DIY video works @ The Liu Institute for Global Issues

Hi all, 

the opening reception for DIY happens this Wednesday, October 16th, from 4-6 pm @ the Liu Institute fro Gl0bal Issues which is located @ 6476 NW Marine Drive @ The University of British Columbia. 

The show will be up until December 13th, 2013. If you get a chance to make it out for a look, I'd love to hear what you think! Hope to see you @ the opening or sometime soon x Scot

Here's a little more info about the show -

DIY- a statement

Part manifesto and part how-to manual, DIY is a series of linked video works that combine old fashioned recipes, the latest cultural theories, guerilla gardening tactics, situationist performance antics, wiki-wisdom and homespun logic to promote global biodiversity and local food sovereignty.

The videos follow a black clad, ski-mask wearing figure called ‘The Activist’, as she sows seeds, picks vegetables, digs holes, performs a series of backyard interventions, and most importantly, preserves food for the coming winter. Titles including Digger, Chopper, Selfish Gene Theory, playfully explore the mystique of food production, the perceived militancy of  guerilla gardening and the inevitable bonds between culture and nature.

In Terminator, the ‘Activist’, in a symbolic act of resistance against the forces of ‘terminator’ seed technology, deposits a land mine of heirloom seeds, helping to turn an ordinary city lot into a potential urban sanctuary. Over –Extension Theory finds her sawing and sorting firewood and considering needs and wants in the real world and the symbolic world. In Time is Ripe  and The Process, she cans peaches and tomatoes and wonders about the relationships between global logistics, food processing and genetic well being. In The Race to the Bottom, ‘Green-washing’, Game theory, and Memetic theory are played out in the middle of a GMO cornfield and In The Great Divide, The Activist ponders social inequality, the politics of poverty and the responsibilities of the individual.

Locally, the last few years has witnessed a proliferation of urban farm markets, community gardens, and an inspiring increase in the number of individual consumers who are rejecting their role in the corporate food chain. Downturns in the global economy and climate change fears have prompted many consumers to become more aware of where their food comes from and what it actually takes to keep the supply lines open. Of course, for many people on the planet, the contingencies and consequences of a tenuous food chain are nothing new.  

But ‘Big Food’ isn’t letting go of its market share willingly; the household cupboard of the West is still contested ground and the kitchen table of ‘Developing Nations’ is a potential battlefield. Chemical companies continue to pump out toxic cleaning agents alongside their new “green” line of products, “factory farms” may be going organic, but they still practice destructive monoculture on a mass scale, and Agri-business giants continue to develop strains of GMO and non- reproducing seeds (all the while, trying to make it illegal for individuals to propagate and maintain heritage seed banks).

Throughout history, populations have been managed or manipulated via the control of the food supply.  In a post 9-11 environment where ‘do it yourself’ activism is often equated with threatening behaviour,  it’s not too hard to imagine that individuals attempting to thwart state authorized food production practices might be labeled as eco-terrorists. In fact, Agri-Business giant Monsanto has been implicated in the burning of crops and the attempt to dictate farming practices in  a number of countries where it considers itself to have propriety rights over the methods of food production.

DIY imagines a multi-national, corporate driven, ‘green’ war which classifies guerilla gardening as an act of terrorism, drives home canning underground, calling it a threat to the stability of the fair market economy, spins backyard composting into a public bio-hazard, or claims that seed saving is bio- terrorism. While open warfare against Food Sovereignty hasn’t been declared yet, a good gardener always plans ahead. As the ‘Preppers’ (modern day hipster survivalists) like to say, “Resistance is Fertile!”

DIY is both a meditation on cultural and corporeal survival and a crash course in sustainable living, giving you everything you need to start disentangling yourself from the corporate food chain and learning how to grow, sow and share in the place where you live.

New Work in Vancouver this September.

Hello all,

busy getting ready for three presentations of my work in Vancouver this September: a performance for LIVE 2013 International Performance Art Biennale, a collection of video works at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at U.BC. and a reading @ Word Festival. Looking forward to showing in the city and getting some feedback from you! Here's a little info about what to expect.

First up, the performance, a collaboration with Leannej called Human Identification at a Distance.

Human Identification at a Distance is an exercise in sousveillance or inverse surveillance, an attempt to subvert the self monitoring that conditions our public expectations and cloaks our private emotions. The goal of the performance is obliquely confrontational, covertly confessional;  two figures, co-opt the gestural guises and costumed coding of ‘Authority’ and ‘Activist’, setting out from opposing points, marching through the crowd, broadcasting individual monologues, probing, measuring, interrogating, exploring the  constructions and consequences of separation and connection. Their movements ultimately define a shared space and the figures converge, their individual voices blurred in an antiphonic chorus of recognition and misidentification.

