Proposal

Show and Tell Vancouver is the collaborative creation of a durational community art piece by Genevieve Cloutier, Grant Hash, and Anna White. As the conference theme is Dislocation, Displacement, Diaspora, and the Creation of the New Village, we want to specifically address the housing crisis in Vancouver through the lens of social sustainability. Our goals are to encourage personal urban narratives, to encourage connectivity, and to encourage the sharing of resources. We are interested in the borders that are created in urban landscapes: between public and private, waste and commodity, man-made and natural, night and day. We are interested in exploring the depth and ambiguity of these binaries, and aim to bridge connections between communities of individuals in Vancouver by creating a space where people can share their knowledge and experiences. In line with a relational aesthetic, showandtellvancouver acts as art and activism and uses grassroots organization in that we are relying on all participants becoming performers in their engagement with the piece.

Show and Tell Vancouver currently exists as performance, installation, and ongoing traces. The three projects proposed are an interactive deck of cards, a blog, and video. Fort makin' is a video installation and documentation of our overnight group performance created for this event. fort makin' is a material intervention activating a dormant time-space through creative community engagement and activism. The three of us will meet at 11 p.m. on commercial drive and ride together on bicycle and a tandem bike with a 10 foot long bamboo trailer and safety gear throughout the alleys of east vancouver looking for materials and a possible location to build a shelter. Between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m we will build a structure and occupy it, sharing a meal cooked over a camp stove. We will tear down the structure putting everything back where we found it. The video will also be posted on our blog www.showandtellvancouver.blogspot.com for which we have created a deck of cards with tasks that embody the projects goals. For example:
-befriend and unlikely stranger
-what is your favorite mom and pop shop?
-walk/ride to the center of the lions gate bridge and watch the sun set
-go to queen elizabeth park, on a full moon, even if it's raining
-what kind of waste is created in your workplace? take responsibility for finding it a home.
Each person who receives a card has full access to co-authorship of the blog and is encouraged to document and share their personal urban narratives.

budget: $500.00
immediate expenses of the ongoing showandtellvancouver project: website registration, printing of directive cards, purchase of non- invasive seeds, worm casting, and powdered clay for guerilla gardening group session to take place during the conference
expenses for fort makin': dv tape, snacks, tea, propane, hot chocolate, and whiskey

technical requirements:
internet access, printing access, paper cutting, video and still cameras, bicycles, bike trailer, helmets, sun gun, laptop, t.v, editing equiptment

venue:
Vancouver city and online space, Gallery Gachet, and back alleys/ parks at night when everyone is sleeping

documentation:
ongoing documentation on blog from community participants in various projects
nightime performance will be documented in a short video and stills

resume

installation/traces

the installations and traces of march 18 and 25 investigated creative process through each artists level of trust and commitment to their object of inquiry. While some of the artists used stream of consciousness to embody social narratives and personal rituals, some opened the space up for interaction with these narratives. The performances illuminated the paradox of publicly performing intimate investigations. Through fictitious narrative and sculptural form Genevieve Cloutier activated a surreal mental landscape. Patrick Cruz, as a fertility bunny, performed an absurd script exploring cultural traditions, appropration, and divinity. Marianna Villasenor created an opportunity for the 'audience' to observe their own growing edges by presenting two very different changes of clothes to be tried on. With aid of a tub of dirty water and a tube, Grant Hash made visible a world of playful discovery and delight based on his philisophical exploration of the body as a tube. And Jennifer Somerstein, by examining her own mental narrative of what performance is, discovered a stream of conciousness in her mother tongue of what she was actually experiencing. She presented the awesome vulnerability of engagement with creative process as a living snap shot in time. The peices for me felt like an opportunity to bear witness to the process of art making. In the making of our art, our art is making us.

installations/traces

Genevieve Cloutier

Patrick Cruz

Fransisco-Fernando Granados

Jennifer Somerstein

Victor Chan

Yota Konishi

Derya Akay

Andy Lee

Grant Hash


Martina Comstock

Ruben Castelblanco

Jennifer Norquist

Lindsay Page

Community Art Practice: Bonnie Sherk

A Living Library/A.L.L. is a comprehensive community educational art project that considers the history of a site, it's current uses, and it's potentiality as a learning environment. Using archived city planning maps to locate natural creeks covered by development, Sherk works with architects, labourers, educators, students, and gardeners to break up concrete and build gardens that function as living libraries to facilitate relational education about biodiversity, biology, literature, and social sustainability through experience.
A.L.L. is the continuation of work Sherk began with Crossroads Community, or The Farm in the 70's. It is linked with 60's/70's "back to the land" ideologies that have been mainstreamed as 'eco-living' and 'going green' as part of the current environmental movement. Sherk uses grassroots organizational strategies and takes advantage of the growing interest in sustainable agriculture.
Where some artists, Germaine Koh for example, are bringing nature to the gallery to shift society's perception of space, Sherk has stuck to her guns for 40 years now on her community based art practice. She has paved the way for artists such as award winner Amy Franceschini and her Future Farmers collaboration.

