(UN)SETTLED
With artists: Lori Blondeau, Terrance Houle, Duorama: Ed Johnson & Paul Couillard, Basil AlZeri, Matthew Walker, Lisa Myers with Shored-up Collective, University of Waterloo Fine Arts Students: Mikayla Barney, Karen Ly, Neda Moshg, Yasmeen Nematt-Alla, Nadine Simec, Sepideh Tajalizadeh Dashti, Emily Traichel, Karissa Van Muyen and Tait Wilman.
Image credits: Henry Chan and Bojana Videkanic.
(Un)settled was a curatorial project seeking to connect an important, but now somewhat overlooked, cultural landmark The Scarborough Guild of the Arts (the Guild) with a number of contemporary artists who engaged, activated and responded to the site and its history. The project involved a series of five-day residencies during which artists did performances, social interventions, installations, and film screenings. These interventions in the public space, served as a bridge between the history of the Guild and the site’s place and meaning in Scarborough’s current cultural and artistic context. Key theoretical and material idea carrying throughout the project was the relationship between Indigenous and settler history and present, and a question of how the site can be re-thought with the Indigenous political and aesthetic practice as a guiding principle.
The Guild is an important landmark, a park and a public space, it carries with it not just the history of the modernist era in Canada, but also of Scarborough’s post-WWII development and much deeper indigenous history. By extending the project to exploration of the site, the landscape, and land the project’s core was to build, through aesthetic means, meaningful relationships between social practices and land. Some of the crucial themes of (Un)settling were: indigenous history of the Scarborough Bluffs, history of land, immigration and transition in Scarborough, urban landscape, urban sprawl, and tension between nature and human intervention. The project was developed with research funds from SSHRC Insight Development Grant, University of Waterloo funding, and in partnership with The Friends of the Guild, 7a*11d International Performance Festival, Doris McCarthy Gallery in Scarborough, LandMarks2017 Project and the City of Toronto.
The crucial element of this curatorial project of re-contextualization of the Guild was to make it relevant to those who live around the site and to engage with the local community. This was achieved through a series of public presentations and programming organized between May 3 and June 16, 2017: a five-week public art residency on site at the Guild, artist talks, guided tours, live performances, temporary installations, film screening series in the park, and even a picnic. The Guild site curated program involved each of the artists spending between four and five days working in our on-site field studio in order to engage with the Guild’s rich history and create a series of public artistic responses and interventions (e.g. video projections, temporary outdoor sculpture, performances, audio installation, etc.). Two weeks of programming was reserved for two groups of students from York University and University of Waterloo. One group, Shored-up Collective, was lead by artist Lisa Myers, while I lead the other group from Waterloo. Each group spent time working directly on site and in the on-site studio creating their own installations, sculptures, performances, and video. During the entire month-long programming we had interpreters and guides to help engage the public.
Unsettling was a group exhibition that continued some of the ideas and themes opened up during the Guild Park and Gardens intervention and residencies.
Participating artists were: Lori Blondeau, Adrian Stimson, Michael Farnan, Lisa Myers, Shored-Up Collective, Duorama, Terrance Houle, Basil AlZAeri.
A group exhibition dealing with political memory in diaspora curated for XSPACE Gallery in Toronto.
Artists: Saša Rajšić, Tamara Platiša, Vladimir Milošević.
In Between: Long Distance Relationships, group exhibition curated at Toronto Photographic Workshop (TPW) Gallery, Toronto, 2006.
Artists: Nebojša Serić, Darko Fritz, Irena Paskali, Maja Bajević, Zoran Todorović, Zvonka Simičič and Tanja Vujinović, Duo p.RT (Vladimir Radišić and Jovan Trkulja).
In Between presents the work of nine Southeastern European artists who know that existing in between people, places, or things is not an easy position. In video, print, and web work, they emphatically act as agents of mediation. Tackling topics including migration, corporatization, and surveillance, they engage various matrices of meaning, mediating social, cultural, and economic realities in their respective environments.
This Could be the Place 0.1 is a series of public interventions, performances and a one day symposium co-curated and organized by Bojana Videkanic and Ivan Jurakic, UWAG Gallery and University of Waterloo Fine Arts Department , June 2014.
Artists: Jessica Thompson, Johannes Zits, Lisa Birke, Terrance Houle, Adrian Blackwell, Adrian Stimson and Cheryl L’Hirondelle.
Image credits: Scott Lee.
This Could be the Place 0.1 points towards art’s capacity to revel and flourish in confusion, to operate under apprehension and misdirection. As much a statement as a question, the title suggests unpredictability, disorientation and aimlessness as strategies that can be used to activate, define or repurpose aspects of public spaces while also paralleling the distinctive lack of navigation and means of way-finding within the built environment on campus.
This Could be the Place is a satellite project for CAFKA 2014 developed in response to the biennial’s theme It should always be this way, which poses a similar question––how to disrupt the everyday by inserting utopian daydreaming, contemplation and curiosity into the ebb and flow of the urban environment.