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Hélène Lefebvre, Ryan Conrad, Pansee Atta, Maayke Schurer + Sasha Phipps
Imagining Publics was an extended public projection series that took take shape as a sequence of five ephemeral video installations, each occurring at different sites within Ottawa, beginning in mid-July and concluding in late October. In conversation with Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC)’s curatorial staff, five local commissioned artists have each selected specific sites and surfaces to host their newly created video projections. Each of these special projects implicates or acknowledges the preexisting architectures, dynamics, and histories of the sites that surround the edges of their frame.
Varied in both form and content, the works are linked by the artists’ ‘imagining’ of public viewing as a transitory and fleeting moment of encounter. In these outdoor locations, the tactics of immersion, narrative, proximity and control, inherent to moving image presentation within the gallery or theatrical setting, have had to be modified or abandoned. In their place, the artists have developed compositional and editing strategies that generate density, compression, seduction, fluidity or ambience, producing modes of imagistic address that make use of the attention offered within the span of a passing glance. Through this conjuring of curiosity and ultimately commitment, these works invite the public to gather around a sequence of illuminated surfaces, to peel back the layers of facades, and engage in an act of collective imagining.
Exterior Façade of the Les Suites Parking Garage | Visible from Ottawa Art Gallery and Arts Court Entrances, 2 Daly Avenue
For Open Water, Lefebvre examined the subject of winter, giving intense focus to the temporarily frozen Ottawa River, known in these unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territories as Kichi sipi, literally “big river”. For a sustained six months, Lefebvre revisited the same precise location upon the river at regular intervals to perform observational, sensorial, and physical field research, ultimately translating her explorations into video form through the hand-held camerawork of Robert Cross.
Through her process of retracing the contours of a singular site, Lefebvre developed a vocabulary of movement that has embodied her relation to the shifting behaviors of the river ice. Central to her approach to the place was the artist’s desire to cross from one side of the river to the other, producing strategies for movement that took form as flat horizontal crawling — scaling and pressing against the vast, opaque terrain. As winter progressed, Lefebvre’s movement’s became increasingly propelled by an inescapable sense of urgency: as spring approached, her possibilities for action and crossing were growing thinner, with the stability of the river fragmenting and surrendering to the coming heat. The result is a video that over its duration describes a slow seasonal transition, accompanied by a lush sonic treatment that covers an equally expansive auditory spectrum, from micro-sounds of the body to the deep, distal rumbling of the sub-level current. Through a polarized treatment of scale and time, Lefebvre opens up an unsettled affective territory that is both determined and precarious – committing to a fiction that is slowly getting real.
Exterior Façade of 21 James St. | Visible from the intersection of James St. and Bank St.
Don’t Believe the Hype! is a silent looping video projection intended for screening on public surfaces in gay neighbourhoods across Canada. It beckons viewers with sensuous displays of queer public affection paired with scrolling text that both provokes and informs. This site-specific work claims public space for queer intimacy and political imagining at a time when Canadians are being encouraged by both the federal government and LGBT civil society organizations to celebrate the so-called 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality.
Critical of the state mythologies and top down benevolence, this piece demands a more critical interpretation of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s 1969 Criminal Code reform that failed to stop the regular brutality, disregard, police violence, arrests, harassment, firings, and bar and bathhouse raids that continue in the wake of the supposed decriminalization of homosexuality. Whose legacy are we celebrating? Whose lives are disappeared by convenient origin myths? What’s the cost of misremembering? And why have so many gays and lesbians been so eager to embrace a demonstrably false anniversary?
Visible in the vicinity of Mill St. Brew Pub, 555 Wellington Street | Accessible via the Trans Canada Trail
How can public art work with, against and beyond the monumental? How can it scale up to address the monumentality of environmental extraction, the long reverberations of colonial violence, or the depths of ideological entrenchments?
Pansee Atta explores these questions in her video projection we only liberate ourselves by binding our liberations to those of one another, which visualizes the counter-monumental as an intervention upon a practice that has directly shaped local histories, politics and geographies in the National Capital Region: the containment of water – a legacy manifested most prominently in the Rideau Canal and Chaudière Falls.
Understanding containment of bodies – of water and persons – to be a foundational ordering logic of colonial expansion, Atta uses her video projection to create a space of excess, setting in motion a counter-flow of uncontainable, surging corporeality. Streams of animated bodies, ungovernable in their form and function, reject atomization to operate as a fundamentally interdependent swarm of subjectivities. Assembling perpetually, they scale up a rocky natural facade of Victoria Island, seemingly emerging out of the watery depths and interacting with the contours of their environment.
Rather than creating a discrete, contained video with a fixed duration, Atta’s compositional strategy is itself an uncontainable system, operating on a continuously running animation script that randomly generates streams of monstrous figures, each mutually aiding one another as they scale the height of the frame. As such, Atta’s work may be viewed indefinitely without encountering a single repetition – a formal irreducibility that exceeds the structural rigor of containment and its relations of enclosure. This is an unruly radiance, bound together by allyship, and borne of a shared struggle.
Projected on the south-facing facade of University of Ottawa’s STEM Complex
150 Louis-Pasteur Private | Visible from Colonel By Drive, various points along the Rideau Canal, and the bike path along Nicholas Street.
