Week 10:

Regrettably, this super cool project came at a time when food was the last thing on my mind. For two weeks, I was in bed with fever and hardly any appetite. The next week after that, I was in the hospital, recovering, hooked up to an IV, gaining some appetite but being fed a healthy arrangement of hospital food three times a day. It was like being on an airplane for a week straight. With every meal came these funny little slips of paper. I saved a few, but not one for every meal I was there. Below are examples of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

• 

• 

• 

I found these papers quite charming and I hoped to do something with them, which is why I suppose I kept them. My initial idea was to use them as some kind of recipe/menu for my meals for a few days. But aside from it being hard to go out and obtain all these little snacks, I thought it would be a horrible waste, since now that I’m out of the hospital I’m quite enjoying eating whatever I choose.

So, I took inspiration from Aislinn Thomas’ Pancakes, and stacked them:

In doing this, I stumbled on a fairly good representation of what the last few weeks looked like to me: an overlay of semi-transparent days and meals all congealing into a hardly legible single piece of paper.

_____________________________________________________

Week 9:

Aislinn Thomas’ A Stack of Pancakes to hold up the Ceiling (2015)

I think a lot of the best artworks fall into the section of art which some people complain about that “that’s not art, I could have done that”. Thomas’ pancakes definitely falls in that category. Her pancake tower is simple, and exists without reasoning. I find it funny that she did not even consider her reason for doing the work until her partner asked her if she did it because her ceiling had previously caved in, at which point she said maybe I did do it because of that… It speaks to the magic of art, and the way it seems to reach in past your conscious mind to bring you things you didn’t even know you were thinking about. Yeah, I could have made so many pancakes that I stacked them to my ceiling and let them start rotting, but I wouldn’t have and I didn’t.

_____________________________________________________

Week 8:

Bread for me has always been a breakfast food, and meal in its own. For whatever reason, if given a slice of bread on the side of a meal, say for lunch or dinner, I never quite got into the habit of eating them together; using the bread to wipe off the leftover sauces on the plate the way I saw my mom do. When I was a younger, picky eater, bread was the only thing I would eat on vacation. We would be in the Dominican Republic, with a full buffet of delicious cooked food, and I would grab a bun and some butter.

A more meaningful relationship I and my family have to bread is to a sweet Romanian bread called Cozonac. My mom makes it twice a year: on her late father’s birthday, and for the holidays. Making cozonac takes a full day of work of mixing and flattening and rising, then my mom braids three strands of dough and puts them into a pan to bake. Normally if she’s making it, she’ll make enough dough for 3 loaves. The result is a sweet bread with cocoa, nut, and raisin swirls throughout. I grew up eating cozonac and look forward to it every year.

Bread has never been an addition to my meals, but something I would eat alone or not at all, so I wouldn’t consider it a comfort food nor the center of a meal. I think my comfort food is spaghetti, with butter and feta cheese, which I suppose is similar to bread in composition.

I think baking, like knitting, is an old hobby that appealed to people in the pandemic for several reasons. For one, it is a skill, and something you can work to improve on, which sets up a sort of psychological ‘ladder’ for one to climb. Next, it takes up a lot of time, which is important since we all have nothing but time on our hands. And lastly, when you’re done, you have something to show from it: something you can tangibly grab and consume as part of your day. In short, pandemic baking seems to have become so popular because of the way it takes up so much time, without feeling like that time was wasted.

_____________________________________________________

Week 7:

Video link: https://youtu.be/M8cLKxICzDU

For the video art, I was inspired in reading Castro’s article and the way they spoke on how Zoom affects our days. Making another appearance this semester, I asked my partner to stay on Zoom with me for the first few hours of our day, despite us being in the same room. We stayed muted and I told him to close the tab so he could focus on doing his work, and I did the same. Castro speaks about having this ‘immediate’ or sometimes laggy feedback of ourselves over Zoom – we can sometimes hear our voices bounce back, and we can always see ourselves in the little square at the bottom. In meetings, our attention, already so weirdly divided, is also in part taken up by our own mirror-image which looks back at us through the screen.

My original plan was to create two videos following the exact same format, but to see what happens if we kept the tabs open rather than closing them. The video posted was around 2-3 hours, sped up and condensed into a 12 minute video (arbitrarily chosen, as I played with the playback speed to find something not too slow but not too fast). I meant for the subject to be mine/my partner’s attention; which you can see through darting eyes across screens, or times when the screen gets no attention at all. Unfortunately, I got sick shortly after filming this video so the second iteration didn’t come to be.

I had hoped to see a difference between the two, noticeable only to those who have been immersed in Zoom for the past few months. I wondered if, while having an image of myself on the screen, the little changes in behaviour (i.e. looking often at myself, adjustment of hair/clothes) would read on the video as purposeful, or if it wouldn’t even change the outcome.

NOTES:

1. Pipilloti Rist – Be Nice To Me (Flatten 04) 2008: The insistent, almost literal “in your face” way in which the video is filmed is hard not to immediately notice. It’s gross, uncomfortable, and weirdly real. By using the glass in front of the camera, Rist affects the viewers by making us feel as though it is our own eyeballs that she’s rubbing against. We all know the feeling of pushing, pulling skin; so Rist puts us in a space where we are viewers of the act but also know exactly how it feels to be in her situation.
2. Suck Teeth Compositions: What strikes me is the semi-musical compositions that the artist probably spent a long time considering and editing in succession. I believe as a viewer these videos affect you in one of two ways, and it is extremely dependent on your race and upbringing. On one hand, as you watch you feel as if you’re on the receiving end of the sounds. Even though you know you’re watching a video of strangers, you can’t help but take it personally. On the other, (I imagine, if you are part of the black community) the videos are like a dictionary of sounds: you may be able to dissect each sound and place it as ‘disdain’ or ‘annoyance’ and so on, with each sound being different to the “trained ear”. The videos present a form of language that doesn’t need words to be understood.

