The Blog
Travel journal: New York City, 2019
In September of this year I was able to travel to New York city with some generous support from the gallery. Under less than ideal circumstances (in relation to life events, purpose, funds and other commitments) my only other experiences with this place have been either too short or unfulfilled. There’s a difference between looking and seeing! So with an iphone 6 in hand and enough underwear to last me a week, I step off a Megabus an onto a busy New York City sidewalk, eager to learn more and do some research about arts / artist run culture in the city.
This post is largely an assortment of miscellaneous things: Observations, art, sights seen, and things i’ve learned. I’m excited to share it with you!
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e-flux journal on feminism(s): Double issue launch with Martha Rosler, Xin Wang, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk. Among all the mini lectures given, Xin Wang’s was my favorite – It was about how Boys’ Love and slash fiction (using sports as an example), a literary genre written primarily for women by women, and its curiosity and interest in empathetically exploring the other, can be
liberating, feminist act.
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- Guerrilla Girls at the Brooklyn Museum.
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- Fred Wilson, Grey Area (Brown Version) at the Brooklyn Museum
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- Printed Matter!!! Pics of some sweet zines I scooped up for our zine library up next ~
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- Proposals for Printed Matter, Inc., 2014. Wanted to pick up something published in-house.
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Haejin Park, Paige Mehrer, Sophie Page, It’s True
(´｡✪ω✪｡｀)
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- “Who Will Police the Police?” On the murder of Walter Scott.
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- Misaki Kawai I love
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- Here they are in our Zine Library, living it up
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- Favorite work from JIM JOE, WHAT DOES IT MEAN AND HOW DID YOU CHOOSE IT at the Hole.
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- Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Until Different
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Marguerite Humeau, Birth Canal at the New Museum!
There was a really strong scent component to this exhibition that i’m to this day still trying to define.
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- Say Something Bunny by Alison S. M. Kobayashi (I was David)
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- I was David
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- Trisha Baga, Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor at Greene Naftali.
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- Amazon Alexa, this week your performance in the mini challenge was Siri-ously sick’ning, and on the runway you left us gagging to our Google Homes. Condragulations, you are the winner of this Amazon Alexa holder shaped like a bust of RuPaul.
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- Trisha Baga’s dog is iconic
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- Clarissa Tossin, xojowisaj ja (to make the building dance), 2017 for Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at Whitney Museum of American Art
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- Ronny Quevedo, The Main Event (Nomadic Structures), 2016. for Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at Whitney Museum of American Art
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- Monica Flaherty, Petroglyph studies forfor Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at Whitney Museum of American Art
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- New York Art Book Fair super fun but also super crowded!
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- Miscellaneous sculptures from the MET (I forgot to jot down what specifically these were)
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- It’s a Dragonfly!!!
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- Wish I took more pictures of some of the amazing garments featured in Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination at the MET.
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- I loved how seamlessly the exhibition was integrated into their existing European collection.
Toronto vs. NYC is so wildly different – Despite this being my longest trip, I know that I haven’t even scratched the surface of what the city has to over. It’s is just so big!
Until next time I guess. Thanks for reading ;^)
-Philip
Gardening with Native Plants
During For Us, By Us‘ opening night, there was a “Seed Swap” and everyone was welcomed to go home with a variety of native flower and vegetable seeds. We have grOCAD and professor Sayeh Dastgheib-Beheshti to thank for their generous contributions. In conversation with the exchange that occurred on the reception evening, I thought that it would be relevant to share an educational document provided by the Toronto Green Community. This PDF is a handout from a past workshop in which you will find a myriad of information, from site assessment to seed starting a variety of native plants.
Here are some benefits of gardening with native plants:
- They are adapted and have evolved to suit the regional climate, soils and wildlife
- They are more resistant to local pests, diseases and harsh weather (require no pesticide)
- They need minimal watering
- They provide shelter and food for local wildlife (who in turn provide fertilizer enriching the soil)
- They help in the proliferations of pollinators like bees
Image from:https://www.torontogardens.com/2015/02/evergreen-canada-native-plant-database.html/
For Us, By Us Database Launch
I am very excited by this first blog post featuring a bountiful basket of goodies. This image picturing Oprah presenting such abundance from the land, is gold to me. I feel very drawn to it, especially as a Black woman who is passionate about gardening. Not only does it visually defeat a spectrum of images in which Black people are shown as dispossessed, but it also highlights an achievable condition- food security and sovereignty for all. While Oprah has many privileges, among them a boundless access to food, to me this picture is a seed of hope for an alternative future of self and communal dietary sufficiency. I believe that it is a fantastic image to kick-off this blog segment accompanying For Us, By Us, a group exhibition featuring works by: Andre Baynes, Lwrds Duniam & Aemilus Milo, Dana Prieto with Chandra Maracle, Rowan Red Sky, and Sheila Sampath. I wish that the forthcoming articles and links will allow for a deeper engagement with the themes of the exhibition, and encourage you to ruminate, reflect, consider, or re-consider the ways in which food holds an important place in moving towards a decolonial future.
