“Dave Dyment is a Toronto-based artist whose practice includes audio, video, photography, performance, writing and curating, as well as the production of artists’ books and multiples. His work mines pop culture for shared associations and alternate meanings, investigating the language and grammar of music, cinema, television, and literature, in order to arrive at a kind a folk taxonomy of a shared popular vocabulary.”

(source: MKG127)

Nothing Else Press

“Founded by Dave Dyment and Roula Partheniou about a decade ago, The Nothing Else Press sporadically publishes artists’ books, multiples and editions. To date, we have published work by Jonathan Monk, David Shrigley, Paul Butler, Alex Snukal, Ken Nicol, Micah Lexier, Michael Dumontier, Karen Azoulay, Colleen Savage, Neil Farber, Kelly Mark and Vanessa Maltese. Forthcoming editions include Jon Sasaki, Dean Baldwin, Cary Leibowitz, Maurizio Nannucci, Jimmy Limit and Lee Ranaldo.”

(source: dave-dyment.com)

A Drink to Us [When We’re Both Dead] (2008 – 2108)

“Working with the staff at the Glenfiddich Distilleries, Dyment created a reinforced barrel, filled it with uncut spirit and buried it in Warehouse 8, among large stones from the river Fiddich. It will be excavated in 2108. This whisky is being pre-sold now, though it will not be available to drink for 100 years. Buyers will receive an extruded wood casket housed in a linen box, a map of the warehouse, a small diary documenting the process, and a contract to pass on to their descendants to collect the whisky in a hundred years time.”

(source: MKG127)

“Harrell Fletcher is an American artist living in Portland, Oregon and a key figure in the development of ‘Social Practice’ and relational art in the US. A one-time collaborator with Jon Rubin, Fletcher became known for making projects in collaboration with strangers and non-artists. He went on to found the Social Practice program in the Art department of Portland State University, where he is still on faculty.”

(sources: Wikipedia + Portland State University)

If I Wasn’t Me I Would Be You

If I Wasn’t Me I Would Be You (2003) are “videos of people’s scars with the stories of how they got them”.

(source: harrellfletcher.com)

People’s Biennial

“People’s Biennial is an exhibition that examines the work of artists who operate outside the sanctioned mainstream art world. As such it recognizes a wide array of artistic expression present in many communities across the United States. Working in cities that are not considered the primary art capitals, the 36 artists in this exhibition present significant contemporary work ranging from documentary photographs of military life in the heartland, to video works focusing on the biological activity in urban ecosystems, and complex, minute marble-like sculptures carved out of soap bars. In covering even the little-known, the overlooked, the marginalized, and the excluded, the exhibition represents a real snapshot of creative practice in America today.

People’s Biennial also proposes an alternative to the standard contemporary art biennial, which mostly focuses on art from a few select cities (New York, Los Angeles, occasionally Chicago, Miami or San Francisco). It questions the often exclusionary and insular process of selecting art that has at times turned the spaces where art is exhibited into privileged havens seemingly detached from the realities of everyday life.

The exhibition is the result of a year of research into the creative communities of five American cities: Portland, Oregon; Rapid City, South Dakota; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. In each place, the curators collaborated with an art institution and participated in a series of public events and open-calls, meeting hundreds of artists, which led to the selection of the works on view.”

(source: ICI)

The original iteration of People’s Biennial took place in 2011. A more recent edition was organized in 2014.

One Mile Loop

“One Mile Loop (2014) is a series of public signs and musical performances that respond to the routine exercise habits of runners and walkers who regularly use the park’s walking trail. Six signs, placed at intervals along the trail, replicate historical markers, but instead of containing historical information, the markers share information about the current lives, exercise habits, and musical preferences of six Nashville citizens who regularly use the park. A musical performance was organized with six local bands playing songs selected by the runners and walkers, allowing the public to experience a continual live music experience as they make their way around the path.”

(source: harrellfletcher.com)

Vancouver-born, L.A.-based media artist Aleesa Cohene “uses found footage and sounds to create videos and installations about human intimacies. … Cohene’s audiovisual collages are expertly edited, telling oblique, strongly atmospheric stories. The artist’s found footage tends to come from Hollywood films and TV shows popular during her childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s. … Cohene was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and her work has also been shown at Oakville Galleries and Galerie Suvi Lehtinen in Berlin.”

