Projects 2022-2023


Anthropogenic Anxiety

Joanna Black, Portrait 2020-2021

September- December 2022

Open Mon.-Sat. 9 AM- 6 PM

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 

Pam Patterson, Killarney, 2020
Pam Patterson

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.

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

Curatorial Team: Parwana Ayubi, Catherine Bradley, Madelaine Ella Daniels, Ella Gray, Farid Hjer, Rhi Hopperton, Pam Patterson, Ella Taylor, Yeokwang Yoon.


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.

Through a process of guerilla knitting, Yarn Bomb! asked crafters to create 7” X 7” crocheted squares which, when combined, created a large tapestry used to cover existing structures. In constructing the squares, collaborators challenged their skills, participated in civic engagement techniques, exercised sustainable practices by using scraps, and used the square to advocate for matters significant to them. Activist themes featured include queer pride, Iranian women’s rights, and female reproductive rights. In pairing activism with yarn, this artwork provides a soft introduction to these themes and offers comfort to those who connect with these concerns and communities.  
                                                                                               
“Mixtape for Comfort”  by Julia Robson-MacGregor was compiled by contributions from students and faculty in Art & Design Education Community. These were music selections we listened to for comfort in COVID-19 pandemic isolation  and still listen to in times of distress.   
(Please be advised that tracks #5 (I’m Afraid) and #7 (Fight The Feeling) contain explicit content. If you are concerned about this content, we suggest you screen these tracks privately or skip to the next track.)

Website (designed by Yeokwang Yoon) for 113Research, Lobby Gallery & ODESI Gallery - Après Quoi Festival : https://www.apresquoi.com/
     
APRÈS QUOI would like to thank the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Sustainability Initiatives (Cathy Cappon & Victoria Ho), Office of Research and Innovation, Writing and Learning Centre (Laura Thrasher, Lex Burgoyne & Emil Doersam), the Disability Community and Culture Group, and the Faculty of Art for their support for this project.


 



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