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.

Stories About Art

One of my favourite Frida Kahlo paintings, Without Hope (1945)

Is there potential in the prospect of critics writing short stories about art in the place of art reviews or traditional pieces of art criticism?  Here's a short story that I wrote recently (raw and pretty much unedited) that used Frida Kahlo's paintings as a starting point and ended with mention of Diane Arbus.

Gross

“Frida Kahlo makes explicit the openness, fragility and leakiness of the body-self, as not just object and subject, but also as always potentially ‘abject.’”  Reading this sentence in an art history text, I am reminded of my break from childhood to adulthood.  What things change between these periods that could serves as signposts, you ask?  I promise, it’s not what you think.

I remember when I was about twenty-one, living in my second apartment; I learned I wasn’t afraid of “gross” anymore.  I remember doing the dishes, determined to wash each plate and mug until it was perfectly spotless.  I relished in the steamy scent of green detergent wafting in my nostrils.  By the time I finished this chore and the chortle of the last trace of grimy water circled the drain, there would be chunks of tomato and bloated grains of rice gathered at the bottom of the sink.  Sometimes I would try to jam it all down the drain with my thumb.  Other times I would scoop up the slimy detritus with my hand and throw it in the garbage under the sink unfazed.  The bottom line is it didn’t bother me like it might have a year or two earlier, when I would have just let the dishes slide for another day.

When I was a child, I was afraid of everything gross.  The country was gross.  The way dragonflies skittered across the surface of a lake did not fill me with a wide-eyed sense of wonder, but rather with tiny jabs of fear that bordered on disgust.  The mosquito avenged the contempt I had for nature.  Their bites would swell to the size of fried eggs on my young, fleshy body, resembling breasts I did not yet have.  My swollen self yearned to go back to the city, back to the perfect balance of chaos and control of subway lines and air-conditioned malls on Saturday afternoons.  Garbage water and gutter dirt had nothing on the smell of cabin and the feel of algae on my feet. As I aged, visits to friend’s cottages were politely passed up more and more frequently.

Gross is never in style for teenage girls, and for a while it wasn’t for me either.  But at one point, I realized that gross could be a weapon.  I put egg white and Kool-Aid in my hair; put black tar around my eyes to look like a cross between a movie monster and a mocking caricature of femininity.  While this may be gross to some, this isn’t really the kind of gross I am addressing here.  This is a more topical type of gross.  What I’m really talking about is the gross that gets under your skin and into your intestines.

In her biography, an acquaintance of the photographer Diane Arbus claimed that in the few years before her death, Arbus “would wander around Central Park with a camera strapped around her neck.  She was always wearing the same leather pants, and often had a strong smell about her.”  It is an unwritten rule that one of the more taboo day-to-day transgressions is body odor.  That man on the bus who smells like a cross between salami and scalp, or the mouth-breather in the doctor’s office who has a cheesy funk to him.  But one day, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, it was like someone had flicked a switch inside of me.  I began to welcome the smell of my own body, and almost revel in it. To some, the smell I’m referring to might be the sort to get under the skin and into the intestines.  But to me, it’s a reminder that I am imperfectly and gloriously alive.

On Curating

Something I've been thinking a lot about lately-- the value of sustainable (exhibition) spaces in the age of pop-up shops, internet art, migratory art galleries and condo booms.  Thanks, Hans.

"(Exhibitions) are a way to resist the pressures towards an ever more uniform experience of time and space, by keeping the visitor in the art moment a little longer.

If that is to happen, it’s important to shape exhibitions as long-duration projects and to consider issues of sustainability and legacy. Fly-in, fly-out curating nearly always produces superficial results; it’s a practice that goes hand in hand with the fashion for applying the word “curating” to everything that involves simply making a choice – radio playlists, hotel decor, even the food stalls in New York’s High Line Park. Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition; curating follows art."

-- Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London

Esther Bubley

I'm writing about the work of American photographer Esther Bubley in the 1940s right now--she was known for depicting working class female subjects.  While working for the IWO in the 1940s, she travelled up and down the east coast by Greyhound on assignments because she didn't drive.  Many of her better known images were taken of passengers, drivers and workers on the bus.  These images were collected in the IWO photo series, Bus Story.

