Corrina Beesley-Hamond

 I am a painter based in Vancouver BC. My primary focus has been large grid based abstract paintings. Textiles and textile design as well as interior decoration influence me. I paint in aleft to right format after making up a list of parameters to follow, similar to a very simple computation or punch cardconcept.

 Since the birth of my son in 2005 I have had less time in the studio and instead, I have been experimenting with moreflexible mediums such as collages made from children’s stickers. I also spend an unbelievable amount of time doing laundry, cooking, cleaning and nursing. 

I am currently on a Candida cleanse for hay fever treatment. I live with my husband and son. 

Domestic Intervention

My plan for Open Engagement will be based around the guidelines and parameters of the conference. I am proposing to work in collaboration with one of the hosts, not necessarily the one I am billeted with to help them with any one or more of their domestic needs. In the physically cluttered world of our homes and workspaces, be it a closet, refrigerator, weedy garden or email inbox, I can organize it and help you to purge: donate, recycle and throw away. I will send out an email seeking a volunteer to all conference participants closer to the time of the conference. My contribution to the conference will be a willingness to discuss the process of the domestic intervention and what was discussed during the domestic intervention, with the permission of the volunteer. If necessary, with the volunteers’ permission, some items can be displayed or discussed at the conference before they are dispersed. A display can consist of various purged item will be variable.

 

Contact: truckstopcutie@gmail.com

 

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Rob Bos 

Rob graduated from the University of Regina with distinction in 2003, receiving a BFA in painting. He was the Saskatchewan recipient of the BMO 1st Art invitational student art competition.

After graduation, Rob founded a non-commercial exhibition space, Art Projects Gallery, where he was active in curating, promoting and assisting artists realise their work. In 2005, he was awarded an Individual Assistance Grant by the Saskatchewan Arts Board, in order to concentrate on his painting. Current and future projects include: a solo show at the Art Gallery of Regina, a publication of Art Projects Gallery exhibitions with critical commentary, the foundation and creation of a mobile museum (to be presented at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery in 2008), and the continuation of painting.

Lost and Found Thoughts

In this project I place, compose, photograph, and then leave paintings in public spaces.  The sites I use are marked by the susceptibility to aimless wandering.  I will be placing in the Cathedral Area, Downtown, and some sites around Wascana Lake ( see map). 

The work will be be placed and into a composed situation within the environment, using architecture, nature and whatever happens to be on hand.  The paintings could be described as ornamental, colorful and expressive, and they are often humorous in the content of the text.  Some refer directly to the surroundings and some are more nonsensical and abstract.  

 With the documented work left behind, I put the images together with their locations and make this accessible through the internet.  In addition to being used to view the work in its various locations,  this also encourages people to seek out the work.  The paintings are meant to be eye-catching, and it is my hope that all the work ends up getting taken away. (instead of thrown all the way out )

I am curious about the fate of these paintings: where will they go? who will take them? what will they think about it? did they know about the project before or after?  I will have my contact information on the back of the work to make it possible to track the work

 

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Jennifer Brant and Robin Lambert

 

Jen Brant lives on the west coast of Canada where she spends her time teaching, thinking and making objects that may or may not be considered art. She is fascinated with the world around her, taking great delight in exploring and observing, and in burying her toes and fingers in the dirt and sand. She is inspired by simple things, unexpected conversations and stories, time honoured processes, and ordinary, beautiful moments. 

Robin Lambert is a recent graduate of the University of Regina MFA program and is currently living life as a vagabond artist and gardener. Robin’s life and educational and artistic pursuits have taken him all over western Canada. Robin currently considers himself an artist in pursuit of lost time and enjoys his idle time. 

A Sense of Place

 What is involved in knowing a place? What process takes place to transform an ordinary spot into a place of significance? What do we notice as we walk down a familiar street or through an unexpected part of the city? How can we connect with a place we visit for only a short time?  A Sense of Place is a project to facilitate the interaction and connection of the participants in Open Engagement and the city of Regina. A guerilla-planting project, the objective is to provide the opportunity for individuals to develop and celebrate a relationship with a particular location in the city.

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Joanne Bristol

Joanne Bristol is an artist and writer who has presented installations, performances and single-channel videos across North America for the past 15 years. Current projects include bentaerial.net, a work for the web about technology, obsolescence and invention, and the Institute for Feline & Human Collaboration (IFHC), a site for ongoing projects in interspecies communication and interaction. Joanne also teaches, curates, and writes about contemporary art. 

Institute for Feline and Human Collaboration

I will spend time during the conference paying attention to the animals of Regina. This will involve daily walks around the city, noting the appearance of various animals (so-called wild, so-called domesticated and everything in-between). I may approach animals and make exchanges with them (verbal, gestural), depending on how interested or inclined they seem to want to get near me. I may take photos of animals, and also do drawings, noting their appearance, behavior and location in the city. I may also invite other people and animals to join me in my walks. I want to leave the structure of this project relatively open to improvisation, so my activities will include all of the previously mentioned ones, plus perhaps more.  (Note: It is very important to me to respect the animals’ space – I would not invade it, and I do not usually feed wild animals or animals whom I have just met.) I will endeavor to walk for at least 8 hours each day while in Regina. I used to live in Regina, so coming to this conference will also create an opportunity to meet up with Regina people and animals whom I miss, and meet new ones.

