A.6 Strategies for Impermanent Mark-Making in Public Space
Fri Oct 20 / 8:30 – 10:00 / KC 208
chair /
- Kari Cwynar, Concordia University
In Banff in 1991, artist Rebecca Belmore performed the first of many iterations of her sculptural performance, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, in which she invited Indigenous peers and community members to speak directly to the land through a giant megaphone, in response to the colonial violence perpetuated by the recent Kahnesatà:ke resistance. With Belmore’s work as the starting point, this session traces the impact of ephemeral forms of artmaking in public spaces. How have artists used voice, movement and temporary intervention outside of gallery walls? How can ephemeral practices support new connections and narratives without leaving permanent marks on the land? What factors have contributed to the resonance and longevity of temporary projects like Belmore’s, decades later? With perspectives from artists, curators, scholars and activists, this session seeks to build new vocabularies for art in public space in Canada, with an emphasis on impermanence as a strategy and methodology. Together the panellists present deep dives into individual practices, sites and experiences, and reflect on a range of topics from action, power and presence in public spaces, to manifestations of care and joy.
keywords: public space, temporality, land, performance, intervention
session type: panel
Kari Cwynar is an independent curator and editor based between Toronto and Montreal. Recently held positions include Curator for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2023, the inaugural curator of Evergreen’s public art program in Toronto’s Don Valley and Editor and Editorial Director of C Magazine. Cwynar also writes on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, Frieze, Inuit Art Quarterly and C Magazine. Cwynar studied Art History at Queen’s University and Carleton University, and participated in the de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. She has held curatorial research positions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario and has participated in curatorial and writing residencies at Fogo Island Arts, the Banff Centre, Griffin Art Projects and SOMA Mexico. She is currently completing a PhD in Art History at Concordia University.
Ephemeral gestures as calls to attention
- Germaine Koh, University of British Columbia & Simon Fraser University
I will outline how in my work I have used ephemerality, performance and deliberately temporary interventions in public space as strategies to create a sense of urgency and a need to reckon with situations in the present. These tactics attempt to enact a “call to attention” to immediate conditions in the changing world around us, and hope to suggest the potential of acting in the moment. I will discuss performance-based works such as Erratic, HIGH NOON, and League; clearly ephemeral works such as Homemaking; and time- and process-based works such as Fallow and Knitwork. I will also discuss how I have attempted to maintain the values of malleability, uncertainty and play when operating in the realm of public art.
keywords: play, uncertainty, ephemerality, performance, public
Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer whose work ranges widely across media. Her work adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. She is a 2023 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts and for the 2023-24 academic year she is a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20 and as the 2021 Koerner Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to teach sessionally. Koh’s ongoing projects include Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing, and League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice.
Care Bois: t4t (trans-for-trans) Projection Activism
- Evie Ruddy, Carleton University
In March 2023, in the city colonially known as Regina, a friend and I went undercover to anonymously project trans-positive text onto the highest part of a building in which anti-trans activist Jordan Peterson spoke to a sold-out auditorium. The messages – trans people are beautiful, trans women are women, all pronouns are valid, and trans joy forever – cycled at 10-second intervals and marked the building for a total of six minutes. Despite this site-based intervention being fleeting, the projected messages were visually documented and widely circulated on social media platforms, generating joy and care for a trans community under attack and filled with despair.
Although our initial impulse was to project punchy messages that responded directly to anti-trans rhetoric, when my friend and I – both transmasc – met to test the projections, we found ourselves joyfully conversing about our shared experiences with testosterone and shifted toward a strategy of care. In this paper, I draw on Hil Malatino’s Trans Care (2020) and Sara Ahmed’s theories of queer phenomenology (2006) and affect (2014) to discuss how this strategy transformed the discourse around this event from one of hate to trans joy. How did this ephemeral intervention enact a politics of care for trans people? What is the significance of creating t4t messaging as opposed to speaking back to the oppressor? What possibilities does the digital appropriation of public space, as opposed to conventional forms of protest, offer trans communities under attack?
