways that are only just becoming known.

 

Glass, rubber, metal, persistent solid material, the overwhelming amount, how vast, domestic waste, unquantifiable plastic mass, buoyancy, durability, undeniable behavioral propensity, indirectly, intentionally, disposed of or abandoned, towards a legal recognition, may be shaped when soft and then hardened.

Obligations, a forage into the great garbage patch, microscopic, their “social contract”, starvation, laceration, fragmented plastic debris, infection and suffocation, new sources of global contamination, enough is enough, just below the surface, the abysmal depth.

 

Over-consuming, we’re all afraid of what we’re going to find, a cylinder of tightly packed, shredded black plastic, strong bonds of various kinds, formerly living materials, blatantly visible, beyond visual, scavengers who take, lethal nature, giving rise to yet another… 

Art, Activism and the Murdered and Missing Women

Tuesday, February 7th, I'll be co-presenting the video Calculating 63 with Leannej @ SFU Burnaby Campus and talking about the Evergreen project. Carol Martin of the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre will also be there and there will be a discussion about art and activism and recent events in the DTES. Please come by if you can and if not, I hope to see you the following Tuesday @ the February 14th Women's Memorial March.