-Geneviève Wallen, curator
The Art of Slowness
It is mid-August and the skies are oily with smog. A handful of galleries have pressed pause on their exhibition cycle, the city streets half-buzz, half-empty as vacationers exit the city for reprieve. If we want to talk about seasonal slowness, August is the month when structures loosen and demands slacken. So, perhaps it comes as no surprise that in the sluggish heat of August, where we are forced to slow our bodies to accommodate the environment that I, too, am thinking about slowness in the context of art writing and practice. I’m interested in the ways that slowness is thought of, implied, and practiced in processes of art making and viewership.
Using the Slow Movement as my starting point for thinking about slowness and its many intersections, we can see that slowness works to dismantle normative ideas of production and consumption and exchanges measured and quantitative temporality with affective, qualitative experience. As slowness becomes suffixed to many sectors threatened by corporatization and capitalist acceleration, it may too be a method of critique and embodied thinking in art practice and writing to articulate spaces of ambiguity and poetics and make way for looser structures of thinking and making.
However, the relation between art and slowness is more intimate than a coupled term: art is fundamentally slow. It both embodies and invites slowness, distancing itself from the accelerated flows of production, distribution, and consumption and inviting interaction without aim or definitive result. Art is an anachronistic, slow object that stages itself against time and instead opens itself to multiple temporalities. Art objects are not static representations but objects open to activation by subjective, cultural, and historical interpretation. These next instalments of writing, produced during my stay at Xpace Culture Centre through the Writer-in-Residency program, expand on art’s slowness and the art of slowness to consider temporality and movement in art writing and practice.
-Sara England
Travel journal: Austin and Dallas, TX
Xpace Director Emily Gove recently travelled to Texas and visited the Blanton Art Museum, The Contemporary Austin, the Webb Gallery and Nasher Sculpture Center while exploring Austin, Dallas and Waxahachie. Check out her photos below.
Gran Fury, Riot in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s at the Blanton Art Museum in Austin, TX
Donald Moffett, Call the White House in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Felix Gonzalez Torres (left) and Gran Fury (right) in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Beverly Semmes, Famous Twins in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Alex Bag, Untitled Fall ’95 in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Nikki S. Lee, Projects in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Mariko Mori, Pratibimba #3 in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Lise Haller Baggeson, Mothernism at The Contemporary Austin at Laguna Gloria
Tom Sachs, Miffy Fountain, in the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria
Paul McCarthy, White Snow #3, in the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria
Mark Mothersbaugh, Myopia at the Contemporary Austin
Daniel Johnston, Jeremiah the Innocent
Esther Pearl Watson, Running from the Police in Camaraderie at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, TX
Inside Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow at Nasher Sculpture Center
Doris Salcedo, Plegaria Muda at Nasher Sculpture Center
Mai-Thu Perret, Sightings at Nasher Sculpture Center
Anish Kapoor, Sky Mirror at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, TX. Read more about the Dallas Cowboys art collection here.
Travel journal: Detroit, Akron, Cleveland and Alliance
Our Director, Emily Gove, visited Detroit, Cleveland, Akron and Alliance this weekend – check out her photos below from MOCAD, Cranbrook Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, the Troll Hole Art Emporium, the Feline Historical Museum, MOCA Cleveland, Transformer Station and the Cleveland Institute of Art:
Dave Eggers Prints and Drawings in the Mobile Homestead at MOCA Detroit
Ragnar Kjartansson, Woman in E at MOCA Detroit
Steve Shaw, Gratiot Ave. in Detroit Affinities curated by Jens Hoffman at MOCA Detroit
assume vivid astro focus in Read Image, See Text at Cranbrook Art Museum
Him, a project by Liz Cohen at Cranbrook Art Museum
Sol Lewitt, Wall Drawings 790A and 790B: Irregular Alternating Color Bands at Cranbrook Art Museum
The Troll Hole Art Emporium, home of the world’s largest troll collection
Entrance to the Feline History Museum at the Cat Fanciers Association of America
Original painting by Louis Wain at the Feline Historical Museum
Natalie Lanese, Depthless Without You in Neo Geo at Akron Art Museum
Amy Sinbondit, Singularity in Neo Geo at Akron Art Museum
An installation of digital enlargements of vernacular Kodacolor snapshots printed on fabric by Laura Ruth Bidwell in Unfixed: the fugitive image at Transformer Station
Valérie Blass, Je suis une image in Stranger at MOCA Cleveland, curated by Rose Bouthillier
Sascha Braunig in Stranger
Christine Meder, Sorry in the Open Student Exhibition at Cleveland Institute of Art
Dupont Street Art District
Nude in the Woods, Jessica Groome, Erin Stump Projects.