Durational Performance Artist: Kimsooja

For the durational performance titled A Laundry Woman- Yamuna River, India (2000) Kimsooja was inspired by a spot on the river near where cremations take place. Flowers and debris from the ceremonies were floating on the surface of the water creating images and reflections. She decided to stand facing the river for as long as her body could withstand it. She describes her experience as being "completly confused...is it the river that is moving? or myself?" (217)


Her work explores movement, the impermanence of all things, and blurs the lines between art and life, self and other. Historically artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Tehching Hsieh, and Ann Carlson have also navigated the thin line between art and life, challenging self and others to step back and see it all as the work. Her work also relates to Marina Abromovich's exploration of the temporality of things placing focus on the mind, rather than the body in performance.

Kimsooja's practice provokes contemplation and with a buddist alignment to compassion can jolt us out of our habitual way of seeing.
www.kimsooja.com/

Works Cited
Kimsooja. Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. Ed Jaquelyn Bass and Mary Jane Jacob. University of California Press, Ltd. London, England, 2004.

Relational Art Practice: Lee Mingwei

The Letter Writing Project is a mixed media interactive relational art work that has been installed about 6 times internationally since 1998. All museum goers are invited to come in to one of three booths and kneel, sit, or stand to write a letter of forgiveness, insight or gratitude. The letter may be sealed and mailed by the artist or curators, or left open to be shared with the other participants. The peice reminds me of Rebecca Belmore's Speaking to The Mother in that it provides an opportunity for people to verbalize/write their internal experience and to share it. There is an emphasis on the healing effects of release. We live in a society focused on collection, accumulation, labelling, defining, and security. Mingwei provides an counter experience rooted in buddist principles and valuing opening, letting go, sharing, and trust.

shadow performance

Four shadow performances took place on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 in FVIM322, my Video and Performance class at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The class was divided into four groups (3-5 people in each) and was given 1 week to prepare a 3 minute performance. Each group took their own approach to the task of collaboration. I will briefly describe the 3 performances that I witnessed as audience.
Group Two:
4 performers, wire sculptures, colourful one dimensional hand held 'puppets' of planets, and live music (drums, shakers, and voice). The screen was framed by the silouette of a string of pom poms.
Enter 'fair maiden' with a makeshift bouquet of grasses and a fantasy of love. She is met by a fairy god genie who gives her a magical tea that whisks her off down a rabbit hole of psychedelic space-scapes. She acquires sculptural wings and has an interaction with an ornate dragon fly. The maiden's 'fall' through space lands her in a provocative scenario in which she is the object of a sneaky peeping tom as she undresses herself. When she realizes she is being watched she freaks out. There is outcry, and a giant boot appears in contrast to her delicate performance and boots the 'tom' out of the picture. The artists employed traditional elements of shadow performance by making good use of the hand held puppets and by referencing the history of the silhouette strip tease. They paired these aspects with innovative explorations in sound, framing, scale, and interrupting folk references with their playful narrative.

Group 3:
The performance begins with a rhythmic drum beat as a hand appears, holding a crumpled shape, from the edges of the picture frame into the bright light cast by a slide projector .
Slowly the shape unfolds to reveal itself as the silhouette of a latex pig mask. The pig entertains a sustained solo performance before exiting in the manner it appeared, crumpling into a recognizable snout and disappearing from view. A cop enters the scene, his emphasized gut leading the way, he falls to his knees and appears to engage in performing a fellatiatic gesture with another silhouette before sinking out of sight. The two 'pigs' then reappear, this time the cop's head is doubled and disembodied. Their voices join the drumming and arc to a crescendo during a power play of position and scale. The effect of the simplicity and pacing allowed the viewer to depart from the narrative and experience the symbolism of the powers at play.


Group 4:
Innovation and improvisation. The inspiration for this group seemed to lay in the discovery of a technique of distortion that occurred when a shadow screen's light is interrupted by glass. The 3 performers begin their improvisation with a playful silhouette dance. The two figures at the outside edges appear to harass the center figure until she squeezes out of the picture plane. The two remaining bodies engage in a battle of wills and the performers use scale and movement to create an ephemeral narrative of violence. The screen blackens. Sounds of tearing, and ripping are heard. With each rip, a blast of light pours through to the screen eventually revealing a tiny silhouetted figure trapped in a box of distorting light. The quality of light shifts, grows, and finally diminishes as the figure navigates her entrapment.

historical performance references

mary wigman: hexentanz
joan jonas
joseph beuys
john cage
laurie anderson: o superman
shirin neshat & sussan deyhim: logic of the birds
erica Lord
elizabeth axtman
maya suess
trisha brown
publik picnic
dana claxton
danielle abrams
video data bank