“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).

Located in Pittsburgh (USA), Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant that serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, publications, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus region. The restaurant rotates identities in relation to current geopolitical events. Past versions served food from Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Palestine, and Venezuela. The current iteration is focused on Iran.

Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, publications, discussions, and workshops that seek to expand the engagement that the public has with the perspectives of people living within each region of focus and their culture. Conflict Kitchen has also given lectures and presentations nationally and internationally at festivals, universities, community centres, libraries, and private gatherings.

Conflict Kitchen was developed and is co-directed by artists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski.

Follow Conflict Kitchen on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Lee Walton is an artist working in new media, social practice, video, performance, net art, drawing, and social media. Walton collaborates with numerous participants and practitioners from diverse fields and across disciplines, and has led commissioned projects for museums, institutions and cities both in the US and internationally. He is also Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Director of Social Practice.

Momentary Performances

On his website, Lee Walton writes: “For Momentary Performances (2008-2010), I used vinyl text on city walls to announce ordinary moments that will take place. These texts are installed throughout the city weeks prior to each performance. Nearly 20 of these public works took place in Minnesota and Atlanta.

After acting out the script exactly on schedule, actors casually disappear into the city as if completely unaware of the descriptive text. Unexpected public is left to wonder about the reality of the serendipitous occurrence.”

 

Birthday Wishes (For Friends I Don’t Really Know)

“Birthday Wishes (For Friends I Don’t Really Know) (2002 – present) is an on-going series of intimate videos wishes for people I don’t really know. Personal information is culled from the recipient’s social media feeds and used to create the feeling that we are close friends. These videos are delivered to recipients on the day of their birthday. … These videos also question privacy and how social media is changing the way we define and understand our relationships to one another.”

 

Father and Daughter View the Exhibition

“Father and Daughter View the Exhibition was an artwork I created for the exhibition “More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s,” at the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC.

For this performance, I scheduled 43 actual father and daughter pairs to view the exhibit each day – precisely from 4:00 to 4:30 p.m. throughout the run of the exhibition. Pairings of all different ages participated. A text piece inside the museum informed viewers of the performance.

The intention of this work was to create a unique, unforgettable art experience Fathers and Daughters. Turning the traditional function of the art museum inside out, the viewing of the exhibition became the art experience. By framing this activity, the event was elevated to the relevance of the artworks in the museum, thus giving value to the ephemeral moments of our lives.”

 

Video Performances

“My video performances are often situational and involve interactions, altercations and musings with (and through) public spaces.”

 

Average Point of Interest

The Average Point of Interest in San Francisco is a piece Lee Walton made where he took the mathematical average of all 287 points of interest according to the Official Visitor’s Map of San Francisco. Using the map coordinates of each point, he found that this “average point of interest” is located on Flint Street off 15th avenue near Corona Heights.

Basil AlZeri is a Palestian artist based in Toronto working in performance, video, installation, food, and public art interventions/projects. His work is grounded in his practice as an art educator and community worker. He explores the intersections between the quotidian and art, and strives for interactions with the public, using social interactions and exchanges to create gestures of generosity.

AlZeri’s performance work has been shown across the Americas.

The Mobile Kitchen Lab

With The Mobile Kitchen Lab (2010 – present), AlZeri performs simple and generous gestures, inviting his guests to identify the Palestinian stories of land, resources and labour that are built into his recipes.

Initiated in 2010, his durational performances feature live projected instructions provided by his mother, Suad, via Skype.

Hear a radio interview on the project here.

Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry and Crush

Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry and Crush (2014) was an interactive performance involving food crops and their re-plantation. In this performance, wild thyme plants that had been transported over thousands of kilometres were re-purposed through the processes of drying, crushing and storing. AlZeri spoke of the plants’ origin and in so doing re-created the Zaatar mix using his mother’s technique.

 

Life of a Craphead is the performance art group of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley since 2006. LOAC live and work in Toronto, Canada.

Life of a Craphead have presented work nationally and internationally, including at The Art Gallery of Ontario; and performed at many comedy shows including at the UCB Theatre, Los Angeles & New York City. They have also been artists-in-residence at the Macdowell Colony; the Banff Centre; Wunderbar, Newcastle, UK; and Flux Factory, NYC.

 

Musical Road

Musical Road (2007) was a project that involved Lam and McCurley dressing as construction workers and using an industrial concrete saw to cut a series of lines into the surface of Yonge Street, in Toronto. They claim that the vibration produced by cars driving over this obstruction creates music, and that thereby the work is a public service.

 

Drugs in Our Stuff

With Drugs in Our Stuff (2032), LOAC alienates almost all potential markets for its works by adding illegal substances to all costumes and props from past performances. Anyone wishing to buy these artifacts will have to sign a legally binding document that simultaneously acknowledges they are purchasing drugs and so guarantees they will be punished by law.

 

Free Lunch

Free Lunch (2007) was a project in which LOAC used money from a small grant to purchase of one of each item on the menu of a Toronto Chinese restaurant and provided free lunch for anyone who saw their classified listing or visited by chance.

 

Doored

Doored (2012-2015) was a monthly performance art & comedy show. Over the course of four years, there were 30 Dooreds held at Double Double Land — a venue located in Toronto’s Kensington Market — with occasional shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Past shows are streamable here.

Founded in 1993 and based in Germany and Canada, Mammalian Diving Reflex is a research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere. Mammalian creates site and social-specific performance events, theatre-based productions, gallery-based participatory installations, video products, art objects and theoretical texts. They create work that recognizes the social responsibility of art, fostering a dialogue between audience members, between the audience and the material, and between the performers and the audience. In all its forms, the company’s work dismantles barriers between individuals of all ages, cultural, economic and social backgrounds.

Mammalian is co-led by a three-director team, consisting of Darren O’Donnell, Eva Verity, and Jenna Winter. Their work has been presented around the world in more than fifty cities.

 

Haircuts By Children

Haircuts by Children is a performance about trust, children’s rights, generosity and vanity, where children between the ages of 8-12 are trained by professional hairstylists, and then paid to run a real hair salon, offering members of the public free haircuts. The project invites the consideration of young people as creative and competent individuals whose aesthetic choices can be trusted.

First created in 2006, the most recent iterations of this touring performance took place in Kuopio, Finland (2015) and Whitehorse (2016).

 

Eat the Street

Eat the Street is an intervention into the city, in which a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds makes stops at several of a city’s most notable eateries. They are feted and fed, and charged with offering their brutally honest, uncensored opinions on the food, the service, the decor, the state of the washrooms and the charm of the waiters. For the mere cost of a meal, the public is invited to sit amongst the kids for a front-row view of the youthful connoisseurs in action. The panel of pre-adolescent adjudicators then holds an uproarious awards ceremony where awards are bestowed for everything from “Most Delicious” and “Coolest Chef” to “Least Graffiti in the Washroom”.

 

Please Allow Us the Honour of Relaxing You

Please Allow Us the Honour of Relaxing You occurred during the Open Engagement conference, October 11-13, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. In collaboration with the First Nations University, Darren O’Donnell organized an opportunity for the participants of Open Engagement to massage the students and staff of the First Nations University.

Please Allow Us the Honour of Relaxing You gently acknowledged that, in our society, stress and relaxation are unevenly distributed and attempted to redistribute some tranquility – if only momentarily.

Slow Dance With Teacher

For Slow Dance With Teacher, 24 teachers from a variety of Universities and schools were available for a slow dance. In the spectacularly lit Great Hall at Hart House, warmed by a blazing fire and a few glasses of scotch, Slow Dance With Teacher let desiring viewers fulfill life-long fantasies.