Aleesa Cohene

Oakville Galeries installation view. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

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.

Janine Antoni

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

Antoni MomDad.jpg — *Mom and Dad*, 1994, Silver dye bleach prints (triptych), 24 x 19 7/8′ each

“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).

Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July

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

Lyla Rye

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.

Evergon

Evergon photographs his mother.

John Sasaki

A Four-Digit Clock Counting From 9999 Down To 0000

2015

At YYZ Artist’s Outlet in Toronto

Accompanied by the video Dead End, Eastern Market, Detroit

2015

“In Detroit’s rapidly-gentrifying Eastern Market neighbourhood, a white van approaches the fenced-off dead end of an alleyway, before beginning a laborious, tense and exhausting process of course correction.”

Bio

John Sasaki received a BFA from Mount Allison University in 1996.

He was an active member of Toronto/Vancouver–based collective Instant Coffee from 2002 to 2007.

He lives and works in Toronto and is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

And often visits Guelph for artist talks!

Party Art

Napkins (Materials Safety Data Sheet)

2011, Multiple, paper serviettes printed with one of three colours of ink. 5″ x 5″

43_napkin-blue

43_napkin-yellow

43_napkin-red

A Machine To Release One Burst Of Confetti Gradually Over The Duration Of An Exhibition

2011, confetti, motorized conveyer belt, scaffold, stanchions.

These images were taken at Papier Montreal Contemporary Art Fair, April 2015.

31_conveyor-papier

31_conveyor papier2

“A conveyer belt topped with confetti is programmed to run imperceptibly slowly. At a rate of roughly one flake every five minutes or so, the confetti trickles to the ground, with the entire ‘burst’ piling up on the floor two months later. An exuberant moment is drawn out to absurd lengths, leaving us to question whether or not such gestures of enthusiasm can sustain themselves over time.”

Stop At Nothing

2013, intervention as part of the Parkdale Film & Video Showcase, programme of video works installed in storefront windows.

“I had hoped to upstage the other artists in the Parkdale Film & Video Showcase with an ambitious, highly memorable project. Unfortunately the project didn’t pan out.

So I decided that the next best thing would be to sabotage all the other video installations instead.

Throughout the weekend, I attempted to covertly turn off each window video monitor in the show using a universal remote control, in the hopes that the other artists who did manage to make memorable work would not be remembered either.”

38_stop_at_nothing

I Wish I Could See The World The Way You Saw The World

2011, installation, monochromatic light fixture, four colourfield paintings from the Kenderdine Art Gallery collection. (works by Herbert Bayer, Yves Gaucher, Gary Lee-Nova, Douglas Morton.)

“Works from the Kenderdine collection were selected for their zeitgeist, possessing the sort of optimism and assuredness often seen in work of the 1960s. Installed under a light fixture that emits only one wavelength, colour relationships were stripped away from these once-vibrant canvases, rendering them grey and depleted. Once faded, they became something of a quiet lament for a more hopeful, bygone era.”

56_monochrome1

56_monochrome2

A Machine to Replicate the Effect of a Breeze Through an Open Window.

2012, Air compressor pump, motor, plexi enclosure, electrical components, 100′ hose, inline filters, aluminum square bar. Dimensions variable. Installation view: Gallery 101, Ottawa.

32_machine3

32_machine5

32_machine6

Black Light Thrift Store

2007, Salvation Army Thrift Store in downtown Toronto

An example of how you can transform a preexisting space into an art exhibition space for a short duration of time using a minimal gesture.

“The store’s regular lighting fixtures were replaced with CSI-style ultraviolet lights, directing attention toward the residue of previous owners. The gesture brought to the forefront all the lint, bodily fluids, spills and stains covering the used garments, invisible under normal lighting.”

39_thrift5

Nuit Blanche

I Promise It Will Always Be This Way

An all-night performance for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2008, Saturday, October 4, 7PM until 7AM Sunday morning. Lamport Stadium, Toronto.

