Projects 2022-2023
Anthropogenic Anxiety
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Joanna Black, Portrait
2020-2021 |
September- December 2022
Artists & Researchers
Pam Patterson & Sasha Shevchenko (OCADU) Joanna Black & Sarah Paradis (University of Manitoba)
The recent regulated and confining pandemic years have
operated to aggravate already existing anthropogenic anxieties. Climate change
– oppressive unpredictable heat waves, uncontrolled forest fires, rising oceans
levels – have had an impact on the race that both facilitated it and now roils
from its effects. Aggressive urban sprawl bulldozes the land, and we search
from among the rubble to find what of “land” remains. In Canada, the colonial
project created divisiveness, poverty, and an early death for some, but also
vast wealth and proprietorship for others. Can this unsettling situation be
unraveled, or have we gone too far?
Anxiety became an oft-experienced emotion in our classrooms – mostly
online - at our universities over the last two years. A research
team, here represented by Pam Patterson, OCAD University and Joanna Black,
University of Manitoba, sought to explore generative potentials found in
addressing anthropogenic and Covid-19 anxieties. We worked alongside our
students and with community members, galleries, and professional colleagues in a
creative investigation. Over 100 people joined to broadly explore in visual
mediums, personal narratives of the pandemic and the larger emerging
anthropogenic era.
Here in exhibition alongside each other and paired
respectively with students, Sasha Shevchenko, OCAD University and Sarah Paradis, University of Manitoba, we
provide a glimpse into this complex dialogue.
The larger project is now housed on a website and, at the University of Manitoba, on an open access libguide.
COVID-19 Anxiety & COVID Pedagogies: Tools, Content & Strategies
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| Pam Patterson, Killarney, 2020 |
The Anglo-Irish castle garden presents a colonial vision of the world which is seemingly fertile and hospitable. But here in Bench (2019), this worldview is distorted, crowded, and challenged. We are further impelled into perceiving the nature of the impact of this distortion as lived, in the red Cholera Room (2020) on Grosse Isle, Canada. For centuries, we have found fertile land, shelter, and sustenance. But now this rich and rooted location has been disrupted and, as nomads, we have become detached and deeply troubled. An ambiguous relationship to land can speak to this disconnection, to a lack of knowledge or awareness of complicity. As Irish diasporic, my farming family, dispossessed of land, was lured to join the British “colonial” project to the New World. Some became impoverished, some implicated. Both Bench and Cholera Room, Grosse Isle address this complex narrative.
Pam Patterson’s (BA, MEd, PhD) research, performance and
teaching have focussed on embodiment, disability and identity politics, and
trauma. She is Assistant Professor
at OCAD University and Director, WIAprojects, a feminist
community-based, arts-informed collective and is Research Fellow at NSCAD University in the
Master’s in Art Education Program. As a performance and visual artist,
she has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally, solo, and with
Leena Raudvee as ARTIFACTS.
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| Sasha Shevchenko, Reaper 2021 |
Sasha Shevchenko
Золото (Golden):
Rich dense stalks of wheat grew around me. Living timelessly in the
Ukrainian flag. Yellow, awkward plains carved out into the earth, and I could
never find the end.
Плекати (Cherish): The wheat was wealth, and
abundance. It tickled the cheeks of family members at harvest . It is our
blood, our currency, and our identity – it is our land.
Горизонт (Horizon): I couldn’t see it. When the stubbles were burned – to control aphids and to regenerate nitrogen levels. Thick smoke enveloped the gold, and I saw the soil’s silent fury. It is a practice where we are one flame away from tragedy, two flames from losing who we are.
Жнець (Reaper): An obsolete taker. What does it mean to have a practice with the land? To let it serve on our tables and in our stories, but to know that its end haunts us.
Sasha Shevchenko (BFA) is a Ukrainian, Tkaronto/Toronto
based interdisciplinary artist. Inspired by her experience as a Ukrainian diasporic
person, her practice bridges sculpture, textile, archaeology, and intimate
ethnography. By combining contemporary and ancient story-telling methods, Shevchenko
creates propositional spaces where tradition can whimsically extend into
cultural futures. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of
Mississauga, Small Arms Gallery, VAM, Portland State University, along with
international online exhibitions. Shevchenko holds a BFA in Sculpture and
Installation from OCAD University.
