To baby or not to baby?

It is funny. I had a hard time posting this because I felt that despite the fact that I was trying to complicate the issue, people would just say "oh look another baby-crazy woman".

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This work is a reflection upon the pressure that society puts upon women to have children. It is the result of a series of conversations with a friend. Both students in our thirties, we discussed how we felt that still to this day, a woman’s worth is defined by whether or not she has children. It is also reflection on the insight I have gained professionally working with women dealing with infertility and high-risk pregnancies

The thirty-five sentences present different thoughts and perspectives around the decision of having a baby. They are personal opinions or experiences but also demonstrate the way in which societal and family pressures and opinions blur the boundary between public and private life. These thoughts come from myself, family, friends and patients as well as society in general.

This video stands alone or is part of a performance. A child's birthday tiara is won during the performance to point to the way in which private matters are considered on display not necessarily with the consent of the wearer.

35 Points of View

To Whom it May Concern

O Canada video installation will be posted soon


To Whom It May Concern
March 3 - 13, 2010

Opening Reception
Thursday, March 4, 2010
6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

As a juried exhibition featuring works by senior visual art students from York University, To Whom It May Concern reflects the accomplishments of students who push technical and conceptual boundaries in their respective studio practices; which span all disciplines from video, painting, installation, photography, print and sculpture, the exhibition.

Like a postcard without a destination, To Whom It May Concern is to no one particular, but to the eye of the beholder. 

Featured Artists: 

Robert Canali, Robert Clements, Sarah Cooper, Katie Fife, Alex Fischer, Phoebe Lo, Alexandra Majerus, Ellen-Elizabeth Paonessa, Meghan Scott, Anna Standish, Calwyn Suominem, Jessica Thalmann, Joshua Vettivelu, Mark Visperas, Sky Fairchild-Waller 

Presented by the Visual Arts Students Association of York University (VASA)

VASA wishes to thank the Visual Arts Department at York University, Judith Schwarz, and Gallery 1313 for all their generous support.

http://www.akimbo.ca/events/?id=18284&day=4&month=3&year=2010

Bear Hunt

Image from Toronto Sculpture Garden website

The four life-size bear sculptures can not be missed in the small space of the Toronto Sculpture Garden, right off downtown King Street East. Their day-glo orange colour is unavoidable and renders the sculptures as somewhat excessive in a space that has been designated to Art. The first impression is that Dean Drever has not only trivialized nature into a fun game, which in Canada could border on sacrilege, but also the art framework in which the bears rest. 

Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that nature has not run wild. The bears only appear bigger, brighter and in our neighbourhood. Each bear has the same shape and comes from the same mold; they are not four different bears but instead the same bear over and over again. The meaning of the sculptures begins to change. The bears become Bear, a signifier of all Bears, a symbolic Bear. Furthermore, only one of the four bears is in fact whole. Walking together eastward across the pavilion, three of the bears seem to pass through the wall on the east side of the garden - only the back half or less of the bears can be seen. Although Drever envisions the wall as a membrane between reality and a mythical realm, the bears appear to be literally and metaphorically disappearing before our eyes. In a country whose identity is invested in the landscape and wilderness, the orange bears confront the viewer as an emblem of this conflicted Canadian identity that has been constructed over the last 100 years, ignoring the presence of First Nations and constantly felt to be threatened, in the past by our British imperial leaders and in more recent years by our southern neighbours (Anderson 246). 

Image from Toronto Sculpture Garden website

Dean Drever is part of the Haida nation and states that bears are a “symbol of purity, strength, dominance and authority” with no known predator (except, I would add, humans). Drever confronts us with “nature” in the gentrified city garden, pointing to modernity’s approach to nature as an idealized, romanticized state. A cement platform underneath the bears joins the four into one bear. However, the bright plastic-y orange paint prevents the platform from becoming a pedestal but rather gives them the appearance of a toy, like little plastic soldiers. Life-size toy bears immediately read uncomfortably within the Sculpture Garden’s framework of the art institution in which the viewer expects an aesthetic experience (Baker 51). This uncomfortableness is, in fact, Drever’s post-modern animal confronting the viewer with their romantic, but inherently destructive, attitude (Baker 53). The Bear Hunt is a game, but not the kind of game that first comes to mind. It is in fact a game that is grounded in our hunt for a cohesive national identity and our loss of understanding of nature. It is a metaphorical bear hunt: the only kind that most Canadians are capable of. 

Bibiliography

Anderson, Benedict. "Staging Anti-Modernism in the Age of High Capitalist Nationalism." Ed. John O'Brian and Peter White. Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 2007. 245-46. Print.

Baker, Steve. "What is the Postmodern Animal?" The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2000. 50-54. Print.

Toronto Sculpture Garden. Web. 25 Nov. 2009. .

Estrange

Gender Demo at Eleanor Winters Gallery, York University

Gender Demo

In collaboration with Calwyn Suominen, this video comments on the performance of gender, both how we can engage in this performance and subvert it. In one channel, I demonstrate how to install an overhead ceiling light fixture. In the other channel, Calwyn demonstrates how to do laundry. During each demonstration, the other gender is frozen in a three second loop: a metaphor for the boundaries of male and female roles that are reinforced in our daily lives. Two books Don’ts for Wives and Don’ts for Husbands are displayed on a pedestal in front of the projections. Originally printed in 1913, they complement the videos by showing how the performance of gender is an on-going act.

Looking Again - A visit to the AGO

I took 20th Century Canadian Art History taught by Sally McKay in which we had to visit the Canadian collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario and write a critical review.