_____________________________________________________

Week 6:

_____________________________________________________

Week 4:

I’ve been staying with my boyfriend for the past two months and a bit. We only leave the house to go grocery shopping, or to walk around the neighbourhood when we find time. Everyday, we wake up to the alarm ringing at 8:00 AM, then it’s head underwater until our work for the day is done. Write some notes, take a small break. Finish that assignment, cause the next one is due soon. Is it already 2:00? We should probably eat. Then back to work. Suddenly it’s 8:00 PM, 12 hours have passed, so we start to power down. Shower, climb into bed, “goodnight”, “goodnight”, and we start over again the next day.

I chose to take my two videos portraits of us in our everyday spots. The concept of Adad Hannah’s video portrait fit in quite nicely with this moment, since we’re stuck in this moment; for now. Like a lot of his distance portraits of strangers reflect, society as a whole is stuck holding its breath until the ‘video’ is over and we can move again, but we don’t know when that’ll be. My partner and I are stuck in the same way as everyone else is right now, and as students, we’re stuck in our daily schedule as well. Not much changes from day-to-day, maybe the clothes and the content of the work, but suddenly it’s nearing the end of October when we could’ve sworn we only just hit September.

_____________________________________________________

For my banner, I found that a lot of the phrases/words I put together from the article related to our current situation, so I decided to go with one of those. The words I found play off at least two meaning of “here”. Firstly – not that we do it much in university anymore, but – is the use of “here” as an answer for role call in school. Second is the physical use of the word. We are present in classes, but we are not in classes.

_____________________________________________________

Nadia Myre’s Indian Act (2002) used traditional Native American techniques of beading to erase all 56 pages of the Federal Government’s Indian Act. The pages were mounted onto cloth to facilitate the beading process. The page is beaded in red and any “words” appear as white beads, leaving behind a facsimile of a document, where words are just lines of colour.

Lenka Clayton’s (collab. with Jon Rubin) Fruit and Other Things (2018) project took the written records of rejected artworks from the Carnegie International (10,632 artworks) and turned each into a hand-lettered text painting. Each painting was exhibited for a day, then given away to visitors.

In both cases, Clayton and Myre are using documents as the basis of their art. In Clayton’s case, the documents seem to be a serendipitous discovery of titles with a certain history; whereas for Myre, the Indian Act holds a great amount of weight and importance to her and her community.

Clayton’s method of work takes the idea of an image, shortened into a title, and transformed so that the words themselves become the artwork. To viewers (or readers), the imagery behind the title can only be imagined; bringing to mind questions of the visual importance of art. What are we missing when we read this title without an image to accompany it? Would it have been better with its image? Does that even matter?

Myre goes the opposite direction. In her case, these words that have been written so long ago, about her people, and have caused so much destruction to their way of living, need to be erased. Using traditional beading, the Indian Act is transformed into a piece of Native American art. Myre utilizes irony as part of her message, and allows (or hopes) for a sort of healing process to begin, whether within herself or within her community.

_____________________________________________________

Weekly Assignment 1:

I have a handful of books in my student house in Guelph, which I use for various reasons. There are many picture/encyclopedia-type books, art books, poetry books, and fiction books which I’ve read so many time their spines are cracked. I found it hard to look for titles to string together into coherent messages, so rather than look for “inconsistencies”, as Katchadourian did, I found a consistency. Nearly all my books start with the word “The” (which I doubt is uncommon among book collections), so I arranged them so each “the” lines up down the middle. Taking inspiration from Dyment, I decided to block out the background with black.

The titles of my rather small collection of books did not bring me much further inspiration, so I stacked all paperback books and lined them up flush left to create this image, which ended up being a nice composition of the various horizontal topographies of my books.

Trying to go in another direction again with my third image, I wanted to make use of space/emptiness. Ripped straight from google, Existentialism “explores the nature of existence by emphasizing experience of the human subject.” In this image, the book is a placeholder for the human subject; metaphorically alone on the shelf, and all meaning must be created by itself.

_____________________________________________________

December 03 Last Bite

These times always make me think about where we be without the generosity and kindness of heart for each other. Thank you for yours during this short adventure and challenge. If you want to follow me I am now on Instagram @gnbelland. Here are a few last food art “bites”, enjoy!

• 

• 

• 

WEEK XI-X Morning Delights:It’s not what you think it is.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

WEEK VIII FOOD ART AND MEMORY

REFLECTIONS

As I read over my notes from this week’s reading, it became apparent to me that food was more to me than just a physical thing or an object resulting from complex process of production and distribution. As I looked at the prehistoric tracings of hunting animal figures created by our ancestral family, I asked myself what was so important that it warranted leaving images of hunting for food on cave walls? Aside from food as a survival imperative, why do humans have a more than a passing fascination with food?
Throughout the history of art, food as the object and/or process of food gathering transcends all the physical and socio-cultural attributes of the actual object. Food is an ontological force and as a form of art becomes an expression of humanity through its physical, socio-cultural and spiritual existence. Throughout our relatively short time on this planet, man has drawn, painted, sculpted, recorded and mediated food in innumerable ways. Food and art have become inseparable as we see in the following works: Antonin’s food as sculpture, Baldwin’s photo-documentation of breakfast, and Calle’s food as color. Food as art may have had its origins in the Palaeolithic pictographs of the hunt, but it has also evolved into an expression of memory and spiritual symbolism such as in DaVinci Last Supper or as a memento mori to what sustains us, as in Hickox food as compost. Even in popular media such as reality food shows or magazines such as the Smithsonian, food as art is recognized and given serious attention. “Food has always is played a role in art: Stone Age cave painters used vegetable juice and animal fats as binding ingredients in their paints, and the Egyptians carved pictographs of crops and bread on hieroglyphic tablets.…¨. “Contemporary artists [Sterbak, Acconci, Chang] have used food to make statements: political (especially feminist), economic, and social”.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/food-art-cultural-travel-180961648/

