BRANDON VICKERD | NORTHERN SATELLITE

Outdoor Site-specific Installation
August 14 – September 18, 2009
Artist talk and reception: Thursday, August 13, 7 PM

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PROJECT STATEMENT

During his eight-week residency with the KIAC Artist in Residence Program, Vickerd produced all the components of Northern Satellite, a detailed exact-scale replica of a Lockheed Martin Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite constructed entirely from birch wood.

Installed near the Dawson City dike as if it has violently crashed to earth,Satellite carries an aura of apocalyptic spectacle as well as a strong vein of sociological critique. Referencing dystopian narratives of surveillance, the militarisation of space and techno-fetishism, Vickerd’s creation also highlights our cultural reliance on gadgets, data and mapping to frame and understand our notions of landscape, place, nation and home. Northern Satellite is a highly-crafted composition that resonates with narrative and perceptual tension, a visually stunning cue to reconsider our actual relationship to the land.

This work wrestles with understanding landscape through the mediation of digital representation and simultaneously through physical experience. The GPS System is a network of 24 satellites (orbiting at 20200 km above the Earth) that constantly transmit precise microwave signals to receivers on the Earth’s surface. This system enables a GPS receiver on the Earth’s surface to determine the operator’s exact location. Regardless of whether individuals own GPS systems or not, we are inevitably aware of these massive balls of metal hurtling through the atmosphere, constantly sending and receiving information. The proliferation of GPS devices allows us to locate any point in the landscape and alternately locate ourselves in the landscape at any point in time. This is a process which demands we look at a screen and understand the representation of the landscape we inhabit as the digital model. This brings a duality to our perception of the landscape; the first lies in the physical experience of being in the place; the second is the ability to understand our location via the two dimensional representation of place that exist in the screen. This seems to be the ultimate clash between experiencing the natural world versus a manufactured experience.

Northern Satellite engages the viewer in a discourse centred on these conflicting ways we see the landscape.  The work is a visual metaphor for two competing and opposing ways of understanding notions of place. The ground is the physical world that we rely on; the satellite represents technology as a mode for understanding, and the control of the physical through representation.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My studio practice is extremely varied, encompassing kinetic sculpture, site specific interventions, emerging digital technologies and a traditional object based approach to sculpture. A common uniting theme in my work is an examination of sculpture as a catalyst for critical engagement in our physical world. Whether through craftsmanship or the creation of spectacle, my goal is to provoke the viewer to question the constructed world they inhabit. The end goal of my studio practice is to draw the viewer’s attention to the assumptions we make about the reality we perceive.

I approach my research in the belief that the idea is essential to the object; material choices are secondary and are made in terms of the most successful way to express the concept.  Sculpture is a language, and by mastering the applicable fabrication processes, I believe artists are capable of expanding their vocabulary, allowing for a greater articulation of the most complex ideas.

BIOGRAPHY

BRANDON VICKERD completed a BFA degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1998, followed by an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2001. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions throughout Canada. Upcoming projects includeDance of the Cranes at Nuit Blanche (Toronto) and exhibitions at the Windsor Art Gallery and Cambridge Galleries. Currently Vickerd works as an Assistant Professor in the Fine Art Department at York University.

brandonvickerd.com

STEPHEN KELLY  | OPEN TUNING

Gallery-specific Installation
August 14 – September 18, 2009
Artist talk and reception: Thursday, August 13, 7pm

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PROJECT STATEMENT

During his four-week tenure as KIAC Artist in Residence, Kelly produced this installation for the ODD Gallery, a work that effectively traslocates our oceans into the confines of a gallery setting. Using real-time data provided by several oceanic buoys operated by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Open Tuning is a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture and sonic environment that responds simultaneously to the ebbs and flows of the oceans that surround us.

