The End in the Spectator

Nice mention of my piece The End (Evelyn Prentice) in the Hamilton Spectator today, in both the Spec print paper and website. Thanks to Spec art critic Regina Haggo for the mention in her review of the Invitational exhibition at you me gallery, which is up for another week or so. The closing reception and informal artist's talks will take place on Sunday, February 8th at 2 pm for those who are interested.

Read the review for yourself here: http://www.thespec.com/whatson-story/5295130-an-inviting-exhibition/ 

Market Value

Last weekend, I was one of nine artists that participated in Market Value, an initiative of the Hamilton Arts Council and the Worker's Arts and Heritage Centre.  For Market Value, artists from a variety of disciplines were invited to make work in public at the (beautiful and light-drenched) Hamilton Farmer's Market for a seven hour shift.  There were paid for their day of "work" at the market with the help of the OAC funding the project received.  The project was part exhibition and part advocacy initiative that puts the hours of work that artists spend producing art in plain view.  My work was performed/made over one day, and five other projects took place over the course of the previous week-- participating artists included Jim Riley, Trevor Copp, (F)NOR (Andrea Carvalho, Svava Juliusson, Donna Akrey and Margaret Flood), Mary Dyja and Laura Bromwich.

I had a lofty idea for a new work to produce for this exhibition that didn't end up happening.  The reason for this is complicated, and though I am very tempted to unpack the saga here, I will not.  Luckily it was not that difficult to change my concept at the 11th hour because making work with food has been my bread and butter (*GONG*) for a number of years now, and dipping back into a older body of food-related work (though not ideal) would be a good fit for a day of performative art-making in the Farmer's Market.

Last summer, I continued my The End body of work by making an installation for Gallery 1313's window box gallery.  This installation, called The End (Seven Samurai) was irreparably damaged by the heat and sun over the course of the exhibition, so I've been meaning to make a framable 2D version of the installation for several months now.  I decided that Market Value was as good a time as any to take this on.  For my market day, I screened Seven Samurai on my laptop while I recreated the end title of the film in dried foods associated with Japanese cuisine-- black sesame seeds and white rice-- a portion of which was purchased at the market.  For those who don't know, Kurosawa's film is about a team of samurai protecting bandits from pillaging the annual harvest of a very poor village in feudal Japan.  I thought that the film and using food as material were both interesting ways to address the issue of food (in)security across history.

 Food for art-making and food for eating over the course of my shift.

 The product of five hours of work...!?!?

Photo: Jen Anisef!

It is always a pleasure to show my work, and I was happy to have the chance to exhibit my own work (after a flurry of curatorial activities and projects since moving to Hamilton) in a very public space, and for the first time in my new city.  Feedback is always so interesting and varied and it's a pleasure to learn how open people are to engaging with art and artists-- especially those who do unusual things with unusual materials.

For me, the most challenging part of participating in this exhibition was casting a critical eye on my own practice, and coming to realize that in having someone else advocate for my work, I maybe haven't been the best advocate for my own work.  I was recently a visiting speaker about my other life as an independent curator in a class at Sheridan College, where I emphasized to a cohort of students-- most of which were about 10 years younger than me-- the importance of being re-numerated for their work.  I remarked that in not being mindful of being compensated reasonably (or at all) for their work, they were not only jeopardizing their own economic health, but they would ultimately have a detrimental effect the livelihoods of their fellow artists.  Pretty ironic, as I haven't practiced as I preached for the vast majority of my art career.  The lesson to be learned here for all artists is to continually step away from your art and look at the big picture of a life in art that involves goals, negotiation, economic exchange and critical thinking, both for one's own sake as well as for the sake of other working artists.

I'd like to thank Stephanie Vegh of the Hamilton Arts Council, Andrew Lochhead of the WAHC and my volunteer Ariel Bader-Shamai for all their help on my market day, and through the entire process of developing and carrying out Market Value.  I'll wrap this post with this cartoon that speaks volumes!

For more on Market Value, look here and here and here.

Swarm at Hamilton Artists Inc.

As a newly-minted Hamiltonian, I thought I'd push myself to make a new little piece of work for this upcoming show at Hamilton Artists Inc.  Over 100 pieces will be included-- lots of great affordable art that will be suitable Christmas gifts, I imagine.  Support local artists and go to the opening this Thursday if you're in the 'hood.