“As inseparable as it is from our daily existence, food and the making of it are underscored by longer reflections and shorter epiphanies about life’s commonalities such as love, sorrow, nostalgia, growing up, the good, the bad and the ugly, all of which becomes a part and parcel of your being and becoming”… “As an antidote to this panic-induced present, where the future remains shrouded in uncertainty, we ponder over the intersection of these apparently incongruous worlds of art and food, to suggest how they both are undergirded by the same ingredients of vision, revision, redressal and transformation.”
https://www.artfervour.com/post/artists-cookbook-deciphering-the-secret-ingredient?utm_campaign=SMO_Artists’ Cookbook&utm_medium=

My claim is this: all forms of food art are meant to leave a mark containing meanings beyond the food as object and the process required to obtain the food itself. This mark is intended to reveal something else, a symbolic meaning, a memory of the food object and of the event surrounding the food. This memory also opens a connection to the future, a transcendent meaning of food and the context that surrounds it. The following proposed projects are based on this claim.

THREE PROPOSALS

Morning Delight. No not what you think it is.

“Baldwin typically engages gastronomic culture with the playful aim of subverting the expectations concealed within social rituals of gustatory consumption in the company of others.”

http://www.no9.ca/ecoartfest/dean-baldwin

This project is a documentation modeled on Dean Baldwin’s work Attempts At an Inventory. The project will document the daily food treats the author and his wife enjoy every morning immediately after waking. The intent to document this daily event is also a means to record the first activities of the day. While it marks the break of the night’s fast it also marks the beginning of a new day and provides an opportunity to commune together before the start of all the activities of the day.

The Family Celebration Tree
This project proposes to gather family photographs in which the sharing of food has been involved. Using those photographs, a timeline collage will be prepared using photographs of significant family events such as birthdays, anniversaries, marriages, family gatherings and other events of significance. It proposes to be a record for the genealogy of events that have created and will continue to create our family.

Mèmere Bellerive’s Tourtière
The intention of this video is to show how the Christmas Tourtière is made. Using my maternal grandmother’s recipe, the video will show how, four generations later, the tourtière is an act of remembrance. Though she never said “do this in remembrance of me”, the Christmas Tourtière has become an annual remembrance of my grandmother – a living testament of the love she had for us and which we can all share during the Christmas season.

-FIN-

WEEK VII BREAD

REFLECTIONS ON BREAD
When I reflect on bread and the questions raised about bread in the podcast, it brought to mind and triggered many deep personal memories.

I grew up in a large French-Canadian, Roman Catholic family. A large family meant my mother was frequently in need of help or away in hospital having another baby, nine in all. The help came from Grand’Mere Bellerive, my mother’s mom, aunts on my father’s side, and from Mrs. Corbett. Mrs. Corbett was a big-boned, buxom, silver-haired Scottish lady, who, on the many occasions my mother was in the maternity ward, was our sitter and the maker of our daily bread. Her large muscular arms and ham sized hands would bring the yeast, sugar, salt and the flour together into a living thing. She would then knead this being to create enough bread for all the family to last two days. On alternate days from bread making, she created her masterpieces, cinnamon buns; large, thick rolls filled with cinnamon and brown sugar, stuffed with raisins and walnuts, then smothered with butter icing. She would wrap these in wax paper and send them with us for school lunch. I remember licking the wax paper to be certain that none of that heavenly goodness was wasted.

My Grand’Mere Bellerive was also a force in the baking department. She was a small gentle woman whose strength was in her heart. She taught me how to bake, and this skill came in handy especially at Christmas. She showed me how to make the French Canadian festive season meat pie- the tourtiere. I still make it today with my daughters and grandchildren using her recipe. Since I was born on Christmas day, she also showed me how to bake my own birthday cake, just in case my mom didn’t have time! She also showed me how to bake the humble Galette or bannock, a simple fur-trade era scone-like bread which could be made in forty minutes. The Belland crew was going through twenty one loaves a week by that time. The Galette recipe served us well over the years, many a time as a snack on car trips and as the staple on camping expeditions.

I knew much of the information in the podcast. I knew the history of wheat, and the history of transition from hunter gatherer tribes to a society based on agriculture. I know bread has been used and abused as an economic, political and religious force. It has been an instrument of prosperity and of war. Bread has been the double edged sword of development and evolution of western civilisations. I also understand the argument that the development of agriculture and hence bread was one of the worse mistakes of humankind, but I also think it’s a little late for those arguments. The podcast also confirmed by belief humanity needs to act in ways which are fundamentally different if we as a species want different social and economic outcomes.

What brought out the strongest emotions for me was hearing the Gregorian chant, the Hebrew prayer and the spoken words which were used as the backdrop for the story of bread. This music, especially the choral works, wove a rich tapestry of the theological, spiritual, symbolic and the ontological relations that mankind has with bread. My Catholic upbringing instilled in me the sense of a transcendence that the bread taken at communion was more than an unleavened wafer of bread. It was a communion with our faith and social community, but it was also a spiritual communion with mankind. Today when I share bread, I am often moved by a sense of spiritual communion. When I share bread or a gallette at a meal or on a hike with family, friends or other travellers I know I am not the only one in need of sustenance on the trail of life.

