The Mending Lounge at Craft Ontario

New documentation up on my website of the project I contributed to The Mending Lounge this past spring at Craft Ontario. Check it out here: http://www.tara-bursey.com/recent/

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.

Market Value at Hamilton Farmer's Market

This just in! This great thing will be happening at the Farmer's Market over a week in March.  I have something in store for the Saturday, but will be spending time at the Market in the weeks preceding the event interviewing market vendors in order to make the work that will be produced on my market day.  

For more on this project and the participating artists, see this post on the Hamilton Arts Council's blog.

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!

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!

Crocheting Time and Space

Not much to share these days in terms of my own work on account of it being crunch time at school.  One thing I would like to share is this incredible example of conceptual craft dreamt up my internet pal Lana, who hails from Hamburg, Germany.  A brilliant example of time-based crochet, this is what Lana had to say about the project:

I have crocheted this bangle in the subways of Hamburg on November 2nd, 9:00 - 14:00.  I crocheted only while driving in the subway, in the color of the current subway line.  I started at home, because the beginning is complex (you have to sew, which would be difficult in the subway). Then I started with the red line at "Gänsemarkt," and drove to intersections to switch the color/line.

I rode the subway for so long until the bangle was finished.
  Surprisingly, this was exactly at 14:00 on the station "Wandsbeker Chaussee."  The whole experiment lasted 5 hours,
 pure crocheting time was: 3 hours 43 minutes.

The bangle was available in my etsy shop.

Genius!  Imagine what the NYC subway system would look like?  It would probably be the size of a skipping rope...or longer!

Miscellaneous News

Promotional Image for Everything Under the Moon (2012)

I've have so, so, so much to catch up on here, seeing as I've been completely and utterly loaded down with school work for the past month at least.  Boy, am I looking forward to the summer, when I'll have the chance (hopefully) to blog more, make some new work, and have time to think about (or should I say linger on...) the things I see and do.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to see Everything Under the Moon at the Enwave Theatre performed by Shary Boyle and Christine Fellows.  A nostalgic combination of theatre, song, overhead projections and shadowplay, the performance was rooted in a playful yet melancholy story about a honeybee and a bat and their fight against extinction.  The music was perfect for the fable-- Christine Fellows' brand of rootsy-folk accompanied by cello and percussion was part Feist and part Fred Penner (well, that may be a stretch, actually...!).  While the narrative at the root of the performance was picked on a bit in a review or two terms of it being a little sketchy and underdeveloped, I liked the fact that it was quirky and had an oddball, almost surreal quality to it that at times contained a surprising mix of humor and sadness.  I feel like all of my favourite things in the world walk this fine line, come to think of it...

For me, the highlight of the performance was hands-down Boyle's magical use of the overhead projector.  During a part of the performance, Fellows sang a verse about the first encounter between the story's protagonists, Idared the honeybee and Limbertwig the bat while Boyle slowly peeled away about five layers of transparencies that featured head-on illustrations of the anthropomorphic little critters.  As the layers were peeled away, the two characters became more and more human-- hard to describe and do justice, but it was visually moving to the point that I was reduced to tears.  There were other points in the performance where the projections were particularly poignant, too-- I can't help but connect this poignancy to the use of a "lost" or obsolete technology animating a narrative about the loss of living things through extinction.  Pretty amazing.

Lots of other news to report as well, but maybe I'll save it for other posts.  On the topic of obsolescence and old-ish technologies, I thought I'd post this poster (0% Photoshop, might I add...) I made for my new solo DJ night at The Embassy Bar in Kensington Market.  I usually try to compartmentalize my various lives and try not to talk about music geek stuff too much on this blog, but this poster is definitely inspired by the projected light shows of the hippie era that Boyle is referencing at least a wee bit in her work.  Part of this new night is that the music will be accompanied by new projections every month.  Last Wednesday, I projected the Monkees' movie, Head on the wall next to the DJ set up.  Next month, who knows.  Gothic horror?  Primitive, early animation?  I'm still thinking about it.