*****

SWARM
Hamilton Artists Inc. Annual Members Exhibition
November 21- December 21, 2013
Opening Reception November 21, 7:00- 9:30pm
Closing Reception December 21, 1:00-3:00pm

This years Annual Members Show, SWARM implies the combined industrious strength of many persons or things; as a verb, to swarm is to move towards – to approach, though not necessarily resolve – a common purpose as a group that is constantly in motion rather than standing still.

With over 100 pieces from our membership, SWARM is a salon style exhibition of scultpure, video, painting, print, drawing, collage, and photography.

Hamilton Artists Inc would like to thank our generous SWARM exhibition sponsors La Cantina and Luscious D’s.

Hamilton Artists Inc.
155 James Street North,
Hamilton ON
(at the north west corner of James and Cannon Streets)

sophia bartholomew at Gallery 1313

Next week, an artist named sophia bartholomew is turning Gallery 1313's window box into a food dehydrator...!

sophia bartholomew
EPLE SLANG
Gallery 1313 Window Box
October 2013

Gallery 1313’s window box is west-facing and receives direct sunlight. Taking the gallery’s particular physical conditions as a starting point, EPLE SLANG will transform the gallery into a solar dehydrator for the duration of the exhibition.  While video and new media are popularly thought of as durational mediums, this work explores how ‘static’ physical materials might also be experienced as something durational – moving and changing over time.  The window box transgresses the distinction between interior and exterior space, complicating understandings of self and of city – it offers us that possibility, it asks us that question.

sophia bartholomew is an artist currently based out of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  Creating contexts through the use of installation, performance, and language, her projects aim to enact situations of moderate discomfort and generative moments of not knowing.  Recent projects include installations for The New Gallery (Calgary), ROOM 321 (Banff), Topdown Bottomup (Vancouver) and The Crying Room (Vancouver), with upcoming projects for Roadside Attractions (Toronto) and Third Space (Saint John).  

There are so many reasons for my general absence-- relocating, family matters and more.  However, even without these factors, I've been pretty occupied with longer-term curatorial and research projects as of late to the point where more frequent posting has become kinda difficult.  There's some really exciting stuff coming down the pipeline in November and February '14 that I will post about sooner or later....!

The End (Seven Samurai)

My window installation at Gallery 1313 opened last night.  Thanks to director Phil Anderson for giving me access to the space (for my own work as well as for the windows I'll be programming for the next few months), and special thanks to Noa Bronstein for writing the following short essay to accompany the installation.

***

Tara Bursey
The End (Seven Samurai)
Rice, black and white sesame seeds, adhesive
2013

A menacing term, the end is the semantic comrade of termination and expiration. The end, however, is also but a provocation to look to other beginnings. In her work The End (Seven Samurai), Tara Bursey uses the matter of beginning – seed, bean and grain – and stages it as an interloper into the rubric of finality. The End (Seven Samurai) is part of a larger series exhibited at the Gladstone Hotel in 2012 for the exhibition //THE ANNUAL//, in which Bursey has recreated the end credit from four black and white Hollywood films using various edible materials. The End performs Bursey’s concern with the insecurity of food production in the wake of mass environmental shifts and devastations. For this iteration, the end title of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), in which bandits pillage a rural, farming village, is faithfully realized.

The End points to a liminality of time and space. Re-purposing easily accessible food stocks, at least in the context in which the works are created, through meticulous processes, challenges our relationship to production and consumption. The labour of harvesting these staples, whether by hand or machine, is recast through the labour of the artist and consumed only metaphysically, rendering field and fork as partial actors. The End further points to a cultural lament for the passage of time and the need to compartmentalize the contemporary and the historic, the past and the present. Inspired by what Bursey has called the illusionary space of film, the titles evoke a lost age of and nostalgia for the belle epoque of cinema and great moments of chimera, echoing that this nostalgia might soon be turned towards our ecologies. Returning for a moment to Kurosawa’s bandits, these antagonists are not merely a metaphor for food insecurity. The bandits are perhaps a reminder of Roland Barthes’ pronouncement that “myth is always a language-robbery.”1  The appropriation of The End is a kind of language-robbery, through which we can mythologize cinema, nature and time.

The end credit can be seen as a signifier for the moment of fertilization, whereby the filmic narrative is transferred from auteur to the subconscious of the viewer. Seeds are a codex for living matter, as films are a codex for narrative, giving form to ideation. The matter of seed is both beginning and end, in the same way that the end credit of a film is only the beginning of our relationship to it.

Noa Bronstein
Director of Exhibitions & Cultural Promotions
Gladstone Hotel

1  Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 131. 

The End (Seven Samurai) at Gallery 1313

Lots going on these days.  This is one thing-- a window installation at Gallery 1313 that opens Thursday, June 27th, from 7-10 pm.  Come check it out!

