Quote of the Day

"Visual art is so Derridative"
--Todd Janes

Lola: A Honey of a Gal!

I was so pleased to see Lola Canola at the downtown farmer's market yesterday. I met her two years ago when I performed Madame Beespeaker at the same market. She was selling honey left and right--people just couldn't get enough of it, and they wanted the really big buckets. She says that people here have become passionate about eating local.

I love these prayer flags Lola made with the word "honey" in several different languages.

Kids love the honey sticks. The all time favorite is root beer flavor. The sour flavors are popular with teenagers.

"Do you dream about bees," I ask her? "Yes I do," she said, and I worry about them. I dream about our bees, about moths getting into the honey because I forget to put the lid on the hive." Last night I dreamed there was a zucchini at the market that was so big that someone made a table out of it. That'd be one big zuke.


This honey is made from alfalfa nectar. People were asking what to do when it crystallizes. "Just gently heat it up," she says. Then she explained how you can place the jar in a water bath in a pot of hot water until it melts down into the liquid state. I bought a chunk of honeycomb to melt onto my porridge in the morning. Yum.

Michael Fernandes told me that he lived in a town where there was a beekeeper who always had a few stray bees flying around him as he walked through the town. (I suspect they were wasps attracted to the traces of honey on his skin and clothing.) One woman in the town who got stung by a bee (or was it a wasp?) tried to sue the beekeeper for damages. The case was thrown out of court.

Day four and some

So it is just over half way past this truncated festival and I am thinking about the richness of gifts that the artist have given to the festival, each other, the audiences, and myself. I am certain part of this is because today when Reona stepped out of the van and into the airport departures area I wanted to tell her how honoured I was that she was part of the festival and how moved I was by her performance - the first time because it just pulled out emotions from me that left me tearful and hopeful at the same time. Today during her performance - which I thought was tighter - I was able to connect with the performance differently and obtain some clarity - yesterday I was moved to tears so they are pretty equal. Tonight, I realize that I have my own special performance traces from her performance residues - scratches on my arms from her barb wire. They hopefully will heal, but the impact will be far longer lasting…

As curator I think of a large part of my role is to actually care for the artist, their work and the art which I often attempt and often succeed. It is also hard as these artist come for intense periods of time and create great works, build relationships and create bonds and then leave. While I understand this is life I am struck wondering where is performance art in Canada today and what are we doing collectively to build stronger relationships over our vast nation? Currently, performance art is homeless again - we had a home that was nurtured and developed through the InterArts Office at the Canada Council for the Arts - but now it seems both organizations that continually present and develop performance art and the performance artists are in limbo - InterArts seemingly evicted us from that home and suggested that we return to the empty nest parents of Visual Arts - where, we might assert, were never much but the poor cousin to the cash strapped visual arts in the Assistance to Artist-Run Centres pool. What will happen to performance art as we begin again to rebuild a sense of place? I write this because the talks that I shared with Reona often came around to mentoring and to youth and I think of the positive and timely injection that performance art received in Canada during the InterArts Office's early years; without which Visualeyez might not have continued and many emerging artist developed under that support through grants.

In her talk today after her performance Reona said that she never learned to speak the language of her elders - and could learn the language now through universities - but that the language is dead as no new words are actively added - it was likened to Latin. She said that her language was performance art and that this language is universal. This thought sticks to my mind like barbed wire to my skin - I need to let it scratch some more. Maybe sleep will help this idea to grow.

Reona Brass: Glossolalia

I read once that barbed wire changed the history of North America. The lives of the First Nations were changed dramatically by fences containing sharp metal barbs that were meant to wound anyone or anything that dared to cross them. A mark of the lines drawn by the executors of the Dominion. A mark of the end of the nomadic way of life. Keeping cattle in, keeping the "noble savages" out.

"...surrendered lands" means a reserve or part of a reserve or any interest therein, the legal title to which remains vested in Her Majesty, that has been released or surrendered by the band for whose use and benefit it was set apart..."


"...surrendered lands" means a reserve or part of a reserve or any interest therein, the legal title to which remains vested in Her Majesty, that has been released or surrendered by the band for whose use and benefit it was set apart..."

