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Growth, Endlessness, Blocks is a sculptural installation comprised of a series of wood structures of various scales. Large sections of drywall function as extensions of the gallery walls. Each structure balances a number of different physical characteristics that are tied to the act of making. Balance and presence combine in a disconcerting way giving the viewer a sense of uneasiness and a moment finely tuned by the artist. The artist seeks to embody the role of the factory fabricator as a means of exhausting the limits of the materials used and of emulating the role of the worker.
Thus Spoke Death and Transfiguration is a multi-faceted art installation that employs the anomalous trope of embedding video monitors into sculptural objects. These sculptural objects include a hanging papier-mâché dolphin, a lectern, side tables, wood sculptures and encasings. The three embedded monitors feature the artist performing in various capacities: embodying various acts in the studio, on a mountain, in an airplane and also performing a remake of a lecture by the French philosopher Alain Badiou. The artist discovered the actions portrayed in video, and the objects, to be art. Appendix A is the research paper written in FPA 812 entitled Defamiliarizing Straight Forward Vision : Undercutting and Satire in the Artwork of Elodie Pong and Leila Pazooki. The paper provides some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of appropriation as an artistic tactic drawing on the Situationist International, Sven Lütticken and Jean-Luc Nancy to explore works by Elodie Pong and Leila Pazooki.
When will my hands become roots? is a performance and installation motivated by the sense of displacement and desire to belong, which I draw from my own experience growing up in Brazil and then moving to Canada. The project is inspired by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of body as chiasm (from the Greek letter chi “x” used to describe crossing over relations), which defines that body and world are intertwined by their common texture, the flesh. Following the idea of the chiasm, I cross over elements from both the performance stage and the art gallery into a project that combines my personal memories, cultural identity questions, and interdisciplinary interests. The outcome is a sensorial installation with performance elements and a performance with visual art elements.
My MFA thesis project titled Temporary Marriage includes nine paintings and four sculptures. The visual and conceptual signs of the divine power and legitimacy of Islamic religious Leaders are embedded in the architecture of religious monuments and Persian literature as a kind of visual and literary propaganda. I explore and analyze this power through depicting elements of Islamic culture and architecture in my paintings and sculptures as a means of metaphorically dealing with the central themes of Religion and History. In my sculptures I further point to the transmutation and deterioration of this power by altering the shape of domes and minarets, and using everyday materials such as metallic stickers to embellish their surfaces and destabilize meaning. Through applying multiple layers of paint and then scratching through its surface a sense of erosion and the symbolic passage of time and history resonates in my paintings.
A material aesthetic practice of making objects, works on paper, and performance; a mystically tinged exploration of lived experience; and a path of theoretical research are synthesized through the co-ordinating “Now” of the camera lens. The resulting 31 minute, 2 channel video confronts a mystery. A spiritual teacher appears, internet-style, on a monitor and a contemporary artist runs aesthetic tests. These tests include the presentation of objects and colored materials and the staging of scenarios all within a system of reflective surfaces. Driven by fascination and a sense of play, the video shifts between the totality of illusion and the clues of its ruse. As with the techniques of trompe L’oeil, a gap opens between belief and knowledge—an open space of inquiry.
Save The Bay! takes, as a catalyst, the gifting of 'Rupert's Land' by King Charles II of England to his cousin Prince Rupert (First Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company). Utilising Zizek's idea of 'overidentification' and elements of clown and trickster, the project comes to an antagonistic and skewed defence of the HBC legacy, using this stance to highlight the unspoken aspects of the company's 'Canadian-ness', the lasting damage caused by colonialism and the status of corporations in the 21st Century (which exploit a chameleonic, multi-faceted and unaccountable, identity as both entity and individual). The project encourages us to face up to our complicity as colonisers, foregrounding the inseparable ties between capitalism and imperialism and asserting that for any kind of true 'reconciliation' to occur in North America we, as settlers, first have to be willing to shoulder the responsibility of the wrong doing for which we are making amends.
A performance, a publication, and a compendium of mobile objects featuring both documentation and the ‘live’ artist in a kinaesthetic dialogue with the architectural and art historical archives of Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Campus constitute the thesis project. Through actions, texts and images, the artist seeks to claim space in order to come into direct contact with the disappearing past of the university’s relationship to the Brutalist architectural movement and the 1960’s and 1970’s conceptual avant-garde, key elements of its inception. The artist looks to establish a form of embodied revisionism through re-enactment, citation, and deconstruction in order to establish different narratives of contextually specific performance-based-research. Images and texts juxtaposed with the immediacy of the artist’s moving body become a means to accumulate layers of meaning in hopes of revealing new and unanticipated ‘truths’. Each part of the project was presented and accounted for during a live event at Burnaby Campus’s Academic Quadrangle.
Two Studies: Working in Public is comprised of release of an artist book and the presentation of several large-scale projections created from original recombinant video. Developed around research into generosity, maintenance, urbanism, and novel practices, this ambitious investigation of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art includes a generative video system; which sorts through source footage of the artist repairing public benches and playgrounds. The artwork also includes a self-published art book, showcasing the creation of new public benches in semi-scenic locations and temporary swing sets suspended from billboards around Vancouver. These works serve as exploration of experimental behaviour inside the urban environment, and interdisciplinary approaches to documenting these findings wavering between the ridiculous and the critical, attempting to both reconcile and taunt the way in which generosity plays a role in the practice of working in public. The release of the artist book "If It’s Still There When You Go Looking" coincided with the one-night-only outdoor screenings in an exhibition at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus.
Ordinary Catastrophes is a concert experience enlivened by the superimposition of several conventions of contemporary theatre practice. Employing folk music’s singer-songwriter tradition, the work tells the story of Clare O’Connor, a young leftist activist, writer and musician. After a period of grief and disillusionment she attempts to rebuild her relationships with her younger sisters and rediscover a sense of broader political opportunity by writing a memoir in song. The songs, lyrics and script were developed in collaboration with O’Connor, who is also the principal performer in the show. The culminating interdisciplinary performance is an attempt to enrich and extend my songwriting practice and to investigate the question of consequence in both artistic and activist pursuits. Ordinary Catastrophes features live music, sung and spoken text, narrative, character, movement, staging and lighting design.
Documentary practices are embedded in the idea of the representation of reality. This paradigm reinforces the authority of the State and neutralizes the political agency of the people being filmed. What happen if, instead of representing, we assume that a documentary film is presenting a reality? After a year in conversation with Indigenous people who spend the day drinking in Oppenheimer Park, in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, I proposed to them employing the framework of the Hollywood Western to make a collaborative film. By introducing the iconic elements of the Western in the form of props, I spent fifteen weeks in the park documenting a series of performances enacted by people who’ve been fighting the imposition of law and order since being ordered onto reservations. The result is 130 hours of problematic footage that raises questions about colonization, political agency, contemporary forms of control, ethics, and historiography.
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