Tara Bursey
THE END (SEVEN SAMURAI)
Gallery 1313 Window Box
July 2013

The End uses film title imagery to address global warming and the effect that it will inevitably (continue to) have on food production.  It also explores our collective inclination to mark epochs and define the time we live in.  If the mid 20th century and its golden age of cinema could be considered an age of illusion and suspended belief, perhaps our current era can be characterized by a general loss of illusions.  

Simultaneously a celebration of mid-century design and a meditation on loss, The End points to our tendency to repeatedly mark historical periods as a series of ends while pondering the precariousness of our environment in the present.  The End (Seven Samurai), the latest incarnation of this series, references a classic film about bandits threatening a farm’s harvest.

Tara Bursey is an artist and emerging curator whose interests include sculpture, installation, performance, social practice, textile art and culture, food, contemporary craft practices, collaboration and publishing. 

This exhibition will be accompanied by an essay by Noa Bronstein, Director of Exhibitions, Gladstone Hotel.

Gallery 1313
1313 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON. M6K 1L8
Hours: Wed – Sun, 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Phone: 416-536-6778

Interview in Essen Magazine

An interview with me was just posted on the Italian online magazine Essen, which covers intersections of food, art and culture.  Thanks Giulia for asking me to take part!  Check it out for yourself here.

Trampoline Hall on TO Live with Culture

TO Live with Culture recently posted some coverage of the installment of Trampoline Hall I lectured about Cheesecake at.  Take a look here for the post, by Shane Gerard.  Thanks Shane!

Jung Jung

Spotted these incredible lace knit veggies by Japanese artist Jung Jung on Essen Magazine's site today...how could I resist posting them.  SO amazing.

A Cheesecake Story

LECTURE: This month’s edition of Trampoline Hall, the long-running amateur lecture series (“amateur” in the sense that the chosen subjects must be things the lecturers are not professionals in) is curated by Becky Johnson and hosted (as always) by Misha Glouberman. It features artist and author Serena McCarroll on “Invisible Problems,” writer and comic Joel Buxton on “What Makes a Hit,” and conceptual artist Tara Bursey on “Cheesecake.” Very limited at-the-door tickets go on sale at 6:30 p.m. tonight. The Garrison (1197 Dundas Street West), 8 p.m., $5.

Yep, I lectured on the process of making and distributing four cheesecakes over a weekend to a packed house at this week's Trampoline Hall.  The fourth cake (not pictured here) was given to audience members at the show.  Also not pictured is Jim, the foreman of a building site on Givens Street who was the recipient of the blueberry cheesecake. This project was inspired by a short piece of non-fiction I wrote about making cheesecake for my family as a child.

The wheels are turning for future edible food art projects like this one!

Vik Muniz's Wasteland (2010)

I watched the documentary Wasteland not once but twice last week, which focused on a multi-year project by the Brazilian artist/photographer Vik Muniz.  Muniz ventured into the largest landfill in the world, on the edge of Rio de Janeiro.  Getting to know the Catadores (Wasteland's website defines the Catadores as "self-designated pickers of recyclable material") who work in the dump, Muniz followed a group of them and created portraits of them using recyclable material from the landfill to auction off in Europe.  All of the proceeds from the auction went to the Catadores union, the ACAMJG.

Wasteland was a really incredible documentary.  Muniz has become an uber-successful artist over the last decade, and for him, this project was a way of going back to his roots.  As a city, Rio de Janeiro is characterized by its disparities between the rich and the poor.  Muniz himself grew up lower-middle class in São Paulo and supported himself by working in American grocery stores before his career took off.  Wasteland gives the viewer a glimpse of a project that not only is a powerful and effective collaboration with a community of workers, but it showed the power of art to create lasting social change and empower marginalized groups.

Jackson Pollock in chocolate syrup!

The child of a plantation worker drawn in sugar.

Predictably, I'm pretty attracted to Muniz's work that involves food and portraiture, which is very similar in spirit and approach to some of my own work.  It is also similar in that it draws on the tactile/formal parallels between disparate objects.  Muniz began his career as a sculptor, and even though his work is photographic, his process of making the images is more akin to drawing or sculptural processes.  Each of the images included in this post were created on the ground and photographed from several feet in the air.  For more on Muniz's process, check out his really great TED talk, which can be found here.

