Directed Studies: reflections

Abstract: Working through elements of embodiment, artist/audience relationship as it functions within a gallery space, text and art, and ephemerality versus documentation, this course serves a time-based medium by engaging with elements of discovery and experimentation, allowing the creative process to flow as public.

Directed studies is great. Its openness made space for deeper reflection and creative direction and I feel a clearer sense of how my art practice lives inside of my worldviews. I asked myself at the beginning of this course, how do I hold love and rage simultaneously, what does that look like as an art practice? and I’ve discovered through the openness of having a directed studies class that slow time is essential to everything, and to hold my rage with the delicate kneading of patience – the latter is a doozie: patience with self, materials, people and technological fast times to name a few. I made decisions this semester that in my first three years I wouldn’t have – mainly for fear of losing the good grade because of scholarships and THE FUTURE (hah)… This course allowed me to understand what my personal rhythms are when they are supported in an academic institution and this pushed me to demand more from my other courses that were not directed studies. By the end of my semester, my classes felt like one informative kokedama ball of cohesive dialogue. Each class was supporting the other, which supported me as a student. I dunno, a feedback loop or some granola thing like that...

I think I asked myself during the In-Separable performance study: What are the possibilities of a performance that emphasizes intimacy, privacy, conviviality and the collective? What was performance for me, before all of these?

To answer the second question…Since I was a wee lil’ting, performance has always been my go to “thing” whenever it came to expressing myself. Impassioned, a little touched, eccentric, as it were. When I came to ECUAD, those interpretations felt kinder, even grand: “radical feminist, conceptual artist, political artist, the one who’s gunna ‘make it’”...Geez, what a heap of steaming shit that all was in my first years here. But it fueled me. I did say it was steaming shit…The pressures of building a credible art career was 80% how well I could write about it, 95% how well I talked about it, and 100% how convincing my hand movements and verbal pauses were while doing the talking about it and as a performance artist… I was easily beguiled by this performative art world. And then I took my head out my ass. “…our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of centre stage”. Solnit, Hope in the Dark

This year I guess was about getting rid of my pink eye…Awful humour, but whatever, that steaming heap of B.S. WAS awful, so the humour ought to match. Anyway, what yawned and stretched out of that ego-driven art practice and into something say, let’s call it intuition, created a dynamic and necessary shift in my research methodologies, conceptual development, and creative process. For me, embodied learning came to emphasize process as public, forcing me to reconsider who I wanted that public to be and where. It made me think about choreographies of the social body and how one may erode their understanding or participation in that groomed social musculature and brain. It helped to understand the power of vulnerability and how quiet a “performance” gesture can be while still creating an influential symbolic action (and how those two things: symbolic and action, come together). After that ego-testicle world burnt me out, I figured I either had to cut out being an artist or cut out my integrity. But nah. All good.

Moving forward, what I’m concerned/perplexed about now is this Western rendering of myself into Category ARTIST and so…when I want to make a gesture…how does the interpretation of site-specificity encounter that work? The City-Bodies concreted spines with their mountainous glassial warts or the immaculate white cube…how do these spaces fixate a work, despite its ephemerality? How does one access the public without the public space itself dictating much of the works interpretation? It all sounds so drab and boring. I want to say that it doesn’t matter, but it always matters... for the person who comes from a land-locked life in Mi’kma’ki, more than anything, that decision feels weird when it’s nestled against the feeling of displacement. Hummmmmmmm…

At the beginning of the course, I also asked: What is the artistic agency of decolonial love? I'd just say…what a great question. :-D

Some images from What Remains: