Funny thing. Yesterday I found this image in my pearltrees and remembered how much I hated collaboration in grade and high school. Funny thing, that I should now choose to explore collaboration in my MFA.
http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-reveal=2&N-u=1_30627…
This past summer, while packing up my life in Canada for a year of studies in the UK, I participated in a collaboration conceived by Millefiore Clarkes.
Four videographers were asked to shoot footage of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island over a 24 hour period and then pass the camera on to someone whose perceptions of the town were of interest to them. I passed my camera off to John Mackenzie, my favourite living Canadian poet. Actually, he is not my favourite living Canadian poet. Zach Wells is my favourite living Canadian poet. John is my favourite, living or dead.
But I digress.
A total of 12 videographers were involved and the resulting ‘communal gaze’ is 24 minutes well spent.
Today I am in Bristol meeting with a technician to see about getting my machines outfitted with video editing software. I promised Zach Wells over a year ago that I would reply to one of his poems in video form. My response is overdue.
Collaborations often have remarkable and unanticipated impacts on subsequent work.
http://www.onethousandflowers.tv/
http://www.poetrypei.com/audio/the-oracle-speaks-o…
http://www.zachariahwells.blogspot.com/
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wells/ind…
When I am not making art, I teach Theory of Knowledge for the International Baccalaureate Program. TOK is essentially an epistemology course for sixth form students – grades 11 and 12 in Canada.
The TOK diagram lists art as an ‘Area of Knowing’ and I don’t see it that way. At least not in my own practice.
For me, art is a ‘Way of Knowing’. Through art making I solve problems, explore my relationships with others and plot my identity. It is in no small part what allows me to navigate the world.
http://www.ibo.org/diploma/curriculum/core/knowled…
in our place is a series of image dialogues.
Becka Viau is an artist and the project coordinator for ‘this town is small’ in our hometown Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Becka is, well, kinda’ awesome.
She is at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax completing her MFA while I am doing the same at Cardiff School of Art and Design in Wales.
From either side of the Atlantic, we upload self-portraits to in our place on flickr.
Our images are in dialogue. We don’t talk about this. Ever. We let the images do the talking.
I think sometimes one is asking a question and the other is answering. Sometimes one will say something and the other will agree or disagree. Sometimes it is quiet. Neither one is saying anything.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69299829@N08/
http://thistownissmall.wordpress.com/
The jig is up. I have to write a paper.
Among other things, it is time to decide what to call “the other“.
How does one do that when…
A viewer needs something to view and sometimes there is nothing to view.
Audience is too passive. Participant too watered down.
Reader might be better, but still not active enough in some cases. In cases where the other is the artist. And the artist is not the artist, not the architect, more a gardener, sometimes a curator?
And where the hell’s the curator?
No one is in the gallery. Everyone is outside. Or on the subway, or at the mall or at home on the computer.
Nobody’s home.
The curator’s playing basketball. She’s the playermaker. Or is that the artist? I can’t see from here.
These seats are crap!
http://edge.org/conversation/a-big-theory-of-cultu…
http://edge.org/conversation/composers-as-gardener…
http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/334/351/5281/3/3
I am an East Coast Canadian on Sabbatical in the UK completing my MFA at Cardiff School of Art and Design. This blog documents what I am seeing, thinking and doing as I explore my interests in cognition, autobiographical memory and strategies for distance collaborative art practice.
