Visualeyez Reconsidered, 2007

Taking performance to the streets, in a non-guerrilla entertaining fashion, continues to pose the question: what is the spectator's role in this heavily developed non-spectacle?
Perhaps the most memorable, although it may not wished to be, was Emma Waltraud Howes' Subtle Architectures: A Practice in Enabling Restraints. Setting ephemeral stages, traffic yellow chalk outlines, in various arbitrary stations, from outlining non-traditional but angular zones around parking meters, loading docks, and other architectural misnomers readily definable as examples of street furniture, Waltraud Howes responded to these ligaments of urban landscape, defining a boundary for herself, and articulating her responses in her developed movement vocabulary. Problem is: this performance was not meant for observing eyes, and could only thrive in a state of sustained fleeting.
Resembling a rehearsed flaneur, the idler of the streets who feels too much, overwhelmed with the bustling movements of the urban centre, the performer, if we may use that term, develops its own movement-based cartography of the city. And movement, in all senses but this in particular, is the ebb and flow of body-to-mind stimuli that is gesticulating in all of us. There is perhaps no way to experience this directly as a audience, as following a flaneur propells you to be one, and in this irregular communion, neither individual continues to exist alone--and for this piece, immediately destroys its entire premise.
As the chalk lines remain, at least until the next rain, as all that is left of these subtle architectural remanants in this city core, the project lives on in a constant state of research.

8th annual Visualeyez, Opening Night, Latitude 53, May 18 - 27, 2007

Performance art, or maybe better termed as 'live art', continues to transform itself into countless fractions, and so it was suggested to record these pieces simply through its entry points.
Theming this year around the city, with all its fluctuations and multiple perceptions, the performances from the 8th year of Visualeyez all boiled down to the alienation of urban interaction.
The city, as represented and performed, appeared at first to resemble the post-Simmel reading of the modernization of the city and its citizens. Less apocalyptic than presumed, the city as interpreted is essentially rendered as a place of intense loneliness.
The opening night performances immediately established the crucial issues of performance art and performance anxiety. The body, the site of performance, pushing us to accept these crafted experiences, is never a one-way dialogue. Although there is one "performer", each witness to the "performance" accounts as performance itself.
The provoking reverberaton of T.L. Cowan's spoken word piece established the distance, the unrequited connections of urban interactions. All that remains is the source, the live voice and body from which this mind speaks, being in performance, live, spilling out stories, spilling out roles, blurring the boundaries of performance art and life to a room filled with silent, observing and estranged faces.
Lance McLean's opening night piece continued his ability to draw out human empathy using his own physical body as the site of apathy. Enclosing his head into an extended wooden structure, simply painted white and with bodies flanked on either side and resembling an inverse martyr's cross, "audience" individuals took turns, at random, to try and saw McLean free. Lines were drawn behind his head and in front, faces turned unable to bear the possibility of harm. It was near the end, as McLean had a one foot cube still around his head, and his limbs limp and falling closely under the saw's blade more than once as strangers attempted to destroy this perishable structure around the fragility of human skin.
Cheap thrills in showmanship, possibly, but doubtful; the live unfolding of who chose to enter the scene of this performance, to help and ease this other sentient and pulsing body out of his self-inflicted cage, was the most powerful performance of all.


Photo: Jessica Tse, 2007.

Foward Thinking, Urban Roots Salon & Gallery May 19 - June 30, 2007

Rightly touted as an exhibition of progressive Canadian graffiti, curator and artist John Drager has put together an impressive selection and representation of contemporary graffiti graphics. Part-inspired by the burgeoning South American graphic/design scene, the group transformed the every-day hair salon from floor to ceiling, wall to wall concept of graffiti from outside in.
A cascading wall of estranged stereos, possibly the invention of the bottle demon, 2D pieces, decks, and wall and floor paintings established the presence of an exhibition, and in doing so, challenges further the general reception of what graffiti does and looks like. An original form and response to urbanity, institutional graffiti exhibitions walk a fine line. They are simultaneously bold and highly aestheticized spaces that tailor the social constructions and implications of street cultures such as skate boarding into a regulated space. Although those concepts were not apparent, perhaps not needed in this alternative gallery space, group graffiti shows still stand as some of the most visually arresting group shows out there.

Artists: LAND, EATER, GRAVY, EKWAL, and PAULe