The wave patterns recorded by these monitoring buoys are transmitted into the gallery via the internet and then transposed into motion and sound through Kelly’s engineering and software design. Within the gallery space, ocean waves become sound waves; wave patterns and fluctuations are rendered suddenly visible. Conflating the natural world with our constructed environment, this installation evokes both our connections to the sea–environmental, economic and cultural–and our disassociation from it. Open Tuning reminds us that while our many of our shared global experiences, interactions and modes of survival are reliant on the sea, often this connection remains an abstraction, a mediated experience, an easily overlooked aspect to what we often consider a pretty view, a point on a map,  perhaps a travel destination. Blending technology, aesthetics and a sense of social urgency, this meditative installation reveals how  the environments that sustain us are often viewed through the lens of distance and misunderstanding, nostagia and emotional projection–a non-critical acceptance of the status-quo.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art practice is largely based on sound and auditory phenomena. I find sound to be an incredibly versatile medium because it takes up no physical space, leaves no lasting trace (at reasonable volumes), and yet can exist almost anywhere to tell a story or convey meaning. My recent work ranges from producing and performing music to building experimental musical instruments to creating mechanized sound systems and installations. I have performed in various heavy metal, glam rock, and pop bands from an early age. Because of this history, I relate to much of what I experience through a musical language.

Electronics and computing technology play an integral role in my work both as materials and subjects. Much of my practice involves dissecting and experimenting with familiar electronic devices as a way of engaging with the increasingly technical structure of society. As a result, much of my work exists in a perpetual cycle of inquiry and discovery. The state of never-completely-knowing represents a loss of control that is integral to my creative process.

I am interested in the distance between the industrial manufacturing environment where everyday household devices are born and the domestic environments they populate. This distance in many ways reflects the more general gulf between nature and technology. I see the mystery and complexity found both in nature and in technological devices as an invitation to investigate the inner workings of both, to contemplate their awkward relationship to one another.

BIOGRAPHY

STEPHEN KELLY holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and currently is studying computer science at Dalhousie University.

Kelly’s installations have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax) and Centre des arts actuels SKOL (Montreal). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Eastern Edge (Saint John’s, NF), Gallery 1313 (Toronto), Current Gallery (Baltimore) and Galleri F-15 (Moss, Norway).

His most recent musical project, with Eleanor King, is The Just Barelys. Kelly currently works as Broadcast Technician at CKDU-FM.

stephenkelly.ca
thejustbarelys.ca

HARRELL FLETCHER  |  LECTURE HIKE

Participatory walking tour
Sunday, August 16, 2009, 1 PM starting at the ODD Gallery

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

During his time in Dawson, Portland-based artist Harrell Fletcher will be undertaking a participatory community-based art action.

For this project, Fletcher will be facilitating a walking tour around the Dawson City limits with a group of participants who will, at some point during the hike, be invited to stop and give a lecture to the rest of the group on some area of personal knowledge. The lectures would happen at a point in the hike that relates to the lecture topic. Talk topics could range from local history to botanical and other scientific information, and could include a variety of presentation forms from a standard talk to musical or performative approaches. All of the hike participants will also be encouraged  to document the hike in some way including written notes, digital photographs, sketches, videos etc. Documentation of this action will  then be compiled and presented as a key element of this project.  This documentation will give a tangible venue for acknowledgement and dissemination for all the participant’s roles within the project. In the context of The Natural & The Manufactured, Fletcher’s project will highlight both the constructed  and natural features of the local landscape through a strategy of informal conversation and direct action with the environment.

PARTICIPANTS

The two-hour Lecture Hike  involved 35 participants with 15 giving presentations about some personal area of knowledge or experience, related or in response to the  Dawson landscape.  Presenters included Pasha Malla on stolen bikes, Lance Blomgren on back alleys, Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling on four-leaf clovers, Caili Steel on landlords and Dawson housing, Clair Forsyth on photography, Dr. Jeanne Randolph on gold and poetry, Nicole Bauberger on her painting career, Lulu Keating on insane friends and deadly hikes, a DC Mud-Bog worker on the annual Mud-Bog Truck races, Jen Laliberte on local history and secret places, Chris Clarke on the 9th Avenue Trail, David Curtis on fishing in Dawson, and eating fish in Dawson, and Owen Williams on changing Dawson architecture.

