MINI GOLF – A SOCIAL PRACTICE (LOOK WHAT I MADE!)

Last week July 6 and 7, I was honoured to be a part of the exhibition opening for ‘Common Ground’ at Cambridge Galleries.  I am one of 9 artists curated by Iga Janik, invited to develop an artist interpretation of a mini-golf course in various non-spaces throughout Cambridge, Ontario.

Although I have worked on installations and group public sculptures in the past with the YPF, I have never designed anything sculptural on my own – this is my first experience of single handedly figuring out a concept in three dimensions!  It was really daunting when it came down to the engineering and material logistics of the ramp… as a painter I never have to consider an oil on canvas supporting human weight…. Anyway, I worked real hard and I’m glad everything works.  However, if it weren’t for my brother Chris, who built the entire structure for me, I don’t know what I would have done.  I owe my bro bigtime.

The aim of my ramp is to celebrate the intrinsically quaint artifice of mini-golf.  I wanted to use it to address issues of agency, the politics of otherness and the reclamation of clichés.  I designed a miniature island, inspired by the step forms of pyramids and ziggurats.  The structure features the reproduction of a mural drawing I made entitled ‘Projections of Idealism: Props to Tahitian Kids and Henry Darger’.  I wanted this island to be bright and beautifully synthetic, as one big stereotype, yet sincere, with plastic flowers contrasting the romantic images of charcoal on paper.  Plastic flowers are an attempt at resisting death, and my drawing of the Tahitian kids was my attempt to resist the exoticism of Paul Gauguin.  All with a grain of salt!  As a spiral golf ramp, one could either start at the bottom and hit the ball up the ramp, or begin at the top to allow the ball to roll down.  My feminine composition, double dong ramp is also a conversation about the Freudian machismo fantasy of golf- of getting it into the holes…

If you can, please check out the show and tell me what you think.  The exhibition will run until September 30, 2012.  Here is a link to Common ground, and a review of the exhibition on Canadian Art.

http://projectcommonground.ca/

http://www.canadianart.ca/online/reviews/2012/07/12/common-ground-cambridge-galleries/

LOVE AND SOLIDARITY

Image courtesy of James Kerr

I recently came back from a two-week visit to my beloved Montreal.  I’m going back in a month to once again stay with Jen and James in Verdun, to chill with my friends, and to see Dineo for open studio at the Darling Foundry, where she is making her first film! 

During my visit I saw protesters sprinkled all over the city, sometimes in bikinis (never understood that part), and little did I know that it would culminate in the giant student protest on May 22 by which point I had already come back to Toronto.  I am so happy to see, hear and read about the determination and continuing solidarity of this particular movement.  Just a reminder – the issue is debt, not tuition!  Now, I hear through the grapevine (facebook) that pots and pans are banging in every neighbourhood including the very residential and sleepy Verdun, since bill 78 was passed.  Way to stick it.

Now onto art homework.  Although I was very ambitious about seeing exhibitions I was largely thwarted by the time frame of being caught in between exhibitions, so many places I went to check out were closed.  I did get to see at the Lyonel Feininger at Musee des Beaux-Arts, Quebec abstract paintings from the collection at the Contemporain, Elizabeth MacIntosh at Division, Geneviève Cadieux at Rene Blouin, Abbas Akhavan at Darling, a whole plethora of shows in the Belgo Building (Peter Flemming at SKOL was the most memorable for me), the adorable musical swings at Place des Arts… can’t remember what else….

Enough of all that.  What I really wanted to share with you this week is this:

scorpiondagger.tumblr.com

Let me introduce to you the King of GIFS, my great friend James Kerr.  Previous to this website I hardly knew what a gif was.  James is the collage extraordinaire of the YPF (don’t know if we still exist) and so now he has evolved his practice into moving animated collage shorts, whereby he makes one a day.  Let’s see how long he can last!  I really enjoyed sexy week, and it seems like he may now be onto pre-renaissance painting revisionism week.... 

