Archive

Curating

UNIDENTIFIED… ENIGMATIC, PERHAPS EVEN ROMANTIC

July 3, 2012
Curating, Performance, Writing

UNIDENTIFIED…ENIGMATIC, PERHAPS EVEN ROMANTIC
 (with the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society)

This informal exhibition offers up a small selection of documents, photographs, texts, publications, correspondence, and art works chosen by the members of the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society during our summer 2012 residency at the John Snow House. Spanning the years of 1974 to 2010, these selections are the result of our collective meanderings through The New Gallery’s archives and library. The title of our exhibition is drawn from a note left in a binder of slides in 1988 by then-administrator Nelson Henricks that reads: “The following slide are unidentified, which is kund of enigmatic, perhaps even Romantic. Nevertheless, I have identified them as Clouds ‘N’ Water because of the remarkable amount of wood paneling…They are coalated into groups that are from the same film, so please don’t mix them up, not that anyone will ever look at them, or even read this.”

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Craft Off

October 7, 2010
Curating, Performance, Publications

A series of performances by Wednesday Lupypciw, Suzen Green & Ryan Statz, and David McCallum & Dory Kornfeld. Presented as part of the M:ST 5 Performative Art Festival, Calgary, AB, October 2010.

This series brings together a group of artists whose hybrid practices incorporate craft and performance. Numerous recent craft projects and exhibitions have emphasized the ways that craft can be used to build community (either as a political tool or as a relational project). In contrast, the projects in this series use the performance of traditional craft activities like knitting and weaving to address ideas of competition and self-interest or to place their creators in a position of advantage. The projects in this series all involve the live creation of new craft works, and thus reveal links between the repetitive and time-consuming actions of crafting and durational performance art practices. Taken together, these performances provide a means to rethink relationships between craft, domesticity, traditional gender roles, and distinctions between the private and public spheres.

A publication accompanying this exhibition, featuring an extended curatorial text “Crafty Advantage: Craft, Performance, and Competition,” was published by M:ST in 2011, and a journal article “Craft Off: Performance, Competition, and Anti-Social Crafting/Performance, compétition et métiers d’art asociaux” was published in the Cahiers métiers d’art/ Craft Journal, Volume 5 Number 2 Spring 2012.

Wednesday Lupypciw, The Ladies 500 Metre Challenge
Wednesday Lupypciw, The Ladies 500 Metre Challenge (detail)
Suzen Green and Ryan Statz, How To Look For Work in the Big City
David McCallum and Dory Kornfeld, Sticks and Stones (detail)

Reviewed by Dick Averns for Akimbo, Oct 11, 2010.

BackTalk@The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

March 3, 2008
Curating

BackTalk
Presented as part of the 42nd Annual NCECA conference
(co-curated with Robin Lambert)

Michael Flaherty
Carole Epp
Shannon Isfeld
Lia Tajcnar

The field of contemporary ceramics has long relied on strong ties to the techniques and traditions of ceramic history for the basis of its conceptual investigations. Due to the richness of this past, ceramic artists have no shortage of historical material that can be mined, referenced, and reworked. Like any specialized field with a long and respected history, ceramics has developed its own unique and sometimes-insular collection of methodologies, mythologies, dogma, cult figures, celebrities, and in-jokes. While this prevailing regard for history no doubt reveals a certain measure of respect for what came before, it has also opened up an irresistible opportunity to take these dearly-held beliefs and to crack them open, poke fun at them, to investigate, question, and talk back.

Shannon Isfeld, Portable Tiles
Michael Flaherty, A Precarious Moment in Ceramics

Groundswell @ Triangle Gallery

March 17, 2005
Curating

Clockwise from top left: Andi Silver, Carmen Schroeder, CathyTerepocki, Chris Faulkner, Robin Lambert, Tyler Fritz

Groundswell: Emerging Ceramic Artists in Alberta
This exhibition brought together the work of Chris Faulkner, Tyler Fritz, Robin Lambert, Carmen Schroeder, Andi Silver, and Cathy Terepocki, six emerging artists involved in the Alberta ceramics community. The exhibition took place at the Triangle Gallery (now Contemporary Calgary), from March 17 – May 5, 2005 and accompanied Form & Fire: Aspects of Modernism in Alberta Ceramics.

Image credits: Clockwise from top left: Andi Silver, Carmen Schroeder, Cathy Terepocki, Chris Faulkner, Robin Lambert, Tyler Fritz