While the namesake program developed by the U.S. Information Awareness Office (IAO), 'Human Identification at a Distance' employs biometric systems in order to: “… identify humans as unique individuals (not necessarily by name)…at any time of the day or night … possibly alone, disguised or in groups…”, with this performance, and the ensuing dialogue, Leannej & I hope to support the unguarded expression of personal traits and private thoughts and promote unprejudiced public encounters that occur beyond, or in spite of, the bounds of CCTV culture. 

Many thanks to Randy Gledhill of LIVE 2013 for inviting us to participate. The Performance happens September 21st @ Victory Square, 150 W Hastings (South West Corner) @ 2:30 PM sharp. For more info: livebiennale.ca

Next up is DIY, a collection of video works @ the Liu Institute. 

Part manifesto and part how-to manual, DIY is a series of linked video works that combine old fashioned recipes, the latest cultural theories, guerilla gardening tactics, situationist performance antics, wiki-wisdom and homespun logic to promote global biodiversity and local food sovereignty. Both a meditation on cultural and corporeal survival and a crash course in sustainable living, DIY gives you everything you need to start disentangling yourself from the corporate food chain and learning how to grow, sow and share in the place where you live.

One or two of these videos have been in online festivals, but most of these pieces have never been screened in the real world. Individual pieces are linked together into a programme of about 50 minutes and with titles like Selfish Gene Theory, Chopper, and The Race To The Bottom, I'm hoping there will be something that speaks to you! 

The Liu Institute for Global Issues is located @ 6476 NW Marine Drive @ The University of British Columbia. The opening reception happens Wednesday, October 16th, 4-7 PM. The show will be up until December 21st and regular hours are Monday - Friday, 8 - 5PM. For more info: liu.institute@ubc.ca

And finally, I've been invited to read from V6A: Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for the Word Festival ( formerly Word on the Street), which will be happening outside the main VPL branch @ Georgia and Robson.  I'll be reading a piece called Skid Row: Establishing Footage, which is composed entirely of language culled from Film Production notices posted in the DTES. Its from a series I call Shoot Me!, which explores the often uncomfortable narrative overlaps between what's being scripted and what's being played out for real in the neighbourhood. Look for me on Sunday, September 29th in the C.U.P.E. Poetry Tent, sometime around 11 AM.

If you're able to make it out to any of these events, I'd love to hear what you think.  At any rate, hope to see you soon.

Hoarding - an installation by Leannej & My Name Is Scot

Hoarding is a vertical midden, an accumulation of ephemera including posters, handbills, tear-away pages, faux signage and plywood mottos that lays bare a visual stratum of textual scheming for forensic investigation. Like the hoardings that surround a boarded up building, or a new construction site, the walls of Project Space Gallery will be covered with a seemingly random aggregation of information signifying both the consequences and implications of remnant efforts and imagined developments.

Representing over 15 years of collaborative and independent, text based works, the installation collages content, chronicles real and imagined moments in time, and documents the ongoing struggle of artist run culture, to (cheaply and meaningfully) insert itself into the public realm.

Individual pieces include selections from Leannej’s acclaimed flowchart narratives which have appeared in a variety of formats and locations, including windows, walls, banners, books and even mugs, while My Name Is Scot provides an assortment of 2-D and 3-D objects which have formed the basis for performance interventions, site specific installations and photo-based texts.

Hoarding reveals both artist's development and commitment to exploring issues of self, place and the constructions of meaning. While many of the pieces have been previously published or displayed, independently of one another, collected together, and presented as part of a larger work, they can be read as a cross section of strategies, a collation of concerns, or an index of intentions.

In Hoarding, objectives overlap and narratives collide, inviting the viewer/reader to decipher the shared storylines and uncover the individual convictions of each artist and perhaps, as a result, consider the infrastructure of their own personal discourse. 

The Installation opened on July 26th, 2013 and will be up for the month of August. Project Space is @ 222 East Georgia Street and will be open from Thursday to Sunday, 1-5 PM. We hope you'll be able to drop by for a look if you are in town and if you have a chance, please let us know what you think!   

Proclamation - poster project in Toronto

Two days wading through sudden summer rains and steamy heat, moving east to west, along Gerrard, jogging up Parliament onto College and over to Dundas and back again, marching south through Cabbagetown and Leslieville, meandering north, up Spadina and beyond, skirting the fringes of the 'Annex' and wandering further, almost lost, towards the borderlands of the 'Junction'. New developments, old neighbourhoods, different histories, same problems.