The Future is Up is a non-linear, randomized video loop from an imaginary perspective – a view of the moon from its outer orbit. Through continuous and subtle centrifugal movements, ‘space junk’ whizzes, collides, scatters and spins before the lens in a weightless, indeterminate choreography. Reflective aluminium cans, shiny metallic foil, coloured vinyl squares, melted industrial rock formations, and packing peanuts are some of the objects that populate Phipps’ outer spaces. Fifty years since the moon landing, The Future is Up recalls the aesthetic of 1960s sci-fi motion picture design in its compositional approach, while the objects that appear are drawn from materials from the era’s urban sprawl, or otherwise resemble pieces of its various spacecrafts. Lusciousness-producing visual effect strategies lifted from food commercials are used to render these materials somehow appetizing while drifting in their zero gravity trajectories. These visual grammars of advertising gesture towards the existence of a corporate entity operating in a futurity where waste has exceeded our sublunary limit, where the planetary has been privatized and the void is at our disposal.
Projected on the south-facing facade of University of Ottawa’s STEM Complex
150 Louis-Pasteur Private | Visible from Colonel By Drive, various points along the Rideau Canal, and the bike path along Nicholas Street.
Tranquil Traffic is a new work by Ottawa artist Maayke Schurer intended for outdoor projection positioned near vehicular traffic. Exemplary of Schurer’s use of miniatures and hand-made visual effects, the video produces a deep, lush and liquid atmosphere over the course of its one-hour looped duration. Tranquil Traffic is book-ended by a sensational and painterly sunrise and sunset, their soft hues generating a deceptively serene backdrop as the frame fills with slow-moving ocean water, rising beneath a fleet of upended, floating vehicles. Situated near the constant flows of Nicholas Street and Colonel By Drive traffic, the surrounding motorists become implicated within the contents of the projection’s leaky frame, where forces of land and sea meet at an ominously tranquil horizon.
Pansee Atta is an emerging Egyptian-Canadian artist and scholar whose practice considers themes of colonization, feminism, and Muslim representation, as well as the role of Canadian cultural institutions in legacies of epistemic violence. Her multimedia practice includes new media forms such as GIF animation, 3d-printed and laser cut sculpture, as well as installation, painting, and video work. Previous exhibitions have taken place at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Z Art Space in Montreal, MSVU Art Gallery and others. As a member of Turbines Curatorial Collective she co-curated UTOPIAS, a 3-day Queer performance art festival in Kingston, Ontario. Previous residencies include the Impressions Residency at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the SparkBox Studio Award, and at the Atelier of Alexandria. Her current research investigates the decolonial role of racialized communities in ethnographic museum representation. She is now completing a PhD in Cultural Mediations and a diploma program in Curatorial Studies at Carleton University, and continuously collaborating on community-based artistic and curatorial projects.
Ryan Conrad is artist, activist, and scholar based in Ottawa. He is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Cinema & Media Studies Program at York University where he is working on a manuscript entitled ‘Radical VIHsion: Canadian AIDS Film & Video.’ Previously he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University with the AIDS Activist History Project. He earned a PhD from the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Society and Culture at Concordia University and an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from the Maine College of Art.
Conrad is the co-founder of Against Equality, a digital archive and publishing collective based in the United States and Canada. He is the editor of the collective’s anthology series that are compiled together in Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion (2014). He has also contributed single-authored and co-authored chapters to several anthologies including: Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (2016), The Gay Agenda (2014), Queering Anarchism (2013), and After Homosexual (2013). His work as a visual, media, and performing artist has exhibited internationally in Europe, Asia, and North America. An archive of all his projects is available online at faggotz.org.
Based in Ottawa, Canada, Hélène Lefebvre’s practice is an inquiry into identity and alterity, all the while weaving links between visual art, culture, and society. The body in movement and sensorial active listening (epicentre of performance action) have been sustained interests of hers since Les Moissons in 2009. Recently, her work has taken the form of performance, installation and video. Her practice in corporeality takes inspiration from studies in visual art, contemporary dance, and authentic movement—a form in which improvisation is central.
Sasha Phipps is an Ottawa-based French-Canadian artist working in video, installation, painting, and public art interventions. He received a college diploma in 3D animation at La Cité collégiale in spring 2006 and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa in the spring of 2010. He maintains an artistic practice in the City of Ottawa and works as the photography and media arts technician for the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa.
Maayke Schurer is engaged in the development of magic realistic moving image works, which entail real-time experimentation without the use of digital effects or manipulation. As such, her works are handmade, using naturally occurring elements such as light, smoke, water and reflection. Her motivation is two-fold. First, her deep concern for the environment meets a conviction that true change does not occur without an initial shift in individual awareness. Second, she believes in the ability of handmade objects to communicate a more powerful message about the environment than could be achieved by direct assertions of fact. Hence, while her work is firmly rooted in the here and now, it opens onto scenarios nostalgically constructed from the imagination and can be seen as highly dramatized nature documentaries. Schurer is a graduate of Queen’s University where she received undergraduate degrees in Fine Art and Biology. She received an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2009. She currently teaches and edits video in Ottawa where she lives with her husband and five children.
67 Nicholas St, Ottawa, ON K1N 7B9