Joanna Black,Covid-19 Spaces: Self Portrait
Joanna Black
Climate change during our era of the Anthropocene is
inextricably linked with Covid-19 -- since March 2020 humans have lived through
this pandemic experiencing isolation, sickness, deaths, and cyclical periods of
fear cut by suspended relief with Covid-19’s ebbs and flow. The beginning of
the pandemic is portrayed by Winnipeg artist, Joanna Black in her art, Portrait
2020-2021 with the world shutting down: increasing death counts, isolation,
and personal loss. Her video art, Covid-19 Spaces: Self Portrait, (Video
Still) is about technology, location, interaction, and transmission. The
technological lifelines in lockdowns create a sense of self that is amplified
and echoed with cancelled face-to-face contact/communication as we increasingly
rely on the sustenance and support of the virtual world.
Joanna Black (BA Fine Arts & English; MA, PhD, Arts
Education) has since 1989 been active in visual art as an artist, curator, and
speaker. She is a Professor at the University of Manitoba in Visual Art
Education and is cross-appointed as an Adjunct Professor at the School of Art,
University of Manitoba. Currently, she teaches visual art and art education at
the University of Manitoba. Black has exhibited her new media, paintings,
multimedia and performance artworks in Canada and the United States in solo and
group shows. Her focus has always been on the political: art during Covid-19 in
relation to the human condition and environment and art for social change and
human rights issues.
Sarah Paradis, [Dis]connection
Sarah Paradis
[Dis]connection is a video created by Sarah Paradis
about how social interactions were limited during the Covid-19 pandemic from
2020-2022. Several themes that emerge from the video include social distancing,
mask wearing, and inquisitive interactions between humans and computer screens.
The movements in the video reflect how humans are engaging with each other as
well as computer screens in a limiting way. This video responds to the social
[dis]connections that our generation has experienced during the Covid-19
pandemic. For this exhibition, Paradis captured still images (video stills)
from the video [Dis]connection, which she used to create a series of
individual self portraits. These self portraits portray the [dis]connections
between Paradis and technology during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sarah Paradis (BFA, BEd, MEd) studied drawing, painting, ceramics, and video in addition to art history during her first undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba (UofM). She also holds a bachelor’s degree in education (2016) from the University of Manitoba and teaches grades 7-12 computer science, graphics, and digital film studies at St. John’s High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has also recently completed her master’s degree in Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning in the Faculty of Education at the UofM (2022).
Inter-Inter-, Cross-, Post-, Pre-, De-, Re-, In-, Con-,
Pro-,
-ology, -ism, -ic, -izing, -ial
The Drawing Board
JJ Lee, Natalie Majaba Waldburger, & Amy
Swartz
Feb 15 - March 24 2023
Installation shots at 113.....
Red tape signifies a bureaucratic knot that hinders
decision-making and
action-taking. During the time of Henry VIII, the most
important documents
were wrapped in red. Henry VIII bombarded Pope Clement VII
with red-wrapped
missives about annulling his marriage. This is the most
famous use of bureaucracy
besieging the system and it has been used both consciously
and inadvertently,
but nevertheless effectively, ever since. As artists and
educators, our work
is entangled in a number of knots. Disentangling the
bureaucratic knot is a
source of playful fascination and creative
problem-solving. Named Rat King,
the sculpture of a ball of red tape recurs in our
exhibitions and participatory
performance as a ubiquitous presence alongside our
activities. Rat King
references the phenomenon, possibly apocryphal, whereby the
tails of
rats living in close quarters become inextricably knotted.
The rats, tethered
together, are forced to move as a writhing, disorganized
mass while they
colonize spaces and consume resources.
Accountable
Materials: accounting paper, pushpins, graphite, ink, conte
2017-ongoing
Consistent with the Drawing Board’s exploitation of office
supplies
as artistic material, we began with grid paper as our
drawing base.
We created mock diagrams, doodles, graphs and
sculptures.
We responded to the supremacy of numbers, record keeping
and
of accounting as institutional cultural practice. The grid
drawings
are organized in a non-hierarchy of grid forms using
pushpins.
The Drawing Board
The Drawing Board is an artist-educator collective (Natalie Majaba Waldburger, Amy Swartz and JJ Lee) that performs methodological explorations at the intersections of labour, process and drawing. Our creative dialogue investigates the complexities of work contextualized by institutional structures. Our artworks examine the role of drawing through collaboration, mediated by the institution’s colonial legacies including race construction, gender identification and organizational hierarchies among human resources.
