danger tea

synthesis of time

2011-07-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

memory is the fundamental synthesis of time.....featuring a 100 year old love seat and a string of sequins.

book of revelations

2011-06-26T13:24:00.000-07:00

book of revelations from danger tea on Vimeo.

china beach

2011-03-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

china beach from danger tea on Vimeo.

knox pilgrimage

2011-03-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

knox pilgrimage from danger tea on Vimeo.

its an artist's talk

2011-03-07T10:41:00.000-08:00

its an artist's talk from danger tea on Vimeo.

views in a landscape

2011-01-21T20:18:00.000-08:00

moving forward

2011-01-21T19:57:00.000-08:00

some new work

2010-12-29T17:54:00.001-08:00

Public monument is the encasement of a history, it is a beacon of that which has happened, and which potentially has had affect on the city and the people within. A monument of Vladimir Llyich Lenin posed in Russia has captured my interest as of late. What strikes me about this image is the authority to which Lenin stands on his structure of history pointing into the landscape.

I have adopted some gestures found in public monuments into my own landscapes as way to displace the prescribed history it represents into an alternative form of remembering. To take a step back from the monument and address what is actually there one would see stone and bronze. The man represented in bronze has no power to govern his history or his narrative, he is a reminder and it is up to the citizens or spectators to fill this structure with meaning. With that in mind, it seems to me that there is the potential for monuments to mean nothing, that without the human consciousness approaching the structure and deeming it one thing or the other it is simply bronze and stone.

Suggesting that a monument represents nothing but the materials it is made of is problematic. I want to implement a connection between the meaninglessness of objects as markers of history in order to postulate that it is the spectator who cloaks the object or monument with meaning, history, and memory.

The landscape that surrounds the monument of Lenin is filled with experience, memory and history, and is deemed meaningful by those who live within it, and approach it as such. Lucy Lippard discusses the difference between space and place in her book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society.

Most often place applies to our own “local” – entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.

In this way Lippard encompasses the personal in the experience of space by creating a multilayered perception of its history and therefore its memory. The structure of public monument does not do this. Public monument marks a specific history and asks to be remembered in a particular way, while the landscape pertains to an open conceptual script of experience and memory for each participant. There is a contention here that resides between the monument and the landscape, and it is within this contention, I believe, that creativity can spark great invention. Chantal Mouffe states in her essay, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces”, that “…public space is the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation.” Perhaps the contention that resides between public monument and the landscape is what Mouffe is suggesting; where the monument represents the hegemonic device while the public space tries to negotiate the structure with no reconciliation. In a space absent of reconciliation the authority of public monument collides with the multifaceted expanse of landscape.

The photograph has always been significant to me. My practice has used archival images from a personal collection, as well as a bank of images and footage that I have created. The photograph to me is of a form of monument, it is a marking of time, it is an object of the past, and it represents a particular history or memory. Therefore, the video projects I am currently working on perform a breaking down of the image, exposing its fallacy and its vulnerability. In breaking down the quality of the image I am also affecting the sense of memory and history within it.

Broken City Lab, Windsor Ontario

2010-12-29T17:53:00.001-08:00

In the summer of 2010 I participated in Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation hosted by Broken City Lab in Windsor Ontario. Their proposal call asked for ideas to help stimulate the local economy and community.

My re-imagining of an economic stimulus called for a situational throw back based on locale, a moment of reflection and remembrance on the location of Windsor Ontario as a boarder town to Detroit Michigan. The Detroit River waves goodbye between these two cities and I wanted to focus on the affect this boundary has had on Windsor’s identity. I see this line between Detroit and Windsor as the centerfold to a dynamic narrative of struggle, triumph and balance.

Broken City Lab’s residency was held in Windsor's downtown and abandoned storefronts. I took this opportunity within a dead consumerist vitrine to use the visual language of storefront abandonment.

Both Detroit and Windsor have a large industry of car manufacturing (or had a large industry), and were both once considered cities outputting the highest volume of vehicles within their respective countries. I was interested in this relationship between Detroit and Windsor as two dying car-manufacturing towns. My research previous to this residency considered the affect of urban renewal, racial and spatial urban politics, and the importance of architecture within communities. Just prior to my Windsor experience I had an essay published, “Invisible Boundaries, Missing Architecture and Displaced Communities: finding ground to remember Paradise Valley in Detroit, Michigan”, which revealed how urban renewal projects enforced urban racial divisions, spatial politics, and ignored the power of community architecture, and space. The opportunity with Broken City Lab's Storefront Residency allowed me to expand this research and in particular tackle issues surrounding the connection between Detroit and Windsor via the Ambassador Bridge.

