The Real Treat: Contemporary Canadian Performance and Installation Artists

For the class of Thursday, March 21st 2013.

I love the work of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, most specifically, their experiential walks. Have a look at one below, called Alter Banhoft Video Walk (made in 2012). I very highly suggest watching it expanded to full-screen, and plugging in some headphones if you have them.

It's been awhile since an artwork moved me to tears. This did it. It is vivid and haunting, but softly so, like waking up to a nurse cleaning your bloody but anesthetized wound, soft white gauzes abounding around you, with your last memories being of angry grenades and battlefield dirt. It is personal, but magical and removed. I love that she talks of people watching, and of being in your head, when all the while her voice is dictating the viewer's experience of the space that he or she calls her own. Is this experience truly the viewer's? Having spent a week mute as an art performance two years ago, I relate immensely to the narrating voice, since by the end of that week, my own thoughts were as loud and clear as the voice in the headphones. I assume that this was because of their inability to be manifested into the outside world. By the end of the week I also "heard" my voice when I wrote to myself, to an imaginary audience (such as would a writer), and directly to others, as a live substitute for talking.

The theme of memory is also one that I am exploring currently in a collaborative project called "Somebody that you used to know." For it, I am making composite drawings based on people's  descriptions of a "past romantic interest", a category that includes (but is not limited to) exes, childhood crushes, friends with benefits, one night stands, almost boyfriends or girlfriends, and ex-partners, married or not. With this project, like Cardiff & Miller, I am interested in the subjectivity of memory and in transplanting the past into the present. Unlike Cardiff & Miller however, "Somebody that I used to know" also brings memory's failures into the limelight, when the memory-holder rates the final composite drawing out of ten for resemblance to what they think the past romantic interest really looks (or looked) like.

Although there are many differences, another similarity comes to mind: Both have the possibility to be highly personal, and yet are very public, either by being made for a wider (mostly art) public consumption or by treating universally relatable themes. And, if everything goes well on my side, both works are complimented if not primarily defined by sound.

All comparisons aside, I'm so glad we saw Cardiff & Miller's works in class today. Other installation and performance artists seen were Shawna Dempsey & Laurie Milan, John Sasaki, Adad Hannah, Daniel Olson, and Rebecca Belmore.

Fringe (2008) by Rebecca Belmore. This photograph of a stitched-up Native woman, red beads strung onto the stitching tread, has been installed in galleries and as an outdoor billboard.