A doodle I made to respond to Elisa’s writing piece for our ECA MMU exchange.
This is a little video bit that I have done for the ECA MMA art exchange that I am taking part of. I am in the midst of trying to track down some good sound recording equipment to create a soundscape for this. Stay tuned.
Walkthrough 2010
I used to live in an apartment with nine other tenants. It was technically two separate units connected together where everyone was friends with one another. It was always filled with people and noise no matter what the time of day. If you ever happened to be home when no one else was around, it felt absolutely eerie.
This is the documentation of an installation that I created in December of 2011 at the Port Loggia Campus at NSCAD. I used five authentic (ordered from Kansas!) tumbleweeds.
I wanted this work to poke fun at how some aspects of the art market have begun to affect students, young artists, galleries and investors. Is everything that is put into a gallery for public display good art?
Newlyweds 1956
(Wood, Fibreglass Insulation, Vapor Barrier Plastic, Bronze)
In the mid 1950’s both of my grandparents immigrated to Canada. My grandfather came from Switzerland as a trained machinist and my grandmother from Trinidad hoping to study to become a nutritionist. They met through a mutual friend and decided to get married when they discovered that my grandmother was pregnant with their first child. Being an interracial couple in Canada, they were unable to marry. They went to Switzerland to do so instead. Thankfully they had the support of both sides of the family.
I was very taken with this family story since there were so many details that I had not been told as a child. My fascination comes from the fact that it is in no way a love story. More so, it is anecdotal evidence of a different time with very different social morals and expectations of people. My grandparents were put in an extremely difficult and terrifying position and had to build up a life for themselves with what they could.
I constructed the bed using building materials akin to those you would use when building the foundation of a home. Meanwhile, I had cast two envelopes with the home addresses of my grandparents families on them. They were placed on the mattress of the bed. After the display of this project, I gave the two envelopes to my father and aunt. When I return to Canada, I will document my father and aunt with the envelopes.
The pursuit for the wilderness of cottage country in Ontario is a surreal experience. Sticky hot Friday afternoons in the summer spent in gridlock traffic to get away from it all. Everyone wants a little bit of fresh air.
Sleeplessness is Next to Godliness/Godlessness 2011
(False Eyelashes, Black Thread)
Insomnia in any form is an awful state. Our brains do not seem to shut off sometimes.
Nested 2011 (Soapstone, Birchbark)
Soapstone is pretty thrilling. You spend hours and hours gently carving and sanding over and over again on these pieces of grey rock until it’s time to oil them. That is when the colours come out. I got really excited when the blacks and blues and greens appeared.
Sidenote: Use a dustmask when working with soapstone. I wish I knew that.