The Drawing Board is a collective of Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) educators/creatives researching institutional structure through drawing as play methodology. We came together in response to curiosities and frustrations with the rigidity of the institutional structure within which we work. We use play and humour as tools for critique. One method we use is performance, structured like committee meetings, and our drawings emerge from satirical play proposals presented with formalized bureaucratic procedure. These agenda items and proposals are formalized as motions and requirements for approval. Our dry, rule-oriented comedic approach illustrates bureaucracy’s ridiculousness when unhinged from context. We highlight absurdities of uncritical adherence to mechanisms of bureaucratic procedure and decision-making such as Robert’s Rules of Order that obscure progressive thinking, creative solution finding, equitable outcomes, and social innovation. We use humour to critique the institution’s regulatory frameworks that functionally oppress the expressions of creative diversity they claim to promote.
We use collaboration as a vehicle to bring attention to the ubiquitous medium of drawing and to address the means and methods of work and working relationships. Our collaborations take two forms; the first involves Drawing Board studio collaborations, with mixed media and multi-dimensional drawing-based artistic activities. The second approach widens the collaboration to include performance and event-based Drawing Board meetings that include a wide range of participants.
The Drawing Board would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
Medicine + Cabinet
March 30 - May 01, 2023
Situated at 113Research, one of the three sites of the APRÈS QUOI festival, Medicine + Cabinet plays with the unique form of the vitrine gallery by asking artists to reimagine the space as a medicine cabinet for post-pandemic life. In exploring ideas of collection, hybridity, messiness, reconstruction, organic and inorganic forms, Medicine + Cabinet considers the changing patterns of care in the wake of major social and environmental change and aims to create a space of care and comfort.
The
exhibiting artists depict community-centered healing, reflect on their personal
practices of care, and imagine how these notions of healing and care can
be extended to the environment around us and to our more-than-human kin.
Curators
viewed submissions though a sustainability lens, being particularly attentive
to artists who used recycled, repurposed, and biodegradable materials.
Together, the artworks of Medicine + Cabinet demonstrate how
we might find refuge within a post COVID-19 space as they reimagine ways of
forging human and non-human connections.
The
Banner Project by
Sabrina Dixon addresses deforestation. Made using recycled naturally dyed
fabric, this banner will eventually biodegrade. Grade 2 French immersion
students were asked to draw a tree and write about why trees should be
protected. These tree images and statements were then embroidered by Sabrina
onto the banner. The completed work gently speaks to a key – and loving -
relationship between trees and humans.
Ashlynn
Doljac began this series of paintings in May 2022 as an ode to the beautiful
bond shared between her little sister and her favourite furry companion. The
moments are so generously warm and deeply compassionate. In the last few years,
precious “family” time has inspired Ashlynn’s work as she explores love,
connection, and belonging. Time spent with those we love is healing, and when
we take time to slow down and appreciate these little wonders and beauties, we
can collectively ignite hope and resiliency in our lives.
Nandy
Heule’s etching is one of a domestic scene series. This series captures
fleeting moments in time and invites the viewer to enter the scene and expect
an encounter. The use of blues and violets provides a sense of calm while sepia
hints at nostalgia; the tulips promise hope and suggest new energy. This
particular etching celebrates therapists who were Nandy’s colleagues at one of
Toronto’s largest, non-profit mental health agencies during the pandemic. In
this intimate scene, the artist considers how we may move away from negative
associations with pandemic isolation and re-claim home as a place of comfort.
Catherine
Bradley and her sister Megan collaborated on a partnered work that speaks to
their attempts, since the pandemic lockdown, to rekindle their close sibling relationship.
This gentle image painted in acrylic in partnership makes use of each artist’s
individual style. This single image depicts Megan’s interpretation of
Catherine’s medicine cabinet and Catherine’s of Megan’s bathroom surround. This
work reflects the conversations both women have had around pandemic mental distress,
but also references the small comforts of home and the many intimate and yet
significant daily moments these two share. Such moments often temper many crises.
Yarn
Bomb! is a
collective yarn project facilitated by curator/artist Paige Lauren Stephen with
community makers Sedigheh Aldavood, Jasmine Canaviri, Wai-Hin Chan, Tina Cook,
Jane Dewar, Hannah Dickson, Lisa Hazelwood, Molly Farquharson, Christina Fillipozi,
Ashley Hemmings, Hamideh Jalili, Sumamah Javed, Jennifer Jones, Esther Kelly,
Breeann Keogh-Chin, Diana Kirkaldy, Praneti Kulkarni, Wendy Lubniewski, Jessica
Lui, Virginia McLaughlin, Kevin Melanson, Kelly Mills, William Oliveira,
Parinaz Pourreza, Parisa Pourreza, Yalda Sabet, Sam Stephen, Amy Szermirska,
Victoria Tozer Butler, Lucia Wallace, Jill Warman, Marjorie Wilcox.