For me, bread is a basic physical necessity, but it can also be a spiritual connector with others. This COVID time is a time of stress, threat, uncertainty and isolation. During these times, we search for those things which will bring us comfort and relief. The act of making and sharing bread which gives us physical, emotional and spiritual sustenance bringing us closer to each other. Bread can be a source of physical strength and it is a powerful means by which we can be together, strengthening family bonds or supporting others in this difficult time.

Grand-mère Bellerive’s recipe for La Galette(Bannock)

Take 3 cups flour, 2 tbsp. baking powder, 1 tsp. salt , 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup of lard, 1/2 cup raisins, 1 cup plus or minus of milk or water (enough to make the galette doughy). If it is too runny add flour, if too thick add water or milk. You can substitute other fillings such as jam, marmalade or cheese. The lard can be substituted with butter or margarine.

In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Work the lard into the flour until it is lumpy. Mix in the filling. Make a well in the centre. Add water and stir together with a fork or your hands. With floured hands, work the dough into a ball, knead a few times and press into a circular form. You can use a greased cast iron frying pan to fry the bread over a fire. Bake till no dough sticks to a toothpick or a twig poked into the thickest part of the loaf. If you don’t have a campfire frypan, cut and roll out the dough into strips. Wrap the strips around a green stick and roast over the campfire coals. For a special breakfast treat, cook the dough till golden on the outside, then finish by wrapping bacon strips around the gallette. Use toothpicks or thin green twigs to hold bacon to the twists of gallette.

Bread Poetry

https://www.lukejerram.com/breadpoetry/
This was a project, by British artist, Luke Jerram, before COVID. Bread poetry is a collaboration between the artist, poets from around the UK and Hobbs House Bakery. The weekly winning poem got baked into Hobbs House bread using rice paper and could be bought in their retail outlets.
The following bread poem was one sources for my reflection.

Notes

-FIN-

WEEK VII ZOOM

What actually went down.

This video was inspired by the articles of Vivian Castro and the Rosalind Krauss. After some experimentation and technical consultation with Nathan S. I was able to simultaneously record a Zoom meeting with myself. I used two separate email addresses and I recorded the meeting simultaneously on my iMac and I phone.

I had original intended to do a question and answer format, however the more I reflected on the works of Krauss and Castro and with further exploration of the myth of Narcissi and the psycho-pathology of narcissistic behaviour, I changed my approach to the content and format of the video. Zoom is an interpersonal personal encounter medium for meetings, but it is also an intimate and artistic medium as proposed by Krauss. Using the meeting technology of Zoom, the video records an emulation of the behaviour of Zoom meeting participants described by Castro and the narcissistic outcomes of video technology as an art medium as described by Krauss.

I think what has caused me to pursue this exploration was how the medium becomes an intrinsic part of the message. While I had developed a shot list and reminder cues for doing this piece of work, it ended up being done in a one-time shot format with minimal post-production mediation. One of the key insights of doing this project for me was, as the artist/creator or as the host/participant, I created a reflection but also a reflex towards of each the personas captured in the video. I experienced firsthand that while the media was a tool, it was the “absolute feedback” that Castro describes. The video media reflects oneself as self and yet also creates another self which is a reflex and reflection created by the media. As Castro says of Zoom meetings, we are surrounded by ourselves. In this circle we become trapped into being a part of the medium and the message simultaneously.

“THE MEDIA IS NARCISSISM”

Notes

-FIN-

WEEK VI Zoom Video Proposal:

Conversations with Moi.

In her seminal critical paper on the use of video as an art medium, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (1976), Rosaline Krauss raises the question. “Yet, what would it mean to say, “the medium of video is narcissism?””. She prefaced the question after viewing Vito Acconci’s work Centres (1971) claiming Acconci’s image of self-regard “is configured a narcissism so endemic to works…it is a condition of the entire genre.” Vivian Castro (2020) claims that the video art of the 1970s could help explain the “Zoom fatigue” experienced during the period of the COVID pandemic by at home workers. Zoom and other digital meeting platforms with their attendant staring at faces in thumbnail boxes, continuously pulls the viewer to the center of a fixed frame image. She argues that while there is a type of intimacy in a face centred, fixed frame meetings they are not the same as face to face, person to person meetings because body language and other non-verbal clues are masked or absent. This causes more isolation, alienation and frustration in participants of digital meetings. Castro used Krauss’s theory that the immediate and absolute feedback inherent in the video medium surrounds us with ourselves. The screen and camera create a narcissistic circle between the object and subject of the videos. Here is a simultaneous projection and reception of our own self-image, the moi of narcissism . Krauss states that this “reflection and reflexiveness are a doubling back of our consciousness “onto themselves, creating a narcissism between them. Castro concludes that being surrounded by ourselves, immobilized in a video frame computer screen leads us to social isolation creating a disconnect between our thoughts and what we are able to express. Castro describes this as an imprisonment of ourselves in our own self-image: ““ bureaucratic home workers, sadder and sadder encapsulated in our safe homes…staring at squares on the screen.” She concludes that “Video art already predicted it.””.

The purpose of this project is to explore Krauss’ question “what would it mean” if as she claims, “the medium of the video is narcissism”” and Castro’s assertion that our bodies are “trapped in the square of Zoom meetings…”. “We are on the screen, cornered and surrounded by ourselves.”

For this work I will simultaneously record two videos of a single individual, who, in the course of the video will discuss the questions raised by Krauss and Castro. The recordings will present one individual as two: myself and “moi”. Both will be recorded on Zoom. The Zoom meeting with the two selves will be recorded using a second camera from behind, whilst showing the other self on the primary Zoom camera and screen. The other self will face the primary screen of the Zoom meeting and will respond to questions from the other self by turning to the second camera and answering or commenting as an alternative “moi”. “Moi” will then turn back to the front and respond to the statements made by my alter self the other “moi”-who is in the meeting using the second camera and screen. The object and the subject will be trapped in a circular tautology which is described by Krauss and Castro.