BIOGRAPHY

HARRELL FLETCHER has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years.

His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in the San Francisco area; The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and The Sculpture Center, in New York City; DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas; PICA in Portland, OR; CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA; Signal in Malmo, Sweden; Domain de Kerguehennec in France; and The Royal College of Art in London.

In 2004 Fletcher was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMoMA, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France.

In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, an ongoing participatory website with Miranda July. A book version LTLYM was published in 2007 by Prestel.  In 2005, Flectcher won the Alpert Award in Visual Arts.

His exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, PICA in Portland, OR, and LAXART in Los Angeles among other locations.

Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

www.harrellfletcher.com

CURATOR’S STATEMENT

Lance Blomgren

The exhibitions, lectures, and sound performances that comprise this year’s edition of The Natural & The Manufactured, were concieved as a multi-disciplinary collection of units that, together, bring the socio-political import of our yearly thematic project into the realm of the intimate, personal, and imaginary.

Unified by a underlying principal of familiarization–post-consumer detritus, typical Home Depot renovation products, rocks, musical instruments–all the projects in the N&M 2010 nonetheless work to fundamentally destable our predictable responses and notions of the ordinary. Instead, these projects revel in the particularities of betweenness, finding aesthetic value and critical awareness in the unstable realm between what we expect and what we see.

In particular, the 2010 projects share a sense of temporal anachronism or spatial translocality, a sense of existing in a future-past  rife with objects and concepts brougt to us from a foreign culture that exists in two places at once, only resembling ours as some sort of two-way mirrored reflection. Indeed, there is a distinct sense of SciFi speculation in these projects–a context at once fantastic and dystopian, where the artificial acts naturally and the the resolutely natural takes on a sheen of Futurism’s fabrication: silicone chip gardens, respiring mounds of moss and garbage, stones with consciousness (or at least ethics), and worlds within worlds where the microcosmic and macrocosmic, organic and inorganic, share not onlyfundamental patterns and elements,  but also a distinct  communicative or telekinetic ability.

The Natural & The Manufactured 2011 is a case study in the social imaginary of our thematic dichotemy, our latent thoughts and associative connections to the environment that exist outside of- or in tandem with- the more literal, rhetorical or even socially-pressing definitions of “natural” and “manufactured” in our current context of environmental collapse and the resulting crisis of economic globalism. These projects render two of the largest abstractions of our human history into a dream-space that is at once perceptually tangible and subjectively open–an evocative and poetic meditation on our symbiotic engagement with the landscape.

LANCE BLOMGREN is the Director of the ODD Gallery and KIAC’s Artist in Residence Program in Dawson City, Yukon. His upcoming curatorial project,Still Films, a tribute to serial and sequential trends in photography, will open at the Yukon Art Centre in Whitehorse in Spring 2011.

NATURAL & MANUFACTURED SOUND:
ELFIN SADDLE & BROKEN DEER

Artist  Talks
Saturday, July 17, 2010, 1 PM
Odd Fellows Ballroom

Elfin Saddle Concert
Saturday, July 18, 2010
St. Paul’s Anglican Church, 8pm

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The ODD Gallery is pleased to present N&M Sound in partnership with theDawson City Music Festival(DCMF). This addition to The Natural & The Manufactured series explores the world of sound art within the conceptual context of the N&M framework.

The sonic projects by Broken Deer (Lindsay Dobbin from Whitehorse, Yukon) and Elfin Saddle (Jordan McKenzie, Emi Honda and Nathan Gage from Montreal), share an interest in site-specificity,  place and environment as they relate to sound production, as well as sustained fascination with the fluid boundaries between produced and “natural” sounds, and the relationship between visual art and music. Both of these art-sound projects find inspiration in hybrid forumulations of sound, the recording process, and the specifc contexts where sound can be found or presented. Their work often spills over into  video work and other visual forms.

