A collaborative exhibition with Lori Gordon and Jessica James Lansdon
Block Party
- My work explores connections, relationships and interactions through situating participation, sharing, group work and collaborations within an artistic discourse.1
Block Party is a playful experiment in community formation through the socially-engaged art practices of three artists. Jen Delos Reyes has invited collaborators Lori Gordon and Jessica James Lansdon to take part in an exhibition that develops out of encounters between the artists, the Sherwood Village Branch Library, and its neighborhood. The themes of Block Party: musical preference, intentionally overheard conversations, and partying are all reminiscent of high school – a time and place when one's relationships, especially with friends, most vividly impact our forming identities, and when the importance of our relationships is most dramatically expressed.
As a teenager, music was central to the way my friends and I defined who we were. Musical preference was the window through which everything else was organized. Politics, fashion, behavior, and friendships all depended on the music that one was listening to. My time in high school was expressed in a series of mix tapes created for friends that were shared while we cruised Regina's streets in the cars we borrowed from our parents. Asking, “What kind of music do you like?” was often a way of beginning a conversation with someone who was unfamiliar. Along similar lines, Jen Delos Reyes polled people who live in the Sherwood Village neighborhood to get a sense of their musical tastes. Questions were asked to a cross section of the residents about the value of music in their lives, what kinds of music they listened to, whether listening to music made them feel like they were part of a community, and most importantly, what their favourite songs were. Once the information was gathered, Delos Reyes assembled a volunteer choir for the performance and recording of her piece, Neighborhood Chorus. The chorus travelled through the neighborhood, stopping on the survey respondents' doorsteps to sing the residents' favourite songs.
By creating moments that cross between the dualities of art and everyday encounters, Jen Delos Reyes' socially-engaged project reconfigures the neighborhood from a collection of private domiciles into a nexus of musical tastes. Connections, relationships and group dynamics are used by Delos Reyes in projects like Neighborhood Chorus to explore aspects of artists' social roles and the value of art and community. Neighborhood Chorus brings into view the invisible connections that could possibly be forged among neighbors through expressions of musical preference.
The textual declarations that appear as Lori Gordon's Snippets are derived from things Gordon has heard or that have been said to her. By sharing these messages and ambiguous moments for local residents to consider and appreciate, Lori opens snippets of private conversations up to reinterpretation as advertising, poetry, song lyrics, or an insider's joke. For the Block Party exhibition, one large snippet is painted on the gallery wall, and this newspaper of Snippets is being distributed throughout the Sherwood Village neighborhood. Local residents are invited to put these up in their windows as signs and to send documentation to the artist for addition to her online archive. It is a project that lays out the intersections of public spaces and private lives with a playfully interrogative gesture.
For the third piece in Block Party, Jessica James Lansdon is constructing an elaborate party space by creating and installing party decorations in the gallery. The centerpiece for her project, Party Animal, is a large wire sculptural armature of an animal. The remainder of the piece is a hybrid of a party, collaboration, performance art, installation and sculpture. All residents of the Sherwood Village neighborhood and beyond are invited to the gallery on September 12th to tear down the elaborate, plentiful and colourful decorations while enjoying food, drinks and each other's company. At the end of the party everyone is invited to gather the party detritus to be stuffed into the sculpture's wire armature. As with most parties, the preparations for Party Animal are elaborate: the cleaning of the space, the selection of themes, the donning of costumes, the careful placement of chairs, speakers and punch. Lansdon has written about the party as a site of anticipation that is transformed into a site of excess of music, drinks, decorations, energy, and emotions, where preparation makes way for participation.
- Often there is a still static moment after the rush to get ready just before the guests arrive; a potent quiet in which both hosts and party goers gather their energies. Everything hangs in anticipation of being pulled down. At each stage of the party are transformations of material and energy; and afterwards the residue of the party retains some of what was spent in its production.2
During Block Party, the artists and audiences will contribute, participate, and experience what can happen when art and life get close. The projects in this exhibition reinvent the ways that we organize ourselves into communities and how we maneuver around within them. They remind us that communities are porous and shifting, and depend as much on geographical nearness as they do on the consumption and re-expression of popular culture within our day-to-day encounters.
Jeff Nye
Assistant Curator, Dunlop Art Gallery
Jen Delos Reyes, artist statement, 2008
2 Jessica James Lansdon, artist statement, 2009