Portland! Performance art!

My collaborator Rina Liddle and I just returned from a fantastically successful trip to Portland. We were invited down by artist Tori Abernathy, the mastermind behind Portland artist run center Recess to perform DIY Lover (Portland) at the opening of IN(ter)DEPENDENCE. This show was an amazing culture mash-up. Recess, along with a number of other contemporary art organizations, was invited to take over a row of empty retail spaces inside of Pioneer Place (a mall in Portland's downtown core) for a six week show. There were installations, new media works, interactive art works, ongoing performance pieces, and more that really showcased the vast amount of creativity and energy in the city's art scene. I was really inspired by the number of grassroots independent art galleries, centers, and collectives, and the quality of the work that was being done. People are doing neat things, with minimal funding, for the community and for the love of art and culture.

DIY Lover (Portland) was similar to the Vancouver edition, but, the text was different, and the objects were solicited locally by Tori so I didn't know what I was going to be working with until I was standing on the stage organizing things. To work the love metaphor, it was as different as your second love is from your first. Rina and I had not gone over the final version of the new text together, so the first time I was really forced to listen to the text during the construction process. This was a strange experience as I kept anticipating certain moments or pieces of text based on the previous performance which were continually subverted. This was a little anxiety producing as I considered time, the text, my actions, the meaning of the objects in relation to the text and my actions, and all of that in relation to the building process. Video is coming soon. Below is a picture of the resultant idol, or lover, or whatever it is.

Statement for DIY Lover (Portland)

DIY Lover” consists of a textual reading that directs the onstage construction of a lover. The text Liddle delivers is compiled from a number of different dating guides, self help websites, and how to manuals. Semczyszyn reactively builds the lover from objects solicited in advance from participants who were asked to donate something they considered gendered. DIY Lover (Portland) is a performative inquiry into the material configuration of contemporary dating advice.

Part of the project was concerned with exposing the absurdity of these texts and their essentializing of gender in laying out rules to get a partner. The interplay between the text and the construction highlights the focus on control and responsibility in the dating advice, and the implications for identity in acquiring and maintaining a relationship.

DIY Lover

DIY Lover

This is documentation of the full Not Sent Letters performance of DIY Lover. Rina Liddle and I compiled text from a number of different dating guides, self help websites, and construction handbooks. We used this text as a script for the construction of the lover from objects solicited from our contacts. While part of the project was concerned with the absurd in these texts and their essentializing of gender in the construction of rules, another part was the material analysis of text using gendered objects. The interplay between the text and the construction really draws out the emphasis of these texts on control and on responsibility and identity in acquiring and maintaining a relationship. Looks like we are doing it again next month in Portland. 

Year in Review!

Last January I made a list of all of the unfinished projects I had. On my computer I found: two writing projects (not including poems); 5 art projects; 2 academic projects; a few music projects; and then there was the dissertation. My theme for 2010 was "gettin' 'er done" and the associated resolution was to not start any new projects until I had worked through the backlog of things left unfinished. This more or less worked, and made 2010 a pretty fabulous year.

PhDone
Most significant, of course, was finishing the PhD. Writing a dissertation is like the Pyrenees section of the Tour de France in the its a steep steep learning curve of things you've never done before. It is also lonely and isolating, at least it was for me, and can make one insufferable to be around. Luckily, I have an amazing supportive collection of friends and family and had a wonderful committee who pressured me in the right ways while giving me the freedom to work the way I needed to.

Preparing to defend was maybe the most intense thing I have ever done, psychologically speaking, as the dissertation became a kind of magnifying fulcrum for all of my anxieties and insecurities. Amazingly, it also helped to resolve said anxieties and insecurities. The great thing about all of these being brought to your awareness is that while each individually seems a warranted fear, they cannot all simultaneously be true. If they were I would never have finished elementary school, would have no friends, and would be living as a pariah in a gutter of social ineptitude. As it was, the defense went really well and then visiting Professor Derek Matravers (Prince Derek to my friends) hosted a post-defense party including a parade with a Balkan brass band along Kits beach. Here is a picture of that.

I firmly believe that defending your dissertation is a parade-worthy event. Graduating is awesome too, but it tends to come many months later and by then you're used to being done and it isn't exceptional any more. So if you are reading this and are working on a dissertation, take some time to befriend a brass band. It isn't procrastination, its investing in future joy.


