ReCALL is a video projection in a storefront window in downtown Charlottetown, as a residency project at the Confederation Centre for the Arts. My focus was the “invisible residue” of place. I developed an inventory of text - smells, rhythms, folklore and colloquialisms – through folklorists, librarians, artists, business people and old-timers and juxtaposed it to images - digital photos of the island and scanned maps. Although incomplete, the data bank of images and texts reflect local traditions, collective knowledge and personal memories as a poetics of place. Presented in the heart of the tourist strip, the video posits the local voice in the public arena with ambient street noises as real-time sound.
Civil Fugue uses the panels of bicycle stands in downtown Hamilton to mount twelve image and text panels as a gesture of repositioning local voices in the public sphere. The text was generated through meetings with participants from diverse sectors in the city as a sampler of attitudes about the future public space in Hamilton. Juxtaposed with a satellite image of Hamilton, the text maps the voice as a live feed of public opinion. The project was part of Future Cities, Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Guessed House (2004)
The three-person, two-part project with Linda Duvall and Rachelle Viader Knowles involved a performative action in a house of a total stranger and a subsequent gallery installation. The action of inhabiting the house of a stranger for a weekend (the owner spent the time at a holiday hotel) was intended to open up an exploration of questions relating to home, fiction and boundaries. We never met the owner. The resulting exhibition used a loose interpretation of the initial experience. Catalogue with essay by Donna Wawzonek. Exhibited at AKA Gallery, Saskatoon.
In Our Beautiful Future was an eight-person collaborative banner and poster project with Martha Rosler and the FLEAS Collective, an international group of socially-engaged artists. As a collective project on the theme of utopia, each member’s contribution was autonomous; as an assemble, they presented a heterogeneous voice.
My panel layers text on a satellite image of Saskatchewan as a opinion feed reflecting utopian dreams from my community. In the context of the Utopia Station Project at the Venice Biennale, local voices are brought into the international forum as a gesture of global connectivity. The banner was subsequently printed in Austrian newspapers through the Museums in Progress.
Track is an interactive public survey about time, daily activity and location. Participants clock in on a digital time recorder to enter the work; they receive a copy of a time sheet as a receipt. Then they proceeded with their business. To exit the work, they need to clock out with me and the time recorder. Participants who do not punch out live in the work for the rest of their lives.
There are two versions of the project. Track 1 surveyed the public space in downtown Saskatoon. I positioned myself in sites including street corners, park benches and a street market to engage with potential participants as faux scientist-surveyor. This version was part of the SPASM Public Art Project in Saskatoon. Track 2 used a gallery as its sociological site. Participants punched the time recorder upon entering and exiting the gallery, recording the length of time they spent in the gallery and with art. The results were published in the Gallery’s newsletter as a public record. The Little Gallery, Prince Albert.
PLAY is a functional sports bleacher that provides seating for spectators while supporting brightly coloured post-modernist fibreglassed objects that contain actual sports equipment (baseball, soccer, tennis) and associated sports gear (jacket, running shoes). PLAY was commissioned by the City of Regina for the Lakeridge Sports Park, adjacent to a high school in Regina.
Lebret’s history includes Metis and Church communities, a residential school and farming activities. As a sculptural installation and site marker INHERITANCE fuses text, materials and symbolic forms. Names reflecting cultural groups, families, institutions and historic moments are carved into wood that references railway ties; small field stones provide the ground cover. Local historians and cultural groups participated in the research; students at the Whitecalf Residential School assisted with production as a collective effort. It was completed during a residency in the Qu’Appelle Valley.
Trace Elements integrates fact and fiction, native and settler communities, and past and present in a hybrid drawing/sculptural installation. The work is a graphic of overlapping habitation forms referencing cultures, time and place as a metaphor of time and history. The dwellings mimic the the actual dimensions of house structures. Installed at Rosemont Art Gallery, Regina concrete, sod, field stone.