On the last day of the conference, I will present a 20-minute slide talk on inter-species communication and my findings in Regina.

This project would be a part of the Institute for Feline and Human Collaboration (IFHC), my ongoing research in inter-species exchange, communication, and cohabitation. For more information on this work, see: http://www.bentaerial.net/ifhc.html

 

Contact:

margaretrind@hotmail.com

http://www.bentaerial.net/ifhc.html

NAOMI BUCKLEY &

ANNA (OXYGEN) Huff

 

Sculptor Naomi Buckley builds work that deals with the ideas of connections, decision-making, and the passage of time. Each piece is constructed without any drawings or diagrams often in the space in which it will be viewed. She has exhibited through out the United States and received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. She is also the editor in chief of BENCH art magazine published in Los Angeles.

Best known for her aerobic live performances, Anna Huff is a multi-media artist and musician. She has toured both Europe and the United States under the name Anna Oxygen, performing dance instructional pop recitals and fantasy-science performance pieces. Backdrops of video animation, made by Oxygen are frequently employed in her shows, illustrating such concepts as the adventure of a Calorie searching for the end of the rainbow. Operating from a wide range of musical skills and experience, she has performed in a variety of styles and guises: folk guitar chanteuse, electro pop diva, and classically trained opera singer, with frequent cross-pollination between these genres. Huff has composed and released several albums of electronic music under the name Anna Oxygen, most recently "This is an Exercise" released in February on Kill Rock Stars. She has also been invited by a number of arts institutions to lead workshops in music and video production, and has been heavily involved in the Northwest arts and music community, performing at such venues as The Seattle Art Museum, Consolidated Works, COCA and The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. She is currently getting her MFA in integrated media at CALARTS in Los Angeles.

WATER: BRIDGE: CLOUD: EARTH

WATER: BRIDGE: CLOUD: EARTH is a collaboration between performer/musician Anna Oxygen and sculptor Naomi Buckley. W.B.C.E. invites participants to follow words into actions then actions into words, exploring connectivity, collaboration, and form.

Participants will be divided into groups and given flash cards and clues to guide the collaborative process. Each group will have a unique set of materials to build with including such items as wood, tape, string, fabric, plastic, vinyl, paper, staples and screws. Using musical cues (provided by Anna Oxygen) they will begin getting to know each other, strategizing, and building often in random and unpredictable orders determined by the music.

Be prepared to mingle, wear hats, dance, create and construct as Anna and Naomi guide your group in creating either water, a bridge, a cloud or the earth. The piece will end when we merge the fragments together into a landscape. We will then take photos of the figure within the landscape to serve as evidence of the previous experience, vacation style! (props will be provided)

Contact: anna@annaoxygen.com

 

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Terry Chatkupt 

Terry Chatkupt received his MFA from CalArts in 2004. In 2003 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  Selected past exhibitions include: “Contemporary Film Series: Spark Video Program” at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY in 2006,“Happenstance,” curated by Lauri Firstenberg at Harris Lieberman in New York City in 2005, and “Sights and Gatherings,” a solo exhibition at the New Chinatown Barbershop in Los Angeles, CA in 2003.  Terry lives and works in Portland, Oregon where he continues to explore themes of memory, subjectivity, and landscape through moving images, sound, and still photography.  

The “Informal Interviews Video”

The “Informal Interviews Video” will be a DVD project based on the theme: “I’ll call you: Long term relationships, communities,and connectivity.” During the conference, each Open Engagement participant will be interviewed for five to tenminutes in an informal setting. Each participant will only be required to answer two questions: 

1) What is your name?

2) Where do you live? 

The rest of the interview will be a casual conversation.  The participant being interviewed may choose to share specific anecdotes, personal information, hobbies & interests, and/or any number of things they think other people should know about them.  After the Open Engagement conference, all of the interview footage will be edited and then made into a DVD complete with a full menu of each participant’s name and contact information.  The DVD will be sentout to each artist who can then choose to watch the interviews at their leisure.  The “Informal Interviews Video” project will hopefully help the participants of Open Engagement learn more about another artist who was at the conference.  Finally, the DVD will assist with the process of reconnecting and building new relationships with other participants they did not have a chance to get to know during Open Engagement.  

Contact: terry@terrychatkupt.com

 

Erinn M. Cox

Erinn M. Cox is a sculptor and installation artist based in the southern United States. She holds a Bachelors of Fine Art from Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL and a Masters of Fine Art from the Memphis College of Art in Memphis,TN.  Her interest in illness stems from a series of personal ordeals leading to a life-threatening event in the summer of 2004.   This specific event and its aftermath serve as the fuel for inspiration for her work.  A love of process and materials drives the aesthetic qualities of the work, producing jewel-like pieces with delicate surfaces made from tacitly known materials such as satin, hair and precious metals. Erinn’s work has been exhibited nationally at the A&C gallery (Nashua, NH & Providence, RI), Dangenart Gallery (Nashville, TN), the Here Space (Norfolk, VA),as well as several shows at the Memphis College of Art (varied spaces). She has participated in several group shows including Devouring House (Tallahassee, FL), the Class of ’06 (Memphis, TN), the Power House annual Dada Ball (Memphis, TN).  In upcoming months she will have a solo show at the Medicine Factory in Memphis, TN, and participate in her first international show in Budapest, Hungary in the summer of 2008. Erinn has participated in an artist residency in Budapest, Hungary, received a fellowship to Istanbul, Turkey and will be in residence this summer at the Jentel Artist Residency in Banner, WY.