With many of Toronto’s beloved galleries making the move to Dupont St., I decided to take a walk in the new gallery hub on a shockingly warm November day. With such a high population of contemporary galleries within a couple block radius, there is a real sense of a growing community.
Though at first the street felt slightly quiet and desolate, the moment I exited the underpass just west of Lansdowne and Dupont- the mood quickly changed.
Immediately I felt I was in a new part of the city, one that was clearly in the midst of developing into a unique and creative community.
Anti-discrimination in the classroom
Academic institutions, particularly Art and Design Schools, tend to be though of as progressive spaces. At least they should be: Art and design is avant-garde and pushes social boundaries. Yet discrimination in the classroom continues to affect many students, particularly indigenous students, women, folks who don’t fit heteronormative gender and sexual binaries, migrant students and folks of colour. It doesn’t stop there though, discrimination in academic spaces keeps potential students from registering in the first place and feeds a wider socio-economic model exclusive of marginalized communities.
In February of 2015, OCAD Student Union’s Student Advocate Robin Fraser, in collaboration with Xpace intern Pablo Munoz and the Diversity and Equity Office put together a workshop on how to address discrimination in the class- room. Pablo generated a document outlining some thoughts that stood out from that conversation and OCAD U’s policy on discrimination. The document also speaks to some of the forms that discrimination can take, and provides some practical tools and procedures based on scenarios.
Download the document here!
Integrated Media Interview Series: Molly Shears
We will be posting a series of interviews our intern Katie Kotler did with a handful of Integrated Media students about their work. we start the series with Molly Shears, enjoy!
Molly Shears is a third-year Integrated Media student. You can see samples of her work at: http://mollyshearsart.tumblr.com/
1. Tell me about your technique and preferred style of animation.
At the moment, my preferred style of animation is to cut and paste different live-action clips and create video collages. I merge and alter the different pieces on After Effects and occasionally I like to go a step further and rotoscope (on paper) the result-whatever works for the specific project!
2. Your work seems to revolve around natural settings, rotoscoping, figures and gifs. One of these natural settings is the ocean. What does that mean for you? How does it resonate?
I didn’t realize it until recently, but shooting nature, the ocean in particular, has been something I’ve been doing since I was a kid. Throughout my life, I’ve spent a great deal of time by the ocean in Nova Scotia, where my family is from. To me, the ocean
resembles a symbolism of familial connections-a reason I collect images of different landscapes and make them into one-it’s a way for me to discuss heritage and genetics. I also love the ocean because of the incredibly profound power it holds: it is so large
and strong and wise.
4. Which artists are you influenced by?
The animators I am most influenced by are Joe Hamilton, creator of the amazing Hyper Geography films, and the sound and video artist Ryoichi Kurokawa.
5. You are now on exchange. What are you learning about your new surroundings and being at a different school?
The school I’m currently doing my exchange in (FAMU, in Prague) is definitely different than OCAD. It’s a film school, so we learn a lot of theory and it’s practical applications. My time here has made me greater appreciate the artfulness and symbolisms within narrative film and how I can apply this to my own work (we watch a lot of movies!). It’s also amazing to be able to create projects with an international group of people-I’ve learned a lot about perspective here.
6. What are you currently working on?
Because I am abroad and have access to a lot less materials while I am here, I have been spending a lot of time working on my writing. I’ve started to work on the script for my thesis next year, as well as some short stories. In a couple of weeks, I’m doing a
“filmmaking bootcamp” with my school, where we go to the woods for a weekend, and return back to Prague having made a film.
7. What do you hope to do after graduating from OCAD?
After graduating from OCAD, I’d love to focus even further on writing and directing short films. I definitely never want to stop creating art. I’m really going to miss being in a school environment, so hopefully I’ll do a Masters degree eventually. My time in Prague has also made me understand the value of working within an international community, so I’d also love to work and travel.
8. What’s been your favourite piece that you’ve worked on throughout your time at school?
So far, I think my favourite piece I’ve made at OCAD is a short video I did last year titled “Recurring, Receding.” I really wanted to create a piece where I collected multiple landscapes and unified them into one entity. The piece fulfilled my constant desire to
work with moving images of the ocean and piece them together.
bye
Current Mood:
Everything seems to be coming to an end. Grad Ex was last night and it showcased a lot of wonderful artists and peers of mine. So much art, so many people, seriously ridiculous. I left early, since I hate large groups of people so I am probably going to go back this weekend so I can actually look at everything. I am really happy for all the medal winners, very amazing and talented friends and artists. Its been a long year, but it was definitely worth it seeing everything thing come together last night.
So, this is my last post ever on the Xpace blog. it has been a really great few months working here and with all the amazing and talented people. Truly a great and memorable experience, I learned so much! The ladies that run this space are sincerely remarkable and it was a pleasure seeing how things go on behind the scenes and to be apart of something really amazing.
It was fun talking to you internet,
c ya l8r