"In these respects, Esther Bubley's photographic apprenticeship was very different from that of other women who had worked for the FSA in the 1930s. Bubley's small town, lower-middle-class background pales in comparison with Dorothea Lange's intrepid documentary adventures across the country. Bubley also did not have the advantage of Marion Post Wolcott's bohemian education in Greenwich Village and Vienna. Furthermore, unlike her female predecessors, Bubley's pre-FSA photographic experience was in commercial and fashion photography rather than in socially concerned documentation, like Lange, or with photojournalism, like Post Wolcott. Bubley did not even have a driver's licence. Her photographic projects for the FSA were therefore confined to the Washington, DC area and the outskirts of Virginia. When she travelled, it was not for thousands of miles through the Southern states solo with an axe in her trunk; nor was it across the Midwest and California consumed by a vision to reconstruct a social and economic history of agricutural production in the United States. Instead, Esther Bubley travelled from Washington, DC to Memphis on an overcrowded Greyhound bus. Her view of America in the 1940s was not of an unobscured road heading west seen from the roof of her car, but looking awkwardly through the bus driver's windscreen as the bus moved along, trying not to get in the driver's way.  Consequently, Bubley's vision was a little lopsided, her view not quite squarely framed."

- Jacqueline Ellis.  (1996).  "Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-Class Women by Esther Bubley, 1940-43"

Patti Smith and Beat Nation

Patti Smith, from her exhibition Camera Solo 

Last week was a luxurious one in that I managed to find the time to take in two art shows in two days.  I went to the preview of Patti Smith's photography exhibition, Camera Solo, at the AGO.  The next day, I braved the snow and embarked on a rather hellish walk to Harbourfront to check out Beat Nation at the Power Plant.  Boy, was it ever nice to spend a few hours outside of my own head (which is constantly consumed by thesis work), looking at the work of other artists.

The Patti Smith show was an interesting one for a few reasons.  The exhibition was gorgeously installed-- a clean and uniform installation of small photographs with nice touches like ephemera placed sparingly on weathered wood tables, persian rugs, church pews facing a video projection, and a huge Italian fishing net in the middle of the main gallery. Despite the exhibition's pitch-perfect style, a telling moment for me was when I took in a photograph taken by Robert Mapplethorpe of Patti-- not the iconic one of her on the cover of Horses, but another one of her looking long-limbed and awkwardly confrontational...in other words, it was pure Patti.  After drinking in this photograph for several minutes, it became obvious just how artless Smith's photographs were in comparison.  The exhibition reminded me of my ambivalence towards Patti Smith's work, whose artistic career has been (in my humble opinion) rather uneven.  The thing is, you'd never guess it from all the attention she has been showered with.

Jordan Bennett, Turning Tables (2012)

Continuing the theme of intersections of art and music, Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture at the Power Plant was worth the walk.  I especially loved Jordan Bennett's Turning Tables (pictured above), which plays Bennett's voice learning his native tongue, Mi'kmaq.  Also really stirring were two of the exhibition's video works-- 10 by Dana Claxton and Nicholas Galanin's Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan Part 1 and 2.  Recommended!

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!

Father Knowledge, Mother Tongue

In the thick of work on my thesis project.  This is a first shot at a promotional image for the project, which will eventually emerge as books, a book launch event in late March, and an exhibition-like space where the launch will take place.  More on this soon!

Marimekko at the TMC

This week, an exhibition of Marimekko fabric, fashions and ephemera opened at the Textile Museum of Canada.  I'm proud to say that I worked a wee bit on this exhibition and that as a bonafide 60s art and culture buff, it was a totally fascinating and visually delicious experience working and living with the items highlighted in the exhibition several hours a week at work.  For those of you who don't already know, Marimekko is a Finnish design house founded by Armi and Vijo Ratia during the post-war period, and whose heyday was in the 1960s and 70s (though they are certainly going strong today).  The influential and visionary company helped usher in a distinctive, Scandinavian brand of Modernism that was fun, bold and combined geometric and organic references to excellent effect.

