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Souvenir of the Canadian Rockies

by on April 3, 2013 in Arts, Banff Artist in Residence, General, Visual Arts

Artist Filip Van Dingenen with one of his hand-built snowshoes. Photo: Don Lee.

Artist Filip Van Dingenen with one of his hand-built snowshoes. Photo: Don Lee.

Filip Van Dingenen is usually looking for places in the world where science and leisure intersect. A Brussels-based artist, he created a wide-ranging and ongoing project called Flota Nfumu, based on a rare albino gorilla named Snowflake who spent most of his life in the Barcelona Zoo. The work went deep into research, public memory, and souvenirs of Snowflake’s life, and how he affected Sabater Pi, the scientist who brought him to Barcelona, and the people of that city who visited Snowflake in the zoo over 40 years. For an earlier multimedia project, called Zoonation, Van Dingenen collected memories and stories from an abandoned Belgian zoo, tracing the relocated animals around the world.

In Banff he encountered a different type of human intervention in natural habitat. “I came here to write about Sabater Pi, but when I got here I discovered new things,” Van Dingenen says. It’s not unusual for Banff Centre artists in residence to collect the evidence of tourism and landscape – that aesthetic is everywhere here. And Van Dingenen found some good stuff to display in his Glyde Hall studio: maps and books on early exploration, documents from the Paul D. Fleck Library on the Fluxus movement, an artifact from the Whyte Museum of an old c.1919 Hudson’s Bay Company snowshoe. He spent much of his March residency exploring.

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Andres Wanner and his drawing robots

by on February 19, 2013 in Arts, Audio, Banff, Banff Artist in Residence, General, Podcasts, Videos, Visual Arts

Andres Wanner builds robots. These robots do art. By this I mean that he attaches Sharpie pens to small robots on wheels, places them on a canvas and let’s them run through a series of pre-programmed movements. So far, so straightforward, but it becomes interesting when the robots bash into each other or into the sides of their pen, or just break and stop working for a while. This element of chaos is at the heart of Wanner’s work. The pictures that are left behind after the robots run out of battery power resemble broken Spirograph images — mathematically complex, but frayed at the edges with randomness.

We spoke to Wanner about his process during his residency at The Banff Centre last December. This audio piece combines interview with sound, with the little whirring voices of the robots chattering away as they go about their work.

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The buoyant meanings of Matt Walker’s Drifting Island sculpture

by on October 23, 2012 in Arts, Banff, Banff Artist in Residence, General, Indigenous Arts, Visual Arts

Artist Matt Walker (left) prepares to fire his sculpture, Drifting Island, at The Banff Centre, with Mimmo Maiolo (centre) and Ed Bamiling (right) ready to help guide the piece into the retrofitted kiln.

Drifting Island, the sculpture by Banff Centre Visual Arts participant Matt Walker, was fired earlier this month in a kiln requiring some temporary reconstruction to fit the large-scale piece inside. The sculpture, a 3-foot by 5-foot ceramic form resembling a turtle shell, will float eventually near the shore of the Hamilton Harbour in Ontario as a temporary intervention on the landscape. The sculpture alludes to the notion of Turtle Island, a traditional narrative within some North American Indigenous cultures about the origin of the continent. The term took on political connotations when activists began using it to refer to North America as a way of recalling its original inhabitants, and to promote a more holistic relationship between humanity and nature.

Walker tells me that by situating the sculpture in the Harbour, a historic site of colonial immigration, he means to inscribe the landscape with a reminder of Turtle Island and its meanings. Designed to support the anchoring of boats and reposing swimmers, this shapely shell is as charming as it is evocative.

It was once more popular for critics to renounce the use of art for political aims, arguing that art is essentially about emotional expression and aesthetic play, and that pursuing the serious, intellectual concerns of politics in an artwork is to belie art’s very nature.

In response to the critics of political art, I say why can’t you have your serious sculpture and float it too?

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Banff Summer Arts Festival Report: Week Five

by on July 28, 2012 in Arts, Banff, Banff Artist in Residence, Banff Summer Arts Festival, Dance, Events, Festivals, General, Literary Arts, Literary Journalism, Theatre, Thematic Residency, Visual Arts

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dOCUMENTA (13) comes to Banff

by on July 25, 2012 in Arts, Banff, Banff Artist in Residence, Banff Summer Arts Festival, Events, Festivals, General, Thematic Residency, Visiting Artists, Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery

Giuseppe Penone: Ideas of Stone, bronze and stone, 2004/2010, photo Roman Mensing, from dOCUMENTA.

