EXHIBITION PROGRAM SCHEDULE

May 25, 5-7 PM – Opening Reception (artists present)
June 3, 2-5 pm – ARTSCAPE Screening & Conversation in the Garden with Dr. Andrea Fatona and the artists
June 15, 5-7 pm – Listening and Sounding Gathering with contributing artist and composer Anne Bourne
June 29, 5-7 pm – Listening and Sounding Gathering Anne Bourne and singer-songwriter, performer, mentor, tUkU
July 22, 5-7 pm – Screening & Conversation in the Garden with contributing artist, critic, and raconteur, Dr. Jeanne Randolph
July 29, 2-5 pm – Closing Reception, Conversation & Screening in the Garden with Kay Rangel

As a communications platform, Zoom exposes a persistent paradox. It claims to make us more connected when, in reality, it often intensifies a sense of isolation. Performance artists Householder and Price bring the medium’s contradictions into focus by facing this paradox head on, using Zoom to record their investigations. Shot over several months during the lockdowns of 2020–21, DIPTYCHS: 43° N, 79° W / 48° N, 123° W (the latitude and longitude of Toronto, Ontario, and Victoria, British Columbia, respectively) work to explore the possibilities of finding tangibility and subjectivity in a space that is, first and foremost, virtual. The installation at John B. Aird Gallery is a new interpretation of the work, which was first shown at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Video Lounge in 2022.

According to the artists, who both come from conceptual, feminist, dance, and performance art practices, “The crude imprecision of the technologies through which we now communicate flattens geographies and obliterates time zones. All backgrounds appear virtual, as mises-en-scène.” Allegory is generally understood as a literary device, often employed to reveal a hidden socio-political meaning. Householder and Price employ the device as a method to playfully save face-to-face communication from oblivion, collaborating to improvise a new relationality. Halfway through the project, they expanded their collaboration to include additional dimensions of soundtracks created by accomplished sonic artists, Anne Bourne, Homo Montrous, seth cardinal dodginghorse, Rita McKeough, Jeanne Randolph and Jeff Morton.

Because the project permits its makers to stop time and focus on something so easily missed in day-to-day life, the work almost becomes a magic trick. DIPTYCHS aims to capture the fallout from over two years of social isolation and, in doing so, opens up space to unpack the grief, memory, and loss that has resulted from our separation. For instance, throughout the video titled Episodes 6, 7, 9, 14, 15: smoke & mirrors, viewers witness the artists scrutinizing themselves and their surroundings via a screen, a familiar point of action throughout the confinement of the pandemic. We see the spaces that the artists inhabit and what they have in common, oddly offering an unexpected threshold-crossing. seth cardinal dodginghorse’s haunting soundscape probes this potentiality, penetrating a rather ordinary, domestic stage with audio urgency, anxiety, and confusion.

ARTISTS BIOS 

JOHANNA HOUSEHOLDER works at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture, making performance art, audio, video, film and choreography. Her interest in how ideas move through bodies has led her often collaborative practice. She has performed across Canada and at international venues for 40 years. One of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, she co-edited two books with Tanya Mars: Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004), and More Caught in the Act (2016). Her current work concerns the vexations of the anthropocene. She has taken refuge in T:Karonto on Treaty 13 territory. 

JUDITH PRICE combines a 30+ year transdisciplinary art practice with a background in modern dance. Her body of work includes performances, video, video installation, site-specific installations and short films. Her performances include site-specific street actions, interventions, and collaborative and durational works, and her solo performances in galleries and festival events incorporate still images, video projections, and sculpture, merging performance and video installation. She is a founding member of the Open Action performance collective. Price lives in Victoria, BC, and is retired from teaching post-secondary courses in time-based art. Judith is an uninvited guest on the Lekwungen/Esquimalt, Songhees and WSÁNEĆ territory.

CURATOR’S BIO

CARLA GARNET is the Director and Curator of the John B. Aird Gallery. She has worked as the curator at the Art Gallery of Peterborough (2010-2013), as a guest curator at Gallery Stratford (2009-2010), as an independent curator (1997-2010), and was the founder and director of Garnet Press Gallery (1984-97). Garnet holds an Associate Diploma from the Ontario College of Art and Design and a Masters’ Degree in Art History from York University. Her core projects include Suzy Lake Choreographed Puppets and Flowers and Photography in which she claims that there is a relationship between Photography and Feminism. Garnet is interested in the politics of the art exhibition and its potential to function as a common—public space for dialogue. Her curatorial area of interest engages with an exploration of work that presents the possibility of existing simultaneously in many tenses or occupying more than one subject position at once, or both as a way to open up a space for greater empathy. For Garnet, an artwork’s significance is tied up with an ability to say what otherwise might be unsayable.

SONIC COLLABORATORS BIOS

seth cardinal dodginghorse is an experimental musician, cultural researcher, and multidisciplinary artist working within performance, printmaking, installation, sound and video. They grew up eating dirt and exploring the forest on their family’s ancestral land on the Tsuu’tina nation. In 2014 their family was forcibly removed from their homes and land for the construction of the South West Calgary Ring Road. Their work explores their family’s history and experiences of displacement.

Jeanne Randolph writes, performs and takes photographs alluding to her fascination with mass spectator sports such as boxing, American Football, car racing and the dead white men’s philosophical tradition, as well as psychoanalytic theory, advertising, ancient history, consumerism and contemporary Canadian art.