Dobbin’s BROKEN DEER is a “low-fi recording project that celebrates nature, tender histories and rural decay.” Focusing on the inextricable relationship between matter and sound, Broken Deer  utilizes field recordings, altered recordings, static and hiss, instrumental intervention / invention and voice to create highly personalized sonic landscapes. Dobbin descibes her Broken Deer project as  “a weld of geology and sound. A historical recovery. The earth building up and collapsing, weathered down, restrained and decayed. Spaces of loss sifting around underneath. Little pieces quietly fading, shifting, wanting to sweep the sky.”

ELFIN SADDLE’S music blends traditions of western and eastern “folk” music , with pop structures, ambient washes and lilting melodies. Using invented, hand-made instruments, found objects and altered instruments (pots and pans, one-handed accordians and automatonic instruments that play themselves), along side more traditional instruments, Elfin Saddle’s music often sounds at once mythical and futuristic. The most fundamental phenomena of sound–motion, vibration and the physcial interaction between two objects or forces–becomes the raw material for music that is constructed and composed. Elfin Saddle’s project suggests that all sound, even in its most unmediated and unarranged state, is inherently a product of nature.

For their artist talks at KIAC’s Odd Fellows Ballroom, Broken Deer and Elfin Saddle will be discussing their work, playing recordings, screening related videos, and giving an introduction to their process and practice. After their talks, Elfin Saddle will be presenting a live concert as part of the Dawson City Music Festival while Broken Deer will be creating a commissioned work in collaboration with Festival Performers and local musicians that will be subsequently broadcast on CFYT Radio 106.9 FM in Dawson City.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

BROKEN DEER is one of many sound and music projects by Lindsay Dobbin of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. She is also busy with Pure Shores, a solo pop outlet and Sync-o a video and sound project that combines 90s pop music with old documentaries. Broken Deer recordings include Our Small Going (Gandhara Recordings, 2006) and Songs for Imbolc (Scotch Tapes, 2010)

Lindsay Dobbin Website
Lindsay Dobbin at MySpace

Founded by Jordan McKenzie and Emi Honda, ELFIN SADDLE also includes Nathan Gage on tuba and stand-up bass. Their work as been recorded on two albums, Gigantic Mother / Wounded Child (Kill Devil Hills, 2008) and Ringing for the Begin Again (Constellation, 2009). Their newest release,Wurld, a video animation with new songs, will be released by Constellation in fall 2010. Elfin Saddle is based in Montreal.

Elfin Saddle Website
Elfin Saddle at Myspace
Elfin Saddle at Constellation Records

The Natural & the Manufactured post-exhibition essay

HALLOWED MIMESIS:
Naturally Manufacturing Art, Experience, and Reality

by Jen Laliberte

“In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God.” ¹
– Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643

The impetus to create and make seems inherently human (to us, as humans), and though as creatures we’ve done much to shape, transform, and design our landscape and world, nothing we create, invent, construct, or develop competes with the grandness of nature. Perhaps becoming creators and makers ourselves brings us closer to understanding how and why we were created, or deludes us into feeling like it ascends our consciousness to a more intense level; we too can become the omniscient, omnipotent makers and flout comprehension. And so human production epitomizes both defiance and reverence of the environment that inspires and enables it, hence the prevalence (or even totality) of ‘nature’ as concept, subject, and medium. This turn to nature reflects a human inclination to understand through imitation; mimesis eases our uncertainty, because if we can replicate it, possibly we can understand it.

But in getting closer to nature, studying and explicating and even dismantling it for its concealed designs, its preeminence truly emerges and the distance between humanity and the natural world is revealed once again. Augustine surmises “that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely” and in trying to decipher what might be absent from the human mind, we are left wondering: “Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?” ²  Our implied connection to, but modern detachment from, the land and its intrinsic systems subsequently compels us to search for, assemble, and build intimacy with the environment, in the hopes it might reflect, contain or encourage our own grandness, and maybe even reveal unknown perfection.