Art and Illness: A Phenomenological Approach to Art Making

On June 7, 2004, I nearly died, and this has consumed me ever since. As an artist, I am occupied with traumatic body memories and in deciphering the differences between events I classify as life changing and life threatening, though I find at times this division collapses. By recollecting past trials and combining them with elaborate medical histories, I am preserving tangled intangible and tangible ideas. The sieve of personal illness is inescapable— casting every action, event, or moment I have experienced into shadow, as it does to anticipated, incomprehensible memories.  I am pushed to a threshold where sensations (grief, fear, and guilt) become so overwhelming that they are physically palpable and cancerous. And I know that I am not alone. An artist living with illness, or heavy reflection of a life threatening illness, can show possibilities of living by creating work about it.  If illness and mortality are part of my everyday experience, they are part of all that I see.  Illness translated into art is not only necessary, it is beautiful.  The beauty and the survival in the aftermath of sickness is valid and connective, causing our very bodies to become the stage for our relationships with others. Illness threatens to separate us, but at the same time, it is what brings us together — without judgment, without anger, without the past.  The validity of sustained life in art desires for something real, it grasps at the real begging for the viewer to take hold. Discussion will include artists with a phenomenological approach to this type of art making and dialogue to discover how others are affected by illness — personally or otherwise.  Conversations on effects of illness, loss, mourning and mortality and its translation into art will serve as starting points. The notions and further questions found here could provide profound ideas. 

Contact: erinncox@aol.com    www.erinncox.com

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Jenny Lee Craig

I have many years organizing and creating various collaborative community
and art projects. For me, the creative process involved in these projects
have always been more interesting than the final project's outcome. I
continually find myself branching out into work that involves more
participants, and that has interactive elements or aspects. I love the
spontaneity that can come from participant based work, and the ways it
allows us to personally grow through communicating and learning about each
other.

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Micki Davis

Micki Davis recently received her BFA in Digital Media from the University of Georgia and currently resides in Athens, Georgia. She is a friendly video/performance artist and co-curator of a weekly free and public screening at UGA's ICE (ideas for creative exploration) initiative.

Project Description :

When we were vids is a collaborative video project between a group of friends in their twenties who were fortunate enough to find each other in recent years and have devised a plan to defy the laws of time and transport themselves into the past to play. By spearheading this operation, I will work with those whose friendships I cherish to evoke the timelessness of our relationships by simply editing and consolidating our separate home movies to create one original video that will act as a flux capacitor and bring us back to a time we wish we had. When we were vids will also serve as a template as I will call for home videos of the conference's participants and create another original home movie featuring soon to be friends. I anticipate and hope for discourse ranging from conversational nostalgia to unconventional socializing practices.

Contact: mmickidavis@yahoo.com

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Cecilia DeJong Jesperen

I am a 28 years old woman, mother and wife. Furthermore, I am a 4th year student at The Funen Art Academy in Denmark which is a 5 year program. I share an apartment in Berlin with some Danish colleagues, we call it the Berlin Office. It’s our aim to arrange gatherings, seminars and other collaborative opportunities. All of my work involve the aspect of personal relationships. I also investigate how we constitute our subjectivity in relation to our surroundings. I find it very interesting to discover (over and over again) how our seemingly "one of a kind" personalities seem to blur when it's taken into a closer examination. I think we constitute ourselves in the mirroring of the others; I like to put up mirrors or make new relationships that can be the beginning of new personalities. 

I’ll Be Your Mirror

The subject is not a fixed form with a fixed content. Being together means a lot more than just sharing space, because we mold each other in many ways. "Communication can be the beginning of a new self, and we become the people that surround us." Taking this literally, I will try to communicate and feel other peoples feelings throughout the conference; everyday interviewing and researching on feelings not my own. Afterwards, I will then look for opportunities to voice these feelings in a situation that are suitable for the content of the statement. As a result, no one will know whether I am being "myself" or if I am "acting". Even for me, it will be difficult to separate the two, and that will make my research on the fluent subject a real everyday-life experience. Being an artist working with interventionistic and relational aesthetic approaches, I hope to question the possibility of originality. If there is no such thing as a genius or a subject of a fixed content, then there is no reason to promote and act as individuals. Can we set ourselves free? Well, let´s find out!

Contact:ceciliadejong@gmail.com

 

Degrees of Dialogic: conversational art within the white cube

 

“What really good artists do is to create a model for a possible world, and possible bits of worlds.”  Nicolas Bourriand

 

The title of the panel “Degrees of Dialogic” derives in part from the concept “dialogical” by critic Suzi Gablik who refers to the new practices of contemporary artists defined by their practice around the facilitation of dialogue among diverse communities. In these projects conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. While there are artists and collectives who have essentially abandoned the context of the art world entirely to develop networks of their own (net artists, political artists), many spaces in Canada where a system of government supported centres, galleries, and museums defines what is dominant in the national art world, are taking an interest in projects which, however obliquely in some cases, involve forms of social interaction with diverse audiences.  The questions raised by these dialogical gallery projects clearly have a broader cultural and political resonance.  How are art institutions in Canada accommodating this kind of post-productive work? Is there an effective forum for dialogue? Should galleries make space for advocacy? If so, how should this manifest?