“For “I Promise It Will Always Be This Way” twenty-six costumed team mascots took the field at Lamport Stadium, with instructions to whip the crowd into a fervent frenzy. Throughout the twelve-hour endurance piece, they pulled out all the stops with their mascot antics, while “Jock Rock” sports anthems played over the loudspeakers. As the night progressed and physical fatigue began to set in, the mascots required cigarettes, naps, snacks and bathroom breaks. Plush heads were removed and mascot illusions were broken, revealing the performers to be human after all…capable of feeling cold and weary. However, flying in the face of all expectations, the mascots’ morale never dwindled. An unbelievably supportive, ever-cheering, crowd reciprocated the enthusiasm, creating a touchingly symbiotic back-and-forth of support. What was intended to be a much darker, more futile picture of misspent energy ended up being a very moving moment of social generosity.”

Simple Gestures

His work often focuses on the failure of objects, the failure of people, the failure of ideas.

His work presents small disappointments, playfully addressing the futility of life and art.

A North American Bulb in a 220V Socket

2010, HDV, 0’35”, looped

A 120V lightbulb has been transported from Canada to Ireland, and installed in an incompatible socket. The bulb illuminates very brightly for an instant, only to burn out immediately after.

Ladder Climb

2006, HD video, 1:50, looped.

“The artist’s fairly unsuccessful attempts at climbing an unsupported ladder. Exhibited as a single channel endless loop, the piece suggests both the desire for self-improvement, and the futility of the task.”

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning

A multiple for Nothing Else Press, Toronto.

Wired LCD screen, copper & zinc electrodes
9 x 6 x 3 cm.
Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

“[The buyer] becomes complicit: they have to stab these two potatoes and watch the system run itself down. It’s tragedy, but really only tragicomedy. If it were a sentient being it would be tragedy. It’s comedy because it’s just a potato. There’s something heartbreaking and funny about empathizing with an inanimate object.” Excerpt from an article by Adam Lauder, Canadian Art Magazine, Summer 2014.

59_old pototo-s.jpg

(four months later)

Performative Institutional Critique

Performance to Double the MOCCA’s Visitor Figures

2014, ongoing throughout the exhibition “TBD” at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, September 6 – October 26, 2014.

“The MoCCA, like most galleries, makes a very accurate count of the number of daily visitors who stop by, and these figures are subsequently reported by the museum to their various stakeholders.
As a service provided to the institution, I have pledged to singlehandedly double the attendance for this exhibition.”

“By literally “running in circles” for a number of hours each week, I will match the thousands of attendees for this show, eventually culminating in a figure that can be cited in the MoCCA’s year-end reports.”

62_mocca1

62_mocca3

Subverting Common Language

A Clock Set to 24 Hours Into The Future

2014-2015, public artwork for Sheridan College’s Temporary Contemporary, Trafalgar Campus, Oakville Ontario.

“Unlike most campus clocks, this one has been set 24 hours fast, always displaying “tomorrow’s time.” Of course, on a four-numeral digital clock, tomorrow’s time appears indistinguishable from “today’s time,” and therein lies a small bit of levity that is intended to open up a range of poetic interpretations.”

“A clock tower running 24 hours fast is in fact practical and functional in the present, but serves also as an aspirational signpost pointing towards the idea of tomorrow.”

63_clock2

63_clock5

(the accompanying didactic panel)

After a Mural I Painted in Grade Four

2013

HD video, 34 min
Produced by the Koffler Centre of the Arts for the exhibition We’re In The Library, November 2013.

He uses the familiar utopian image of children of varying nationalities holding hands in a circle (usually surrounding a globe) to call into question such problematic yet common societal images.

“For this piece, twenty children enacted this utopian moment in real life, stretching it to an extended period of time. The instructions were simple, they were asked to “hold hands in a circle, smile and think happy thoughts.” Any control over the participants’ reactions was relinquished after that, and a huge spectrum of behavior resulted. This video charts the event minute-by-minute, from the instant their directive was given to the time the original utopic ideal became unrecognizable.”