(source: Canadian Art)

Like, Like

“Like, Like portrays two love-sick women. The women are composite characters created from the actions, reactions and dialogue of multiple women from multiple Hollywood sources. The exhibition space includes a wall painting of a textile pattern reproduced from an image in the video and a scent created by the artist. The scent is composed of amber, musk, bergamot, black pepper, juniper bark, fibers from security blanket, lavender, Lenor “April Fresh” fabric softener, neroli, and ylang-ylang.”

(Source: aleesacohene.com)

View it on vimeo.

Something Better

“Something Better consists of three synchronized videos, each a different member of a family. Spectators are introduced to multiple film actors who merge into three personae: father, mother and child. The three composite characters hear each other but don’t listen, look but don’t see and have relationships that are simultaneously distant and intimate. Something Better recognizes that our relationships to others are constructed through mirrors of ourselves. A textile pattern that appears in Something Better is painted from floor to ceiling on the gallery walls leading to the videos.”

(Source: aleesacohene.com)

View it on vimeo.

Born in the Bahamas and based in New York City, Janine Antoni works across disciplines, including performance, sculpture, and photography. In her process-based work, Antoni often uses her own body (or that of others) as a mark-making/performative tool.

Mom and Dad

“In Mom and Dad (1994), Antoni made up each of her parents in the guise of the other, photographing them together in three different permutations with either one or both of them costumed in this way.”

Momme

“For the 1995 photograph Momme, Antoni hid under her mother’s dress, her own adult body bulging like a pregnant belly.”

Loving Care

“When Janine Antoni performed Loving Care in 1993, she moved herself into the history of contemporary art, and she has occupied that place ever since. Like any negotiation with history, the understanding of her performance, in which she dipped her long hair in black dye and set about mopping the floor, has been complicated by its initial reception. Loving Care is famous because of a series of black and white photographs documenting the event that recalls the photographs Hans Namuth took of Jackson Pollock working on an Abstract Expressionist canvas. The association is apt; as a woman artist Antoni was mimicking the making of an action painting and claiming a piece of the territory that had been occupied primarily by male artists. (She was also referencing Yves Klein’s use of his models as paintbrushes with the transformative difference that in her enactment she was both model and master). But what the Loving Care photographs don’t show is that she was also driving out of the performance space the crowd that had gathered to watch a woman, in a vulnerable position, enacting a laborious and inexplicable ritual. Like so much of her subsequent work, Loving Care was simultaneously about being in danger and being defiant.” – Robert Enright

Lick and Lather

Antoni on Lick and Lather: “I wanted to work with the tradition of self-portraiture but also the classical bust. So, the way I made it is: I took a mold directly from my body. … I started with an exact replica and then I carved the classical stand. I made a mold, melted down thirty-five pounds of chocolate, poured it into the mold. And when I took it out of the mold, I re-sculpted my image by licking the chocolate. So, you can see that I licked up the front and through the mouth up onto the nose, over the eye and back up over the ear onto the bun, and then down in the back around the neck.

I also cast myself into soap. She started as an exact replica of myself. We spent a few hours in the tub together. I slowly washed her down, and she becomes almost fetal because all her features start to be washed away. So, I was thinking about how one describes the self and feeling a little uncomfortable with my outer surface as the description of myself. And this piece very much is about trying to be on the outside of myself and have a relationship with my image. So, the process is quite loving. Of course chocolate is a highly desirable material, and to lick my self in chocolate is a kind of tender gesture. Having the soap in the tub was like having a little baby in there. But through that process, I’m slowly erasing my self. For me it really is about this kind of love-hate relationship we have with our physical appearance.”

Click here for an Art21 segment on Janine Antoni, from 2003 (segment starts at 36:05).

An instruction based work by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July. From the web project (and book) Learning to Love you More. 

Byte – 2002
Multi-channel video installation available also as a single channel work
Duration: 8 minutes with audio
Distributed by: VTape

Through different manipulations of the same video clip, attention is redirected to different aspects of an intimate game between a mother and child. Displayed on a grouping of TV monitors to suggest an electronics display.