Danville Community Encyclopedia

A few days ago, I finished my latest zine, Museozine.  This got me thinking about how artists have used the interview format in both performance and printed matter.  Tonight in my Publications class I was introduced to a really awesome example of this (somewhat minor) tradition called the Danville Community Encyclopedia by artist Anna Callahan.  For this project, Callahan hung out in a public library in Danville, Illinois interviewing members of the public of all ages about their respective areas of expertise.  She eventually filled an entire book with transcriptions of the interviews she collected-- the encyclopedia entries as diverse as Ghostbusters, Gospel Songs, Attention Deficit Disorder, Protest, Chicago Illinois, Canada and Tupac.

This was an uber-limited edition.  I wish I could buy this!

For more on Anna Callahan and her community projects, check out her website.

(P.S: This is my 300th post!)

Crime Map Walk

Here are some photos from my final project for my Performance Art class.  The following text is my short artist statement about the project.

Crime Map Walk
Performance documentation from 10.12.11 
Video, laptop, paper, pins


This performance is inspired by the idea of the artist as traveler, responding to the city they find themselves in as well as walking tours and maps.  Its jumping off point was an online “crime map” of Baltimore, which one can consult to find an up-to-the-minute map and information indicating the locations and types of crimes committed across the city.  Before coming to Baltimore, I found myself browsing such maps as a way of attempting to distinguish between the “good” and “bad” parts of the city.  As any long-time resident of Baltimore knows, it is quite difficult to make such a distinction here, where there is a fairly high crime rate city-wide.


For this performance, I used the Baltimore Crime Map (http://crimebaltimore.com/) to trace a walking path between my house in Charles Village and a main intersection in the Inner Harbour.  I then walked this long path, trying to pass as many sites of recent crimes as possible, taking photo-documentation in the form of over 100 photographs taken every half-block or so along the way.  These photographs were then turned into a stop-motion style video, which serves as the main document of the performance.


This performance plays with the idea of how people respond to crime and fear in an urban environment.  As a defense mechanism, many people avoid areas they feel are “bad” in their day-to-day travels.  This performance reverses this logic, and in doing so, faces certain fears of crime head on.  Also, in performing this walk on a Saturday during the holiday season, I realized that hardly anyone was walking around on the streets I walked during my journey.  This performance also attempts to address the importance of street life and pedestrianism in keeping cities both lively and safe.  

Don't Flinch, Jack.

Photos from an assignment from school that incorporates performance and hand-drawn posters of quotes about labour taken from Newfoundland "Jack Stories," Barbara Erhenreich's book, Nickled and Dimed, and an interview with my father. This performance isn't quite where I want it to be, so I won't post too much about it here. The photos turned out good, though!

Top Photo: Kristine Woods

The Wall at the Back of the Theater

A couple of Sundays ago, I decided to do a performance for Occupy Baltimore-- Baltimore's version of the Wall Street Protests-- which started a few weeks ago in a public square in the Inner Harbour area of town. The performance was inspired by a project I was assigned in a performance class (I still have yet to do the actual assignment in class on Monday...this wasn't the school assignment) where we were asked to develop a character or alter ego.  For this piece in McKeldin Square, I became an out-of-work "popcorn lady" who lost her job because the theatre she worked at (In the present? In the 40s or 50s?  I'm not quite sure...) closed down.  The performance consisted of me kneeling on the ground for two hours, spelling out a long quote in popcorn kernels.  The quote belongs to the annoying, but highly quotable (Baltimore-born) Frank Zappa, who once said: "The Illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion.  At the point where the illusion becomes to expensive to maintain, they will take down the scenery...pull back the curtains...and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."  The quote was slightly abridged from it's original form for the performance, for the sake of my knees and back.