As someone who grew up of the prairie, I am familiar with the gesture of searching for the loosest part of a fence, pulling apart the wires and stepping gingerly onto the other side. I wasn't worried about getting caught by the farmer, but I was worried about getting snagged by the wire. It would be painful and there was danger of being infected by the rusty barbs. (One of my friends had a nasty snowmobile accident when he collided with a barbed wire fence.) So when Reona Brass started to unroll a spool of silver barbed wire, I was relieved she was wearing thick leather work gloves. Standing at a music stand in a tailored brown business suit and matching shoes, she named the piece Glossolalia, Speaking in Tongues. Then she began to read selections from the Indian Act.

..."intoxicant" includes alcohol, alcoholic, spirituous, vinous, fermented malt or other intoxicating liquor or combination of liquors and mixed liquor a part of which is spirituous, vinous, fermented or otherwise intoxicating and all drinks, drinkable liquids, preparations or mixtures capable of human consumption that are intoxicating...

The words made me feel ashamed to be Canadian. They are injurious, repulsive, bathed in an acid bath of legal jargon. I was compelled to the Government of Canada website check if the artist had made the text up. She did not. The connection between the text and the image of the barbed wire was shocking.

"...mentally incompetent Indian" means an Indian who, pursuant to the laws of the province in which he resides, has been found to be mentally defective or incompetent for the purposes of any laws of that province providing for the administration of estates of mentally defective or incompetent persons..."

As she read the text her unwrapping action became more intense, she was wrangling physically with the wire and it began to snag on her business suit. She fought with the wire, taking its resistance on as a challenge and becoming more determined and frenzied in her struggle. Finally she stopped and took the time to catch her breath before she lowered herself into the wire, entangling herself in it and crawling through it towards the stage right podium. She stood up and read the words of the Navojo poet, Sherwin Bitsui:


What land have you cast from the blotted out region of your face?

What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth
resembling frost?


Finally, Brass unhooked herself from the wire by shedding her suit to reveal the jeans and a blouse she wore underneath and she stepped free of the wire.


The artist doesn't speak her native Soto language, and performance allows her to escape the vicious traps laid by the words of the Indian Act and other words written in the same spirit. "Performance art is my language," Brass states. It allows her to be hopeful. She is also inspired by the words of her collaborator Navaho poet Sherwin Bitsui. "He thinks in Navajo," she says. It is wonderful to see a performance grounded in experience and intention. Brass has been working with barbed wire for four and a half years, she likes physical nature of it, but has grown wary of its ability to injure. For the past few years she has been teaching on her reservation, and she loves to see young people create pieces of performance art so that they can share in her power to create their own language.

Michael Fernandes: The Water Whisperer

This piece is called "Water is a Word," Michael Fernandes announces in a gentle, resonant voice. He is backlit by pin-holes of light leaking into the gallery through perforated boards in the gallery. "Water," he whispers as he looks into the eyes of each audience member in succession. He says "water" as a benediction, as a mantra, and a blessing. I begin to feel hypnotized by the use of repetition and the tone of his voice. The lights behind him have an other-worldly effect like the lights in a tunnel people describe after a near-death experience. The same word is repeated again and again. Then he looks into my eyes, saying the word again and starts to laugh harshly, jarring me awake from my state of relaxation, Then he gradually calms down and resumes repeated the word in a gentle voice and looking into our eyes until he finally leaves the room.

Everyone seems a bit surprised the piece had been so short (about 10 minutes), including the performer! I had also been looking forward to seeing the pinhole images described in the festival program. Fernandes decided that since his piece was so unexpectedly brief he would hold a question and answer session. He admits that he changed his performance after seeing the work of Reona Brass and Naufus Ramirez-Figeroa. He felt that the images and gestures he had planned to perform would have been too empty in comparison. I disagree. I think that he has a beautiful presence as a performer, and he could have filled his original piece with the content that a transparent soul expresses.


"I didn't know what I was going to do until five minutes before the piece," he said. This work was created out of a desire to pare down his performance to its barest elements to connect to the audience and refresh and ground his practice. Somehow the Q&A led to an discussion of a television show called "The Dog Whisperer." Suddenly Fernandes became very animated and showed us how he'd been coping with an aggressive dog by getting down on all fours and presenting the top of his head. He tells us about a pet psychic in England on television who makes parrots and pythons stand at attention. His friends tell him its all in the editing, but Michael wants to believe. I want to believe too, keeping my mind as open as as a starry Alberta sky where anything is possible. Perhaps that what the ephemeral nature of his piece is really about.