Works Referred to

Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October, vol. 1, 1976, pp. 51–64. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/778507. Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.

https;//www.debredinoire.fr/philosophie radical

Video Test

Notes

-FIN-

WEEK IV: Video Vivant

Reflections: Adad Hannah

Hannah’s video’s follows in the tradition of the tableau vivant. Hannah makes use of modern digital video media to make tableau vivant portraits, documenting observations of the affect of the COVID 19 pandemic on individuals. The videos records the time of pandemic beginning March 2020 and documents the ongoing impact of this global event on individuals. Ultimately the videos are a time line , an intimate personal tableau of all those affected by the virus.

In contrast to other global pandemics the effects and affects of COVID can be seen virtually by anyone using Instagram. These virtual video portraits are not of a targeted segment of society but a documentary panorama, of the individuals who volunteered to be portrayed to express the affect COVID 19 was having on them at a particular time. This is broad and diverse canvas of those individuals affected psychologically and emotionally. In doing this over an ongoing time period Hannah creates tableau vivant which is a reflection all of us, individually and collectively as we live through these uncharted times.

The videos frame the individual within the confines of their daily lives. The intimacy of the video portrait lives in the daily activities of those persons and those close to them. While the subjects are posed, there is no sense of artificiality or banality of the daily events the subject live every day of the pandemic. Even in the most informal of poses we still get a sense of the tension and stresses on each of the individual person. The video are not mediated or contrived, nor is this street photography, there is no decisive moment no singular image. Each frame of the video is a moment and the video is a chain of moments. In that chain we see reflections of ourselves.

While the videos are shot from the recommended safe social distance this gap becomes filled with intimacy. The personal worries, concerns , the daily tension of uncertainty and the unknown which the pandemic created is seen in the eyes, behind the mask, in the furtive looks of each individual portrait. As the project and the pandemic progresses we witness a change in the demeanour of the individuals and the social distance bubbles of individuals created during the pandemic. In the later videos there is noticeably less formality. The poses are less rigid, a state of relaxation , perhaps habituation or acceptance of the new reality is visible.

The full frame portraits captures moments which are not historic, they are the seconds and minutes of life with COVID 19. They track and mark the changes the virus has imposed on our every day social norms. Over the time of pandemic, the collective of the videos becomes a larger tableau which is witness to the changes collective behaviours. In the beginning phase of the pandemic personal fear and anxiety is expressed in a the tension of the poses, eye movement, gestures of strength or resistance . This tension creates a relationship of common feeling between the viewer and the subjects. As the initial Covid phase crested and waned, we see a less rigid attitude in the poses, the individuals and bubbles are more congenial. In these later portraits the images appear less fearful, fewer frowning brows and tense stances, cautious smiles are visible, movement appears less restricted as life is slowly re-opened. Is this an expression of acceptance or a resignation to a new norm? Are we becoming accustomed or tamed by the virus?

Video Portraits

Notes

-FIN-

WEEK III: A Banner Week

The banners produced this week were inspired by two phrases in the ar Canadian Arts article Dirty Words : Interesting. The first banner is adapted from Joie T. Arcand work Neon Channel and inspired by the Cree syllabics translated as “Don’t Be Shy”. What intrigued me about the words were the syllabics written using a neon sign which unless you can read Cree could mean anything. The translated phrase Don’t be Shy could also have multiple meaning depending on the context. Arcand intends the Cree words to be simple and gentle reminder to the indigenous community not be shy about their language and their identity, She also uses the words to be an invitation to non indigenous people to not be shy about building a relationship and future with the native peoples of Canada. In this banner I used a series of LED light panels which are placed in the stairwell of our “Sweet” where we live . The light panel can be programmed to change colours. I placed red coloured Cree syllabics over the pink coloured panels and then placed the phrase “Don’t Be Shy” around the free space of the light panel form. I selected a clean non-serif type style and used various colours for each letter. The palette outside text is intended to create a sense of calm through the use of tones of the primary colours of blue and yellow. The pink tone can be modulated using the application of the panels. By changing the color of the light panel I can emphasize the feeling of welcoming and sense of arrival to our home. This modulation of colour also change the hue of the surrounding letters making them disappear and re-appear, like shyness and sense of welcoming to our “Sweet” place.

The second phrase is “Ongoing Temporality”, a descriptive term describing the detached, removed or cool attitude of the abstract and conceptual art of the 1960’s and 70′. At first I thought the terms were contradictory, an oxymoron of sorts. The more I reflected on them it became apparent that the words are opposite sides of the same coin. This idea of contradiction brought to mind the nature of the COVID virus and the pandemic time we are now living in and through. Both the virus and the pandemic are ongoing and temporary. I used the mask to represent both sides of the contradiction. One side in outward, the pandemic, the blue mask, the white side is inward , the virus . Thus one mask is the ongoing, the other the inside is temporary. We are caught in the temporality of both. I chose white paper and a cool palette of colors to suggest the subtle nature of the virus being invisible but also very visible in its effect. It masks a potential severity but does not mask its contagion. We can contain it with our masks, just as we contain so many other vulnerabilities with different kinds of masks. COVID has changed our ongoing temporality. As every moment is temporal and and ongoing the meaning and the effects change within the internal and external context of those changes.

Don’t Be Shy

This attempt is confusing because the text gets lost in all the other elements in the picture.