Images, from top:

The Gypsy Magna, Pictures of Garbage Series, 2009/10
Action Photo (After Hans Namuth), 1997
Valentine - The Fastest, from "The Sugar Children Series," 1996

//The Annual// Recap

Photos of the work I made for //The Annual//, both on the night of installation and the night of the opening.  Bottom photo of pals Lyndall and Christine by Grey, found on the Gladstone's Facebook page.  Thanks so much to curators Noa and Deb for giving me the opportunity to strut my stuff!

//The Annual// at the Gladstone Hotel

Just found this great post about my participation in //The Annual// on the Gladstone Hotel blog.  Check it out!

http://gstoneblog.com/the-annual/preview-the-annual-tara-bursey/

// THE ANNUAL //
Thursday October 25 to Sunday October 28, 2012

// THE ANNUAL // is the Gladstone Hotel’s annual independent contemporary art event, offering an open and fertile ground for engaging and emerging practices. Over the course of four days, // THE ANNUAL // brings together artists, curators, and collectives to present new work and site-specific installations.

// THE ANNUAL // features artists Tara Bursey, Soon Cho, Shlomi Greenspan, Brady Gunnell & Mikhail Mansion, Thea Jones, Maria Flawia Litwin, Isabel M. Martinez, Faye Mullen, Jen Spinner, Laura Taler, and keep it UP guest-curated by Zach Pearl & Caoimhe Morgan-Feir and featuring artists Andrew MacDonald, Johnson Ngo, and Cecilia Tiburzio.

// THE ANNUAL // 2012 is curated by Noa Bronstein and Deborah Wang

Gallery Hours:

Friday and Saturday, 2PM – 10PM
Sunday, 2PM – 6PM

Admission: $5

Programme:

Thursday, October 25 – Opening Reception, 7PM – 10PM, Free
Friday, October 26 – Designers Support the Arts with guest DJ Katey Morley, 7PM – 10PM, $5
Saturday, October 27 – Raw Foo, video art screenings, presented by Zach Pearl, 8PM – 10PM, $5
Raw Foo will feature: Dennis Envoldson, Jennifer Chan, Josh Studham, Mark Kasumovic, Sarah Ann Watson, Sara MacLean, Tracy Van Oosten, with audial/visual performance by Frank Tsonis during intermission

The End

I've spent the last week and a bit working hard on the following project for an upcoming show in October.  Lots more to do, but decent progress is being made, I suppose.  Above is a photo of the work in progress-- essentially a drawing of a mid-century end title card made with black and white sesame seeds.  Below is some of the source material, as well as an excerpt from my proposal for the project.

The End
Summer 2012

Last week, North America faced record-breaking high temperatures from coast to coast.  Ominous newspaper headlines marked this summer’s early heat waves, storms, wildfires and power outages to be a glimpse of “what global warming looks like.”  For me, one of the most disconcerting aspects of global warming is the effect that it will inevitably (continue to) have on food production.

In addition to my ongoing concern over global warming, I have been thinking a lot about shifts from one historical period to the next, and our collective inclination to mark epochs and define the time we live in.  If the mid 20th Century and its golden age of cinema could be considered an age of illusion and suspended belief, perhaps our current era can be characterized by a general loss of illusions.    

Simultaneously a celebration of mid-century design and a meditation on loss, The End points to our inclination to repeatedly mark historical periods as a series of ends while pondering the precariousness of our environment in the present.

This Week

Began one mammoth project...

...and finished another.  Perhaps rock'n'roll cross-stitch is my calling...?

New Zines

Eat to the Beat: A Rock'n'Roll Cookzine

"Food and music are two of the most primal pleasures on earth! It’s a wonder that their paths don’t cross more often than they do-- exceptions being pasta sauce made by ex-Ramones, punk sommeliers and the song titles of bubblegum pop bands, of course…and that guy behind the desk at the record store with the pizza sauce dripping down his chin…

Community recipe collections in the form of cookbooks are not new. I embarked on this project because so many of my friends in “rock”-- whether they be musicians, DJs, record store clerks, recording engineers or record collectors-- are also total foodies. The premise for this zine is simple-- to bring rock and food together in one tasty package, as well as to pay tribute to my community of talented, creative and fun rocker pals and the songs and artists that inspire them."

Eat to the Beat is a collaborative rock'n'roll-themed cookzine featuring contributions by Alycia Wahn, Alexandra Gutnik, Andy "Dictator" Shernoff, Ben Needham, Bev Coneybeare, Casey Johnson, Christina Wozniak, DJ Nico, Elaine Banks, Mark Kingdon, Mary Ann Guiao, Matt Hitch and myself. Zine includes a super special "Food Fight" Risograph pin-up insert illustrated by the fabulous Elaine Banks.

