artist residencies – visual arts news

Portable Culture: Soheila Esfahani

vanews — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 05:00:08 +0000

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at farmhouse II,” detail, mixed media on wooden pallet, 2018

Billions are said to be in global circulation. In the United States alone, five hundred million are manufactured every year. They are everywhere, including inside and outside of our large retail shops. Their ubiquity and number, however, do not guarantee their visibility. Few of us look at, let alone think about the wooden shipping pallets at the heart of global trade and therefore of our daily lives. For Canadian artist Soheila Esfahani, the pallet constitutes both the material and conceptual node of her current body of work aptly called Cultured Pallets. What better symbol could there be, after all, of the circulation and migration of goods, people, technologies and ideas characterizing the global, contemporary world?

“What I like the most about Cultured Pallets is its nomadic aspect,” Soheila tells me. “I generally work with pallets found in the vicinity of where I work and exhibit. This makes the concept, process and product all equally portable,” she adds. “I also think it’s uncanny how the pallet mimics culture in that, although it surrounds us and dwells in every location on any continent, we don’t usually pay attention to it.”

Soheila recuperates found shipping pallets only to etch and paint them with decorative designs, often hailing from her native Iran. Cultured Pallet: FMC (2015), for example, displays an all-over blue and turquoise design that evokes Persian manuscript illumination, while the blue mandala-like arabesques on Cultured Pallet: Annie’s Garden take inspiration from the dazzling dome of a famous monument in the Iranian city of Isfahan. The pallets, however, obviously change the motifs’ purpose, meaning and aesthetic. While the works represent the artist and her peregrinations, they do not nostalgically hearken back to the past. Instead they probe the process of cultural transfer and translation, in its radical sense of “carrying across.” The artist, who chose to move to Canada as a young woman, has found in the pallet the ideal object to both map the experience of living across cultures and frame culture as a dynamic, complex process rather than a static, hermetic reality. Esfahani’s Cultured Pallets not only broaches cultural translation across space, but also across time as the historical designs question what happens to cultural markers in an age of global capitalism and the commodification of culture.

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Annie’s Garden,” detail, 2018, mixed media on wooden pallet

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Scot’s Bay,” detail, mixed media on wooden pallet, 2018.

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Scot’s Bay,” detail, mixed media on wooden pallet, 2018.

Although based in Waterloo, Ontario, Soheila’s art has brought the artist twice out east. Last year, she participated in a group show at Halifax’s Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, and this summer, she had a solo show—Interstice (April 15-June 20, 2018) —at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, where she also engaged in a three-week residency and offered a workshop on Middle Eastern calligraphy. Soheila loved the setting and staff and enjoyed meeting fellow travelling or local artists as well as exploring the region’s lush landscapes and culture. “What struck me about Ross Creek Centre was that it seemed to embody all that Canada stands for, to the point that if someone wants to get an idea about our country, I think: “Send them to Ross Creek,” she recalls. “Multiculturalism is usually associated with large, urban centers, but here is an all-inclusive art center in rural Nova Scotia where people with different roots assemble to share and learn from one another. It was a beautiful experience for me, a living example that inclusion happens naturally.”

Two of the pieces produced and exhibited at Ross Creek witness, in particular, the residency’s impact on the artist’s work, thereby shedding light on Soheila’s modus operandi. Having discovered a chest made in India—its exact origins unknown—at the Ross Creek farmhouse, Soheila reproduced its vase and flower motif in her latest works: Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at Farmhouse I (2018) and Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at Farmhouse II (2018). That Soheila felt moved by the object’s handsome design evinces how her work possesses a personal, intimate dimension linked to life experience and encounters. It also demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the relationship between place, decorated artifacts and memory. Soheila often refers to “portable culture,” by which she means the small decorative objects that we carry with us when we move to another country or that we acquire as mementos when visiting countries abroad. Like the concept of the pallet, that of portable culture suggests the importance of visual and material culture to subjective and cultural memory, as it equally establishes culture as a site of ongoing transcultural connections.