Ongoing Temporality

After thinking about the feed back I received, I changed my approach simplifying and eliminating everything that could be could be considered extraneous. All but one of the texts are from various painted rocks that have been placed throughout the neighbourhood since the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic. Though these are part of a larger photographic documentary project, I thought many of the text could stand alone as maxims about the pandemic. These simple maxims get to the heart of what COVID is all about. The panels could be read separately or together.

Notes

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

WEEK II : Text as Art.

Text as art can be traced back to medieval times. Think of The Book of Kells a manuscript where illumination creates gold embossed text surrounded by images of vines, angels and demons. Fast forward to the post-modern period where a growing number of artists incorporate text into their artistic practice. From the collage work of Picasso to the surreal work of Magritte’s This is not a pipe and the Brillo box pop art of Andy Warhol, text is recontextualized and restructured into art. It was not just in art but also in literature that text and language were restructured. In poetry, e.e. cummings changed the physical structure of his poems and Gerald Manley Hopkins reframed the sound structure his poems.

When text is the art beyond the words.

The change of text to art questioned preconceived notions of what art is and opened the windows on new concepts on the use of the written word, creating a visual language not meant to be read but to be viewed new visual language went beyond the letters and the literal text. What was once perceived as letters, or words with a singular meaning became signifiers of multiple meaning. The signifiers, text, letters and numbers were recontextualized and restructured to evoke uncomfortable truths, and to create tension, ambivalence, satire and irony. Often these texts were meant to reveal and protest against social and cultural inequities and injustices. This art form was expressed using a wide range of media from performance to posters, to billboards, T-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers. It appropriated many techniques from advertising, the graphic arts and, more recently, digital media. Meant to provoke and often to shock, this art had the capacity for a much wider distribution. Ultimately it has become an interrogation of and reflection of our society and culture.

Joi T. Arcand and Nadia Myre use text to refocus the viewer perceptions and cultural biases about Canada’s indigenous people. The prejudices and racial injustices created in Canada’s colonial past are still deeply rooted in our present day culture and behaviours. These works call that past and the present into question. Alisha Wormsley, an Afro-American artist, uses a public advertising billboard as her medium to proclaim an uncomfortable future for the passersby. Each artist uses a particular medium. Specific colours, fonts, type scale and design space are used in subtle and not so subtle expressions of lost identity, social injustice and racial inequities. But as Arcand, Myre and Wormsley show, their pieces can also be proclamations of hope. Each artist creates a visual callout to the viewer to shift their beliefs from the past and to imagine a different future for indigenous and black people.

Joi T. Arcand

Joi T. Arcand is a First Nations artist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. In her Here on Earth Future Series she creates and photographs streetscapes with Cree signage. Cree is a syllabic language using a system of phonemic spelling invented by James Evan, a white missionary in 1830. Arcand interjects syllabics Cree onto street and business signage to create a new optic of and for Indigenous people. It creates, as she says, “an alternative present”[1] and in doing so she presents a radical hope that we can all move beyond the colonial injustices of the past. The thick rounded borders of the form, shape and glyphs of the syllabic texts are in a pink hue. The pink represents kindness and tranquillity. The syllabics even though angular evoke a sense of flow and a unifying geometry binds the text together. The texts are signage on ordinary buildings found in the sparse streetscapes of prairie reserves and towns. The scale of the signage fits over existing signs and is not overstated. Yet these new signs change the landscape, creating an indigenous presence in that space. They evoke a prairie landscape that is filled with a different meaning; a meaning that is not bound to the logic of terra nullius (that place that exists without history or politics prior to European Settlement) and to the myth of Indian savagery and degeneracy.¹  The signs are signifiers that these places are of the Cree. They are indicators  that exist in a place beyond colonialism. The simplicity of the shapes and the muted hues create a visual field which interrupts us yet welcomes us to the threshold of “a radical hope,… a new kinship and a new world making praxis”¹.

Nadia Myre

Nadia Myre is also a First Nation artist, an Algonquin of the Itigan Zibi  band in Miniwaki, Quebec. She reclaimed her Native status in 1997. Her status, hence, her otherness, as it is for all people of First Nations and Metis ancestry, is governed by the Indian Act of 1876. This singular piece of British colonial legislation still governs every aspect of native life and identity. Her work Indian Act is a piece of beadwork created over the first fifty-six pages of the legislative text. By overwriting that text, she reclaims in a small part the identity of Canada’s indigenous people. The bead work replaces the words of the Indian Act with white beads and the red beads replace the white space surrounding the text . The beads are symbolic as they speak to the value of the bead which was used as a trading currency during the fur trade. Myre interchanges this currency for the values of colonialism imbedded within the words of the Act. The words then become white currency and the space surrounding the text is the red currency. Myre reframes and recontextualizes the meaning of the words in the Act. She deconstructs the Act, flipping the colors and using the beads to show the red space as First Nations territory that was lost due to the broken promises since the passing of the Act. This deconstruction illustrates how the colonizer misappropriated the indigenous understanding of the words and used the words to colonize and suppress Canada’s First Nations. While the beadwork piece is a modern artifact, it redacts the white words and reappropriates their symbolic power. The red beads recreate space that was lost by the First Nations people. The piece strikes me with its simplicity of color, red and white, and the beads, once an article of value and power, which are used here to act in opposition to the value of the legal words and white spaces of the Act. It is a modern palimpsest covering the original text, demonstrating the power of erasing the past using a traditional material. As a form of Braille, the text can be felt and the energy in the text is sensed through the space occupied by each color. In this way Myre has created a symbol of radical hope. The past must be written  over in order for there to be hope for the future.