Anne Bourne composer, sound artist, writer, is seasoned in intermedia performance and recording; improvises emergent streams of cello and voice; composes sonic video shorts from field recordings. In contemporary voice context, Anne teaches collectivity through the text soundscores, and the Deep Listening practice of composer Pauline Oliveros. Anne’s international reach as a creative mentor for well-being, is based in one to one conversation and listening walks. A Chalmers Fellow, Anne’s research is interdisciplinary and touches equanimity, microtonal voice, the ocean, wave patterns, listening, and the sound of water. www.annebournemusic.com/listen

Homo Monstrous is Leo Keiser and Jaye Kovach

Leo Keiser (they/them) is a musician, sound-maker, and performer based in Treaty 4 Territory (Regina SK). Equipped with common tools of live music creation, Leo frequently uses electronics to distort sounds driven by their body. These sounds find homes in live performance, music recordings, and sound art; In energetic rock, angular electronic noise, and bass-heavy drones. These sounds help the body find a home in itself. Collaborative in nature, Leo has performed in works/projects featured by: Canadian Art Magazine, Cups n Cakes Network, Femme Wave Arts Festival, Grind Central Festival, Ness Creek Music Festival, Queer City Cinema/Performatorium, Regina Folk Festival, SaskMusic, and Sled Island. Leo makes sounds with Regina-based music projects Homo Monstrous, MechaDroid, Oiseaux, Team Player, and makes body-reactive drones under the name Dandelion. 

Jaye Kovach (she/her; they/them) is a queer, disabled, butch trans woman, and a multimedia and performance artist living in Treaty 4 Terrirtory (Regina, SK). Their practice includes a growing tattoo business that, using trauma informed approaches, centers creating a safe space and comfortable tattooing experience for marginalized bodies. In 2019, Jaye was featured in the spotlight section of Canadian Art’s FEMME issue. Her performance work has been presented at Queer City Cinema/Performatorium, a queer media and performance art festival based in Regina, Saskatchewan, that attracts international artists and filmmakers. They also perform as part of Homo Monstrous and Forced Femme, bands that blur the line between music and performance art.

Rita McKeough is an installation and performance artist based in Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta, on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Îyâxe Nakoda Nations, the Métis Nation (Region 3).

Her work incorporates audio, electronics, and mechanical performing objects.

McKeough consistently works from a feminist perspective. In her recent work she focuses on the environmental impacts of oil production using sound to articulate forces of resistance in the natural world. McKeough’s work has been featured in Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (YYZ Books, 2004). Rita McKeough: Works (Emmedia, Truck Gallery and MST performative art festival, 2018). McKeough credits the support and assistance of her community in the production of her work. In 2009, she was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Jeff Morton is an artist living in rural southeast Saskatchewan, on Treaty 2, land of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Assiniboine, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and the traditional homeland of the Métis Nation.

His work integrates music composition and media art, exploring themes of sound-making, communication, and transcription. Drawing on traditional instruments, found musical objects, natural materials, and technology, his performances and installations have been presented in galleries, festivals, and showcases across Canada and internationally.

DIPTYCHS: CONVERSATIONS IN THE GARDEN

SPEAKERS BIOS

*  transcripts from recordings made during these public engagement events will appear in the online publication planned to document the Aird Gallery/CONTACT Festival, Householder, Price, Diptychs, and project. 

In December 2020 — DR ANDREA FATONA, Associate Professor, Faculty of Art, was named Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Canadian Black Diasporic Cultural Production. Dr. Fatona, an independent art curator and scholar, and former director of the Graduate Program in Criticism and Curatorial Practice, has been working for years to rectify the absence of Black visual art from “official records”— art critics’ reviews, art archives and other avenues of representation. Dr. Fatona is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was the 2017/18 OCAD U-Massey Fellow. She has published scholarly articles, catalogue essays, and book chapters in a range of publications.

ANNE BOURNE is an artist/ composer, mentor, producer, and traveller based in Tkaronto/Toronto near Lake Ontario, composes electroacoustic compositions for multichannel spatial installations in collaboration with artists and writers, scholars and scientists who stand for the wild and all life forms, known as sentient beings; improvises emergent streams of cello sonics, voice, digital image and text. Seasoned in International recording and concert touring, energy work and ceremony Anne became a creative improviser with composer Pauline Oliveros, and a facilitator of empathic collective gesture through a listening practice developed in Oliveros’ Sangre de Cristo deep listening retreats. A Chalmers Fellow 2023, Anne observes shorelines as difference in coalescence, through walking, listening and field recording creates sound in attunement to the spectral wave patterns of water.

DR. JEANNE RANDOLPH is one of Canada’s foremost cultural theorists, having been writing, publishing and lecturing for over thirty years. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming (1993); Symbolization and Its Discontents (1997), Why Stoics Box (2003), The Ethics of Luxury (2008), and more recently Shopping Cart Pantheism (2015) and Out of Psychoanalysis: ficto-criticism 2005-2015. She is also the author of countless published articles in Canada and the United States and has contributed texts to numerous monographs and exhibition catalogues for artists including Fastwurms, Vera Frenkel, Robin Collyer, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Bernie Miller and Ian Carr-Harris. Her pivotal essay “The Amenable Object,” (1983) remains required reading in many university art courses. Her writing is marked by an innovative approach to her chosen subject, a deeply ethical philosophical meandering that blends cultural theory and art criticism with personal history and a poetics of the imagination. A practicing psychoanalyst, Dr. Randolph is also known as engaging lecturer and performance artist whose unique vocal soliloquies–ranging from cat curating to architecture to boxing to Barbie Dolls to Wittgenstein–have been delivered in universities and galleries across Canada, as well as England, Australia and Spain. Randolph is the first and only writer in Canada to develop an Object Relations psychoanalytic theory as a medium for cultural criticism.

KAY RANGEL (b. 2002) is an emerging artist and curator from Mexico City based in Toronto. She’s examining new ways curatorial practices could have a more caring structure within art institutions. Through painting and video, the artist’s main body of work depicts her close observation of her surroundings and emotions, leading her to inquire into intimacy, spirituality, and connection.