Real Life in Huntly, Interview with Ross Sinclair*

Image credit: Ross Sinclair, Real Life Huntly (surveyed from the Clashmach), 2011 (courtesy of the artist and Deveron arts; photograph: Anna Vermehren)

Glasgow-based Ross Sinclair has been the Artist in Residence at Deveron Arts for the summer of 2011 researching the history of The Gordon Clan of Huntly and its relationship to present day Real Life in Huntly. From writing songs encapsulating the history of The Gordon Family to marching up and down The Clashmach carrying painted portraits of past dukes and Robert the Bruce, Sinclair has been negotiating the boundaries between being a research-driven studio artist to working in a socially engaged practice through Deveron Art’s “the town is the venue” methodology.

Canada-based Amy Fung is Deveron Art’s Visiting Arts Writer in Residence for 2011.

This is an excerpt from an interview, which took place on September 6, 2011, Huntly, Aberdeenshire.

Amy Fung: Let’s go back to the beginning: what have you been doing in the town of Huntly?

Ross Sinclair: Thinking about it now, it’s turned out like a 3 months research residency where I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the subject of the Gordons of Huntly, while at the same time constantly questioning myself, thinking about the process and context … a lot of the ideas have woven in quite well into a whole strain of my work, ideas about living in a small damp northern European nation sometimes known as Scotland that touches upon notions of identity, location, history, geography, and what we’re all made up of. Part of that is just where I am myself at the moment, as a lot of that has been a reflection of what does it mean to come to a place like Deveron Arts to be an artist in residence working in a socially engaged method with a maxim of the town is the venue. I think it’s very challenging for all concerned.

For me, to explore the situation where there’s still quite a big constituency is really interesting. We did this event down by Huntly Castle where we called up all the Gordons in the phone book and we invited them to have lunch together. I set up this carnival style tableau facade with a doorway at the bottom and we invited them to all bring mementos of their Gordon heritage. It was a really lovely day where everyone met each other as they didn’t all know another, and I did this performance of songs that charts 12,000 count ‘em - muthafuckin years of history and we did a photo of all the present day Gordon’s in Huntly with their illustrious forebears in the background and the castle as the backdrop.

It was this very simple way to present the Gordon Family here in 2011 and the castle bearing their family name and here’s me as the artist in residence bringing it all together and Deveron arts hosting; looking back it’s interesting to articulate as it was just a really human moment of a really simple exchange and sitting down across the table like this and talking. It really only lives in the memory, but it was quite a rich and dynamic moment. Though at the same time I’m thinking about a meta view of the event where I’m considering whether the Gordons are part of the work, or participants, or viewers as the piece is documented as an artwork.



AF: Do you think that’s the focus of these residencies, that if the town is the people as you say, can you imprint something on people as one could with a venue?

RS: Well this thing in the Mart last weekend where Huntly hosted its farmers’ market on Saturday and then the livestock mart on Sunday hosted all of Huntly life from the bouncy castle to the tractor show to the rare breeds, sheep shearing and rabbit skinning amongst the Guides and Brownies and people selling landscape photos and all sorts of other things, and then in the middle of the livestock mart, there’s this artist in residence too. I brought all the stuff I had been working from the “studio” into the pen, and I was sitting there in the back painting and making music with my back to the audience and for me I really did feel like I was just one of the other exotic zoo animals. But the question after all is whether this idea of culture and art is just another aspect that goes on in the town? I did a project a few years ago called “Studio Real Life” at de Appel in Amsterdam and that was riffing on similar ideas. I had set up this symbolic studio where I was there every day being an artist for 3 months in the public gaze, but as much as anything it was for me - trying to answer: What the fuck goes on in there? What’s my job? What’s my role?

For the full interview, please download the pdf here


*First published on The Huntly Review

Reframing Her Nation: an interview with Maria Hupfield*

 

Image credit: Maria Hupfield From Pigment to Pantone and Back Again. 10ft x 20ft, Photo mural with latex paint,  2010

Interdisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield was commissioned by the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) to respond to the landscape exhibition titled "Reframing a Nation" (2010) curated from the AGA collection by Ruth Burns. Hupfield produced a wall sized monochromatic photo-mural, titled From Pigment to Pantone and Back, depicting her and her double in an artificial wilderness, caught in a moment of tension. She painted four stripes of colour directly onto the photo that reached across onto the gallery walls. Acknowledging traditions and history of both Western and Indigenous modes of landscape and identity representation, Hupfield creates a space for herself by moving freely between mediums such as photography and performance and working through the materiality of her artistic process.

On leave from her teaching position at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Hupfield is currently working and living in New York City on a series of new projects.