42 pages, 8.5" X 5.25"
Xerography with Risograph insert
2012

Rusty's Dusty:  

A solemn short story in mini-zine form about a man who works in a boatyard in Etobicoke. Inspired by a real-life encounter I had in the early 1990s. Zine comes in a little origami boat.  Recommended for people experiencing post-industrial anxiety.

Zine measures 4.25" X 2.25"

Xerography, origami paper

2012

Buy them here.

Ziney Morning

Got up at 8:30 to get a head start.  Zine Dream is tomorrow!

Thursday

Lots happening this Thursday!  First off, as I mentioned in a previous post, I'll be taking part in the exhibition Under 30 at 30 at the Japanese Paper Place's warehouse space on Brock Avenue.  All day Thursday, the JPP will be celebrating their 30th Anniversary with an open house, exhibition, paper sale and heaps more.  The exhibition opens in the evening...come out and support this singular Toronto institution in the process.

Japanese Paper Place - 30th Anniversary Celebration
Thursday, June 7, 2:30-9:30pm
77 Brock Avenue, Toronto
http://www.japanesepaperplace.com

Later that night, there will be a legal fee benefit event for my good friend, fibre artist Lizz Aston at The Piston, on Bloor Street West.  Lizz was falsely accused of assault when someone ID'ed her to the police using Facebook, resulting in her unlawful arrest...!  Unbelievable!  I am donating the piece pictured above, A Breast, for the event's art auction.  The night should be a blast, with dancing, crafty art and live music by psych/pop locals The Whirly Birds, The Persian Rugs and Hollow Earth, who I've been meaning to check out for ages.

For more info on the event, look here.

Under 30 at 30 at The Japanese Paper Place

My recent piece, A History of Hunger, will be shown at the Japanese Paper Place's upcoming exhibition Under 30 At 30, which will open during the first week of June.  The exhibition is a small part of the JPP's 30th anniversary festivities, which will include a paper sale, workshops, an open house and more.  They are such a unique local institution and I rely on them for project supplies frequently--I'm so glad they exist!

For more info on the JPP's 30th anniversary, look here.

A History of Hunger

Here a is new-ish project I completed recently called A History of Hunger consisting of one dozen mini-scroll "books" made of a dozen white eggs.  Admittedly, this was a project for school.  Here's a statement about it...sorry if it comes across as a little clinical sounding.

A History of Hunger
Eggshells, Japanese paper, adhesive, egg carton
Edition of 12 unique objects

A History of Hunger is a series of 12 miniature objects inspired by books.  Using the phrase “break in case of emergency” as a starting point and combining creative writing with research and sculptural processes, I used broken, empty eggs to frame an exploration of hunger and famine across time and space.  Through online research, I learned about both contemporary and historical examples of famine and food insecurity such as the Irish potato famine as well as periods of hunger during communist rule in China, WWII and the Great Depression.  Each of the twelve book-objects represents a year when a famine or food shortage existed somewhere in the world, and contains a short poetic response to a condition or situation that I read about.  A guiding idea in the series is that in opening each egg and finding it empty aside from a short piece of text reflecting an experience of hunger or famine, one might learn not only how widespread hunger is, but how people have coped with food shortages, as well as how they come to exist.

This project is in keeping with the guiding principle of our class publication-- playing with time by imagining the present through the lens of the future, and guessing what aspects of our contemporary cultural/societal condition will carry over to become major issues in subsequent decades.  Food security is an issue worldwide that will likely only get worse with increasing climate change.  The series of multiples resists providing a linear narrative or definitive history of hunger, and the inclusion of a multiple marked with the year 2042 alludes to the fact that hunger will likely be a continuous problem in a rapidly growing and warming world.

Many of the material/formal decisions I made in the execution of A History of Hunger grew out of my initial decision to use a carton of broken eggs as a starting point.  While the content of the multiples is historical, the use of a contemporary carton of eggs marked with nutritional information at a recent date stamp root the work in the present.  The multiples play with the scroll-- a historical format that is echoed in word processing applications, web browsers and film credits.  Typing directly onto the narrow scrolls required the use of short words in my poetic responses to each historical example of hunger, making them resemble Haikus and giving them a quiet quality that softens the tragic imagery contained in some of the text.  The long scrolls made out of Japanese Kozo paper were designed to mimic the look of egg yolks and whites pouring out of their shells.  Finally, the fragility of the eggshells fits with the precariousness of food security across time, as well as the increasing instability of our environment.