Pockets of Wisdom and Wakefulness
France Trépanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly
Understanding Aboriginal Arts in Canada Today: A Knowledge and Literature Review
Research and Evaluation Section Canada Council for the Arts April 2012
Trépanier’s and Creighton-Kelly’s research investigates an essential, but not a simple, question – how does one understand Aboriginal arts which are created in the territory known as Canada?
Skeena Reece Raven: On the Colonial Fleet, 2010
“I once heard an elder say that the great crime in this land was not that the natives had their language and culture beaten out of them in boarding schools – the great crime was that the people who came here did not adopt the culture of the land.” - Mike MacDonald
Trépanier and Creighton-Kelly use methods of observing, listening, respecting, remembering, regenerating, transmitting and healing to tell the connected stories of
Land ~ Peoples ~ Languages ~ Cultural Practices ~ Art
and find knowledge located in different places, in songs, baskets, moccasins, weaving, dreams, ceremony, language and political discourse
Inuvialuit Drummers and Dancers, Inuvik. Photographer: Chris Randle.
Alex Javier, Morning Star, Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization
Robert Houle, Paris/Ojibwa, 2010
“In Native culture, stories are not simply stories. They are told and retold so that ! they resonate in the present, not as myths and legends, but as a vital part of history. They teach critical lessons and cultural values, like bravery and the necessity of communication.” Candice Hopkins
Please read and become a pocket of wisdom and wakefulness
Understanding Aboriginal Arts in Canada Today
“It is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people”, Rirkrit Tiravanija
Open Engagement conference 2012
“Who am I Where?”
“It turns out there is room for everyone.”
The walking studio or walking environment explored as aesthetic practice to investigate movements, bodies and space.
“The Public: public space, public readers, public body, public action…on-going space for discourse, mutual knowledge, shape shifting gestures, co-created meanings, form and flux and shared memory” -Paul Ramirez Jonas
“I didn’t even know it was art”
“Oh it’s just art”
“But I don’t care if its art.”
“Escapology. Escape from objecthood, authorship, spectatorship; escape from Art’s purposeless purpose, autonomy and disinterested spectator. Consider real time, full scale, user-ship, use-value, collective works“. Stephan Wright
“Art isn’t always representational; in performance studies, behaviour and conduct, is staging a reality has hasn’t happened yet but I hope will happen, force more thinking….a transitory state. Performance is useful, it does for others, …something is generated to last longer than the piece itself” -Tania Brugerua
Trimpin sound …
Trimpin sound sculpture/kinetic art titled CanonX+4:33+100
Reconfigured Pianos, Joy Stick, Graphic Score and Robotics
(ballbearings, internet router, rubber, felt, suction cups, files, electro magnets, o rings, springs, coils)
sound = information
sound: waves, falls, spirals, bounces, travels, vibrates, touches, moves space
sound is a physical, kinetic, visual experience
Vic Sightings
Vic Sightings
Victoria based skate photographers and videographers at the fifty fifty 2516 Douglas St. Victoria BC
http://vicsightings.tumblr.com/
photographer jay zee http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayzemanek/
photographer matt macleod http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewmacleod/
photographer luke connor http://www.flickr.com/photos/60515360@N08/
Plant Spirit
Sitting with Species at Risk
Elyse Portal’s project brings attention to local Vancouver Island plant species in risk of extinction. Portal builds an altar for species-at-risk out of the gallery’s neighbourhood found and trash objects. She invites the public to build clay bowls for each near extinction northwest coast plant, candles are lit in each bowl and added to the altar. At the close of the project the bowls are fitted with at-risk plant seeds and left outdoors with a chance to propagate.
Bridge
Faith — is the Pierless Bridge
Supporting what We see
Unto the Scene that We do not –
Too slender for the eye
It bears the Soul as bold
As it were rocked in Steel
With Arms of Steel at either side –
It joins — behind the Veil
To what, could We presume
The Bridge would cease to be
To Our far, vacillating Feet
A first Necessity.
Emily Dickinson
Poem: 915. Faith — is the Pierless Bridge