Amy Fung: I first saw your work in the "Face the Nation" (2008) exhibitionat the AGA,  curated by Catherine Crowston, and this piece, From Pigment to Pantone and Back is a continuation from the exhibition? I am thinking of Trees from The Counterpoint Series.  Can you talk about your thoughts for the commission of From Pigment?

Maria Hupfield: Originally when this project came up, the work that was referenced did come from "Face the Nation", but it wasn’t the photo works. It was the mural East Wind Brings a New Day that references Tom Thomson’s West Wind.  I painted directly onto the walls and I was looking at the idea of landscapes and how that was connected to nationhood. So when the AGA was looking at their collection for "Reframing a Nation", Ruth thought of me and invited me to respond to the collection as a First Nations Person and set a context to frame how the works could be viewed. 
In the end I did this piece, From Pigment to Pantone and Back, where I combined both the photo-mural with a painting component from "Face the Nation."

AF:  The majority of works in “Reframing a Nation” are straight forward oil landscapes and they  present a view of the “Canadian wilderness” but your landscape is that of an urban wilderness. Can you talk about that?

MH: When I was invited to respond to the works, I wanted to complicate the issue of landscapes a little bit more. I found it ironic to be in an urban setting with all of these typically romanticized landscapes of the Canadian prairies on the walls. I knew I wanted to use an image that had an urban context. I drew upon the photo series in which I had documented public places where natural environments had been manipulated or controlled to affect how we engage with the natural world. The image that was used was taken from a front area of the Marriott Hotel in downtown Vancouver. I wanted it to look like a manicured artificial space that referenced the urban and then situated the two figures within it  . . .


*Read the full interview in the Winter 2011 Issue of BlackFlash.

Interview with Brian Jungen, Art Gallery of Alberta*

Known for his deconstruction and reassemblage of mass produced consumer goods such as Nike Air Jordans and plastic lawn chairs into critiques on museum-ready artifacts, Vancouver-based Brian Jungen has been internationally heralded for his work, and was the first living artist to receive an exhibition at The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.
Taking a short break during an intensive three-week installation at the AGA for three of his past major works, Carapace (2009), Shapeshifter (2000) and Cetology (2002), Jungen sat down for a chat about his old works, new works, the weather, and some insights about contemporary Canadian art.

Image credit: Brian Jungen's plastic-chair Cetology /  Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

AMY FUNG: It's a pretty big year for you. First, congrats on the Gershon Iskowitz prize.

BRIAN JUNGEN: Thank you.

AF: I was curious about how you feel about having a retrospective in the same year you have this commission to do new works?

BJ: Well, I don't really like the term retrospective because it seems that's what happens after someone dies. I tend to think of it as a survey of older work, or a showing of older works in a new context.

AF: Will the new works be a continuation of this style?

BJ: No, the show at the AGO will be a whole new direction and a whole new body of work that I recently just started and showed in Vancouver last month at Catriona Jeffries. A lot of the new work is using found or unconventional materials, but very different from this kind of store-bought, mass-produced material. They are materials I think you would be familiar with through the landscape of rural Canada, like car body parts, animal skins, and things like that.

AF: Does your sense of place and home seep into your work?

BJ: It's becoming more important in my new work, this sense that I'm from Northern Canada. I've lived in Vancouver for about 15 years now, and though I really like the arts community in Vancouver, I find myself returning to Northern BC a lot, especially in the last few years. Maybe it's because I'm approaching middle age, and want to make connections to the place I grew up. I don't know if it's that, I just like the environment and the folks up there. I generally like the climate, believe it or not. There's hot summers, cold winters, probably just like Edmonton, but it's sunny and it's a proper winter. In Vancouver you don't really get a winter, you get a cold monsoon, and it's a different type of cold. I really miss winters like this. I've been here for the last two weeks, and folks in Edmonton have been saying how unusually cold and how much snow it's been this year, but I totally like it!

AF: Well I'm glad somebody likes it.

BJ: I guess I get to leave, but place is becoming more important in my work, I'm doing less site-specific work and building everything on-site, which I've been doing for the last several years.

AF: You're also showing in Close Encounters, the largest exhibition ever organized in the world on contemporary Indigenous art, happening in Winnipeg right now. Can you speak about that?

BJ: Sure, what I really like in Canada is that there is no division. You can be a contemporary artist and making work on Aboriginal issues and identity, but you're still a contemporary artist, whereas in the States, there's a huge division. That became really apparent to me when I did this project at The Smithsonian last year, Strange Comforts. It made me realize how much more wide open the Canadian contemporary art field is. Like with Close Encounters, I think it's amazing. If that show was curated in another country, it would be generally ignored by the contemporary art press, but not in Canada, which is great. It's very inclusive that way.

AF: Let's talk about the works in this show.