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at farmhouse I,” acrylic on wooden pallet, 2018

The found chest—made in India—that Soheila Esfahani used as inspiration in “Cultured Pallets”

The chest acts as a physical metaphor, reflecting the artist’s existential location: “The Indian chest was a kind of anchoring point for me,” explains Soheila. “Part of the place, it was not aesthetically connected with any of the other furniture in the farmhouse and its designs were close to the Persian one that filled my childhood. I wondered what story it would tell if it could speak. How did it get there?”

Cultured Pallets remind us that we all possess multiple identities and that these are constantly shaped and reshaped by the people, events, and even objects in our lives. The shipping pallet forms embody the movement and exchange integral to life and cultures, especially as some of Soheila Esfahani’s Cultured Pallets are left in situ ready to continue their journeys; stamped with her email address, they encourage communication and point to further, endless possible ley lines amongst us. While she “has only had a few people contact her via the email address,” Soheila is confident that creating a thousand pallet works will make “this inter-connective aspect of Cultured Pallets go viral.”

Above: Soheila Esfahani

Soheila Esfahani, Cultured Pallet: FMC, 2015, mixed media on wooden pallet, 25.4 cm x 78.7 cm x 1.2 m.

Lou Sheppard: Spaces Between

vanews — Fri, 04 May 2018 20:01:29 +0000

Lou Sheppard, Continental Drift, courtesy of the artist.

Living and working in K’jiputuk (Halifax), Lou Sheppard uses performance and media installation to explore the rifts between human experience and our attempts to define our place in the world. Sheppard turns data sets, medical texts and geographic information into movements of drawn line, dance and music. Their work tugs and pulls at the structures of language and research in order to play with what is undefinable.

As an artist selected for the Antarctic Biennale, Sheppard mapped melting polar ice and translated the musical scores. A duo of pianists played the composition to one another, the grand curve of their instruments intimately interlinked.

While in Paris, Sheppard began tracing the space in between words in the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Their project A Strong Desire translates these gaps into a choreography of gestural dance. After being awarded Banff’s second annual Emerging Atlantic Artist Residency and then traveling to exhibit in Antarctica and Venice, Sheppard flew to Paris for a Canada Council
funded residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. ANNA JOAN TAYLOR caught them for an interview while they were being swept away by this upsurge of travel and creative focus.

“I had this idea that the spaces between words in a text could be read as queer spaces, because they were spaces outside of defined meaning.” —LOU SHEPPARD

Lou Sheppard, A Strong Desire, 2018. Courtesy of the artist

ANNA JOAN TAYLOR: In A Strong Desire you work with the space around text in an act that speaks to the absence of trans voices in the medicalization of dysphoria. How does the work play with the notion of what is unspoken and undefinable in the diversity of queer bodily experience?

LOU SHEPPARD: I had this idea that the spaces between words in a text could be read as queer spaces, because they were spaces outside of defined meaning. So, with this diagnostic text the words themselves construct a very specific (and very heteronormative) trans body, while the spaces between the words in the text become these flexible, undefined moments—queering the text itself and also suggesting a queered narrative of trans experience. Finding gesture within these spaces (literally by fitting the choreographic notation into the gaps in the text) is a way for me to reclaim and re-embody trans/queer identity, and a way of pointing, through the estrangement of these movements, to the construction of trans bodies through these diagnostic tools.

ANNA: You refer frequently to “lacuna” and the spaces that open up between meaning and definition. What is “lacuna” and how are you exploring it in your work?

LOU: Lacuna is the rift between a translation and source text. Languages, or any kind of notation system, are not interchangeable— each one maps its own (its user’s own) epistemology. So, when a text is translated there is always a gap in meaning between the translation and the original that can’t be accounted for. The lacuna then, is precisely what cannot be said. So lacuna is a space full of undefined meaning. And the only way to apprehend this space is through pointing to it. So much of my work is about this idea of lacuna—gesturing at what can’t be described.