Alisha Wormsley

Alisha Wormsley, in her work The Last Billboard, expresses the theme of radical hope again. A 36 ft. long black billboard adorns the roof of a building in Philadelphia. The text in large white block type letters reads, “ There are black people in the future”. The scale of the piece, the placement atop a building, the white text against the stark black background are different from the thousands of advertising roof top billboards across the city of brotherly love. It also proclaims a future. This simple and eloquent text brings forth an uncomfortable prophecy. The voices of the Black people are rising, claiming a radical hope for their people in America.

Arcand, Myre and Wormsley, through their individual text art, engage the viewer in the present while offering them an “alternative present” which at the same time points to a future narrative.

---

References

[1] https :canadianart.ca/features/optics-language-joi-t-arcand-looks-words/

https://150ans150oeuvres.uqam.ca/en/artwork/1876-indian-act-by-nadia-myre/#description

http://https//www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet//functional-white-crafting-space-silence

8 Artists Who Harness the Power of Words in Art

https-//www.asymptotejournal.com/visual/leslie-ross-text-and-image/

https-//www.typeroom.eu/from-picasso-to-ed-ruscha-the-use-of-text-in-visual-art-explained

Notes

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

WEEK 1: IT ALL STACKS UP

My book shelf is an archive, a memory of moments lived, past and present. The books are bound through time, they are links to experiences, thoughts, people and places. It is a reflection of my history and the history of those closest to me.

My family history links me to voices past and present. Individual and collective memories. Conflict of cultures and world views form the past and a present reality.

Iceland is my wife’s ancestral place. Living in the shadow of fire and ice created tensions and fear. In the 1880’s Icelanders moved away from winter, darkness, starvation. Their struggles gave voice to a culture and its people, here in Canada. Could the COVID-19 do the same?

A life intertwined, a long conversation flowing through the years, something gets lost but memories persist. We are different and time has made it more so. Each thread of our relationship runs through the warp of time and our lives, knotted in memory. In this stack the ideas expressed above seem to get lost because of the vertical stacking of each book

Words are not all they are made out to be. Is devotion made more powerful through words prayed on our knees? The stacking of the books was an experiment on stacking books vertically in a horizontal plane. The relationship between the three words, power, knees and devotions gets lost in all the text of the first title.

In this first attempt I realize that the four books express too many ideas. It misses the my main point of what I was trying to express about the photographer eye which sees the light as form and metaphor beyond the physical reality.

In this stack I simplified the message by removing any extraneous information including the photo and I think this gets the message across more effectively.

Harmsworth claimed to contain all the knowledge of the universe in 21 volumes. The problem today is too much information. It has become noise, the challenge is how to decipher the knowledge from noise. I think this stack conveys the idea. It could be improved upon with a black foreground and background to make it appear that both are floating in an ether.

MAQUETTES

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

NOTES

My Chocolate Cake and Bread From The Semester

The 5 Day Lifespan of a Piece of Tomato.

For this piece, I decided to document a slice of tomato every day for five days to see how it changed. The tomato stayed unbothered on a styrofoam plate in my kitchen. It was interesting to watch the changes each day, and I wonder what would have happened if I didn’t have to get rid of it.

Food That Reminds Me of My Family (One with illustrations, and one without).

Food That Reminds Me of My Family, 2020. Victoria Abballe

Here is a conceptual food portrait of the members of my immediate family. These were the first food items that came to mind when I thought of each family member.

A dozen of butter tarts for my mom because she bakes these every other week – I swear

A single shot of espresso for my dad because he has at least one a day.

A gluten-free loaf of bread for my sister Laura because she has a gluten intolerance.

A steamed head of broccoli for my sister Abbey because she loves broccoli and I had a vivid memory of her once cooking me some in her apartment.

And lastly, a cup of coffee for my oldest sister Emilee, but it has to have a bunch of cream and sugar in it.

Notes from Bread Podcast/ Week 8

Morning Routines on Zoom with Sydney

https://vimeo.com/user108364993/review/476986209/df0cbfbee6

Apple Eating on Zoom- Video Art

https://vimeo.com/user108364993/review/476102220/37aec21dfd

https://vimeo.com/user108364993/review/476102220/37aec21dfd

IDEA 2) 5-10 people Miming each other. One person will start to make a movement, then the next person will copy the movement, then it will be passed on to the next person, etcetera. This will go on until the leader stops their gestures. OR it can be like broken telephone and the leader will make gestures to reference a sentence/ short story.

IDEA 3) Using the tiny zoom screen to put on makeup instead of looking in a mirror.

IDEA 4) Throwing an object (like a ball) to one person back and fourth. To make this work, there should be one person with each artist in real life throwing the ball to the artist so it looks like the ball is passing between two screens.

IDEA 5) 5 people playing different songs on different instruments.

IDEA 6) 5 people taking their computer for a walk around their house. (This may become too chaotic)

IDEA 7) Reading a section of a book with someone. (Aloud or silently)

Adad Hannah & Social Distancing Portraits

Here are my three social distancing portraits I have created in the style of Adad Hannah. I shot my subjects for one minute straight as if they were posing for a photograph. Similar to Hannah’s, my videos were all shot outside on a DSLR camera, about 5-10 meters away. (I have updated my videos and taken out the distracting music)

Social Distancing Video Portrait 01. Eileen (gardening edition).

“Quarantine has given me the opprotunity to spend time in the garden and take care of my plants.”

Social Distancing Video Portrait 02. Max (photography edition).

“I picked up a new hobby that I have grown to love over quarantine. Photography. It got me outside in the fresh air instead of staying cooped up inside.”

Social Distancing Video Portrait 03. Victoria (an extra edition).

“Here’s me posing for a photograph for one minute straight. Nothing too special about it except my eyes wouldn’t stop watering.”

These books (some of which were generously lent to me by my roommate) come together to create a sense of an imaginative starry sky at night.

These book titles together pretty much sum up my existence. I can’t live if there’s no sketching involved.

