An interpretive essay response to Michaela Bridgemohan’s exhibition, embalmbed funks by Karis Dimas-Lehndorf
An interpretive essay response to Erin Scott’s exhibition, 9/3. This essay was donated to the Alternator by the author.
An interpretive essay response to Puppets Forsakens’ exhibition, The Noisebau.
An interpretive essay response to Natasha Harvey’s exhibition, Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics, and Love.
An interpretive essay response to Christine D’Onofrio’s cat cat cat by Claire Geddes Bailey.
But what did you come here for?
I’m often asked.
Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine…
You mean?
Well, it must be for the nature; the remoteness, the space, the experience, the beauty.
On December 3rd, 2022, Katherine Pickering met with M.E. Sparks over Zoom to discuss her exhibition of new work at the Alternator Center for Contemporary Art. This is an excerpt of that conversation.
I swear I saw something. It was right there, in front me. Nothing scary, nothing bizarre, I think. More like a form, something that has a presence, a form. It was tall. Not that tall. A bit shorter than that maybe. It was right there. I say a form but that might be misleading.
What is time, and how do we experience it? Recent and ongoing events have made us all aware that
time is as fragile as it is precious. If the order of time were to collapse, for whom would it matter?
In my artisan life, there is tension between textiles that survive and that have the potential to rot away.
Weaving in progress, like all works in progress, are compelling visions which can offer aspiration and dread simultaneously. It is a stark dichotomy of tangible formulations and opened parallels. Like all forms of craft, it is the result of practice, iterations and repetition.
I am going to take you on a journey today. I will to anchor this journey through my artwork, practise and thought process, mixing imagery with ideology.
As an adult, my art practice has evolved out of an interest in nature, a sense of conflict over contributing further objects and materials into a culture of “too much”, a sensibility to use what is around me, an innate desire to make, and a belief that investing energy and care into materials is deeply meaningful.
“There can be no repetition,” wrote Gertrude Stein, “because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.” Here, in Figure as Index, images repeat.
Our current archeological record suggests that the earliest human-made mirrors were created approximately 8,000 years ago in southern Anatolia, or what is now south-central Turkey. These Neolithic mirrors, unearthed in the settlement of Çatalhöyük, are round or ovoid, approximately palm-sized, and were painstakingly crafted from obsidian, a deep black volcanic glass, with very finely polished, slightly convex surfaces.
Just as in life, art is a perpetual unfolding of that which came before. My painting exhibition at the end of 2021 at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art was titled, This is a Love Story, and I have recorded a series of walks that are an extension of that; the search for meaning, and the decision to rest in the space of Love during the present time when it often feels easier to choose fear. In my painting practice the built environment stands as a metaphor to explore the spectrum of human experience. Our lives are the construction site. Experience teaches us what is no longer of use, we demolish and rebuild, continuously, it can be no other way. The great expedition that is life, is the persistent pursuit of Love and purpose.
We are failing to protect Earth because we assign global governance to the United Nations. We forget that in this geo-political world, nature knows no national borders. Who speaks for Earth? We need a new assembly, United Earth, with representatives from earth scientists, global finance, and green NGOs. Even if we achieve Net-Zero through United Nations efforts at COP26, it will not be enough. All nations have a voice through the United Nations. Earth needs her own voice to be heard through a new assembly, United Earth.
S.C. Jean, who I have always known as Sandra Cook, has lived in Kelowna for about 25 years and is a beloved and cherished presence within the art and music scene. If you have attended any live music shows in Kelowna you most likely have seen her in the audience – frequently she can be found snapping pictures of the people in the band or of her friends, who she refers to as her “kids”. If not at a music venue, you would definitely run into her at an opening or volunteering here at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary. You may have seen her photos gracing the walls at Fernando’s Pub or in the back office at the gallery. Having your photo taken and placed on one of these walls is a coveted achievement and means that you are part of the “in” crowd. Though she is well-known and liked by many because of these activities I have primarily got to know Jean through her paintings.
Levi Glass’s Legroom for Daydreaming invites curiosity and encourages enquiry. This intriguing assortment of visual puzzles and strange devices stirs our desire to investigate what we see. Not limited to a singular meaning or interpretation, Glass’s sculptural assemblages generate an active, open relationship between audience and art. Here, ordinary materials and mundane, domestic items gain the capacity to inspire, awe, and delight.
Cities have always been centres of growth. However, in what scholars refer to as late liberalism, urban life is dominated by neoliberal ideology, or what the political philosopher Wendy Brown (2015, 17) calls “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms.” Neoliberalism, as the dominant ideology of the present, transforms the way we understand cities.