 

Canadian public institutions have the potential to foreground multiple perspectives and create/curate together with audiences. Opening the curatorial process up to different forms of synthesis challenges both internal and external perceptions of what galleries do and how they work.  All of this, of course questions the gallery as an elite institution but none the less has the potential of making new narratives of art practices or curating and finding new interesting ways for them to coexist.   Transformative and collaborative facilitation of dialogue are shared concerns of the panelists and will frame this panel. It is the intention of the moderator, Elizabeth Matheson, to suggest a shared set of aims and practices amongst this group of artists and curators whose work involves a rich mix of creative, dialogic and civic practices often within the boundaries of gallery spaces.

Moderator

Elizabeth Matheson (Lecturer, Art and Art History, University of Saskatchewan)

Panelists

Joan Borsa (Professor, Women and Gender Studies, University of Saskatchewan)

Linda Duvall (Lecturer, Art and Art History, University of Saskatchewan)

Adrian Stimson (Lecturer, Art and Art History, University of Saskatchewan)

Biographies

Joan Borsa is an independent curator, critic and professor in the Women and Gender Studies department at the University of Saskatchewan. She has been the Prairie editor of Vanguard magazine, a contributor to Third Text, Photocommunique, Border Crossings, Vanguard, and Canadian Women’s Studies magazines and has written many catalogue essays. She has produced solo and group exhibitions and has done postgraduate work in the social history of art, women’s studies, art education and independent curating. She has taught at Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Simon Fraser University, Bradford Community College in England, and the University of Saskatchewan.

Linda Duvall was has completed degrees in both Sociology (Carleton University, Ottawa) and Visual Arts (OCAD, Toronto, ON and MFA University of Michigan). As an artist, she   creates contexts in which she is physically present to interact with an audience.  Mimicking the fieldwork of anthropologists or sociologists Duvall collects and organizes ordinary conversations and other mundane matter. In her projects, public knowledge and presentation is posited in contrast to more intimate material. Duvall has been teaching media and sculpture classes at University of Saskatchewan for the last 11 years. Her work has been exhibited both locally and internationally, including Guatemala City (GA), London (Engl.), Barcelona (SP), Westport (County Mayo, Ir.), Moose Jaw (SK), Halifax (NS), Brandon (MB), New York (NY) and Edmonton (AB).

Elizabeth Matheson is an independent curator and writer of Canadian and International contemporary art and culture based in Regina/Saskatoon.  Elizabeth’s recent curatorial projects include Back Talk: protest and humour (2006), Familiar but Foreign (2007) and she is currently researching transnational migration including a performance process based procession with artist Humberto Vélez (Panama/UK).  She was the organizer of Missing and Taken: A Symposium, an international event that initaited dialogue among diverse communities including artists, writers, filmakers,activists and families to converse and exchange information about the systemic tragedy of missing women in Canada and Mexico. Elizabeth is a graduate student and lecturer in the Art and Art History department at the University of Saskatchewan.

Adrian A. Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta and a Saskatoon-based interdisciplinary artist, curator and lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan.  His research has included identity, metaphysics, two spirit people, ecology, spirit and healing modalities within artists practice. He has exhibited and performed nationally, including collaborative performances with artists and art festivals at such notable alternative sites as Burning Man, Black Rock City, Nevada, USA.  Adrian was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003 and the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 for his human rights and diversity activism in various communities.

 

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Manon De Pauw

Manon De Pauw works mainly in video-performance, audio and video installation, and photography. Her solo exhibitions include venues such as Optica, La Chambre Blanche, La Bande Vidéo, Expression, and Dare-Dare. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions and video programs in Canada, Europe, and Latin America. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec. She is assistant professor in the Photography department at Concordia University. She lives in Montreal.

L'atelier d'écriture

My presentation will address the artistic and ethical issues, joys and problems of integrating other artists into a solo practice. For the past six years, I have been working mainly in video-performance and photographic self-representation. In 2006, I initiated a project called L'atelier d'écriture (beside writing) that explores various ways of amplifying the writing gesture and of giving it poetic existence. It is also a pretext for choreographed interaction with other artists through collective video-performances. I first set the stage, providing a table (above which is hung a camera), various materials, and choreographic indications on the rhythm, duration, and intention. The guests come together in silence to create an ever-changing group work rendered on the screen. Usually, one person leads the actions and the others follow in synchrony, but sometimes chaos takes over. Throughout the session, the act of writing is transformed into drawing, collage, and audible rhythm. It is creative and destructive by turns. The tabletop becomes a field to invest or to share, a sensitive zone of interactions between individuals and the community.

  L'atelier d'écriture allows me to connect with other artists in a way that is structured, yet playful. These collective video-performances (live or in isolated studio settings) are like temporary, silent get-togethers where things happen in the moment. They do not require specific skills, rather a quality of presence. This learning process brings up questions of control, spontaneity, community, and authorship, amongst others. It is also a formal investigation on the construction of images through collective gestures. The Open Engagement conference is the ideal context to pursue this research. I am hoping that the other artists and panelists present at the conference will participate, share their point of view, and above all take pleasure in living the experience.