BJ: We have two of the whale skeletons, Shapeshifter and Cetology, both on loan, and Carapace, which I initially made in France two years ago. I was working in this old chateau that was converted into a contemporary art space and it had been surrounded by idyllic farm land, except the last few years it was all being converted into suburbs, just like what you would see in Calgary, Edmonton, Fort St John. In these suburbs I kept seeing these new garbage bins that just became a symbol for the sign of the times and a symbol of unbridled housing excess that I decided to use the bins as source material. I also thought it would be a nice pairing of this idea of this waste of garbage bins with the structure of a tortoise, which is a symbol of the Earth in many cultures, and is a house and home.

AF: Can you tell me about the construction of these works?

BJ: I keep working with material until I feel some sort of resolution with it, that a way of working with the materials has been realized. So with Carapace, instead of making a new one three different times, I decided to use the same materials three different ways over three different times. After the first time in France, I saw a completely different way of constructing it that would be a lot more dynamic, so I made it a second time last year at the Smithsonian, and when Catherine [Crowston] invited me here I proposed making it a third and final time. This will be the final configuration of the materials.

AF: What do you think viewers can expect from this, who generally will not have seen the first two configurations?

BJ: Because the piece is quite large, there's usually an immediate response. People want to go inside it, and they have this very strong physical reaction to it. People want to touch it and climb it—which you can't do—but the last two times, people sometimes saw it just as the materials and so they don't see it as art works. They think they can be interactive with it, which they can't, so now I'm actually cutting up the materials enough that you can't really recognize at first what it's made out of it.

AF: How many bins are you actually using?

BJ: I don't know. We usually deal directly with the manufacturers, but we basically take what we can get. Same with the chairs. When I was making those, I was just driving around to all the Canadian Tires, buying them up and clearing them out. If I need more, it's something so plentiful that you can just go out and get more. I bought some new bins here in Edmonton. There are certain things that are global products that you can basically get anywhere.

AF: And that really is the impetus of your work, how everything has been globalized, including art.

BJ: Yeah, there's a discourse about that. Art has taken on a much stronger profile in the last 10-plus years with museums wanting a much bigger presence in cities, to become a tourist attraction, like this place, the AGO, the Bilbao Guggenheim, that's how it's changed a lot, I think. Not sure if it makes art more accessible to the general public, but it has made a certain type of style or international strategy around art institutions.

*First published in Vue Weekly

Audio Interviews: The Changing of The Guard in defining Artist Run Culture

Last weekend in Calgary, I ended up speaking with Clive Robertson and Matthew Mark Bouree, two instigating artists with similar intentions, but living and working on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Image credit: Clive Robertson

Robertson, who now teaches at Queen's, was back in town for the opening of Then and Then Again, a self-initiated retrospective on artist run culture (1969 - 2006) at The New Gallery. Robertson in his time was a co-founder of Centerfold magazine, which later became FUSE, and is often credited as coining the term "artist-run culture". The exhibition reads more like an archive in and of itself, and focuses heavily on the DIY mentality and its tenuous relationship to public funding.







On the other hand, before I even stepped into town, I was recommended by another instigator, Shelley Ouellet, to meet Matthew Mark Bouree, the founding director of The Haight Gallery, Calgary's newest satellite space located in the NW quadrant. Calgary has been home to several notable DIY spaces, from 809 to Carpet and Toast, to the Haight, which exists out of a refurbished garage. With three shows under its belt, the gallery exists as an artist run space with commercial intentions geared towards supporting emerging contemporary artists.






Artist run culture has undeniably shifted over the past forty years in Canada, and here's to seeing what will occur over the next forty years.

Audio Interview with Laura St. Pierre, November 25, 2010

Image credit: Laura St. Pierre "Urban Vernacular" series

As a series of makeshift architectural sculptures constructed and photographed in Northern Alberta, Urban Vernacular is Laura St. Pierre's latest series of works addressing the excess of our consumer culture. While not immediately viewed as environmental, the works nonetheless speak to an imagined relationship with our environment through our discarded waste, and attempts to reconcile what appears to be a future, yet sublime existence.




Urban Vernaculars is on view in The RBC New Works Gallery,  AGA through to February 13, 2011.
This interview was conducted on October 30, 2010.

Audio Interview with Anthony Kiendl, on Saturday, Nov 6, 2010

On the grand re-opening of Plug In ICA, Anthony Kiendl, Executive Director and the 2009 Hnatyshyn recipient for curatorial excellent in the Visual Arts, , takes a short break in the stairwell to discuss a brief histry of Plug In and their new summer residency.

 

Designed by DPA + PSA + DIN Collective, the new building works in perfect harmony to the rest of the block, complimenting the outlines of is neighbor, the WAG, marking a new presence of art in downtown Winnipeg.
 

For more information on exhibitions, programming, and residencies, please visit Plug In ICA or head down to the intersection of Portage and Memorial.