A perfect machine produces no waste. In the ideal scenario, all energy put into a machine would be efficiently converted into work, and an equal quantity of material that enters the machine would exit as product. This, as we know, is impossible; all machines emit waste. Machines discharge heat, exhaust, various unpleasant liquids, and excess material as a matter of course. Design theorist and craftsperson David Pye described this fourth kind of waste as a technique—“wasting technique,” he writes in The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, is the “carving away [of] a piece of material until the shape you want remains.”
By the time we reach adulthood, the written word has long since stopped holding any mystery for us. We are so accustomed to the tiny black shapes arranged in their tidy lines across the page that our minds jump immediately to the message they carry, forgetting to look at the spaces they occupy. Occasionally, something will challenge this easy ritual: we learn a new language and we remember the magic of discovering new meaning where before there was none; we struggle with a word puzzle that ruptures the distinction between a word’s shape and its meaning; and, sometimes, we learn that we have been using a word incorrectly and are stunned and maybe a little embarrassed when it unveils its true self. But, for the most part, in our day to day lives, language is a seamless conduit for the sense and meaning we seek, and we entirely take for granted that it will accomplish its given task.
What are we looking at in Signal chains: images or visuals, the representation of reality or the reality of representation? Do they refer to an Other or are they just to be conceived of as self-referential? What objective or subjective criteria are to be utilized here as a reference for measuring what is at work in the representational mechanism of these works? The objectivist ‘reality’ to which they may refer, or the subjectivist [art] history of formal transformation, which by now operates in its own reality?
Instead of seeking answers solely within the works displayed in Signal chains (i.e., the objects in isolation), it would be much less tedious to explore the trajectory of Steven Cottingham’s recent image-based works, from which Signal chains seems to have come about (i.e., the objects-in-relation).
Audie Murray’s work first came to my attention in the form of a circulated Instagram image of a pair of sport socks with a beaded sole, Pair of Socks (2017). I immediately was drawn to thinking about these works, what does it mean to walk on these beads, to feel them on the feet- their potential to break-and how do they relate to historic works of moccasins with beaded soles? I was invested in the artist’s practice that I view as a mix of humour, skills-based material process and an intuitive sense. In another recent work, T.P. (2018) a roll of toilet paper is beaded with a dusty rose scalloped design that covers the entire surface of the tissue (a work that has become predictive of the global pandemic in 2020 and the rush on bulk toilet paper purchases!). A visceral materiality that lives in a bodily conceptual aesthetic is one of the ways I started to see Audie Murray’s work. This materiality is, at times, also concerned with a good laugh, an important healing belly laugh along with memories of laughter and who we share it with. In this exhibition, As Old as The Hills, these themes continue in the body of work on exhibition at Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, BC (July 31- Sept. 12, 2020).
Since 2015 I have been collaborating with a contact, Bagalwa Baliahamwabo, in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). To be straightforward, I am outsourcing beadwork to his family. I order the supplies online, organize and label them with detailed instructions, and ship them. Each swatch is 128 by 128 beads and is woven on a bead loom for a wage of one US cent per bead ($163.84/swatch). I estimate this works out to $1.50-$3.00/hour. For comparison, a plantation worker in the DRC makes about $2.00 a day.
Why are some holes in the body coveted, and some considered shameful? Gazing into another’s eyes is a romantic act of love, while gazing into a butthole, another’s or one’s own, is an awkward proposition. It is safe to assume that the initial reactions to Christopher Lacroix’s artwork, There is a minimum to operate properly will range from disgust, titillation, curiosity, desire and a variety of other states, perturbed and pleasing. This project requires multiple lenses in order to consider its subtle production of meanings, beyond initial visceral responses.
The artist Holly Ward makes work that has run a course through a retro optimism towards a darker, more anxious meditation on our collective future. Ward’s pieces are constructed across mediums, using sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing. Her work produces material investigations as tools for an audience to deeper analyze late-stage capitalism. Ward acquired an MFA (Studio) from the University of Guelph in 2006, a BFA (Interdisciplinary Studio) from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, and a BA (English Major, Fine Arts Minor), from the University of New Brunswick.
Like the sacred trickster coyote of Indigenous plateau lore, the pieces that RYAN! Feddersen create make us feel empathy while modeling to us our missteps, so that we may choose better for ourselves. RYAN! Feddersen (b. 1984, Wenatchee, Washington) is a mixed-media installation artist who conceives large-scale, site-specific pieces which use interactivity to create opportunities for personal introspection and discovery in the local community. RYAN! is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, and descendant of the Okanagan and Arrow Lakes peoples.