 Contact: manondepauw@hotmail.com www.manondepauw.com

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Jennifer Delos Reyes

Jennifer Delos Reyes is a Master of Fine Arts Candidate at the University of Regina and is known to her friends as “Delios”. Her theoretical and studio research interests include: relational aesthetics, interactive media and artists’ social roles. She has exhibited videos, installations, and site-specific participatory work across North America and had recently completed an intensive workshop Come Together: Art and Social Engagement at The Kitchen in New York. She has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Masters Grant and is currently working on her MFA exhibition Open Engagement: Art After Aesthetic Distance.

 Open Engagement: Art After Aesthetic Distance

 Artist Jennifer Delos Reyes is the conceptual director of this innovative art project that will combine exhibitions and events with a conference about contemporary art issues. For this event, Regina will host over 70 national and international artists. A keynote address will be given by Harrell Fletcher, whose internationally renowned work has help to expand the notions of socially based art practices for over a decade. The artists involved in Open Engagement challenge our traditional ideas of what art is and does. These artist’s projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships.

This conference is situated in the space between theory and practice, where participants and audiences will also engage in artworks. The topics to be explored include: What would new relational models of artwork, theory, and writing look like? What is the social role of the artist? What happens when people really connect with each other or with art? What could we do in our daily lives to form meaningful connections and build communities? What should art do? Can art provide an alternative? Can art provide an answer?

The conference will focus on relational art practices- post-Bourriaud: striving for art that desires for something real to happen–not just the imitation of something real. The goal of Open Engagement is to bring together like-minded individuals (artists and audience) to confer on socially engaged art and forge lasting connections. This is an intense, immersive, around the clock experience. It is a conference, an exhibition/performance venue, a mini- residency, and a workshop. Participants can partake in experiences that connect them with each other: artists, art institutions, audiences, and arts communities. Each out-of-town presenter will be billeted with a member of the local community. Participants will make meals together, share meals together, and are encouraged to thank their hosts by leaving a created trace.

 Contact: jendelosreyes@gmail.com

www.jendelosreyes.com

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Paul Druecke

Paul Druecke’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States. His work has been featured in Camera Austria, written about in Art in America,and included in Artforum’s Top Ten List. His project, Between Sleep and Awake,was exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; InterReviewmagazine recently featured his project, A Public Space. This year marks theten-year anniversary and culmination of Druecke’s project, A Social Event Archive. 

A Social Event Archive Paul Druecke 1997-2007

Teenagers being obnoxious, children being cute, weddings, drunken adults, and earnest holiday portraits—these are often-repeated themes among the hundred of photos in A Social Event Archive. The Archive is a collection of snapshot photographs that have contributed by the public. The project began in 1997 when Druecke went door-to-door in various neighborhoods inviting people to contribute one social-occasion photo from their personal collection. The resulting photographs have been archived in the order received and are presented as a traveling exhibition, website, and in books. A Social Event Archive is a populist self-portrait—a portrait complete with its notions of competing identity, resonance, entertainment, and with all of the attending dysfunctionand sincerity of a family gathering. The majority of photos having come from the U.S., the project documents the day-to-day theatrical texture of this melting pot. The Archive is also a picture of our relationship to framing, posing for, and collecting the snapshot. Like recent www phenomena, YouTube, Flicker, etc., the Social Event Archive is a platform for the public expression of the personal—a forum to showcase the populace’s use of democratic technologies. Unlike Flicker the Archive asks participants to select just one photo, retaining the (focused) intention of an art project. A Social Event Archive holds over seven hundred photos and is celebrating its ten-year anniversary. The ten-year anniversary is also the logical end of the project. The Archive began, unknowingly, at the twilight of 35mm photography; digital photography now reigns. As technology changed, we’ve adjusted the way we organize, save, share, and relate to our photos. This transformation, while limiting the reason to continue soliciting, augments the significance of the Archive. The Archive documents a national obsession for self-documentation as it oversees the shift from 35mm to digital format photography. 

Contact:pdruecke@asocialevent.com

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Linda Duvall

Linda Duvall was born in Newington, a village of 200 hardy souls in Eastern Ontario. She began life on the corner of Duvall Avenue in a home that housed three generations of extended family. Possibly as a result of this environment of close family and even closer neighbours, Duvall has been very engaged with people and community. Duvall has completed degrees in both Sociology (Carleton University, Ottawa) and Visual Arts (OCAD, Toronto, ON and MFA University of Michigan). These two disciplines have merged into projects that involve and give voice to her friends, neighbours, and interesting new acquaintances.

 Support Groups for the Humdrum

 Is everyone that you know going to their own special support groups? I am offering to set up support groups for the participants of Open Engagement.

 Support groups bring together individuals with some kind of shared personal experience. During support group meetings, participants have the opportunity to share stories, converse and learn from each other, and deepen their own understanding of their personal histories. From these support groups develop a network of people who enjoy talking to each other.

 I will develop a series of groups that emerge from discussions with others during Open Engagement. As I notice themes and issues emerging, I will post lists of possible groups. Each participant will make his/her own choices in terms of which groups one might wish to join. I will also prepare in advance proposals for possible support groups that might be relevant to the group i.e. for those who do not want to live where they are currently living, for those who have noticed that they are closer to their pets than their partners, those who are making major shifts in their art practices, etc. I am also open to suggestions from others for support groups that they would like to see develop.