The quest to reconcile existence via mirroring the aesthetic grace of the natural environment necessitates not only a belief in, but also a devotion to, the inter-connectedness of life. The process becomes as imperative as the product and output, in the traditional or expected sense, is de-centralized. Art emerges as the most “natural” method to create and interact without a requisite outcome. A (re)turn to nature thus allows art itself to become what philosopher Jacques Ranciere might deem an “emancipatory practice”, liberating both producer and consumer from the restrictive classifications of what art is and does. The guileless state of the artist in this external unknown zone results in an experiential creation process that is responsive rather than didactic. In this model, the artist, like Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster, “does not teach his pupils his knowledge, but orders them to venture into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen, to verify it and have it verified.” ³  Creator and receiver embark upon the same processes of excavation and exploration, and in doing so can also collaborate with one another as equals; the work can truly become interactive when it is a collective conversation rather than a solitary lecture.

The ODD Gallery’s 2010 edition of The Natural & The Manufactured brings together a series of projects that, while disparate in sites, mediums and methods, are unified in their reliance upon nature as a key collaborator. The works by  Evans, Honda & McKenzie, Akrey, and Dewdney are forge channels of accessibility and interaction; the intangibility of nature and its persistent evasion of human comprehension, mastery, and domination renders viewers a bit uneasy, conjuring uncertainties about the places, positions, and roles we fill as humans, citizens, and individuals. Interfacing with the natural environment reminds us that no matter what we build, fabricate, or construct, we are always operating within the overwhelming systems of nature. In this inter-world collusion, all human contributors can be deemed equals in their relative insignificance. The artist/poet/creator must embrace the same humility as viewer/spectator/consumer, and this acknowledgement effectively dismantles and subsequently voids some of the most deeply engrained social hierarchies by rendering them utterly irrelevant, since nature, “red in tooth and claw” ⁴  and impartially brutal, takes no heed of our invented ranks. Dewdney’s “Strange Days”, Evans, Honda & McKenzies’ “Boreal Growths and Other Disturbances”, and Akrey’s “Vague Terrain” each embody nature in distinct ways, and yet all need the responsive engagement of the audience to live.

Dismantling expectations of art begins with liberating thought and embracing its universality: “There is no specific territory of thought. Thought is everywhere. Its space has no periphery.” ⁵  Once the boundlessness of thought is acknowledged, the infinity of creation and presentation can emerge too. Extricating the art exhibition from its characteristic position in a purpose-built indoor ‘home’ and sending it (or returning it, even) out to the feral ⁶ Now often applied to  animals or plants that have lapsed into a wild from a domesticated condition. (Oxford English Dictionary), unpredictable realm of nature removes the human edifices of display and subsequently deconstructs the boundaries, both real and imagined, that separate geographies, communities, and individuals from the art created within, about, and of them. It is by these means that Donna Akrey’s “Vague Terrain” is able to respond and communicate with its viewers, whether their gazes are deliberate or oblivious. Here Bourriaud’s discussion of art which functions in an “interhuman sphere”, founded on and produced by “relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity” ⁷ is relevant, as it explicates the evolving reality of Akrey’s “ephemeral non-uments” ⁸ embody in their temporary landscape. Akrey’s undetectably manufactured and seemingly discarded vestiges require the viewer to become the intermediary between the work and the nature it represents; when a spectator observes the human textuality of Akrey’s forged rocks and begins to consider with their verisimilitude, the interaction with nature is realized.