DOING MY HOMEWORK

Exhibitions: Recently I saw a lot of art: at the AGO - Jack Chambers (blech, I got no feeling or connection from the work at all) Ian Baxter& ‘Works 1958-2011 (I liked the Rothko in plastic ok, and all those plastic molds. Those painted tvs are classik. But the taxidermy animals were so bad). Then drank in the group of 7 paintings and Haida argillite carvings next to Jack Chambers. Bee-u-tiful with a CAPITAL B. Then ‘Sovereign Acts’ curated by Wanda Nanibush at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, which I really recommend seeing as it considers issues in the complexity of representation, cliché and reclaiming that representation as Aboriginal artists. General Hardware Contemporary for Celia Neubauer: Exit Enter (nice colours) The Mercer Union for TACTICAL USES OF A BELIEF IN THE UNSEEN: Deborah Stratman. I liked the giant speaker sound installation, you should go feel the vibration. Then I even got on the Artbus to see my friend Keren Cytter’s exhibition at Oakville Galleries (a fabulous show as I know her work already, but there wasn’t time to really watch much, with the opening and the tight bus schedule) and to the Art Gallery of Hamilton to see Mark Lewis and William Kurelek (wasn’t crazy about either unfortunately). Best thing was Keren’s play, part of the Images festival at Al Green Theatre, ‘I Eat Pickles At Your Funeral’. So good. Based on the premise of failing/cheating relationships, it felt like the most vulnerable thing she has written somehow. The humour wasn’t just the beautifully nerdy, witty badass armour that she is known for, but more the entrance way to the meat and potatoes of her thought process. And it was so nice that Andrew Kerton was one of the four actors, he is a performance artist from London, and so we got to catchup over ginandtonics and dumplings. Keren, Andrew and I attended De Ateliers in Amsterdam, which is how we know each other. The international cult where reunions are lovely, especially in my hometown, because that never happens. Photo by Lisa Marie Becker

ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL, ACCESS IGNITES!

I recently participated in a wonderful symposium called Access Ignites, organized by the Ontario Arts Council. The event began with a traditional Anishnaabe blessing by Dan Commanda and ended with a hand drumming performance of the ‘Strong Woman Song’ by Veronica Johnny. Keynote speeches were made by Philip Akin, Samina Mansuri, and Jani Lauzon. For two days, fellow grant recipients of the Access and Career Development Grant shared presentations, performances and projects.

This was an opportunity for Aboriginal artists and artists of colour to learn, or be mentored in a way that relates to their cultural heritage. For two days we ate together, brainstormed, discussed our experiences and learned from each other. We addressed goals and strategies in continuing to establish true multiculturalism, issues of tokenism and visibility, barriers as artists of colour. It was so super nice to have such a diverse group of unified camaraderie, and made me feel really proud to be from Ontario, a province with such eclectic talent. Additionally, I think it was one of the few times I could remember where I was in a room full of artists and did not feel one iota of competition vibes whatsoever. The organizers of this event, Bushra Junaid and Nazanin Shoja, facilitated an inclusive space, which was constructive, meaningful, and inspiring.

In regards to my own project (which I have written about in past posts) – to study the lion dance drum in order to transfer that energy into my paintings – I was able to pursue this ‘secret project’, as Wanda Nanibush called it. She developed the program only five years ago. Other grant recipients agreed that when applying for this grant, it was an application that felt really like it was coming from the heart more than the brain.

Anyway, again, I am very happy to have been part of this event, to experience the immense scope of creativity and wisdom in our province. Ontario artists, if you might qualify, please apply for the upcoming deadline: Ontario Arts Council, Access and Career Development Grant May 1, 2012

SISTERS AND ME

I can’t completely get my head around the recent round of (supposed) self-constructed music video image women, although it should be my zone of expertise… Nicki Minaj, Lana Del Rey and of coursey, the lady gaga, for example. The following isn’t judgement, it’s merely reflection on surface impression.

I haven’t delved into any of these ladies too much, I don’t own any of their albums. A couple weeks ago, I was surprised by how much I like Nicki Minaj, after seeing her on the superbowl (I was soo curious about the Madonna hype!) I wondered, who the hell is she? Often, I live under a rock. Now I know the song and video, ‘Stupid Hoe’. From what I can deduct, she is one oversexed to the max crazytown bitch (I mean this in the most respectful way) who marks an aesthetic lineage from say, Grace Jones and Missy Elliot. L’il Kim is too obvious. Now I can’t get that song out of my head, with the schizophrenic siren drilling the hook over and over (dissing Lil Kim btw) “you a stupid ho you a you a stupid ho!” as she shakes her ass in a cage. If she was a big lesbian (which I think she is on some level…), that would make her even more awesome.