 All persons attending the Open Engagement event will have the opportunity to add their names to any support group that they wish to join. Once a critical mass (two or more) on one topic has accumulated, I will facilitate an initial meeting.

 Traditionally, support groups shape around personal crises. However, I am proposing to move beyond this narrow definition to one that enables intense discussion about those issues that matter to us in our everyday lives. The concept of support groups is an appropriate framework for connecting people both short term and for more extended relationships.

 By: Linda  Duvall

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 Blair Fornwald

Blair is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is always discreet, generally performative, and often intervention-based. Originally from Saskatchewan, she received a BFA in Intermedia from the University of Regina, and hopefully by the time you read this, she will also have an MFA from the University of Western Ontario. She has exhibited and performed across Canada, and makes art on her own and with the loosely Regina-based performance collective, One Night Only. She likes it when art looks like life, when life looks like art, and when things are simultaneously banal and sexy.

art like life like art

For the Open Engagement conference, I will produce a series of subtle, site-specific, and anonymous interventions in the city: little gifts and gestures that may confuse, surprise, or otherwise disrupt the familiar routine of the everyday, but may also go unnoticed and disappear.

These projects will investigate Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the inframince, or infrathin, the term that he used to describe infinitesimal, often imperceptible, and sometimes purely imaginary degrees of separation or difference between two entities. His notes on the subject, written in the mid-thirties (more than a decade after production of the last Readymade) are fragmentary and idiosyncratic texts that do not define, but rather, describe, instances of the phenomenon: he writes about the warmth of a seat that has just been sat in, the sound that velvet trousers make when the wearer’s legs brush up against one another, and when exhaled tobacco smoke also smells like the breath of the mouth that exhales it, a “marriage” between odors. The infrathin describes the space between the front and back of a single sheet of paper and the difference between two “identical” mass produced objects.[1] 

The Readymade can be understood as an early experiment in the infrathin, wherein the difference between banal object and philosophical puzzle lies only in the cognitive operation that marks them as such. The Readymade, bound up in the specificity of the object, however, still suggests a binary dialectic between art and everyday life: either something is one or it is the other.  The notes on the infrathin suggest more complex relationships between entities, relationships where categories are ephemeral, contingent, and in constant flux. Art and life can momentarily touch one another, they can marry like smoke; and in the interstices, however infrathin, there is room for artlike life and lifelike art.  I believe that this ambiguity can be productive, and sometimes, exciting.

 Contact: blairfornwald@hotmail.com

[1] Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, Ed and trans. Paul Matisse (Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, 1983), 1-46 (English translations of notes on unnumbered pages at the end of the volume). See notes 4, 9, 11, 17, and 40.

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Harrell Fletcher

Harrell Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over a decade. His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Wrong Gallery, and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, TX, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, Signal in Malmo, Sweden, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, and The Royal College of Art in London. Fletcher exhibits in San Francisco and Los Angeles with Jack Hanley Gallery, in NYC with Christine Burgin Gallery, in London with Laura Bartlett Gallery, and Paris with Gallery In Situ. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, an ongoing participatory web site with Miranda July. A book version of the project will be published in 2007 by Prestel. He is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. His current traveling exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled in 2006 to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, and PICA in Portland, OR. Fletcher is a Professor of Art at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon

John Holt Escape From Childhood Reading Group.

What I would like is for people to read John Holt's book Escape From Childhood before coming to the con- ference. Holt was a very popular writer in the 70's (my mom read most of his books back then) but since that time not so many people know about his work. He started as a grade school teacher, wrote a book called How Children Fail, and then one called How Children Learn, both of which challenged standard educational practice and affected change in the educational system. Eventually he abandoned institutionalized education entirely and help found the home schooling movement. Escape From Childhood is one of his more radical books. Over the years I've read parts of it to various people and it usually evokes strong reactions, both positive and negative. I think it is just interesting to consider his ideas even if you don't agree with them. A lot of Holt's book can be found in thrift stores and used book shops and are generally very inexpensive. Copies should be available in most libraries. Used copies can also be ordered from the internet:

I'd like to hold an informal reading group meeting to discuss Escape From Childhood during the conference.

Contact: hfletcher@earthlink.net

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Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine

Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine have worked together since 1999. Their collaborative work ranges from snow shoes made for their search for hydrogen producing blue green algae in the Rockies to a Photosynthesis Robot  that is propelled by a plants effort to reach for the sun. Their work manifests in the form of installations, open-access laboratories, and educational formats that collectively question or challenge the cultural, social and economic systems we live in.  Amy founded Futurefarmers in 1995, and Free Soil in 2003. Collectively they have exhibited internationally at the New York Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Jack Hanley Gallery New York and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They teach social sculpture classes at CCA and SFAI.

BINGO: Field of Thoughts

For Open Engagement Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine will facilitate a bingo game based on a template Futurefarmers developed last year. The cards are made so that new content can be used for each game.

For Open Engagement each participant of the conference will be represented instead of a number on the bingo cards, and when their name is called, they will come to the front of the audience and present something under a theme.
Please let me know ASAP if this is OK. Also let me know what information you may need from me for this. I will be posting the conference program to the website shortly (this will have all of the contributors names, but I should maybe give you a list of the contributors that will be in attendance), but just wanted to confirm this description with you.