Piece de Resistance

I broke my New Years resolution from last year by starting a company making cocktail hats and fascinators with my friend Tasha. In my constant attempt to balance between scholarly pursuits and visual art, the greatest challenge has been bridging the cerebral and the material. I love the weight, sensuality, grittiness etc... of ceramics but it isn't very convenient when you are poor as a rock and live in Vancouver. I love painting, drawing, and more performative/ conceptual work; but none of these have the same sense of material and making something with your hands. So, hats. Material, creative, lovely, glamorous, kind of conceptual hats. Check out www.piecederesistance.ca to see what we are up to. Tasha and I will also, eventually, be doing some blogging about culture on our blog there.

Job Season = getting amazing at MS Paint!
Many people have asked me if my life lacked direction after finishing. The answer is no. After I finished I went to England to the British Society of Aesthetics annual conference (and to hang around in the Cotswalds with my friend Jill). It was great, I won a prize. I spent hours and hours in galleries (free!). When I came home I immediately had to rehearse with one of my sisters for the first ever performance of a musico-comedy thing we have been working on. Then I started a hat company. I have not, in any way, felt directionless.

For those not in academe, fall (at least in philosophy) is job season. I am 'on the market' which means that I have spent my fall applying for jobs for next fall. This takes a lot of time. It's uncertain and exciting and a little scary to not know where you'll be living, or if you'll have a job. It's also pretty great since I've tried to not have any real geographical boundaries. I'll happily move where ever I get a job. I've also been working on papers for publication, so that's quite good. I remain cautiously optimistic about the whole job thing. 

An unexpected benefit of job season has been that I have been spending a lot of time in front of my computer trying to write cover letters, write postdoc proposals, or finish editing papers. Since I nearly divested myself of wasteful procrastination habits while dissertating, I took up productive procrastination in the form of getting awesome at doing drawings in MS Paint. My family has pressured me into blogging more because they want more MS Paint drawings then just what I periodically post on Facebook. How productive!

This actually started when I tried to tell my friend Joshua a story, and he told me to write it in the style of Hyperbole and a Half with illustrations. I, of course, did just that. I will post that story later. I'll never be as funny as Allie because she rules, but I have been doing lots of fun things with MS Paint. Here, for example, is a survey of life during Job Season. Enjoy.

Later the same night...

My friend Joshua and I wrote the greatest children's story ever over the Christmas holidays, then I had to go back to finishing applications for jobs. That felt like this:

But then all it took was a lot of work, and I had successfully crammed a lot of philosophy into the fall so that I had it off my plate for January and February. The end of the year went like this:

So now it is art January! It will be all about hats, art, and music. I have an upcoming performance with my friend Rina, a super fun MS Paint project with my friend Brendan, a lot of accordion playing, and only a few more philosophy things to do. I do still have to get a job.
Hearts,
Nola

Zealously Abecedarian

This piece was done as part of a show responding to the Vancouver Olympics its the official abecedary of the games with all the words A to Zed being drawn from media about Vancouver and the Olympics. It was presented complete with references. This is the third abecedary project I've done and I'm looking forward to doing more of them in the future as it is a format I'm crazy about!

It was a low-fi and analog response to a games that was both highly technological and extremely digital. The materiality of the work, paper, paint, ink, newspaper clippings, has an archival quality that contrasts with the very transitory nature of the games and of Vancouver's perception of the games and its lasting effects on the city.

The words were all selected from media, and were chosen as what I thought were the interesting and important aspects of the games and how they impacted Vancouver as well as Vancouver's unique responses to hosting an international event.

Swing Space; the (im)possibility of life in 434 ft(2)

This was a piece for an invitational show in Jyväskylä Finland. It is a triennial show of contemporary art in a private apartment, the themes are meant to relate to house, home, domesticity etc... Maybe one of my favourite pieces ever! Although the image above is actually a draft, hmm I need to document the final image but you get the idea.

Here's what I said about it, "My project, entitled Swing Space, is an exploration of the realm of possibility one enters into on moving into a new house. Specifically, my new 434 square foot house. Done in architectural blueprints and using conventions of home marketing, the project explores the ways in which use of living space both enact subjectivity and create limitations on who we can become. The project references the way in which tiny spaces in Vancouver are marketed as offering a variety of ‘lifestyles’ to potential inhabitants. We are the lifestyle choices we make and the way in which we use our space. Some possibilities open doors for other actions, while closing off others. The project is both an exploration of these possibilities, and of the pleasures and anxieties of examining the way in which living space can reflect who we become."

See their web site for more. http://housegames.fi/info.htm

Just looking

"peer hungrily once or twice"
"think sceptically tree"
"lurk sidewalk randomly"
"lunge fiercely up and down"

More images from the Just Looking project at the Vancouver Public Library.