Rising to the Occasion (1987-1991) is strategically placed in the centre of the small gallery. Part installation / part artifact, Rebecca Belmore wore the original dress for 12 Angry Crinolines, a protest performance during the Prince of Wales’ visit to Canada in 1988. Belmore explains in a video interview in the gallery that she remade the dress upon the Art Gallery of Ontario’s (AGO) request. Softly lit on a low pedestal in the centre of the gallery, Rising to the Occasion is a Victorian-style velvet dress with pink padded shoulders with a small floral print, which leads down to a dark blue bodice, decorated with patch-worked flowers, brown leather fringe and feathers. Two tea saucers attached to the bodice face outwards like two perfectly round breasts. The saucers’ delicate pink rose design makes one think of older British ladies sipping tea. Suspended above the dress is a headdress made of a simple metal band wrapped in ribbons and cloth with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth above the left eye and a large shard of a flowered saucer above the right. Two cloth braids with a feather attached to the left end extend upwards from the headdress. The long pink skirt with a white front panel ends in a blue ruffle. This however is no ordinary Victorian dress. The blue ruffle extends around the back of the dress to encompass twigs of wood piled into a bustle-shaped beaver dam. All manner of trinkets can be seen nestled in the dam: cups, silver spoons, newspaper clippings about the Royal family, bells and a mirror.

The beaver is iconic in Canada’s history as an animal that was hunted and traded by both natives and newcomers from Europe and is thereby an excellent reference for the discussion that the AGO wishes to raise here. The stated overarching theme of this room is “Is seeing always innocent?” Along one half of the room are works of Euro-Canadian artists, such as Emily Carr, Edward Curtis, Paul Kane and Cornelius Krieghoff. If the viewer is unfamiliar with these specific works, they are likely familiar with the forms of representation of Aboriginal people and Canadian landscape as throughout history, Europeans have produced images of the peoples over whom they wish to extend their power (Moray 3). The long-standing supposed neutrality, or to paraphrase the AGO, the innocence of the representation of First Nation peoples is questioned and a dialogue is created by placing in direct opposition representations of Euro-Canadians done by Aboriginal artists.

By placing Rising to the Occasion in the centre, the opposition between the two perspectives is challenged and expanded into a more contemporary discourse that contact was in fact more complex and reciprocity greater than usually represented (Hill 201). Belmore discusses how she feels the common view that natives “sold themselves” for shiny trinkets is erroneous and serves to reinforce power relations. She feels that natives simply incorporated the new items into their lives. The fact that this artwork was made by a native woman who clearly has managed to make a place for herself in an environment that has been dominated by Euro-Canadians supports this discourse of exchange and adaptation. Closer examination of the surrounding works further reinforces this. Robert Clow Todd’s Northwestern Portrait (1855) of what may be a native but could just as easily be a white man dressed in native clothes with a teepee in the background suggests interaction while the Haida sailor sculpture Sea Captain (1840), with its individualized white face, denotes interest and trade in goods.

The notion of looking through the lens of otherness is compounded and broadened in several manners. A sub-theme of the male gaze is present in the gallery as Rising to the Occasion, an empathetically feminine work, is surrounded and gazed upon by work that, apart from two paintings, is done by male artists. The question of high art versus low art, with its connotations of class, gender, ethnicity and authenticity, is also highlighted by installing painting, traditionally considered high art, opposite small scale objects, considered low art or craft due to their use in daily life or as commercial goods or simply because of who made them (Phillips 46). This discourse is then highlighted by the hybrid nature of Belmore’s dress with its floral prints, feathers, fringe and trinkets suggestive of the blending of aboriginal and western cultures as well as women’s domestic art all placed in a high art setting.

The curatorial intent of using this non-traditional work as mediator within the room’s installation is its strength as well as its weakness. For viewers who prefer traditional landscape and portraiture painting, this work and therefore the nuances of the installation may not be accessible. The gallery’s location as the final room before the elevators also means that some viewers pass through quickly. However, much like Rebecca Belmore is known for her unapologetic attitude, the Art Gallery of Ontario should continue to confront their viewers with long overdue curatorial installations that question complex themes such as European versus Aboriginal, colonizer versus colonized, masculine versus feminine and high art versus low art.

Rising to the Occasion by Rebecca Belmore at Art Gallery of Ontario
Photo by Alexandra Majerus

City Odyssey (2009)

City Odyssey draws upon both the tradition of landscape and the contemporary postcard. While using these languages, the active gesture of writing upon Toronto's skyline and most recognizable landmark, rather than fixing the understanding, describes the ways in which the city and population adapt and change over time. 

Havana

Havana, Cuba

Although this is really a tourist shot, I enjoy it and decided to post it. I took it with a Vivitar plastic wind-up camera two years ago but it was developed only a few days ago.

Untitled 01 and 02 (This is the life!)

The Good Life series

Two “typical” photographs of Barbados scenery seen through a window covered with frost bring together two geographies and cultures.

Depending on the viewer’s perspective, it may portray the Northern phenomena of traveling south in the winter to get away from the “grind”. Although the exoticization may be innocent on the part of individuals, this longing and idealization of warmer climates is often done with no concrete understanding of the reality of daily life for the people there. The beauty of the frost becomes an allegory for the privilege and opportunity that is possible in developed countries.

From the Caribbean perspective, or in fact from the perspective of any country of the global south, the insidious nature of frost suggests the Westernization that is occurring in many countries. The frost permeating across the surface points to the increasing quantity of foreign-owned property and business in underdeveloped countries, which drives up the cost of living and real estate for locals further increasing the economic gap between rich and poor. With this gap comes a counter-idealization and necessity, which has can be seen in the history of emigration bringing with it the trauma of displacement through the generations.