Contact: Amy Franceschini + Michael Swaine www.futurefarmers.com 

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Brette Gabel

Brette Gabel has recently completed a degree in Theatre Studies with honors and a minor in Visual Arts from the University of Regina. Her work is primarily performance, design and textile based with a heavy focus on safety directions and horror (although the two are currently unrelated). She has shown textile work in various group shows in Regina and she has contributed work to Terminus1525 in the Consistent Variable Project II. In May 2006 Brette Directed, designed and co-wrote a live Horror play titled Emily. Brette is a co-organizer for Open Engagement: Art after Aesthetic Distance and a contributing artist.

Call for Submissions:

Artists and contributors attending Open Engagement: Art after Aesthetic Distance are invited to submit tattoo ideas and drawings to contributing artists Brette Gabel. One drawing will be selected on October 13th to be tattooed onto the artist’s right tricep. The tattoo will become shared ‘property’ of the selected artist and Brette Gabel. Both artists will reserve the right to use the image in future shows, and hold ownership over documentation of the piece. The image will be tattooed onto Brette during the conference and everyone will be invited to watch. Drop off points for tattoo submissions will scattered through out the university and can also be submitted directly to the artist. Size and position of the tattoo are flexible but the complexity of the piece should be kept to an hour long tattoo sitting.

Contact: brettegabel@gmail.com

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Erin Gee

Erin Gee is a currently attending the University of Regina, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus on studio practice inthe Visual Arts.  Her work often explores ways of mediating spirituality and personal identity within inherently coded and scientific arenas such as technology, the internet, and virtual experience. She is currently experimenting with ways to create commentary on digital realms and virtual realities by using two-dimensional media, performance, and one day dreams of making cyborgs. She has shown her work in Regina at venues such as Mysteria, 5th Parallel, and Firefly art galleries, as well as having been screened in the 2005 Regina International Film Festival.

RealSpace

Some would argue that our ability to initiate and maintain relationships within traditional, three dimensional spaces is fading. There seems to be a tendency to judge human interaction as intermediated through technology as reclusive, passive social activity, sometimes dismissing internet interactions and relationships as entities that somehow aren't as important or valid as those maintained in "real life" or physical space. The concept of space as a determining factor in defining and valuing a relationship is of central importance to this project, especially as our perceptions of reality become increasingly blurred through virtual domains, ergonomic technologies, and user interfaces that make use real life processes to make our experiences with technology seem more like extensions of real life rather than departures.

The allure of meeting people through the internet and indeed negotiating and maintaining relationships is quite strong, but what is the nature of this attraction, and could elements that distinguish social interaction on the internet be factored from the digital domain by us, "the artists", in order to engage people in physical, day to day social arenas in a more attractive way?

Exploiting elements of internet based interaction such as written communication, anonymity, data collection, surveillance, voyeurism and exhibitionism, RealSpace uses the website MySpace.com as a template for creating an analog emulation of the popular networking tool in a fixed location at the University of Regina.

Using pen and paper, we shall emulate MySpace.com in the most physical ways possible, to lure physical people into physical spaces, in order to ensure that "real" interaction continues to occur. 

Contact: realspace123@gmail.com

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Lori Gordon

Lori Gordon is San Francisco-based artist, creating cross-disciplinary projects that attempt to decipher both humanity's and her own connection with the universe. Through collaborative endeavors, she explores the distance between coincidence and intention, with an emphasis on setting up moments that deviate from the expected. In some cases, she is more interested in providing the organized framework around which potential interactions may occur. With all her work, she is more interested in the journey than the destination. Visit www.lorigordon.com

Snippet.

I anticipate displaying textual observations within Regina, by permeating public and private spaces around the city. These declarations are derived from snippets of things I've heard, provided out of context for others to read. By sharing these messages through indicators like lawn signs, storefront banners and restaurant table cards, I am sharing these ambiguous moments for local residents to consider and appreciate.  Inevitably some will interpret these as advertising; poetry; or an insider's joke, but I am interested in that ambiguity as well.

Panel: The Luckiest Dreamers Who Never Quit Dreaming: Emerging Social Practices Across America.

Participants: Sara Thacher (San Francisco), Ashley Neese (Portland), Ben Guttin (New York), Hope Hilton (New York), Sal Randolph (New York)

Section I: Who are you really?

Section II: What have you done?

Section III: What do you think?

Contact: www.lorigordon.com

Ben Guttin

Ben Guttin is a Mexican artist living and working in New York.  His work has been shown at the Multiforo del ICBC, Tijuana, Baja California, among other galleries and institutions in Mexico and California. Since coming to New York and finishing his studies at NYU in the School of Continuing Education, Guttin's sculptural, installation, performance and video work has been included in a number of group shows in downtown Manhattan. Most recently he awarded 300 gold dusted medals to the visitors of the "You Can Have It All" exhibition in Spring 2007. His photographic work has been featured in Art Forum. Guttin also regularly offers his expertise as a moldmaker to other artists , and is a full time assistant for artist Anne Chu.

