Brutalist Leftovers: How I Survived Conceptualism

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.