This performance was obviously inspired by my time in Baltimore-- and the United States.  It is a crazy time to be here-- there have been protests across the country, and Baltimore itself has been a troubled city since the 1960s.  The downtown core of Baltimore is beautiful, but largely deserted.  There is poverty and blight everywhere.  While the arts community and a select few are fighting hard for the city to have a chance at a renaissance, it will be a long, hard road.  What are the odds that it will happen?  This is a city made for a million people, and the population has steadily declined since the 1970s to 620,000 people.  Poor Baltimore-- in so many ways, the city and its people have been really inspiring, but I leave for good in December.  I know it will haunt me, and I will wonder and worry about it as if it was a wayward friend.



On a lighter note, executing this piece was rough.  I did a somewhat similar performance with popcorn kernels last spring that took just under half as long, and that was hard enough.  Because the piece is at least partially about labour, the endurance aspect of the piece was fitting.  About a third of the way through the quote, this sweet little man offered me a bit of help.  He did one letter-- an F-- before I shoo-ed him away because he was slowing me down.  The poor guy was very disappointed, and reluctantly left me to my work after a while.  I really hit my stride after he left.



This was the first piece of "work" that has materialized since my arrival here, and I'm glad to have it more or less behind me. There is definitely more to come soon.  I'll end this post with the lyrics of a Randy Newman song I only just heard for the first time yesterday.  While my photos don't really illustrate the Baltimore this song speaks of, the idea of it is definitely simmering close the core of this piece.

Beat up little seagull

On a marble stair

Tryin' to find the ocean

Lookin' everywhere

Hard times in the city

In a hard town by the sea

Ain't nowhere to run to

There ain't nothin' here for free

Hooker on the corner

Waitin' for a train

Drunk lyin' on the sidewalk

Sleepin' in the rain

And they hide their faces

And they hide their eyes

'Cause the city's dyin'

And they don't know why

Oh Baltimore

Man it's hard just to live

Oh, Baltimore

Man, it's hard just to life, just to live

The Illusion of Freedom...

My little helper at work in McKeldin Square, at Occupy Baltimore yesterday afternoon.  Much more on this later.

Photo: Jacob Ryan Smith via Facebook

Corn Maze Performance

Last week, I did a performance at Dundas Square with popcorn kernels.  I confess, this was an assignment for the one studio class I am taking in school this year, called Special Focus Studio: Nature, Transformation and Change.  The assignment simply required that we make a piece of work that references ecological art, bio art, and uses "light, weather, animal, vegetable or mineral" as material for a work of art.  Pretty familiar territory for me, I'd say!

My idea was to continue in the vein of the last piece of work for this class-- it involved a proposal for a piece of public art using cast Iroquois longhouse/greenhouse hybrid forms as a basis for three bronze sculptures across from a cluster of highrise buildings in my old neighbourhood in Scarborough. The project was rooted in ideas about urban food insecurity.  I was also thinking about recent work I've done with cornsilk, specifically the corn maze quilt square I made for the Greenbelt Foundation Quilt Project, sponsored by the Ontario Craft Council.  This is the short write up I did about my square, for the project's catalogue:


Corn Maze is a representation of an aerial view of a corn maze made out of the corn silk of Ontario-grown corn.  Corn mazes, like berry picking, are attractions commonly linked to agritourism or “agritainment.”  As a city-dweller, my experiences of the Greenbelt growing up were limited to such forms of contact with rural life.  Similarly, as an adult my connection to rural Ontario is almost entirely limited to my consumption of locally grown produce. Corn Maze pokes fun at my unabashedly urban relationship with Ontario’s countryside.

In doing further research on corn mazes, I came across photos of a number of corn/hedge mazes that served as enormous advertisements for McDonalds, Husky and Chevrolet, meant to be seen aerially.  To me, these rather perverse advertisements served as an apt metaphor for the omnipresence of corporate interests in the realm of food, from agriculture to food retail and brand power.  Corporations mediate out experiences with food-- it is disturbing to think that such a vital, elemental part of our lives is essentially constructed and informed by corporate interests.