keywords: projection art, activism, trans joy, t4t, affect
Evie Ruddy is a trans non-binary white settler living in Treaty 4. They are a socially engaged interdisciplinary artist, an instructor in Creative Technologies at the University of Regina, and a PhD Candidate in Cultural Mediations at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University. As a PhD Fellow with the Transgender Media Lab, Evie is researching feminist lab ethics and helping to develop an online database of film and audiovisual works made by transgender, Two Spirit, non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming artists. In 2020, Evie’s interactive web project with the National Film Board, Un/Tied won a Digital Dozen: Breakthroughs in Storytelling Award from Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award. Their doctoral research investigates improvisation as a method for ethical co-creation between media artists and trans collaborators.
Multidirectional Carework: Imprinting Diasporic Imaginaries in Public Space
- Laurel V. McLaughlin, Bryn Mawr College
In Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art (2023) art historian Mechtild Widrich argues for a multidirectional theory of site, in which artists, publics, and artworks actively engage in public carework. This dynamic carework—of movement—undermines the staid and permanent assumed character of a public work, as it is administered across, through, and into site with publics. In this paper, I trace the multidirectional carework of practitioners Emilio Rojas, Azza El Siddique, and Dawit L. Petros in mark-making gestures of smearing, dripping, and staining that imprint themselves within communities. In the 25-hour performance The Grass is Always Greener and/or Twice Stolen Land, 2014, Rojas smears a patch of grass 7 km from UBC to the Musqueam Reserve; in the site-specific installation 2021, Fade Into the Sun, el Siddique drips Sudanese bakhoor into the air through an irrigation system inside the architectural scaffolding of a Nubian burial chamber; and in Inscribed Surfaces: On Transient Histories, 2022, Petros forges diasporic community through henna staining of modernist utopic building plans. Whether by dirt, incense, or henna, these ephemeral gestures interact multidirectionally with public architectures—the University campus/stolen land, the public museum/the heritage burial chamber, a storefront/colonial structures—diasporic imaginaries of Mexico, Sudan, and Eritrea, respectively, infiltrating Canadian settler logics. Together the works in these case studies create a lexicon of ephemeral imprinting upon land and in/on bodies that unveils the inextricable incorporation of the two and the dynamic care required to sustain imaginaries.
keywords: diasporic, imprint, public work
Laurel V. McLaughlin (she/her/hers) is a writer, curator, and art historian based outside of New Haven, CT on Oneida sacred lands. McLaughlin is completing her doctorate at Bryn Mawr College, writing a dissertation concerning performative migratory aesthetics in the U.S. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work in conferences ranging from Performance Studies International, Calgary, Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, the College Art Association, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and published her work in Art Papers, ASAP/J, BOMB Magazine, C Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Performa Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, te magazine, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. McLaughlin has organized exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the University of Pennsylvania with the Arthur Ross Gallery and the ICA Philadelphia, the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, Portland, OR, and Artspace New Haven with the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.
Choreographic Structures & the Promise of the Ephemeral
- Jenn Goodwin, Toronto Biennial of Art, City of Toronto/Nuit Blanche
Jenn Goodwin is an artist, curator, and producer. Much of her practice focuses on temporary art in public space. Her dance and choreographic work often explores the play, power, and politics of the body in motion, the feminization of public space, and the choreographic of the everyday.
She is a graduate of the Masters of Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto and previously graduated from Concordia University in Contemporary Dance.
Goodwin co-founded The Movement Movement – which took the public running through public spaces and galleries through their Run with Art series. Along with Camilla Singh she created MORTIFIED; an art band that uses drums, fight choreography, tap dancing and cheerleading as their instruments. She also co-founded DoorTODoor Dances during the pandemic to deliver dances to the doorsteps of long-term care homes.
She is Curator of Public Programs at The Toronto Biennial of Art, and previously worked for the City of Toronto as the inaugural programmer of Nuit Blanche. She recently wrapped ArtworxTO/Year of Public Art, as Lead of the Cultural Community Hubs and multiple legacy programs. She has written for Holding Ground, Nuit Blanche & Other Ruptures, the Journal for Curatorial Studies, Canadian Theatre Review, The Dance Current, and ANANDAM.