I like Lana Del Rey’s songs, as they are very easy to like for indie people, but I am not in love with them as I want to be. The broody, cinematic melodies and girl’s aesthetic are hard to dislike for someone like me, but ultimately I find the melancholy too cool to be sincere. I wished she had the type of voice where she could really belt her heart out. So far, the lyrics to me are dumber than Stupid Hoe and they don't have the same wink and nod. Video games? So young! And painfully to me, the first time I saw her video posted I was really saddened by the botox. I thought it was an ironic joke done for one video, until I watched another.

I imagine that lady gaga by now is old news. I will say that over all, I like that gal, and in many ways she started this recent wave. She’s got a lot of chutzpah, and that Telephone video she did with Beyonce is, I think, the pinnacle of her cultural significance in music video history.

I am not going to say what a lot of music fans say, that artifice today trumps the sincerity and talent of a nostalgic past, of Nina Simone or Cat Power or Janis Joplin or Etta James, et al. because that isn’t the point. Today is today, unfortunately.

I’m curious, are any of these women aware of Orlan? Just curious. And did you notice that I started every paragraph with I? That was by chance. To end this article is a Bell Hooks dissertation on the politics of why black women don’t identify with Madonna much. As a woman of colour, I was never fanatic about her either, even though I love her VOGUE era. Hook explains this well. The article is taken from a fb post from curator Gabi Ngcobo via Martha Rosler. Next week’s article… I’m getting off the internet!

http://stevenstanley.tripod.com/docs/bellhooks/madonna.html

I LOVE UBUWEB

OK, this may be redundant to art nerds but I just wanted to express my true love for the UbuWeb archive. It is utopian, anarchistic, unbridled academic pretension at its best, anti-capitalistic independent obscure art distribution of audio and video. As I am only a painter and not internet savvy, I generally look up hard to find art videos on youtube. I mean, one doesn’t always need to go white room perusing. When I was in school the video art library took so long in comparison, those days of looking up, renting and rewinding battered vhs tapes. Then I remember UbuWeb. Everytime I visit this site, I am so amazed and thankful for it. What a great, and free, learning resource that refuses to advertise or promote itself. That's so cool. ‘Deleuzian nomadic model’!

If you haven’t had a chance to explore, I highly recommend it. Especially in light of the current SOPA, PIPA, ACTA wars, this site is an ideal example of what the internet is capable of being.

http://www.ubu.com/

UBUWEB MANIFESTO FROM THEIR WEBSITE LAST YEAR WHEN I MEANT TO WRITE THIS ARTICLE (it has since changed…)

Concrete poetry's utopian pan-internationalist bent was clearly articulated by Max Bense in 1965 when he stated, "…concrete poetry does not separate languages; it unites them; it combines them. It is this part of its linguistic intention that makes concrete poetry the first international poetical movement." Its ideogrammatic self-contained, exportable, universally accessible content mirrors the utopian pan-linguistic dreams of cross-platform efforts on today's Internet; Adobe's PDF (portable document format) and Sun System's Java programming language each strive for similarly universal comprehension. The pioneers of concrete poetry could only dream of the now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost.
Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away and have been doing so since 1996. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb's work never goes "out of print." UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms.
UbuWeb has no need for money, funding or backers. Our web space is provided by an alliance of interests sympathetic to our vision. Donors with an excess of bandwidth contribute to our cause. All labour and editorial work is voluntary; no money changes hands. Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from academic bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves.
UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.
Sounds like a marginal situation? Hardly. We've won many prestigious internet awards and are acknowledged web-wide as the definitive source for Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry. UbuWeb is on the syllabus of countless schools; we've gotten queries from Ph.D. candidates seeking information to third-graders researching a paper on concrete poetry. UbuWeb embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4-dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing "rhizomatically" with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.
-The Editors

PEACE HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR LETS DANCE

This same time last year, I swooned about the Chinese Lion Dance, a performance I have loved since I was a kid. I should be more specific. There are many types of lion dance but the one that hits home for me is the Southern Nian ‘fancy’ style…

In that article I had longed to get a grant that would allow me to learn to play the lion dance drum, remember that post? Well guess what, I actually did! I am happy to say that this year I have the support of the Ontario Arts Council Access and Career Development Grant to learn the Lion Dance drumming, dance, and the martial art Choi Li Fut, as the foundation. I recently began my intensive training with sifu Kin Sze at Bamboo Kung Fu, and my whole body has been so sore that I’ve been brining myself in Epsom salts since. I feel my wimpy artsy self, getting stronger already.