While Akrey’s work encounters the task of relational interaction through site-specific exhibition that enables inadvertent or unconscious encounters, Evans, Honda & McKenzie’s “Boreal Growths and Other Disturbances” and Dewdney’s “Strange Days” lecture project occupy conventional spaces/modes of delivery; they bring nature inward, revealing the disparity between the realms of humanity and nature while simultaneously reproducing it. Once again, response and interaction are essential; “Boreal Growths and Other Disturbances” transplants the landscape (and physical land itself) of its inception, highlighting the human inclination to own and direct nature and explicating critical issues of environmental necessity and response to human imposition. The gallery installation of culled/harvested/found objects and life forms responds to its audience with sound, light and movement, creating exaggerated simulacra of the life nature actually possesses. Comparably Dewdney’s “Strange Days” asks the listener to conjure and call upon his or her own conceptions of the natural world and pour them into the content. Reciprocity is not simply a theme of the lecture, but also its process. As with Akrey’s project, nature becomes the ultimate universal public sphere; whether real or constructed, nature represents the opposite of ownership and possession, and as such the participation of the viewer is not dictated by any one individual but rather permitted to form and develop organically, a process that Nicolas Bourriaud asserts shapes our very perception: “There are no forms in nature, in the wild state, as it is our gaze that creates these, by cutting them out in the depth of the visible” ⁹, and thus all the places, environments, and realities of the viewers/participants inform and construct the meaning. Experiences, landscapes, and geographies merge and blend and it is their essences rather than their actuality that yields connection and exchange.

From the relational exchange of The Natural & The Manufactured projects delivered by Akrey, Dewdney, and Evans, Honda & McKenzie emerges a collaborative mode wherein artist, viewer, and work respond and react to the environment they are made of/from/in. All parties are essential in this “art form where the substrate is formed by inter-subjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme” in order to foster “the collective elaboration of meaning.” ¹⁰  The result is a product of immense value, but intangible corporeality, like nature itself. With particular pertinence to a thematic installation exhibition in a small and isolated community, Nikos Papastergiadis queries: “How will art history acknowledge the status of the non-durable, site-specific work that passes through the experience of just a handful of people?” ¹¹  And to be sure the permanence or longevity of this experiential work is a concern; once again, collaboration must be sought, and the collective (if divergent) memory of the land and its people become essential not only for the creation and realization of the work, but also for its anamnesis. Memory, as impervious as nature itself, becomes the only monument. And so just as nature is omnipresent, so too are our human perceptions, interpretations, and memories of it: “All this goes on inside me, in the vast cloisters of my memory. In it are the sky, the earth, and the sea, ready at my summons, together with everything I have ever perceived in them by my senses, except the things which I have forgotten.” ¹²

Dawson City, September 2010.

CHRISTOPHER DEWDNEY | STRANGE DAYS

Public Lecture
Friday, August 13 , 2010, 7:30 pm | ODD Fellows Ballroom

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Dewdney’s writings and lectures are defined by a highly individualized cross-disciplinary approach to his chosen subjects. For over 30 years, Dewdney has creating a body of work that routinely draws upon and interrogates the fields of natural history, neurophysiology, media studies, linguistics, literature and evolutionary biology. For his keynote lecture, Dewdney will be presenting new, original research into the reciprocal relationship between our environment and our human mechanisms for understanding and describing it. Using “Strange Days” as both a theme and theme song for his address, Dewdney will be looking at the intimate relationship between language, evolution, consciousness and technology.

BIOGRAPHY

Since the publication of his first book in 1971, CHRISTOPHER DEWDNEY has been consistently creating and publishing some of Canada’s most innovative, evocative and challenging writing.

Acclaimed for his poetry, non-fiction and work in culture/media studies, Dewdney has published 15 books and countless essays and articles. He is a past winner of the CBC Literary Competition, the Harbourfront Festival Prize, and is a four-time nominee for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His most recent books include Soul of The World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time,  Acquainted with the Night: Excursions though the World after Dark (both published by HarperCollins), and The Natural History (ECW), which collects his seminal long poem, began in 1975, about the history and landscape of Southwestern Ontario. His work has been published internationally China, India, Germany and Spain.

Dewdney’s visual art, often created to accompany his written work, has been exhibited and published throughout Canada.

In 1984, Dewdney was featured alongside John Cage, William Burroughs, Michael Ondaatje, Allen Ginsberg and Tom Waits in Ron Mann’s acclaimed documentary, Poetry in Motion.

Dewdney lives in Toronto where he also teaches at York University .