I knew that I wanted to make an installation in a public space that used the idea of a corn maze as it's framework.  My objective was to make make a physical manifestation of this dichotomy of food experience as natural, nourishing, visceral and personal while also highly mediated.  I also was thinking about the ideas surrounding my original Corn Maze quilt square-- in an urban environment, our experiences of food involve us purchasing it as opposed to growing it.  How might one reconcile this distance from food's original source-- the farm, the earth-- through a performative gesture? Deciding on the right site was really important to the performance. After briefly considering laying a Corn Maze out in the parking lot of the Liberty Village location of Metro (where I do most of my grocery shopping), I decided that Dundas Square would be the best site due to it's proximity to so many billboards, signs, and for the square's general sense of insane media barrage.




So, for my performance I made a corn maze-- modelled after a corn maze drawing I did with corn silk on Kozo paper just under a year ago-- on the ground.  It ended up being about 10' X 10' large.  I used a Metro reusable shopping bag to carry about 30 lbs of kernels to Dundas Square...it was insanely heavy!  Being on my hands and knees for an hour was no easy task either, but the pain was eased slightly by the fact that many passers by stopped to look and chat as I was working.  Children tidied my stray kernels as I worked and distracted hungry pigeons by feeding them breadcrumbs.  One man-- who was awesome, and helped me clean up all my kernels with a shovel when I was done-- told me about how what I was doing reminded him of his wedding in the Philippines where coconut leaves were laid out in patterns on the ground as part of the ceremony.


 
There is a little more to this piece and my research for it than I will write about here.  I did a bit of research on GMOs and the artwork of Costa Rican artist Lucia Madriz, who does artwork with staple foods such as corn, beans and rice.  I also learned about some interesting parallel practices that are related to my installation, such as Navaho and Tibetian Sand Painting, as well as the Indian practice of Kolam, which is essentially sand painting with rice powder in order to invite birds and small insects and animals into the home in order to pay tribute to the harmonious co-existence of humans and animals.  All in all, making this installation was a great experience, and it has provided me with a number of ideas for more work with corn...work that will be a little easier on the knees, at that!


More pictures of the performance can be found on my Flickr page. All photos by B. Needham.  Thanks, Bo!

Punk Rockers on Creative Survival and the Survival of Creativity

Last September, I finished a print project called Punk Rockers on Creative Survival and the Survival of Creativity that was at least 9 months in the making. I never took much time to promote it after I finished it, despite the zine being available at zine and craft fairs, on Etsy, and most recently at Art History-- Katharine Mulherin's new art shop at 1080 Queen Street West. So here I am, finally writing about the project, which has since turned into a multi-faceted undertaking spanning a second year.

Here is a piece of writing that explains the jist of the project:

The jumping off point of PRCSSC was the potential of counter-cultural activity and the DIY ethic as vehicles for social change. This zine is essentially an exploration of the sub-culture that I have identified with for over the past ten years-- Punk Rock.

Punk Rockers on Creative Survival and the Survival of Creativity compiles interviews with punk rockers within and outside of my social circle. The interviewees are of all ages, and were interviewed based on their level of creative activity-- participants represent a cross-section of Toronto-based fanzine makers, musicians, artists and concert promoters.

In producing PRCSSC, young punks were given a platform to express their thoughts on creativity and discuss their creative production. Emphasis was put on making creative work, and how living in Toronto-- Canada’s largest metropolitan centre, the Canadian city with the highest cost of living, and the second most expensive city to live in North America-- effects creative production, from free exchange and collective work to house shows, handmade merch, “creative” methods of repairing equipment, and simply doing without. Connections were made between punk, creativity, and class as well as balancing an active creative life with a work life.