Other Themes

Sasaki also makes work about Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven.

As well as cultural differences between North America and Japan.

http://www.jonsasaki.com/

Bridget Moser

http://artspace-arc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/BM-004-small.jpg

“Bridget Moser is a Toronto-based artist who works predominantly in performance and video. Her work occupies the territory between prop comedy, experimental theatre, absurd literature, existential anxiety, intuitive dance, Dr. Phil transcripts, the internet, etc.”

Moser began at a very young age with dance lessons and drama classes

“Acting from an intersection of performance art, stand-up comedy, experimental dance and theatre, Moser’s gestures are a potent blend of funny and anxious.” – Canadian Art

Moser did a little bit of performance art while still in school but really began afterwards when she attended an experimental comedy course in her residency at The Banff Centre. She now does performances both live and on video. She has performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, 8-11, Artspace, and Doored, as well as other galleries and at some universities.

http://www.mercerunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Untitled8.jpg

Her performances are seemingly random scenes and clips taken out of different contexts, using different props, costumes, characters, and audio to signify a change in the story. Each performance has a different visual aesthetic, achieved through different props, costumes, and setting. Her performances involve various forms of audio, such as: voiceovers, ambient sounds, pop songs, and other sound effects. While performing, Moser interacts with objects using her body in different variations, permutations, and combinations. Moser will take an object that we associate with a certain action or use and subtly change the interaction between her body and the object, which subsequently and temporarily changes our relationship with the object.

“The artist’s performance refused fixity, moving frenetically between different vignettes and voices on stage, all the while straddling the divide between comedy and art.” – Loreta Lamargese in The Editorial Magazine

Almost every performance stands on the boarder between absurd comedy and profound thought. Moser plays into the fact that comedy is typically seen as frivolous and disengaged with conceptual themes. Despite this generalized view, she sees comedy and conceptual art looking to achieve similar goals; taking an expectation or conventional idea, and turning it on it’s head.

“Moser uses [conventions] as tools; she uses them to stabilize her slippery semiotic shifts even as she turns them back on themselves, slicing the bonds between signifier and signified with the ease of a practiced shoplifter removing a security tag. Moser does not defy or reject popular culture, but her performances do undermine the unified significations on which it relies, offering instead a thicket of signification so rich with distraction, dazzle and reflection that we forget the habits we came in with, forget, as it were, how to walk. In her activation of this dialectic of known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, Moser is less a young artist trying to define herself against the masters who precede her, than one in a long line of meaning-makers, outclassed but clever, sparring playfully with the behemoth of mass culture.” – Sarah Hollenberg

Moser’s work ethic is based upon her trying to understand her interests and attraction to certain items or ideologies and the process she takes in trying to figure them out. For example, a topic that comes up a lot in her work is the idea of self-help. Moser finds this notion interesting as it has been made into a commercialized process that you can make yourself OK if you follow steps x, y, and z. She amplifies this in her performances, as she rehearses, she changes and rearranges scenes as she grapples with intriguing concepts, such as self-help.

http://www.publicenergy.ca/images/stories/2015-2016/Fuelled-by_Bridget-Moser/bridget1_web.jpg

References:

http://bridgetmoser.com/

The strange new world of Bridget Moser

Bridget Moser & The Art of Self-Improvement

http://www.hwy-mag.com/features/2015/3/6/tender-offer

http://the-editorialmagazine.com/?p=4459

ARTIST PRESENTATION: VSVSVS

VSVSVS – Party Art

hhh

VSVSVS is a seven-person artist collective who formed in 2010. They work out of a warehouse in Toronto, Ontario and engage in collaborative art production. They create works in areas of: multiples, drawings, video, sculpture, installations, and performance. The Members of VSVSVS include: Anthony Cooper, James Gardner, Laura Simon, Miles Stemp, Ryan Clayton, Stephen McLeod and Wallis Cheung.

