Interdisciplinary – visual arts news

Q + A: Jordan Bennett

vanews — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 20:49:13 +0000

Visual Arts News was excited to feature the work of artist Jordan Bennett in our Fall 2015 issue. In this online installation of her interview series, Current Conditions & Forecasts, Eryn Foster chats with Bennett about everything ranging from his experiences representing Newfoundland in Venice to his work bringing traditional Indigenous art forms into contemporary art discourse.

Jordan Bennett, “Sky Container,” 9 in x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist.

ERYN FOSTER: You were in Venice this summer representing Newfoundland (along with Anne Troake) at the Biennale. How was that experience? What was the response to your installation Ice Fishing?

JORDAN BENNETT: The opportunity to exhibit Ice Fishing at the Venice Biennale was great. It has been very well received throughout the past few months with a large number of visitors interested in both Anne’s work and mine. Venice is an amazing and unique city and being part of such a grand event is something I will not soon forget. It was exciting to see so many viewers come into the exhibition and interact with the installation. The curator of the exhibition, Chris Clark, did an amazing job choosing the works to be part of the show. Anne’s work really gives the viewer a sense of Newfoundland in spring and summer. It’s very poetic in nature. I feel that my work gives a glimpse into the ways of being and existing on the land and water during the long Newfoundland winter months.

EF: Did you feel any stress or pressure in preparing for your show in Venice? Or did you approach the opportunity as you would with any other exhibition?

JB: I approached it with the same mindset as I would have with any other exhibition. The only difference was ensuring the work was securely protected in rugged crates to withstand the long trek. It was truly an honour to be included in the official programming of the Venice Biennale.

Jordan Bennett, “Double Rainbow,” acrylic on wood, 12 in x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist.

EF: You are now in the second year of your MFA at UBC Okanogan. What is it like for you living on the other side of the country? Do you feel that the experience of living out West has influenced the way you make and think about art?

JB: Living in the Okanagan is quite a beautiful experience. Being in a MFA program is definitely a change of speed, as now I am balancing both my ongoing art practice and completing a thesis and exhibition. Being out West has really allowed me to explore new ideas, materials, and methodologies within my practice. [In September] I was at a conference, Performing Turtle Island, in Regina. During his presentation, the academic and actor Michael Greyeyes said, “Being so far from home allows the lenses in your eyes to refocus on it.” This resonated with me, as this is precisely how I feel about being out West.

EF: Can you tell me a little bit about your MFA thesis project? From what I understand, you are looking at the parallels and similarities between the visual cultures of the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq? What brought you to this research?

JB: Yes that is correct. My thesis work is re-imagining the traditional art forms of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq into a contemporary art discourse. Through this new work I am making a series of carvings accompanied by sound to create an immersive and interactive environment. My ongoing research came from thinking about the shared history of the traditional people of Newfoundland— the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq—and how centuries of their shared history have been reduced to vague one-liners and inaccurate interpretations, assumptions, and statements by European explorers and settlers on the island. Through creating this new work, I am bringing an Indigenous perspective to the assumptions and myths regarding the historical, physical, and cultural erasure of the Beothuk by European settlers. This is exemplified by the death of Shanawdithit in 1829, who is believed to be the last of her people. In Shanawdithit’s testimony, recorded in the 1827 diary of Bishop Inglis, she recalls that “the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq held relations and had a partial oral understanding of one another for centuries, but in the last 150 years this relationship turned for the worse.” This statement has been one of the factors that has driven me to create artworks rooted in re-imagining a space for both nations to coexist again.

EF: And how has this research informed your creative practice?

JB: Through this research I’ve been employing mediums that I have not explored in a long time such as drawing, painting, and I’ve also been learning wood-carving. Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to visit and learn from fellow artists Dean Hunt, Shawn Hunt, and their father Bradley Hunt of the Heiltsuk Nation. Bradley and his sons are very well known for their mastery in carving amazing cedar panels and totem poles, pushing the limits of both material and visual. I had the honour of spending two weeks with them in their studio, learning techniques of which I am employing in this new body of work. Through researching Beothuk and Mi’kmaq visual culture, I have been creating new drawings based on Porcupine quill designs from the turn of the 19th century along with the drawings of Shanawdithit and Beothuk items and articles found throughout Newfoundland archaeological digs. These new drawings are the basis for my new carvings.

EF: Having grown up in rural Newfoundland, do you feel the landscape and the culture of the island has influenced you as an artist in any particular way?

JB I grew up in the town of Stephenville Crossing on the west coast of the island. I believe that the whole reason I am an artist is based on the landscape and culture of this place. The landscape is both beautiful and brutal, growing up only a rock’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean really makes you appreciate the power of where you come from. My ancestors have lived in this area off the island for countless generations and I think that through a tie like this, you are born with an inherent connection to the land. In our community, as with many other communities in Newfoundland, we still greatly depend on the land for sustenance, be it food or spiritual.