I just found this cool little video produced by Maclean's Magazine which features an interview with Marimekko With Love Curator and TMC Directress/Boss Lady Shauna McCabe, as well as cameos by many of my fabulous co-workers.  For those of you who are interested in checking out the exhibition, it's up until March.

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

Art Page in MRR #356

My drawing for the Maximumrocknroll art page is now out in the January 2013 issue, #356.  Check it out!  More writing about it can be found here.  Big thanks to Bidi Choudhury for inviting me to do it!

School Jerks LP on Art 4 Punks

Big huge thanks to the very cool Paul D'Elia for posting about the School Jerks LP art on his blog, Art 4 Punks. Having a blog focus on the art and design of contemporary punk and hardcore is a noble pursuit that I cannot endorse enough.  Nice to feel appreciated, to say the least!  Also, thanks to anyone who has spoken up online and in person (locally, all two of you...ha, ha...) about how much they dig the art for this record and the previous EPs.

Also, I recently made the jump from Wordpress to Tumblr as a platform for an archive of the punk/rock/music related art I've done.  Check it out here, and dig deep for some seriously moldy oldies that will prove that I'm not as young and fresh as I look.

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!

"Other Research Activity"

Right now, I'm in the middle of my final thesis project at school.  Things are starting to shape up, but I have to admit, I am such an f'ing procrastinator when it comes to research.  I am a bad (slow) reader, and have trouble retaining things I read-- I even admitted this in my thesis proposal in so many words.  One of my favourite things to do to procrastinate/weasel my way out of reading is watch movies/video under the guise of research.  Here is a short run-down of the films/video works I've been immersing myself in lately while working towards my major project.

7 UP/21 UP, (1963/1977).  Dir: Michael Apted.  Grenada Television, UK.

     “Give me a boy at seven, and I will give you the man” is the Jesuit motto at the heart of the Up Series, the renowned documentary series that examines the lives of twelve individuals over several decades as an interrogation of the British class system.  Originally focusing on twelve seven year olds, these individuals were subsequently interviewed every seven years in an attempt to determine if it was possible for them to break out of the class divisions they were born into.  What started as an examination of social stratification in England eventually became a compelling portrait of not just twelve individuals, but of post-war cultural and society in Britain.  

     Of particular interest to me is the ethics of representation at play in 21 UP, the series’ third instalment.  In the segment devoted to Tony, an aspiring cab driver from East London, the director 
accompanies him driving through some of London’s more crime-ridden neighbourhoods.  Apted later admitted to filming such scenes intentionally because he predicted Tony would become a criminal and end up imprisoned before the next installment of the series.  Apted later acknowledged in interviews the ethical problems with making these sorts of assumptions about his subjects.

sum of the parts: what can be named (2010).  Deanna Bowen.  V-Tape, Toronto, Canada

     sum of the parts: what can be named is an oral history of Bowen’s family performed on video.  Bowen traces her family history back several generations, from the earliest history she could find of enslaved relatives in Georgia to the family’s subsequent migration to western Canada in the early 20th century.  For Bowen, the oral history serves as a record of family members who could not speak on their own behalf as well as reclamation of a history that is largely unrecorded.

     The formal strategies employed by Bowen in sum of the parts evoke ideas of “disrememberment” and what it means to exist versus to not exist.  Bowen’s physical presence and strong narrative voice contrast with the absence of family members, whose only trace of existence is embodied by their faint signatures reproduced against the video’s black backdrop.  Importantly, the centrality of Bowen within the video anchors the history in the present, and gives the video a strong emotional resonance.

Goin' Down the Road (1970).  Dir:  Donald Shebib.  Evdon Films, Toronto.

     Goin' Down the Road is a 1970 Canadian film directed by Donald Shebib and released in 1970. It chronicles the lives of two men from the Maritimes who move to Toronto in order to find a better life. It starred Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood and Cayle Chernin. Despite a lack of production expense, it is generally regarded as one of the best and most influential Canadian films of all time and has received considerable critical acclaim for its true-to-life performances. In 2002, readers of Playback voted it the 5th greatest Canadian film of all-time.

