Gift, 2004sound collage, recorded voices, installation, vintage quilt collection

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Gift is an installation of 80 hung heritage quilts with 16 channels of sound. Heard through the speakers hidden behind the quilts are the voices of quilters talking about why they give their quilts as gifts rather than selling through the market economy. The texture and quality of voices not normally heard (typically older women), is a defining aspect of this piece. Their thoughts meander and stray—fragmented by interruptions and reminisces. Gift is a patchwork quilt in sound.

Credits:

Voice Composition: Martin Deller
Quilts from the collection of Jeffrey Alford 

Voices:
Corinne Anderton, Maureen Bardusk, Maria Becker, Marilyn Brunner, Chris Caddy, Lois Carter, Mary Corcoran, Betsie Downie, Eileen Ford, Ellen Fox, Lynda Jensen, Jill Lorenz, Betty Lou Minaker, Elizabeth Plumtree, Janet Read, Alison Seale, Mary Taylor, Mary Vansen, Debbie Williams, Dorothy Winter, June Wolford

Gift Giving, Artist's Essay




Image from breathing underwater

Breathing Underwater, 2009floorcloth installation, variable size, painting/drawing, canvas, image transfer, acrylic paint, marker, chalk

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Breathing Underwater was the environment created to house the larger project of Finding TrackHouse and Psychedelic Chick. It was created as an installation at the Red Head Gallery, and augmented the exhibition of a hybrid reality relational piece that took place in Second Life.


The floorcloths of the Breathing Underwater installation are an extension of textile design. The floorcloth tidal-waves out the doors of the gallery and seduces visitors in to float above lyrical images and texts, facets of the street outside throughout Spadina’s markets. The visitor orients their journey through the water tides. The gallery walls are left white and provoke visitors’ imaginations to project upon the surface and beyond; and emulate an ethereal cyberspace. It is fantastical and enchanting, yet composed of found materials, images, and tokens of exchange that resonate from our daily journeys and what is often discarded: takeout bags, newspapers, and price stubs. The visual idioms are appropriated into a rushing collage of seemingly free thoughts and exotic norms. Experiencing the journey relates to web-based experience, in that one chooses which icons to click and pages to crawl. Visitors float around the gallery as they would in cyber-scapes, and choose if and when to bend down to focus in on details like the saturated purples and blues of lily pads, delicate tie-dyed dragonfly wings, and characters within text. The installation includes beanbag chairs- mod furniture of the late 60s- and a television monitor that displays a montage of moving fantastical images so that visitors inhabit the space; jump into the water and become part of the three-dimensional rendering of the PsychedelicChick.com landscape. The notion of an expansive landscape bares relation to this domain name, as historically, landscapes have been feminized. Taking on the term Chick then can be regarded as a claiming of terrain, and a maternal nurturing.


 

 

 

NAFTA - North American Free Trade Art, 2010 - ongoingphotographic triptychs series of 75 images, 11” h x 17” w, commercially printed on 65 lb. cardstock, hand-bound, chicago screws, unlimited edition

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Each image in this series consists of three images taken in Canada, Mexico and the United States. The series situates itself between the real and surreal. The photos taken in the three different countries are 'off the hip' shooting of street images – a captured everyday reality. However, coupled and cropped, they function as mechanisms for pointing out both difference and similarity. By not knowing which photo is taken in which country the viewers are challenged to question their own impressions of those places. The exoticism of the unknown is examined through snippets of scenes, peepholes into the unknown. The deliberate slicing of the photo plane, in thirds, though not always equally, emphasizes the problematic construct of nationhood.

The term NAFTA implies a coming together, an agreement to co-operate between three nations. As Canadians have learned through debacles like the softwood lumber dispute, the reality of the agreement is a far cry from the written and publicized intentions of the pact. The images in this series are 'forced' together, sitting uneasily, but also with the need for each other to support the whole composition.

Curator's Essay

Image from Finding TrachHouse

Finding TrackHouse/Psychedelic Chick, 2009hybrid reality installation, performance, sculpture, installation, live streaming, comic book documentation, relational, animated website

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Finding TrackHouse/Psychedelic Chick is the possibility of disappearance. It is the possibility of reemergence. It is elusive and slippery. It is a creative spirit harnessed. It is projected and played in mixed reality, weblandscape and earthplane. It is always moving and forever expanding. Like a mushroom carpet...it will be spreading, creating a magical weblandscape of psychedelic interactive play. It is interactive installation and performance - a searching, a reaching out, an exploitation of the web 2.0 paradigm, a questioning of boundaries through technological bridging, creating a diving board for artistic exploration of a medium - the internet - that has been principally the domain of commerce and popular culture.

This project flows between well established and emerging forms of internet technology and behaviours. Using every available innovation - websites, social networking, instant messaging, online auctions, media sharing, virtual worlds, mixed realities, gaming and viral communication - the aim is to co-opt those modes of presentation and dissemination.

The artists invite other artists to become an integral part of a visual and aural, ever-expanding collage stretched over networks and interstitial space. In the cracks and crevices, the offered artwork will be inserted and melded into a fluid and cohesive experience. The viewer/user will move seamlessly from network to network. The project owned many domain names - URLs that link or lead into the piece at multiple nodes and intersections.

Alter-ego creation is a cornerstone strategy of the proposed work. All online communities whether they be a dating website or political blogging, are landscapes of anonymity. The possibilities of re-forming yourself psychologically and physically are infinitely seductive and addictive. Critical concern and fascination around who a person ‘really’ is versus how they are representing themselves litter the internet. Allowing that extremely human impulse to be a driving tenet of Finding TrackHouse harnesses people’s obsessions to the art.

Finding TrackHouse creates an artistic forum in which artists and visitors share a role in navigating through its physical and non-physical spaces. In its installation at the Red Head Gallery, the exhibition offered an immersive simulation of the visual idioms of its innumerable domain counterparts: the PychedelicChick.com website, and Facebook profiles. Finding TrackHouse is projected and played in mixed reality, a web-landscape that spans the gallery and the surface of multiple monitors. The work expands on Kim Mitseff’s ongoing TrackHouse, a virtual platform and event for creative, inventive and free-minded thinkers. Together with Lynne Heller’s weaving of disparate iconic and conceptual elements, an intricate and dense set of narratives play within fields of psychedelic pattern, and aesthetic delight.

Finding TrackHouse is projected and played in mixed reality, a web-landscape that spans the gallery and the surface of multiple monitors weaving disparate iconic and conceptual elements into playful fields of psychedelic pattern, and aesthetic delight.

Press Release

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Cloth, 2010floorcloth, size variable, drawing/painting, canvas, image transfer, acrylic paint, marker, chalk

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Cloth consists of a group of floorcloths that take on sculptural form. Floorcloths are surfaced designed canvasses, traditionally used as floor coverings. They reference domestic functional decoration and structures, imagery and tropes. Within a visual arts context, they represent alternate aesthetic practice and history, namely issues around feminism and the re-evaluation of what has been traditionally labeled women's work.

One of the most vivid references for the floorcloth imagery is the Dutch vanitas paintings of the 17th century. These paintings were an expression of the ephemeral nature of life and pleasure—a morality lesson. Flowers and flies populate my floorcloths as they did vanitas paintings. As much as the floorcloths refer to a history of painting they also negate that allusion by their functionality, impertinence and horizontal orientation. This is art to walk on. The viewing perspective creates a dizzying sense of vertigo and dictates a new way of looking.

Floorcloths have always been primarily about pretension. They were a poor man’s Persian carpet—thin, flat, paint taking the place of rich, warm tufted wool. They have the subversive power of a fake or a facsimile.