Windsor, like Detroit, is car-centric and because of this it becomes a statement to pedal-bike in the city, in this way cycling becomes political in Windsor. Many of us were blessed with one of senior research fellow Michele Soulliere’s bicycles. With my new wheels I made a video that documented my travels and discoveries in the city. This video was projected within my dead consumerist vitrine.

image by Daragh Sankey

Video Stills:

The Ambassador Bridge is privately owned, this has caused many issues for both Windsor and Detroit. The bridge company has bought an entire street of homes on Indian Road in Windsor. The families are gone, the windows are boarded up, and there is a fence that runs along the street dividing the property of the home from the street. The grass is cut on the side of the fence that the bridge company owns while trees, bushes, and local wildlife take over the homes. Below are video stills of Andrea Carvalho running a stick along this fence.

Windsor has spent a lot of money creating a water front park along the Detroit River. This park has been groomed to fit walking, riding, and rolling, from one end of the city until you hit a dirt path at the other end, at which point you simply turn around and head back. Within this park there is the usual ill-fitting public art works: running aliens, penguins, representations of a minimalist tradition, and the hand of god. The most ironic aspect about this park is that when you sit on the benches and gaze out towards the river you are also gawking at the megastructure that is Detroit. There is no emphasis back into Windsor; it seems to consistently point you towards the auto Mecca of Detroit.

image by Daragh Sankey

A trip to grand central station in Detroit Michigan with Daragh Sankey. We also visited the Heidleberg Project where Tyree Guyton has been taking over the street for 25 years.

embroidered landscapes

2010-04-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

front and back

front and back

"the colonial landscape" front (work in progress)

"the colonial landscape" back (work in progress)

double A & tj

2010-03-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

from the depths

2010-03-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

knox and sarsons

2010-03-13T14:59:00.001-08:00

chick flick

2010-02-13T19:31:00.001-08:00

Growing up my family was three, my brother, my dad, and me. My understanding of Mother was that they were women, but they were not mine. In 2001 my Dad married Jennifer Macklem, after nine years of courtship and common law. In the summer of 2009 I accompanied Jen to Eyelevel Gallery, in Halifax Nova Scotia, as her videographer to document her performance Chick Art, which was a part of the art festival 35 Days of Unorganized Art. Jen brought an incubator of 24 eggs into the gallery and played Mother Hen. The chicks hatched in the gallery over a period of 3 days.

The return of the chicks to the farm was the climax and the finale. We brought the chirping chicks to the farm at night. We were told to put lavender oil on them, and at the farm lavender oil was stroked onto the Hen’s soft feathers as well. We then placed two Hens and eleven chicks into a large box together, with a lid that was slightly weighted so that it could not be thrown off. Confining the Hens and the chicks into quarters where they were forced to find comfort. “Hens make the best step-mothers,” the farmer said. Jen and I looked at each other with great hope, for the chicks and for us, as we too were finding our comfort in our confinement. The commotion from the box was extraordinary. Everyone in the box had something to say. We left them, and toured the farm. After about forty-five minutes, we decided to leave. Piling into the car, after purchasing eggs for breakfast, the farmer knocked on the window, motioning us to come out and look. He led us to the box where we had left the Hens and our chicks. Silence. Peace was found. He lifted the lid and there were the Hens nestled in with their wings slightly bulged and all the chicks somewhere tucked beneath them, warm. The last chick to be born was the weakest and we were worried it might be expelled from the love. From the first pecking of its shell and through the entire car ride to the farm it did not stop talking, chirping constantly, until its confinement with its Hen. Silence, peace. Jen turned to me with tears in her eyes and we embraced. She’s my Hen.

Together Macklem and I tackled the powerful imagery captured in at Eyelevel Gallery, and produced a video. This project resulted in, though was not intended to, a look at the nature of the our relationship as step-mother and step-daughter.

“Hens make the best step-mothers,” became the keystone of this work. This project began with Macklem’s interest to explore the dynamics between being a woman and being a mother. Chick flick questions the actions and the role of the woman as Mother, regardless of whether she has given birth. The video functions in narrative layers; the birth of the chick, the step-mother (Macklem), and the step-daughter (Jones) are the ribbons that tie around the Mother, innate or performed.