     The film reflected an important social phenomenon in post-war Canada as the economy of the eastern provinces stagnated and many young men sought opportunities in the fast growing economy of Ontario. Although the men in the film come from Nova Scotia, the "Newfie" as an unsophisticated manual labourer was a common stereotype starting in the early 1950s as many Atlantic Canadians moved to the cities looking for work, only to find widespread unemployment and jobs that may have seemed to have attractive salaries, but made living in large cities marginal at best. Many of Toronto's early housing developments (particularly Regent Park) were built to handle the influx of internal immigrants before they were eventually replaced by external immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia starting in the 1960s. (Wikipedia)

Delirum (1993).  Mindy Faber.

     Mindy Faber’s Delirium (1993) is a video portrait of the artist’s mother’s history of mental illness.  Like autoethnography, Faber’s video uses a portrait of her mother and their relationship as a greater exploration of a social/cultural phenomenon-- a history of women and madness and the link between domesticity and depression.

//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!

New York, New York

A few weeks ago, I threw caution to the wind and went to New York for the NY Art Book Fair at MOMA P.S.1.  What a great time!  I was gone for only 2.5 days (and spent almost as much time on the bus as I did in New York), but it was a whirlwind of awesome.  Much better than my last trip to Manhattan-- a mandatory day trip from Baltimore that equalled 8 hours on the bus and 5 hours in the city...?!  Boy, was that frustrating.

We covered a lot of ground in less than two days, spending much of both days at the fair in Queens, staying overnight in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (bed and nightlife delivered by the fabulous Elsner), and hanging out a little bit in Manhattan.  As great as the book fair was-- with tons of art publishing houses as well as a zine tent, beer, music and more-- the main attraction for me was a talk by Gee Vaucher (below), the artist behind all the iconic Crass record art.   She talked for an hour about her art practice, punk and self publishing.  I even worked up the courage to ask a (rather doofusy) question about how punk strategies of communication and resistance (collage, wheatpaste, etc.) have been co-opted by mainstream advertising/capitalist ventures.  I was a little starstruck, I admit-- she's an art hero of mine, for sure.  For more on Gee's amazing work, click here.

The NY Art Book Fair was a pretty inspiring event.  There was lots of overlap between art, music and publishing there (even Malcolm Mooney, the first singer of CAN and an amazing artist in his own right, performed-- I missed it!) which made me feel more at home than I've felt at an art event in a really long time.  I even ran into a fellow ziney Torontoite.  Here's to blowing off school and travelling!  Up the art book punx!

//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

Hamilton Supercrawl 2012 Report

Tons of fun was had last weekend at what may have been my last summer hurrah before a deluge of autumn work at the Hamilton Supercrawl.  I went as a special assistant to pals Becky and Kalpna whose fabulous project, the Toronto Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, was (and still is) installed at indie accessory and vintage shop White Elephant for the duration of weekend.

Becky and I rolled into Hamilton late on the first night of the Supercrawl.  Armed with a mickey of bourbon, we took to the streets and spotted some great stuff, among it DIY street haircutting, ornate steel quilts, a samosa vendor that had 10+ tantalizing varieties including vegetarian South African samosas, and the above collage work by art collective Group of Seven Billion, which in many cases reminded me of the punk art of Winston Smith and Crass artist Gee Vaucher.  The next night, I came away with three fabulous pieces for a whopping $12-- thanks guys!

After a night's rest, we pitched a tent and made some impromptu hyperbolic coral models and answered questions from passersby about the installation and the fine art of hyperbolic crochet.  Visitors to the tent marveled at Kalpna (whose hands are in the foreground) and her hybrid crochet-knitting overhand swoosh technique as well as Becky (gal with yellow tights) and her anus-themed pseudosphere...!  We also answered the question of the day exactly eleven million times: "How much are you selling these afghans for?"  Answer:  "They are not for sale-- they are only for decoration. Sorry."

My Saturday was spent slowly making what ended up being a rather wimpy crocheted pseudosphere.  I also got to see the fabulous Hamilton-born and bred proto-punk band Simply Saucer on an outdoor stage.  Later that day, we took down the tent, ate dinner, drank a few pints at The Brain, and caught the end of Owen Pallett's set before hunkering down for the night.

I'm ready to move to Hamilton!

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.