Therese Chabot

Therese was Robin's external evaluator and a very gracious and kind woman. I very much enjoyed my critque with her. I think that she liked my work and thought that I should add some sort of performativity to my work or it was there somewhere because of my interactions with my sculptures. I enjoyed her Art for Lunch talk. I also found out from her talk that art had an birthday!

Article on Therese Chabot's work.

William Pope L.

Pope L. or "The Friendliest Black Artist in America" spoke at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in conjunction with the Situation Comedy show. His talk was a performance in itself and I found him and his work fascinating. With his work he tries to unpack identity and stereotypes with humour.

Luis Gispert

Luis Gispert Artist Talk, MacKenzie Art Gallery and Art for Lunch

Luis Gispert was brought to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in conjunction with the Situation Comedy show. The New York based artist presented his body of work some of it based around hip hop culture which he participated in as a youth in Miami. Gispert plays with and subverts stereotypical images from that culture with humour to look at hybridizing of culture and cultural identities. I also think that by doing this, Gispert is also critiquing stereotypes associated with these cultures through this subversion. I enjoyed his work and the humour that he finds and creates in his work. I wish that I had enough money to create a film like Stereomongrel. It was beautiful and mystical. I was happy to be able to see it twice because it was a lot to take in at once. I could probably watch it again. Gispert himself was a down to earth nice guy and very approachable for an art star and I was able to have a good conversation with him.

Massimo Guerrera

Darboral (and the maintenance of a practice field), Dunlop Art Gallery

Darboral was a show by Montreal based artist Massimo Guerrera that was at the Dunlop Art Gallery this fall. People were required to leave their shoes at the door and entered the gallery space to find a collection of photographs from previous shows, ergonomical sculptures made from interactions with other people (shaking hand sculpture) which were made by a very touchable material called hydrastone, and most importantly an entire spread of food and it’s remains. Viewers were welcome to come into the gallery space and touch everything that was part of the show as well as sit down and enjoy some tea and snacks. This show is based around the theory of relational aesthetics. In this case this show is: “based on the notion that we are overridingly beings shaped by our relationships, he uses food as the main metaphor to implement this idea of constant change and digestion where certain people are concerned.” I attended the show with the artist in attendance. He was a very welcoming man who seemed to encourage an interesting interaction with and between the viewers. I realized that this was the show, if it really weren’t for the people participating in the space, it would not be the same show. The viewers make the show. I just liked that when I was at the library while the show was on and usually I was starving, I knew that I could stop by, visit with Margaret, have a cup of tea and a yummy snack. Is show a soup kitchen for poor students? I considered it but I was grateful anyway.

Kelly Mark

Kelly Mark, Artist Talk, MacKenzie Art Gallery.

Kelly Mark is an artist whose work is currently being shown in conjunction with the Situation Comedy show that is currently on at the MacKenzie. I went to Mark’s lecture not familiar with her work (I had not fully explored the show at that time) but I was overly impressed with her repertoire. I enjoyed the humour and beauty that Mark sees in relatively mundane, banal activities of the everyday such as time card punching or spoon collecting (but instead, Mark collects plain old table knives which every one she has stolen if she did not already have it). I also found her drawings entertaining where she literally covered chairs, tables, pictures and still lives with graphite markings made with a pencil. One body of work that I interesting was titled “Glow House” which was an installation where Mark filled a house with about 50 televisions, tuned them all to the same channel at night in the dark house. The house seemed to be pulsing with all of televisions flashing from scene to scene. I love how Mark takes a simple everyday occurrence or object and seems to make a spectacle out of it or monumentalize it. I also found the element of surprise interesting particularly in “Glow House” or the idea of the unexpected audience.

http://www.ireallyshould.com/

Epoch Bookmark show

I got accepted into an art show in Toronto at the Koffler Gallery entitled The Bookmark Project 2006: Epoch. The bookmark was one of my Senior Intermedia class projects.

Koffler Gallery

Art For Lunch: Rae Staseson

Rae Staseson is an intermedia artist, working in a variety of electronic, digital and live forms. Her videos have been exhibited at such prestigious venues as the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Carillo Gil Museum (Mexico City), Goethe Institute (Montreal) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has also been screened in museums and galleries in the United Kingdom, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Argentina and Venezuela.
Rae Staseson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where she teaches video practice/theory, visual culture, and media studies courses in both the undergraduate and graduate programs.


For Art For Lunch, Rae Staseson talked about The Laurie Project, a performance documentary that examines how the process of learning and the role of mimicry can be used as research tools to investigate performance art and its intersection with popular culture. I found her work funny and she was full of enthusiasm which seemed to resonate through the room.

Louise Bourgeois Fabric Sculpture

This woman never ceases to amaze me. I love her work and I am particiularly interested in her fabric sculptures. I got these images from this online magazine that has a great article about the show that these pieces are from entitled Stitches in Time.