Archives 1997 ()

September | October 1997

Artists | Sarah Crawley, Shawna Dempsey, Shari Hatt, April Hilcox, Sophie Hogan, Stacey Lancaster, Euan MacDonald, Lorri Millan, Chuck Samuels, Angela Somerset, Sheila Spence, Susan Turner, Clint Wilson and Cyndy Warwick

Symposia: October 10-12, 1997

Utopia/Dystopia | The Landscape
Panel | Andrea Kunard, Lorraine Gilbert, Doug Buis, Lewis Baltz and Shirley Madill

When we refer to landscape, are we referring to a myth or the real? In Simon Schama’s book titled “Landscape and Memory” (Chapter III), he speaks of landscape being culture before they are nature. In of Other Spaces Michel Foucault stated that utopias have no real place, nut rather are direct or inverted analogies to the real space of society.
This panel will open discussions related to ideas of the utopic and dystopic, reality and myth as it relates to the landscape. Contrary to the cherished belief that nature is ever-replenishing and regenerative, the ecological crisis has confirmed that nature can no longer be conceived of as an immutable entity existing outside of history.  we know that nature can change course and mutate. As local and global ecosystems become more unstable and uncontrollable, what can be awaited from this rupture?
As we approach the millenium, distinguished by violent upheavels in politics and culture and environmental devastation, the landscape as subject is being addressed by artists as a site of much utopic or dystopic revelation.

Sex, Cloning, Digital Technologies and Intellectual Property | Vectors in a New Ecological System
Panel | Timothy Druckrey, Adele Clarke, Louise Wilson and Anthony Kiendl

This panel is intended to visit what I call “vectors” in a new environment which is characterized by the proliferation of digital technologies, successful cloning of multi-cell organisms, and patents pending on multi-cell organisms.
When “everything is connected to everything” what happens to our perceptions of everything? Matter, knowledge and biology are reduce-able to information bits, the above subject to changes on a tidal scale. A cocktail comprised of digital media everywhere, millenial anxiety, and the replacement of master narrative by post-modernism, inspires among other questions, how do we understand what it means to be human, and what effect does that have on cultural activity and contemporary art practices?

9 May - 7 June 1997

Toward the end of his life, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a collection of twenty-four poems in French, entitled “Les Roses”. Twenty-four, remarkably concise and lyrical vignettes on a rather tricky subject. An interest for such a subject matter also reveals the poet’s type of sensibility. To say something new about roses is not an easy thing, for one challenges a stereotype. However the underlying quality of the rose cliche is the universality of its symbolism, and - let us speak frankly - its real beauty.
This performance is based on such a context. The twenty-four poems are staged in the form of a reading with other fragments such as correspondence and additional poems accompanied by a photographic suite based on roses and the book of poems. A real rose is given to a spectator at the end of each poem. The cycle of creation and giving is completed by using the water from the container finally emptied of its flowers: I drink from it, I wash my hands and I water a potted rose plant: the ground for future creativity. Thus the process of loss is completed by the reabsorption of the vital element of water.

If we refuse to live, if we renounce
what was and what may happen still,
we never think enough of this tenacious friend
who’s next to us, at work on miracles
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Roses - X

Now our gardens greet each other! I have planted in
mine (however without helping much, since I lack the
practice, the experience and the touch) more than a hundred
rose bushes, my work is limited to watering them
every night - there isn’t much variation; one needs to be
fair; and yet, since nuance always matters, if one proves
to be both attentive and pensive, perhaps it is possible to
give a little of oneself, modestly, with the water, in
silence, so that it contributes to the infinite growth.
-Rilke, Letter to Lisa Heise, May 19 1922

Up to a point all writers play with the desire to both be
read and not be read. This applies to many poets.
Otherwise, they would not put in their works so many
traps to discourage readers.
-Marguerite Yourcenar

15 February - 15 March 1997

10 January - 8 February 1997

Curated by Doug Melnyk for Artist’s Choice

Mortal Traces
I remember that as a child I was always fascinated at how the existence of one species would often be contingent on the demise of another, but always in a very orderly and predictable manner. I travelled at the tidiness with which all living things depend on each other, how everything has its place and purpose, both in life and in death.
“Mortal Traces” has developed out of this general concern, but deals with the moment when this natural law goes amiss and turns against itself. The subjects in my images are on the endangered list; they are creatures who have lost their place in the greater scheme of nature. They’ve been expelled and deemed no longer useful, obsolete. The tragedy of an individual becoming the last of its kind pulls greatly on the emotional tug of existence. Species come and go all the time, that too is part of the natural course of things, but how does one accept one’s own extinction as part of this order; contradicting the most basic of all struggles, the struggle to survive. The injustice of being left for dead, discharged and dismissed proves to be the harshest of realities. As I search to build legacies of creatures unrecorded, perhaps it is I who refuses to let go.      - Jules de Niverville

“Mortal Traces”, a series of photographs by Jules de Niverville, is a record of creatures that are endangered species, “creatures who have lost their place in the greater scheme of nature.” Such a statement might lead one would expect a documentary exposition replete with examples flora and fauna doomed to disappear from the earth due to a variety of environmental factors. Rather, what we are given is fantastical creatures, half human and half animal apparently caught in their natural habitats. Their bodies and heads are those of beautiful young men and women but feathers, wings, beaks, and fur suggest they belong to a hybrid species that is a link in the evolutionary chain of human development.
This project, “Mortal Traces”, has emerged from the artist’s fascination the with interdependence of organisms, “how the existence of one species would often be contingent on the demise of another… The tragedy of an individual becoming the last of its kind pulls greatly on the emotional tug of existence.” Through these photographs he mourns as he sees creatures becoming a part of the past as his images become a record for the future.