Links:
The Canadian Encyclopedia
Radiant Inventories: Christian Bök on Dewdney
Canadian Poetry Online

SCOTT EVANS, EMI HONDA & JORDAN MACKENZIE
BOREAL GROWTHS AND OTHER DISTURBANCES

ODD Gallery Installation 
Artist talk and reception: Thursday, August 12, 7pm

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PROJECT STATEMENT

Working through the KIAC Artist in Residence Program, Evans, Honda and McKenzie spent six-weeks as KIAC Artists in Residence conceiving, planning, constructing and installing their installation at the ODD Gallery. Boreal Growths is a growing, immersive environment that incorporates natural, organic material, found objects, altered post-consumer detritus, low-fi electronics and sound to locate sites of symbiosis and tension between nature and human society. Part dream world, part environmental critique, this installation is at once lush, wondrous, confounding and cautionary; the Edenic promise of the overgrown paradise takes on uncanny, sometimes apocalyptic overtones in this work as the typically “natural” reveals its own artifice and the patently artificial acts naturally. More of a phenomenological experience than an exhibition to be viewed, Boreal Growths highlights the role of human consciousness and perception within our evolving understanding of the limited culture/nature dichotomy.

ARTISTS’ STATEMENT

Our work as a collaborative team is a process-oriented, material based art, unified by shared ideals, ways of life, and perception of the world. Each of us is influenced considerably by natural landscapes, flora and fauna, and the way in which these entwine with human society. We are all obsessive collectors and scavengers, each of us having different ways of discovering objects in day to day life; tokens that suggest a vague, transitory significance. We glean these items in the hopes that, when reconfigured, they might take on a new life or purpose.

In the gallery we compile our respective gleanings and a more focused creative process begins. Like a game of chess, our first moves are reserved, structural, thoughtful. But as the work progresses the game becomes bolder, less linear, as we become caught up in the moment. The work’s complexity escalates as we drift from one place to another, editing and adding to one another’s workings. Individuality is blurred as the collaboration becomes absolute.

Through this shared investigation and construction process, we create a multifaceted, multi-sensory environment in the gallery—a composite psuedo-landscape that is left for the viewer to explore and experience on his or her own terms. By creating a shared environment for these contrasting elements to converse and coexist, we hope to generate an extensive dialogue between materials as well as viewers/participants. A questioning of our current reality becomes central, the way that we perceive and interact with the greater environment that surrounds and connects us.

BIOGRAPHIES

The Evans Honda McKenzie collective was originally founded through a series of Wednesday night meetings at a rental house—known affectionately as the Brown House—in Victoria, British Columbia. This site soon became a creative incubator for the trio, as well as an exhibition space, and evolved into a ongoing creative endeavour in the form of installations, recording and publications. Now split between Montreal and Victoria, continue to work on individual and collaborative projects.

Now living in Victoria, SCOTT EVANS was raised in Belcarra, British Columbia. He graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in 1996. The recipient of grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, Evans has shown his work in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Victoria and Vancouver, as well as in exhibitions in New York City and Melbourne, Australia.

EMI HONDA was born in a small town in southern Japan where her family has run a Buhddist temple for many generations. After finishing a diploma program in oil painting, she moved to Victoria, British Columbia where she began to create intricate sculptures from found electical components and a variety of natural materials. Honda has exhibited in many west coast art spaces such as The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Open Space, the Helen Pitt Gallery, the Crying Room and the Ministry of Casual Living. Most recently, Honda presented a solo exhibition at SKOL Gallery in Montreal, where she now lives. Honda is also a member of the musical group, Elfin Saddle.

JORDAN MCKENZIE grew up near the town of Chemainus, British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. The mysterious atmosphere of the surrounding landscape and his isolated childhood show their influence through reccurring themes of the wild and an outsider’s approach to construction and assemblage. McKenzie recieved a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria in 2003, and has since exhibited and performed extensively on the west coast of Canada and in Montreal, where he currently lives and performs with his musical group, Elfin Saddle.

Links:
Artists in Canada
Open Space