IdeaAssassins

IdeaAssassins Project: Courtney Lohnes and Kimberly McLeod
No. 66--In a Pool

It was ten o'clock at night and they had turned off the lights inside the room that housed the aging Scona indoor pool. We entered the back door and took off our shoes, enjoying the warmth of the floor on the bottoms of our feet. I was itching with curiosity to see the performers setting up to do their sound check, but we were told to stay away until they were ready. I loved the quality of light coming from the back of the screen in the distance projected onto the water. The quality of light reminded me of a Peter Greenaway movie. Some of the publicity for this piece had hinted that the crowd could enter the pool during the performance, so a couple of performance artists in the festival were really keen to join in. Naufus changed into his bathing trunks and did a little happy dance. There was much talk about whether or not we could swim and the rumor was that there was room for 13 people only because there was only one lifeguard on duty.


Once we were lead in we saw one performer laying face down in the water playing dead with a transparent breathing tube, and the other performer told us that we could choose to see the performance however we wanted, as long as we didn't block the video projector facing the screen hung above the water. Naufus slipped into the water and stayed there for the entire show. We were given permission to use a hand-held light so I pointed it at the performers when I wanted to take a photo. (Still, I apologize for my documentation--it was a very challenging lighting situation.) A projection of a nude man swimming on a beautiful pastoral outdoor pool played on the screen.

There was a looseness to the structure of this piece that was playful and nonsensical. The artists performed tongue-in-cheek baptisms on one another, they played with breathing into opposite ends of the transparent tube, and played an interactive game of matching a quote with a celebrity face. The quotes were written on papers that floated in the water on flutter boards and the faces looked like they'd been taped to flutter boards. Foam noodles and other pool toys floated in the water around the performers. A chaotic mish-mash of pop culture images from television edited with original images created by the artists played on the white screen; home-made DIY pop culture was mixed with snippets of found mainstream pop culture.

Volunteers were conscripted to join in the fun: Cindy Baker put on a white sandwich board which acted as a screen for a silent video of talking head shots. Three men volunteered to read the same short narrative about a personal experience in a swimming pool in Spain. The performers headed back to the ropes at the far end of the pool and used them to jump into the water while an audience member read a review of Water World, the notorious Kevin Costner movie flop. Arcane statistics were presented on a film that's apparently not really worth recommending.

Knowing that this particular pool is doomed to be shut down for good lends a melancholy tinge to this piece. However, the performers seemed to have a lot of fun. They each have a strong presence on the screen, as you can see in their Youtube videos. The anarchy of web surfing and channel surfing entered the performance paradigm. There is a work-in-progress interactive web component to the piece that contains Youtube videos with each of the artists reciting the same pool story from Spain. In No.66-- In a Pool the IdeaAssasins have created a collage of images that the viewer is left to sort and untangle or just let float and drift through one's mind like autumn detritus on a dark and murky pool.

What effect does a life mired in the banal trivia of pop television and pop web culture have on the evolution of identity and consciousness? That old gem the "opiate of the masses" comes to a cynical mind. Every time a new form of technology emerges, it is criticized for the negative effects it will have on corrupting the youth of its age. The positive features of current web culture include the ease at which the audience can also become a generator of culture on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Furthermore, virtual water coolers in the form of online forums make intelligent critique on the work possible among people a great geological distance apart. What could happen is a slow erosion of national identity itself, breaking down barriers between provinces and countries. What could happen is an erosion between mainstream and domestic culture. What could happen is an erosion between product--sponsored (Proctor and Gamble et al) culture and DIY "vanity" culture. The possibilities are intriguing and IdeaAssassins are part of the movement of young artists who will be exploring them.

The Twisted She Project Installation is Up!

Here is a sneak peek at the installation up right now for your viewing pleasure at the Latitude 53 gallery during viewing hours (10 am-6 pm) today and tomorrow. T.L. Cowan will be performing with her collaborators this Saturday at 8 pm. If you want to get a tasting sample of what you'll experience, come and have a listen to the soundscape, read the text and a look at some of the evocative imagery. The show is the culmination of many years of the artist's work, so it promises to be something very special.