ANNA: Can you tell me about the written, or perhaps more appropriately, drawn choreographic language that you use in your work?

LOU: So, I have been working both with labanotation, which is a choreographic notation system as well as a system of notating any kind of gesture or movement, and a notation system more specific to dance called “Banesh notation.” Both come from Europe—Labanotation or Kinetography Laban was designed by Rudolph Laban, a Slovakian dancer and theorist, and Banesh notation by Joan Banesh and her husband Rudolph—a mathematician and artist—in the UK. I found both of these notation systems through necessity, looking for ways to extract gesture from graphs and shapes.

Lou Sheppard, A Strong Desire, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

ANNA: Part of your work at Cité des Arts in Paris involves practicing through these movements and broadcasting them online. They feel like sketches made with your body exposing the process behind your practice as finished work in itself. How does it feel to perform these for the camera?

LOU: At first this was a function of necessity. I realized that if I were to work with choreographic notations, I needed to understand them in my body so I would dance them, with the idea that I would use these sketches to convey the choreographed sequences. And now I am thinking more and more about how my own body functions with and disrupts expectations about what a performing body, and even just a visible body, should look like. I post this work online also out of necessity—to see it outside of a studio, and also because I have a kind of compulsion to render myself vulnerable.

ANNA: You also mention using this instant and accessible forum of the internet as a way of distancing the work from ideals of finished performance. How does your work untangle other institutional processes—such as scientific processes—which are historically marred in eurocentric, white-male dominated modes of research?

LOU: Totally. Eurocentric, capitalist, patriarchal, colonial etc. etc.—all systems that I am both deeply complicit in and resistant to. Scientific data is presented as truth, but, like any meaning system it constructs knowledge based on a particular set of values and biases, specifically a bias towards that which can be measured or ‘objectively’ observed. By setting up processes of translation that inherently fail to convey the specific meaning of these data sets, and instead produce a series of jarring and abstract musical notes or gestures, I’m pointing to other ways of knowing or apprehending. Of course, I am using meaning systems that are encoded with their own values and biases, and often originating from these same dominant culture(s), like musical staff notation or choreographic notation, and—more recently and explicitly—Sacred Harp notation and notation used for Gregorian chanting. So maybe not untangling so much as tangling more?

Tracing the gestures: Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard find everyday wonder on the Magdalen Islands

vanews — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 19:57:54 +0000

Maps and notations collected by Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard during their project (on display at the Admare headquarters). Photo: Becka Viau

I first met Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard to talk about their project Lines of Desire — Geopoetic Survey of our Neighbourhoods in the community of Grande Entrée. It was a hellishly windy day, the kind that takes your breathe away and submerges you in white noise.

Grande Entrée is a remote, eastern fishing village, isolated from the rest of the Magdalen Islands by the municipality of Grosse-Île. Its people and landscapes are shaped by the sea; I would even say it has been miniaturized by it. Like many North Atlantic coastal landscapes, the plants living there grow dwarfed in order to survive the salt spray and unforgiving winds. It is a small place with a declining population, and it is very much isolated in its location. You could say it is an Island within an Island. These geographic and social circumstances force people to be connected more intimately and creates a comfortable insularity. They also can normalize the diaspora of youth and the loss of intergenerational memory of place.

Leblanc and Dignard — two French artists, one from Montreal and one from the Islands — set out to map this place, to uncover a new way of knowing this place from an outsider’s perspective, as part of the Songlines artist residency series in the Magdalen Islands. They were to deny the Google Maps or other formal ways of mapping the area and seek the unwritten in the unexpected. Their perspective was one of astonishment with the very seemingly small and unseen, investigating the everyday from a place of intense curiosity and attention to detail. They allowed everyday gestures and serendipity guide them through the story of the community, all the time collecting specimens from their journies and re-articulating the experiences through drawing, poetry, photography, sound and video.