I Interviewed Miles Stemp, he spoke on behalf of VSVSVS. We discussed where the collective stood in terms of what party art was and where their works fit in.

The collective VSVSVS began their career making party art. Party art is categorised as event based interactive art, which requires some form of play with the viewer. The main focus of party art was the fact that people had to interact with people, which created one on one connection and experiences. Another form of party art is the sceptical. The sceptical goes against the event planning interaction. There is a tension created in these types of works. Usually, in some form the artist is on display and the re-actions that occur as a result of the intervention in a space become the piece.

The first piece of party art created by the group was in 2011, titled Ghost Hole III. This work was framed as a Halloween party taking place in a three-day art festival located in Toronto’s Kensington Market. They built a giant pyramid bar where viewers could get a psychic reading by a VSVSVS member while getting a drink. Alcoholic drinks were specifically given out tailored to the personality of the individual getting their fortune read. The work allowed for a one on one interaction between the audience and the artists. This created a relationship with the viewer and the artist’s that most artworks tend to lack.

Another work that follows the party art aesthetic is VSVSVS 2O15 work titled Vibration Station. This piece was made for the 2015 Wayhome Festival. They constructed a geometric plywood platform that vibrated with the music of the festival. VS’s wanted to create a space that had a focus on rest and conversation. People were encouraged to hang out on the platforms. This created a relationship between the viewers, the music and the art.

bbb

This work is what VSVSVS’s made for the 2O15 Edmonton’s nuit Blanche, its titled Make It Flat. It was an event that lasted the whole night. It included temporarily building a hockey rink and having a steamroller replaces the Zamboni, which indiscriminately levels any object placed in its path. Items selected by the artists range from ramps, ceramics, lightbulbs, yoga balls, air-mattresses, toothpaste tubes and bubble wrap etc., are continually arranged, destroyed and rearranged over the course of the night. The project aims to use the act of destruction as a generative gesture and as an aesthetic spectacle. Over the course of the night the audience continued to participate in cheering on the performance. This created a high level of energy which fueled the VS’s members making for an exciting show.

ARTIST PRESENTATION: GILLIAN WEARING

A PRESENTATION OF BRITISH CONCEPTUAL ARTIST GILLIAN WEARING

BY MIKAYLA GAUTHIER

ORIGINS

Gillian Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England. She received her BFA in 1990 and it is notable that she graduated at Goldsmiths College where she became one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).

Wearing was 21 when she first acted on her interest in art. She became intrigued by animators painting film cells at her job at an animation studio in Soho’s Golden Square. Upon the animator’s suggestion, Wearing applied to a foundation course at Chelsea where she eventually went on to studying at Goldsmiths.

Wearing is considered lucky for the timing in which she decided to practice art, as her generation overturned the idea that it was next to impossible to have a job as a practising working artist. Gillian Wearing found herself as a part of the YBAs, a famous group of young artists who graduated from Goldsmiths in the late 1980’s that exhibited art together. Soon after her graduation in 1997, she won the Turner Prize for her work, which is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50, organized by the Tate Gallery.

ARTIST CONTEMPORARIES

Gillian Wearing is linked to artists of the YBA including Damien Hirst and Tracy Emins. However, when compared to these artists who often use shock factor in their works Wearing is noted for taking a more subtle approach to her themes.

Damien Hirst, “A Thousand Years”, 1990 = not so subtle

It is said that Wearing has never really conformed to the YBA stereotype; she is modest and polite. Through the use of subtle photographs and films, Wearing examines ordinary people and how they present themselves in public and private spaces.

THEMES

Gillian Wearing explores the nature of identity and the complexities of personality. She uses interview and documentary as apparatuses for her work. After she graduated from Goldsmiths, Wearing started creating portraits of individuals that revealed their innermost thoughts. She believes that everyone has a secret and her works aim to expose them without necessarily exposing the individual. I wonder if Wearing’s intent is to emphasize the quirks of humanity that are often hidden by embarrassment or fear of confrontation.