This so-called lion is the Chinese unicorn (Qilin, or Kirin in Japanese). The myth of a one horned beast is the only mythical creature that existed in every ancient culture. Described as a composite of different animal traits, it could only be tamed by a good, pure (aka virginal) maiden, whereby it would lay its horn in her lap. Eventually, by way of rumour and broken telephone translations by ancient Greek philosophers, it became associated to symbolize Christ, and the maiden of course turned into Mary. In China, the Qilin was associated with Guan Yin Po Sat. It doesn’t need to be said that the unicorn was a universal symbol of phallic power. In Mesopotamia, it dipped his horn in the seas and created life!


Facts From Wikipedia:
This Chinese Southern dance is more symbolic than the other styles. It is usually performed as a ceremony to scare away evil spirits and to summon luck. It has a distinctive head with eyes (of an eagle), a mirror on the forehead (demons are supposedly scared of their own reflection), and a single horn at center of the head (the horn of a unicorn).

The story goes that once upon a time a monk had a dream in which there were many sorrows and evils plaguing the land. The monk prayed and asked the gods how he could prevent these evils from occurring. The gods told him that a lion would protect them and fight back the evils. The Chinese people had never seen a lion before, but had heard stories that the lion was the king of all the other animals, so the monk combined all the lucky or magical animals he could think of and so made a lion.

If you look closely at any lion, you can see a red sash tied on its horn. It is told that the lion was disrespectful to the Jade Emperor. This of course caused the Jade Emperor to get very angry, so as a punishment he chopped off his horn (The source of his life) and the lion died. The Goddess of Mercy (Guan Yin) felt bad for him so she tied his horn back on with a red sash with golden leaves and chanted to the lion and he came back to life.


Here is a video of the dance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXN1qLid5z8&feature=related

LOST RIVER REUNION

What a way to bring closure to two and a half months of traveling…. As I said before I just came back from Lost River in the Laurentians in Quebec (close to Saint Sauveur) with some of my oldest friends whom I rarely get to see all at the same time, all together in an old wood log cabin.

Ksenia Yurganova I’ve known since high school at Danforth Tech Baby. She now produces tv, currently some murder show and can’t stop complaining of Toronto’s work pace, because she’s part of it! She drove up with her boyfriend Dave Hamelin and Jackson the dog, his white paw just like Michael’s glove. We knew Dave before he started his band the Stills 10 years ago, now defunct. He just started a new band called Eight And A Half. Jill Kasian used to work making IMAX films and now she has some new job going, and her bf Jonathan Dorthe is an architect at Sid Lee. Krissy Longtin, Jen Storey and James Kerr I’ve known since the beginning of moving to Montreal 12 years ago. Krissy has been long done her Masters after working with orphans in Romania and now works as a therapist, James is the best landscaper ever (I’m sure Debbie Travis has a crush on him) and Jen of course I have featured in a past article… most recently she collaborated on beautiful fabric print work with Angie Johnson of Norwegian Wood. To top it off, we had Neil Doshi and his gf Katie, now both Cal Arts grads who live on the west coast… Neil just got a FIVE YEAR Creative Capital Grant to build a graphic design house in the dessert then work around the world. Sheeit.

Some major nostalgia s down the line, well, my best pals are now grown ups who do wonderful things. Because I am so often away, it’s so crazy and amazing to see them so changed. At the same time, it's so good to feel our goofy idiotic chemistry, dynamic as ever when we are together. I had so much fun, which counts for everything in this life. AND, that whole week, I did not see one exhibition, as it was not the point of this trip. Felt So Good.

When we were back in Montreal, our New Years Day hangover hangout was more or less a very humourous group therapy for kids coping with their thirties. Before I left I was treated to a spa at Bota Bota in the old port, which by chance, Jonathan worked on!

I’ve been kind of emotionally losing it in a good way, feeling blessed to always surround myself around such special people. I played Dance Central for 4 hours straight with James (a natural), ate poutine at the same time, and didn’t get sick.

NEW YEAR NEW YEAR FIND YOUR SPIRIT

Blessings! Here is a picture of my spirit animal, a miniature dreadlocked unicorn found next to the parking lot of an apple orchard in upstate New York, back when my pals, German painter Julia Muenstermann, curator Natika Soward and I went for a day trip to the Dia Beacon. After experiencing one of the most sublime museums in the world, and one of my favourites, it was the end of a perfect day to find this little grungy creature appear out of nowhere, much akin to the epiphanies from experiencing 1960s conceptual art!

I hope this guy inspires you to find your own hidden spirit animal for the years to come.