This footage is from a performance by Jennifer Macklem, at Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, for 35 Days of Un-Organized Art, June 2009. Chick Flick was exhibited at Feminism: Now, Anna Leowens Gallery, NSCAD, Halifax NS, Nov. 2009.

at-trac-tion

2010-02-13T12:39:00.000-08:00

In this work, sound, light, and image play together, layering their patterns one on top of the other. Constantly building a tactile interaction of pattern and conversation between the light, sound, and bugs—cyclical dymanics of light, sound and image.

At-trac-tion consists of an analogue electronic system. It incorporates the sound of wooden spoons hitting bowls and glasses of water, the visual of country insects and the flickering of their desires, lights.

Five light bulbs are suspended infront of the projected video loop. This system takes a basic digital volume meter and dispatches the information, intended for LEDs, to a light bulb instead. In this way, the on-and-off of the lights is triggered physically by sound. The electronic circuit receives a digital audio signal from the wooden spoons and glasses of water, and then relays that signal to the light bulbs above the insects.

I am interested in the fabric of sensation, in both its complexity and in the tactile perception of sound and light. I want to play with the possibility of experiencing light and sound, however elusive and intangible they may be, as the sensation of an object deeply woven in a dense fabric that wraps around the listener tightly.

At-trac-tion also explores the spaces of physicality where sound and light facilitate a dialogue that features insect life and an unexplainable attraction to light.

This work was exhibited at Galerie Artefacto, in Montreal QC, 2009, Night Vision Nocturne, Art Matters.

Many thanks to Peter Flemming for his electronic wizardry.

balconies

2009-12-02T16:05:00.000-08:00

Balconies combines the front and back horizon views from my house in Montreal. In this work I wanted to map my surroundings as a type of archival analogue representation. Whereby, the walls of my home metaphorically defined my presence, while respectively the back balcony horizon outlined my past and the front balcony my future.

I am curious as to what can happen or what is left behind when an item or an object is removed from an archive. The front and back balcony views surrounding my home, and represented as a metaphorical map of an archive, can not necessarily be removed, however, that does not mistake the view's potential to change.

What stands in the empty space of the object or image removed from the archive?

Can I stand in that empty space?

Balconies is an attempt to do just that—stand in the empty space and observe what the removed object was surrounded by. What I found were parenthesis, or the north and south vistas of my home.

(lynn)

2009-12-02T15:53:00.001-08:00

The images used in this performance are from a collection of slides created in the 1950's by my paternal Great Grandpa when he, and my Great Grandma, moved to the Okanagan Valley with Grandpa Jones. Grandpa Jones was a military man, working in the NAVY (let it be clear). He was a fitness and physical education instructor. Now, he curls. Great Grandpa Jones was an FM radio dispatcher*, and Great Gram was an active crocheter and made many afghans.

I am interested in the ways we remember and the tricks and plots that are invented in order to hold onto something that once was. I have witnessed an ordinary seam of water and beach, surrounded in the near distance by embracing mountains, become crucial to maintenance of the past in order to trudge through the present. The significance of this space and land was established through ritualized visitations and an over powering desire to remember.

(lynn) adopts the body, or the carrier, as both canvas and container, providing dimension and movement to a personal collection of archival imagery. The landscape’s repressed memory is revealed through the body, and place is memorialized through a series of gestures. The body holds the landscape and is imprinted with the potential to remember.

Over time, the body, craved escape from the very honest landscape cloaked around the skin. The carrier, exhausted with the task to contain all points of memory on its own, and defeated with its inability to do so, is juxtaposed with the resilient and consistent, yet changing landscape; creating a relationship that is founded with the same needs that remembering has with forgetting. In this work the body holds the landscape and becomes itself a landscape of memory.

My investigation into the landscape's potential to contain or describe memory begins with photographs. Lucy Lippard suggests that, “images can survive but lose their places…photographs root other places in one time, one moment”[1]. The organization of space (i.e. the landscape) in combination with the body, the narrator, the act of telling the memory defines a place. This work sparks the relationship, or dependence rather, between the body and the archival image as both are portions of the memorial.

This work is dedicated to my mother deborah lynn froese.

lynn from danger tea on Vimeo.

Screenings of this work were at a Breast Cancer Fundraiser in Sackville, New Brunswick, we well as O.k.Quoi Compemporary Arts Festival in Sackville. And was part of the exhibition esturary at Galerie VAV Gallery in 2008.