Wearing’s work tends to focus on the lives of others. When she steps into the frame, her presence is described to be entirely elusive. The sense of Wearing being there and not there became a theme of hers. Another theme of Wearing is “masks” –literal and metaphorical.

A subject wearing a mask from her “Confess all on video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian…” series, 1994.

She uses masks as a central theme in her videos and photographs which range from silicone mask disguises to voice dubbing. These masks conceal the identity of her subjects and allow them to reveal their most intimate secrets.

WORKS

Wearing’s breakthrough work was a series of around 600 photographs called “Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say” (1992, 1993).

In this piece, passers-by hold up messages they wrote on sheets of paper. Participants include a black policeman who holds up a sign saying “Help”, and a man dressed for a white-collar job holding up the words, “I’m desperate”. These signs allowed for a deep connection to strangers in Britain who would not normally expose their secrets and thoughts so openly to other strangers. This work became highly influential as it was produced before the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which have now made it common and socially acceptable to express personal feelings and comments to the world.

The curator of her Whitechapel exhibition Daniel Herrmann comments, “Gillian coined a number of aesthetics during the Nineties that are mainstream now. She was 20 years ahead of her time.” Gillian’s themes are intriguing to individuals and artists who seek a sense of greater identity.

“Dancing in Peckham”, 1994 is one of my personal favourites by Wearing. In this video piece, Wearing dances aggressively in a south London shopping mall, by herself, while shoppers pass her by without intervening. Although Wearing is in a public space, her dance moves are outrageous and remind me of the saying “Dance like no one is watching” despite the fact that she is in a public space.

She dances for 25 minutes in total confidence, to music in her head, while the audio track of the video is of shoppers conversing, vehicle engines starting, and store music clashing together. It becomes clear that Wearing is completely disengaged with the space she is physically in, and completely involved in the space she created in her head.

Wearing found inspiration for this piece when she was wandering around a jazz show and came across a woman madly dancing by herself.

“This woman caught my eye. She was completely separate. She was dancing not in sync with the music at all. She was caught in the moment.” –Gillian Wearing

Wearing characterises her art as a “type of portraiture” which is evident in her work “2 into 1”, 1997. In this piece, Wearing collaborated with a mother and her twin sons to create an unsettling documentary about their relationships. Wearing filmed the mother and children separately and asked them to talk about each other.

She then asks the children to lip sync the audio of their mother, and asks the mother to lip sync the audio of her children, dubbing the voices over each clip. The result is an intense interaction between a mother and her sons who reveal a very raw view of each other. It is intriguing that the family members had to listen to the harsh criticism and comments of their family about themselves, and then participate in lip syncing those comments while being recorded. This work is said to have dramatically changed documentary practices that long for objective truths.

INSPIRATIONS

Wearing’s education during her foundation program at Chelsea inspired her appreciation for Old Masters of art. This has been commented on as a surprise, since she belongs to the generation of YBAs who have “shocked their way to prominence during the Nineties”.

She loved Rembrandt because she sensed there was something far richer going on underneath the surface of the oils, that there was somebody really there.

Wearing was also influenced by film such as Michael Apted’s ongoing series of documentaries that began in 1964 called “Seven Up”. Apted followed a group of seven year old British children from widely ranging background who are interviewed in seven year intervals to reveal how their lives have progressed. Wearing has described her method as “editing life”. Her photographs and videos target ordinary people and explore dualities such as the individual and society, voyeurism and exhibitionism, fiction and fact, and public and private life.

References:

GILLIAN WEARING: TRAUMA AND THE UNCANNY

Gillian Wearing: Everyone’s got a secret

2 Into 1 (Gillian Wearing, 1997)

Gillian Wearing: ‘I’ve always been a bit of a listener’

Gillian Wearing – Turner Prize winner 1997

Dancing in Peckham, Gillian Wearing (1994)