Every five years, the contemporary art exhibition dOCUMENTA, located in Kassel, Germany, brings together curators, artists, and art-lovers for a concentrated experience of current thought and creativity in the form of a large exhibition. In 2008, Turin-based writer, art historian, and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was appointed artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13) (June 9 to September 16, 2012) . Titled The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted and lasted for a long time, this edition will include over 100 artists from 55 countries who will gather to present artworks as well as other objects and experiments in the fields of art, politics, literature, philosophy, and science.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, photo courtesy dOCUMENTA.

In addition to Kassel, Christov-Bakargiev has developed new sites for the 2012 exhibition, including The Banff Centre. She is working with Kitty Scott, the Centre’s director of Visual Arts who is a Core Agent for dOCUMENTA (13), and Imre Szeman, a Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta to organize a residency on the subject of retreat in Banff in August 2012 as a section of the exhibition.

dOCUMENTA is widely regarded as one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art in the world. It began in 1955 as an opportunity to refocus the position of culture in postwar Germany, establishing itself in Kassel with an overview of significant European painting from the previous 40 years. It quickly grew into a beacon of current thought in contemporary art, exhibiting minimalist and conceptual work, and eventually representing art from a vast geographic and stylistic range.

Christov-Bakargiev was a guest at a 2011 Visual Arts residency, On the Commons, and she immediately saw the potential for The Banff Centre, with its long history as a setting for creative retreat, to play a significant role in dOCUMENTA. Having begun creating a program for this thirteenth imprint of the exhibition as a gathering of artists working in many disciplines, she saw the Centre as a valuable place that had already established itself in multiple creative disciplines.

Kitty Scott talks about the August residency with excitement that rightly identifies the importance of allying The Banff Centre with this monumental international contemporary art exhibition. “The Banff Centre can be a profound space for the creation of new knowledge, be it in the form of art and/or ideas.” she says. “It will be a place for artists and scholars from all over the world to reflect on what it means to retreat in the current condition.” She continues, “dOCUMENTA questions exhibition-making. It represents a hyper-curiosity about the world, and creates an urge to connect art-making to every other discipline.”

The Retreat residency will bring together 30 participants from multiple disciplines, with faculty including Italian media theorist and activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Cornell University-based literature professor and translator Bruno Bosteels, French philosopher Catherine Malabou, French artist Pierre Huyghe, and Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás. The sessions, which will run during the dOCUMENTA exhibition in early August, will be part of The Banff Centre’s collaboration with the University of Alberta for Banff Research in Culture (BRiC), an annual residency program for scholars in cultural disciplines.

The Retreat promises to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for artists and scholars to participate, in real time, in an exhibition of international significance, with the mandate to truly test the benefits of creative retreat, and allow breakthroughs in artistic, intellectual and personal achievement. 

The Retreat is supported by The Banff Centre, the Canada Council for the Arts, dOCUMENTA (13), The Kahanoff Foundation, and the University of Alberta

 

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Sarah Anne Johnson’s 3D vision

by on March 28, 2012 in Arts, Banff, Banff Artist in Residence, General, Visual Arts

Sarah Anne Johnson, Party boat, 2010.

Have you ever taken a photograph on a trip, looked at it when you got home, and felt…well disappointed?

This happens to me all the time. Those photographs just fail to capture how I felt in that exact moment, the smells, the sounds – what my experience really was. After an artist-led residency through the Arctic Circle in Norway, Sarah Anne Johnson was feeling the same disappointment. Left with only calendar-quality photographs and her memories, she wondered how to capture how she felt about the effects of global warming – everything about her experience that had been outside of the camera’s frame.   

I figured out I can add that in – I can paint that in.  All my worries, all my concerns, and all my hopes and fears of the future of this place, I can paint it right on. 

Here, as part of the Banff Artist in Residence winter program, Johnson is taking this work one step further by creating a giant sculpture based on her photograph Party boat. “I’m learning so much and that’s why I came here – I have an idea, with no idea how to turn it into a physical reality.”

Sarah Anne Johnson working on the framework for the fireworks in her sculpture. Photo: Don Lee.

To create the party boat, Johnson will use many similar sculpture techniques she used in House on Fire. What she is here at the Centre specifically to work on is the construction of the fifteen-foot round fireworks that need to hang from the ceiling and light up. 

“The inside skeleton needs to hang from the ceiling, so it can’t be over a certain weight. It also needs to break down for shipping. It’s quite a technical project,” she says.

After this project, Johnson plans to take a break from the political realm of global warming.  Her thoughts are already on to her next subject - intimacy and sexuality - a personally risky topic. “As artists, we can - and we should – be talking about things that are difficult to talk about and sharing the pictures in our head that are difficult to share.”

A graduate of the University of Manitoba and the Yale School of Art, Sarah Anne Johnson won the inaugural Grange Prize in 2008 from the Art Gallery of Ontario.  She lives in Winnipeg, where she teaches sculpture at the University of Manitoba, and is Artist in Residence. 
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