*And email was sent to me from my Grandpa Jones, this is what he said:

Hi love, read your dissertation and would like to correct one area. Don Jones was a ham or amateur radio operator, which in turn was his hobby, which he started in Alberta long before he met my mother, and carried on the rest of his life. You had to qualify first with the Morse code and use the telegraph key when contacting other hams through out the world. Then you had to qualify again to transmit using voice only, which also meant a change in the radio equipment used. These hams used to make their own transmitters and receivers in the early days, which was another reason that they all used the Morse code because the equipment was easier for them to build. It was after the 2nd war that a lot of surplus equipment became available and more refined, and as money became more plentiful better radios were produced. Don's brother Stan was a telegraph operator and served in the merchant navy during the war and after. Stan was also, or may still be, a ham radio operator. So there is my little tale to hopefully give you a better idea of what Great Grandpa and his brother were involved with from a young age. The exact dates I'm not sure of. I hope you don't think I'm being picky. It was just something I saw and thought I could clarify… I think maybe I should quit now as this has turned out to be a monster of an email. Have fun, we will be thinking of you and the rest of the clan every day and always. Love and kisses Gram & Gramps

[1] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local – Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. (New York: The New Press, 1997), page 57.

estuary

2009-12-01T16:21:00.001-08:00

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in

having new eyes." --Proust

I pull from the archive, re-negotiate its associations and re-place the object back into an archive functioning in clusters as opposed to temporal linearity. The archival landscape as a spatial location can lose its place, but it is the body or the memory that locates it through narrative attempts.

The act of embroidery incorporates a typically feminine practice, whereby mother teaches daughter what a “good woman” does. The embroidered knot represents a duality of calm and crazy, in its faint and fluid occupation of space and its complex and discouraging sense of beginning and end. In an attempt to follow the lines of the knot the eye is led in, out and along pathways, guiding the mind into a meditative cycle of looping again and again and again.

The human eye is accustomed to lines, which lead the view into or out of a two dimensional space, similar to the way the human mind is accustomed to pathways of narration—a linear direction from beginning to end through a consecutive period of time.

The embroidered knot over the landscape affects the narrative whereby, the end is not obvious and the beginning is disguised. For me the narrative movement in this work is encased in memory. I want to incorporate enough room in this work for the viewer to stretch and follow the passages that open.

Fay's flowers

2009-09-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Belmore suggests that, “…the land harbours memories that we cannot always locate,”[1] and while this notion fuels my work I have turned from the landscape outside my door to the archived landscape. I have looked towards my own past, and extracted images from a family archive built by Grandparents. The images I have been working with come from a selection of landscape slides taken by my paternal Great Grandfather of the Okanagan Valley, BC in the 1950s, and images from my maternal Grandmother’s rose-garden in Everson, Washington taken during the same time. This post concentrates on the work that has come from the images featured in Grandma Fay’s rose garden.

Grandma Fay has always had a luscious garden. When I was young, roses filled her front yard and winding paths lead you through pockets of growth. I used to ride a small, ceramic donkey pulling a wagon of more growing things, tucked into another corner of her crawling garden. She lives in a small town, her neighbours are miles away and her property bordered by cows, potato patches, railroads, and more cows. The roads in her town run along the perimeters of farm land, so miles and miles of straight lines and four way stops, where the miles of road come to meet each other from all directions. A section of two-lane-farm-road ran in front of her house. One year a local development project expanded this road and subsequently flattened her rose garden. This body of work Fay’s Flowers is in homage to her landscape, flora, and archive.

The installation above features the archival photographs I used to create the video details, and the woven textile, which depicts a replication of a flower arrangement done by Grandma Fay in the 50's.

Details investigates the interiorized spaces of the land through archival landscape images, images that pinch a single moment from an expansive narrative. An investigation of memory that takes place between the paper image and myself, the human body gathers experience, and the human consciousness remembers that experience. Therefore, a dialogue between memory and the landscape dematerializes when the conscious body is removed. Details uses archival floral images taken from Faye’s garden and reshapes them into a digital fabric, which I have integrated with a resilient moving image. In this way, the fragility of the floral archival image, both its age and the nature of its history, is seen through a changing set of associations supported by a consistent force. This renegotiates the narrative and opens the frame to a fluid dialogue between landscape, image and memory.

(details video stills)

I have been developing ways to transfer these archival photographs into illuminated digital image formats, manipulating and altering the way the photograph can be re-imagined (retold). These transformations of the image reveal an aspect of the visual that was not there before; they become important metaphorical markings, rather than homeless floral documentation.

I use both textiles and video to explore the landscape’s potential to contain memory and to renegotiate place in the archival image. It is the individual qualities of these mediums that offer the appropriate avenues for the subject matter I am passionate about; the way that images can be brought together like patchwork, fading and overlapping, the lure of subtle movements, looping and replaying in the electronic image; and the stitching, binding, layering, and holding together of the detail and labour-intensive textile process. Each medium influences the other: video elicits qualities that pertain to more tactile sensitivities, while the textile exhibits attempts to expose the luminosity of the video pixel. The tactile sensitivity of fabric and the ephemeral illumination of video enable something as intangible as memory and as personal as a landscape to be the subjects of inspiration. It is both the landscape and the narrator that facilitate a memorial of experience. The landscape then contains more than visual and physical establishments it preserves pockets of our past.

An investigation into the whereabouts of memory in the landscape has led me to an inquiry of place—the place of a landscape image and in particular an archival image. Lucy Lippard points out, in The Lure of the Local—Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, that place is “a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar.”[2] In this case, place is a location in the landscape (the organization of space) that is familiar because of memory and history. An archival image can lose its place but it is the conscious body that locates it through narrative attempts. It is the conscious body’s desire to remember in order to facilitate a location that feels like home, a “psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.”[3] The archival image needs conscious eyes to continue to exist in a place, eyes that renegotiate place and locate both the body and the image.

Martha Langford’s study of photographic albums, in Suspended Conversations—The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums, reveals a direct link from photography to memory in the retelling of the event or moment depicted. One might sit and flip through an album thinking "I remember when..."

Langford also questions, in reference to the documentation of rituals, why there are no images of the ritual of looking through albums and remembering? Perhaps the many incarnations of Fay’s Flowers attempts to document the ritual of looking at the archive, remembering, and retelling.

[1] Dot Tuer, Reforming Memory – The Act of Storytelling in the Work of Rebecca Belmore in “Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art Technology and Cultural Resistance.” (Toronto: YYZBOOKS, 2006), page 168.

[2] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local – Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. (New York: The New Press, 1997), page 7.

[3] Ibid., page 7.

argyle

2009-09-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

...a meditative process

monuments for zebrah

2009-08-25T15:41:00.001-07:00

These video stills come from a body of ideas and creations that explore incarnations of memory; how memory is constructed, maintained, experienced, and facilitated. While memory itself may encase a vast spectrum of meaning and happening, it is memory as a theoretical or performative vessel through which my work travels. The landscape then functions as the embodiment of the performative vessel, and as a descriptive catalyst for the interaction between place and memory.

Rolling around in my mind have been the provocative words of Lucy Lippard, from her book The Lure of the Local. The way in which Lippard articulates the characteristics of place has contributed greatly to my interest in the landscape as a vehicle to explore processes of remembrance. She imagines that...

...place applies to our own “local” – entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.

Metaphorically my curiosity has been fueled by the illustration of the land as a container for memory, while my understanding has come to reveal that it is not the land on its own that holds history from us. But rather our consciousness is a container for our histories, narratives, and memories and that in space, land, and time we are given a chance to remember. It is here, while one rests and remembers that space, land, and time become a (significant) place.

In these three video channels I used a combination of landscape views from two varying contexts: rural and urban. Within both the rural and the urban setting two contrasting perspectives were then layered together in each video. In the city, industrial architecture and sparse slivers of nature that crawl out from concrete’s tired corners and cracks, is coupled with the clean hard lines of glowing downtown skyscrapers. In the country, the still stamina of a dense dark forest, and weather worn trees is contrasted with the cool river flow, and the mechanical propulsion of watercraft. The third channel collaborates the rural horizon, which is delineated by the seam of water and land, with urban movement, which is represented by a urban gardener’s selection of tall grasses tossing in the wind.

Each video monitor was placed at the bottom of a topless plinth, to see the videos one had to look down and inside. The plinths were used as reference to a culture of mass memorializing, which is executed most often through a canon of history that renders history, narration, or memory into a dialogue of truth. In this way the metaphorical capacity of memory escapes into a social canon of history and truth.

The absence of the object from on top of the plinth becomes a marking of remembrance and opposes traditional monolithic sculptures that erect from the earth in a proud proclamation of existence. Monuments for Zebrah memorializes the absence of the object (and memory), giving pause for remembrance and reflection.

duo tone babes

2009-08-20T14:20:00.000-07:00

once upon a time there was a festival created through the blood, sweat, and tears of Jose Gates and a crew of devotees. here, among some of the few archived image remanence, are some of the babes who swooned around the Gates creation

amanda acorn: dancer / jennilee murray: artist / eli svoboda: film maker / darcy hancock: musician / matthew s morgan: artist/architect / zoe oppenheim: community activist

this is oscar

2009-08-19T15:42:00.000-07:00