The site where the artists were to present the public presentation in Grand Entrée. Photo: Becka Viau

Building upon a geopoetic approach, the duo were determined to be lead by locals down their everyday paths. Some people walked with them on their favourite footpaths, while in some cases the artists only walked the memory of the path being shared. Through the process Leblanc felt they were “actualizing the paths for people” — perhaps, giving the everyday some conceptual power by acknowledging it as a space for knowledge.

To reach the community and create the connections that would drive their project, Leblanc and Dignard relied on the openness of local people to refer them to the next subject. In social science, the surveying approach of following one connection until it takes you to another is called snowballing, building a sample of people from social circumstance. Snowballing is intentionally intimate to ensure that hidden experts and populations can be reached or uncovered, and that trusted relationships can be built quickly. It has also been used to scientifically validate local knowledge and unregistered expertise, and I noticed the artists using this tactic as well.

Dignard reflects on the what she considered to be her role as a vector between community members, collecting and sharing stories from one neighbour to another: “It was like our actions have created a secret society.” Leblanc agreed: “ We had many emotional points as community connectors.There is something special in the meeting of strangers on an ordinary path.” One memorable encounter included an elderly man who could no longer walk the path he wished to take the artists down. Instead he shared the knowledge of the path as a story. Dignard and Leblanc found the path and walked it as they understood it to be. On another walk the artists stumbled on an abandoned house and collected some peppermint herbs from the garden. A few days later, via word of mouth, they connected with the owners and shared a cup of tea made from the peppermint found on the abandoned property. Over the cup of tea the house owners revealed that they hadn’t been back to the property for many years, since a member of their family passed away there. As the artists shared their story of finding the house on a walk and collecting the peppermint leaves, a whole world of memory was revealed in conversation.

The Eastern Part of the Magdalen Islands is an incredible place to be in residency. The landscape alone is enough to transport you to a new world. Yet, somehow the restrictions on the format of the residency seemed to challenge the ephemeral nature of Dignard and Leblanc’s research and limit the amount of time they could invest in the collecting of experience rather than preparing for a formal public presentation.

Detail view of maps and notations collected by Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard. Photo: Becka Viau

Yes, three weeks is a good amount of time for a residency, to build a conversation on a theme, renew creative energy and welcome some reflection on studio practice and research, but Lines of Desire made me wonder: Why are we constantly tagging on the often gratuitous public presentation at the end of these types of projects? At first, I wondered if it was due to funding restrictions, but I now feel that the public presentation is a safe ending, or an expected packaging of art activity that institutions (artist-run or not) end up deliberately programming. Why? I could speculate, but ultimately, I feel it serves as an easily digestible way of building some form connection between the community and the art world. Is it valuable? Perhaps. Dignard described the final presentation of their project during Songlines as “a gift back to the community.”And so, I suppose, who can deny a gift?

I don’t feel the work could finalize or resolve itself at the end of the three week residency, and I am surprised at the lengths the artists were going to to try and formalize the research so quickly. Again, is this a symptom of current art culture, the nature of first time collaborations or the drive of the artists? I was left unsure. For this project, the action of formalizing or materializing the residency experience seems to be pretty integral to revealing the third space that geopoetic expression aims to open up. I encourage the artists not to stop at the expected public presentation during Songlines and urge them to continue the collaboration.

But I would also like to see residency programs built to support the re-materialization of the artist’s experiences or the re-membering of the findings of their research after the residency. Many artists residencies are built to put the working artist on display, interacting with or even just on view for the community, while many also include public events around the very fresh work in progress. The problem isn’t so much in the public event; Rather, it is about the desire or urge to contain the work of the artist-in-residence in a package that is easily digested by a general audience. Instead of supporting the artist through a more fluid and ephemeral process of research and creation to a resolved public presentation, we often leave the artist’s actions dangling in the “gift back to the community.” This is doing a disservice to both the host institutions, the artist and the public.

Maps and notations collected by Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard. Photo: Becka Viau