These books looked very aesthetically pleasing together so I thought I’d add them here. Inspired by Ryan Park.

Here is my banner with words taken from the “Interesting” article. I took the words “Identifying Patterns” and placed two different patterns in my banner for the viewer to recognize and identify.

Media: Colourful letters printed on printer paper, string, and shot on a DSLR camera.

• 

Here is another banner I made from a word from the “Interesting” article. I made it as simple as possible.

Media: Marker on printer paper, string, and shot on a DSLR camera.

NOTES:

• 

• 

Joi T. Arcand, Northern Pawn, South Vietnam, 2009

Joi T. Arcand, Amber Motors, 2009

YOKO ONO, Grapefruit, 1964

Yoko Ono, The RIVERBED, 2018

• 

• 

Laurel Woodcock, wish you were here, 2003

Laurel Woodcock, on a clear day, 2010

Laurence Weiner, Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, 2004

Jenny Holzer, All Fall Text: Truisms, 1977-79 (in English and Spanish); Living, 1980-82 and Survival, 1983-85

Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1980-

Jenny Holzer, Survival Series, 1986

Shelley Niro, The Shirt (detail), 2003

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989

BARBARA KRUGER: BELIEF+DOUBT 2012–ONGOING

Bruce Nauman, Eat Death, (1972)

Bruce Nauman, American Violence, 1982

Christian Bök & Micah Lexier, Two Equal Texts, 2007

Micah Lexier, Here, Not Here (Dark Blue), 2017

Michael Fernandes, Arrivals/Departures, 2010

Jose Andres Mora, Continuous Script, 2019

Jose Andres Mora, Reeler, 2019

Mel Bochner , Blah Blah Blah, 2016

Nadia Myre, Indian Act, 2002

Adam Pendleton, Black Dada, 2017

Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls Definition Of A Hypocrite, 1990

bpNichol, First Screening, 1984

bpNichol, Blues, 1968

Eleanor King, No Justice No Peace, 2015

Jon Rubin, The Last Billboard, 2010-2018

Lenka Clayton, Fruit and Other Things, 2018

Germaine Koh, Dear Mercer, 2006

John Baldessari, Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, 1966-1968

Francis Alÿs, Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, 1997

https://vimeo.com/130838361

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004

Francis Alÿs, Cuentos patrióticos, 1997

Francis Alÿs, Tornado, 2010

Eryn Foster, New Canadian Pilgramages, 2007 –

Eryn Foster, walking and talking and not saying anything, 2013

Walking Lab, performing lines & research-creation, ongoing

Walking Lab and RiVAL; The bank, the mine, the colony, the crime: A walk for the radical imagination against Bay Street, 2018

Tim Knowles, Nightwalk – Valley of Rocks #1, 2008

Tim Knowles, Windwalk – Seven walks from Seven Dials, 2009

Mammalian Diving Reflex, Nightwalks with Teenagers, On-going

Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle walking tour, 2012

CARMEN PAPALIA, MOBILITY DEVICE, 2016

Richard Long, A line made by Walking, 1967

Richard Long, WALKING A LINE IN PERU, 1972

Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez Jonas, Migration, 1999

Hamish Fulton, Walking on the Iberian Peninsula, 2018

Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance, (1981)

Narratives in Space + Time Society, Walking the Debris Field: Public Geographies of the Halifax Explosion, 2017

Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969)

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, 2012

Guy Debord, The Naked City (1957)

Gudrun Filipska and Carly Butler, The S Project, On-going

Tino Seghal, This Progress, 2010

Marlene Creates, Sleeping Places, Newfoundland 1982

Exercises by Artists: Abramovic, Fluxus, Learning to Love You More, Do it, Erwin Wurm, Jen de Los Reyes, Academie X, photos of you holding hands with a stranger

Intervention assignments – cross a boundary, go somewhere you shouldn’t

Colour Sculpture/Intervention:

Text As Art: Make a Sign for a Fictional event, Make a BIG BANNER in public, Site specific didactic intervention, Laurel Woodcock, Micah Lexier, Dave Dyment, Lawrence Weiner, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, Artists who use text

reading on Text as Art

Tattoos as Art

Spacious Quiet assignment (Acoustic ecology podcast from On Being, and artists who use silence –  or Walking as Art – reading/response/exercise

Videos -collage, montage and sound, Daniel Cockburne, Arthur Jaffa, Christian Marclay,

Videos – After Gillian Wearing

Walking as Art: Richard Long, Francis Alys, Tim Knowles,

Some prompts, scores, assignments and exercises by artists:

Yoko Ono

George Macunias, 1931-78 Founding member of FLUXUS in 1960 – wanted to “promote living art, anti-art, promote NON-ART reality, to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes, and professionals”

“When asked to define exactly what Fluxus was, Maciunas would often respond by playing samples of dogs barking or geese honking, rooting the movement firmly in the absurd tradition that had grown up out of dadaism and surrealism. Fluxus activities ranged from public performances and street theatre, to lo-fi sculptures. Maciunas was anti-ownership and refused to allow any of the Fluxus works to be signed, making it difficult for dealers to value their worth. He was also instrumental in transforming Soho from a run-down, unfashionable district of New York city into an artists colony; when a warehouse shut, Maciunas moved in, using it as an art space for his collegues and friends. Those enticed by the movement included Joseph Beuys, who was drawn to the group because of its inclusive philosophy – echoing as it did, Beuys’s own beliefs that everyone was an artist. Yoko Ono was also a member and her bed-in with John Lennon is a classic example of Fluxus performance. “

Text from: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/jan/28/artist-george-maciunas

Marina Abramovic:

Learning to Love you More: Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July

Jen de Los Reyes

Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell: Outdoor School