EF: Once you have finished your MFA, do you think you will you move back East? Or do you have some other ideas as to where you might go next?

JB: I would love to move back home. If the opportunity arises, I would be back in a minute, the east coast holds a very special place in my heart. I am also not against going somewhere new that might hold exciting new opportunities.

Physical Landscapes

vanews — Mon, 11 May 2015 07:57:59 +0000

Howie Tsui, “Of Malingerers, Skulkers and Dupes,” 2012. Acrylic ink on deerskin parchment. Collection of the Artist.

While exploring Anatomica, I experienced several moments of disorientation, unsure whether I was approaching a piece with stronger connections to an artists’ studio or a laboratory. Take the human spine curving from a steel frame in the gallery. From a distance, artist Sarah Maloney’s Vertebrae, Sacrum, Coccyx looks like a replica meant to be studied by medical students, while up close, the unexpected is revealed: each vertebra has been realistically hand-knitted, stitches multiplying like cells. These split seconds of uncertainty gave the exhibit an adventurous sense of mystery.

By combining contemporary artworks with medical artifacts, Anatomica—on view January 16 – March 8 at Dalhousie Art Gallery—set up a complex dialogue about the human body and its representations, allowing “a curiosity to emerge, and for new sets of questions to be asked of the materials on display,” as Ottawa-based curator Cindy Stelmackowich describes. A pink knitted brain, also by Maloney, rests near a plastic classroom model of the same organ. I wondered if Maloney’s soft, anatomically correct folds of cerebral cortex might make the more inviting teaching tool. Stelmackowich’s own recent artworks find inspiration in vintage microscopic slides—which is fitting given she completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie that focused on the relation between science, knowledge, and representation. The exhibition included rare materials from Dalhousie University’s Killam Library Special Collections and its Division of Anatomy within the

William Cowper, The Anatomy of Humane Bones, 1737
(Dalhousie University Killam Library, Special Collections) and Anatomical Model: Brain, 1960s (Division of Anatomy – Department of Medical Neuroscience, Dalhousie University).

Department of Medical Neuroscience, such as anatomical atlases, engravings and diagrams. Seeing these items in a gallery setting highlighted their artistry and idiosyncrasies, while showing that our understanding of human anatomy has not been static over time. The viewer is led to “ask how aesthetics, imagination and creativity have always informed the making of medical representations and medical teaching tools,” Stelmackowich says.

“Normally, these types of questions are not asked of this material, as they are understood as laying down the ‘rules’ of the medical gaze.” The artworks in Anatomica were presented as the products of unique imaginings, while still connected to their scientific origins. These pieces converse directly with “the histories and medical traditions to which the artists’ imagery and sources of inspiration belong,” Stelmackowich explains. “The contemporary artworks bring new narratives, new materials, new psychologies, new logics and new ways of seeing to the standard yet complex biomedical gaze.”

One of the ways Anatomica complicated the textbook view of anatomy was by highlighting different materials and textures. Lyn Carter conjures the lungs and heart as sewn three dimensional forms, where fabric becomes skin and buttoned up collars suggest composure and concealment. At the same time, the design on the chintz fabric of the lungs is reminiscent of veins—maybe the heart is being worn on the sleeve, the interior made exterior, after all.

Patterns recur and repeat, in nature and in art. Lisa Nilsson creates models of cross-sections of human tissue by paper quilling, which involves rolling and shaping narrow strips of Japanese mulberry paper. The density and detail of her re-creations is breathtaking. Maskull Lasserre also works with paper and sculpture in his work Lexicon, where he has carved a human spine and ribcage into a stack of newspapers, which are squeezed together in a mechanical press and continuously disintegrating. Nilsson, Maloney and Carter’s processes, in particular, ask us to consider the relation of crafting practices to fine art, the gendered body and how it has been represented in medicine and in art, and the traditionally labour-intensive, yet invisible quality of so-called women’s work.

Human anatomy is laid bare as both beautiful and grotesque. Maura Doyle’s Bone Dump features 8,000 hand sculpted porcelain femur bones, which are quite lovely in their individual delicacy, but disturbing as a whole, their piled form bringing to mind a mass grave. Musketball! is a working pinball machine, repurposed by Howie Tsui to depict a British soldier reeling from a musket shot, his guts exploding while the pinball bounces off a background of graphically drawn innards, the words ‘mangled viscera’ decorating the ribs. Tsui contrasts the game’s whimsy with the violence and repetition of combat. Meanwhile, a human skull from the 1930s, a frighteningly archaic-looking surgical kit and casts of fetal lungs and blood supply are eerie in their realness.

Whether dissecting or synthesizing, clinical or playful or reverent, Anatomica provided us with an uncommon window into interior physical landscapes.