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.

“Miss Canadiana is a persona created and performed by Camille Turner since 2002. She has made appearances across Canada and  has represented Canada in the UK, Germany, Senegal, Australia, Cuba, Jamaica and Mexico. Documentation of the performances have been included in numerous exhibitions and festivals.”

Hometown Queen, pictured above is a series of staged photographs of Miss Canadiana returning to Hamilton, Ontario, Camille’s hometown.

“I created the Hometown Queen series to re-write my personal history and to pay homage to my complicated relationship with Hamilton, my hometown. The Hamilton I grew up in was a proud, hard-working steel town with a no-nonsense attitude.  On the one hand I admire this city’s fierce resistance to the influence of nearby sprawling full-of-itself Toronto.  On the other hand, growing up there I witnessed and experienced many incidents of blatant bigotry. I couldn’t wait to get away from Hamilton when I was young but now I realize that this complex city made me the person I am today—always looking beneath the surface and recognizing the irony in everything around me.”

Sherisse Mohammed’s 2005 video “Miss Canadiana”

“My image as Miss Canadiana points to the contradiction of the Canadian mythology. My body, as a representative of Canadian heritage, is surprising only because Blackness is perceived as foreign in Canada.”
Camille Turner

See Camille Turner’s site

Curling in the squat rack is strictly prohibited in the gym world; a big no-no. Since you are only able to squat in this area, people get very angry when they see someone using it for other purposes, especially when you can curl literally anywhere else in the gym. So I took that action that is shunned upon and  entered that prohibited area.

For a Relationship
2 years of still images,
4 minutes, 15 seconds 2007
A motion piece created by Jim Verburg
Two years of still image

In this visually daring and beautiful work, Verburg sorts through two years of photographs to make sense of the relationships in his life. Sexual, romantic and familial ties blend together in this intimate reflection on the artist’s relationship with his practice, his lovers and his family.”
– Jason St Laurent, Director of Programming, Inside Out Film Festival

“A diaristic portrayal of ties with family, friends, and lovers. The piece focuses on Verburg’s own passing life, which is summarized in quickly flashing photographic stills of vacations taken, sexual exploits, tender exchanges and conversations, and encounters with landscape. What emerges is a system of values, a life lived according to objectives, that the artist is eager to share. In the piece, his hopeful attempts at communication with a family member are riddled with expectations, and are continually foiled.”
– Mark Clintberg, Curator, Recovering Agnostic

See Jim Verburg’s site. Check class library for full video.