An important part of PRCSSC was its method of distribution. A plain, photocopied edition of PRCSSC was distributed for free-- by myself and by interviewees-- in public places such as bookstores, coffee shops, parks, subways, schools and libraries, to be read by people outside of the punk community. While encouraging dialogue among punk rockers, the zine also served as a way of challenging and broadening the general public’s definition of creative practice while encouraging them to explore creative acts in the same spirit.

The method employed to distribute PRCSSC is a tongue-in-cheek nod to religious tracts such as The Watchtower and the cartoon gospel tracts of Jack Chick. The cover of the limited letterpress edition of PRCSSC also references the minimalist design of many philosophy texts, as well as the King James Bible.

At the time I first conceived of the idea for the PRCSSC zine in late 2008, I was responding to both my incredibly bleak financial situation at the time and-- not at all unrelated, and on a much broader scale-- the bleak state of arts funding in Canada and the financial situations of Canadian visual artists according to this study conducted by the AGYU during the same year. It was my intention that this project would pay tribute to the way people engaged in punk culture have always done what they do on a shoestring, largely by making do with what they have in spite of perceived norms of (specifically) music, print and artistic production. PRCSSC was my way of reminding myself how I and so many other people started making creative work-- in my bedroom in the suburbs, with little more than my own energy and enthusiasm, twenty dollars at a time.

Thanks to all the people I interviewed for the project-- Ben Needham, Julian Maxymiw, Luke Forster, Patrick Mooney, Gena Meldazy, Lyndall Musselman, Candace Mooers, Matt Hitch and Greg Benedetto. Also big thanks to Nicholas Kennedy of Trip Print Press, who foil-stamped the amazing covers of the limited edition of PRCSSC.

Next up, I'm hoping to do a large scale public art intervention and performance with copies of PRCSSC, likely in early spring. Stay tuned.

Bouncing Bride at Nuit Blanche

I will be jumping on a trampoline in my mother's wedding dress on top of an enormous wedding cake for this year's Nuit Blanche. Yup, you read that right.  I am a volunteer assisting with Cathy Gordon's performance project Bouncing Bride: What is Down Must Go Up which takes place tomorrow night at the Music Gallery.

Come and laugh at me from 11-1am!  Better yet, come up on the cake and jump with me!  Here is all the information:

*****

NUIT BLANCHE

SATURDAY OCTOBER 3, 2009

7pm to 7am

ZONE A

The Music Gallery, 197 John Street

Concept & Performance – Cathy Gordon

Cake Design – Laird MacDonald

Wedding DJ – Ulysses Castellanos

BOUNCING BRIDE: What Is Down Must Go Up

Coproduced by The Theatre Centre

Be the bouncing groom to the bouncing bride on your own mini-trampoline atop a ten-foot high wedding cake. Cathy Gordon follows up her last endurance piece ON MY KNEES: a public divorce ceremony, with this light-hearted look at the “bright-side” of divorce.

Projected from within the cake-sculpture will be a series of a hundred positive divorce stories ranging from Canada’s own Maggie & Pierre to personal stories collected for this project. The aim of the work is to expose the untold “happy side” of divorce, which is still regarded negatively in our society.

Request your favourite wedding songs from our very own Wedding DJ, Ulysses Castellanos, and then dance the night away under the stars in the beautiful courtyard of St. George The Martyr’s Church.

Those who wish to venture to the top of the cake, can sign up for a number and then continue dancing while they wait for their turn. Audience members will be allowed one at a time to the top of the cake where they can bounce with the artist (if only for awhile) as her new groom.

Fatigued Nuit Blanchers can also lounge instead - sinking into the cozy “bottom layer” of the cake. Their imprints in the memory-foam with create “waves in the icing” which serves as a physical reminder of their metaphysical traces and the impermanence of all relationships.

Cathy Gordon is a multidisciplinary artist and programmer living and working in Toronto. She co-curates Free Fall, a national festival of contemporary performance produced by The Theatre Centre in partnership with World Stage. Her work deals with the themes of hope, resilience and joy.

http://www.cathygordon.com