The Final Showcase

Step Up (2006), Save the Last Dance (2001), Beat Street (1984). All of these films address the universal theme of triumph. Each tells the story of a protagonist surpassing their background, prejudice and limitations. This films are becoming a modern mythical or legendary premise, reappearing regularly in teen movies. The Final Showcase is a collaborative performance workshop that will span all three days of the Open Engagement conference. Ben Guttin will pull from his personal experience as a teenage folk-dance choreographer, and develop a three day movement vocabulary, drawing from these three films as inspiration. Through these movements, Guttin hopes to help participants locate, explore and express the physical moment of glory that occurs in the finale of each film. While he realizes that these might be empty movements for some, that is not his concern, as there will inevitably be people going through transformative experiences in the process. This will inevitably occur as the dancers start to feel more comfortable with their bodies , and as they get to know their fellow performers  better. He believes that the movement will help everyone  to break free and connect. By facilitating a kinesthetic response for the participants from the films, Guttin will be able to help others realize that impulse. He considers this dance an opportunity to create a dialog without words, enabling a more physical connection in relation to the idea of achieving glory. Most importantly, it is about honesty, inspiration and fun.

Contact: benguttin@gmail.com

John Hampton

 John Hampton is a BFA student at the University of Regina, and graduate of New Media Campus's 3d animation course. His practice is an exploration of the experience of the individual's relationship with society. . His hobbies include playing music, watching classic movies, reading, writing, building, dancing, jumping, and playing. He is generally a quiet guy waiting for opportunities for either child like fun, or debates. He loves you conditionally.

Community Star System

For the Community Star System, participants will list the stars they admire, as well a list of characteristics they admire in said star. Then they will look at their list attributes that constitute an admirable role model, and choose someone within their own lives or community that fits one or all of those attributes and write a letter to them as fan club president. When all the participants gather they will have their photos taken in groups (i.e. Everyone who listed beauty as one of their attributes in one group, and everyone who listed commitment to environmentalism in the next group), and each group will take a picture for each community star with a sign saying Mr. Smith Fan Club. Hopefully the joy all the recipients have from this honor will be hard pressed to match joy the participants will have at honoring someone in need of recognition, and it will be a small gesture towards changing or system and allowing local role models back into our lives, where they can help us learn and grow.

Kate Hartman

Kate Hartman is an artist who creates new tools for expression through innovative applications of technology. She holds a B.A. from Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts and a Masters from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her individualand collaborative projects span the fields of video, electronics, fashion, and art. Her work has been exhibited at Sony Wonder Technology Labs, the Future Fashion Show in Pisa, Ask the Robot, HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth), Maker Faire, and the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference and has been featured in Wired, the BBC World Service, and Gizmodo.   

This Device Is For You

I am developing a new line of communication devices. These devices examine the way we relate to ourselves and to others. They are assistive, demonstrative,and potentially invasive, demanding both performance and play through the avenue of physical involvement. They are an attempt to simultaneously transgress personal, social, and geographic space. They are, in a sense, a form of social intervention. This project poses the question of what it would be like for non-verbal exchanges to be elevated to device status. My goal is to examine what falls outside of the normal range of vision - that which is difficult to be captured with a phone conversation, an email, or a video chat. I am making devices (clothing and objects and organs) that provide the awkward and the unseen with a physical presence so they can occupy space and sight, sound and touch. These devices are being replicated (by hand) and mailed out into the world to be tested and documented in variety of cultural and social contexts. It is a humble attempt at creating a grander narrative about what it means to be human and how our objects, gadgets, and devices affect our relationships. They are instigators, spring boards for conversation, attempts to draw people out of themselves. The testing/video-making is a platform for engagement, an invitation for participation. It's a way to traffic an idea and see the evolution of its interpretation. The project as a whole represents a narrative that bridges physicaland digital worlds. A blog-based site houses the video created. It provides the opportunity for time-based commenting both by testers and observers. The result is an archive of cross-referenced videos that capture intimate moments and map interpretation of the ideas originally set forth through these devices. 

Contact: http://www.thisdeviceisforyou.com email: mail@thisdeviceisforyou.com

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OUR AIMS:

Hideous Beast is a collaborative effort between two artists, Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick. Through organizing structured participatory events we attempt to encourage cultural activity outside the bounds of mainstream entertainment and fabricated desire.

Critical of the audience as a passive participant, Hideous Beast seeks to coordinate events in which an acknowledged exchange between the event (as entertainment) and the spectator (as collaborator) can generate meanings beyond traditional formalized modes of entertainment.

It is our intent as artists and beings in common to shift perceptions of authorship and participation within the realm of constructed entertainment and art generated activities.

This might change though. 

FIELD TEST:  A PEER REVIEW

 Hideous Beast is invested in creating alternate forms of social exchange.  Entertainment is a platform we use to this effect.  To further this practice, we investigate the efforts of other artists and cultural producers who work in the field of relational art.  Many of these examples carry an imperative for the gesture to be repeated.  This is apparent either implicitly in the ideology and logic of the activity, or explicitly in the form of instruction sets or public presentation.  As an extension of our own search for new tactics of engagement and in order to evaluate these reproducible actions, we will recreate a number of projects that attempt to foster social exchange through entertainment.

Entertainment resides in a muddy space between the everyday and escape from the everyday.  It is a potential place for public/group exchange and collaboration.  For the conference we will initiate Field Test: A Peer Review, to select from a range of artist projects that call to be reproduced, and not only recreate these activities, but also open a dialogue for conference participants to evaluate their effectiveness.  Reproduction and criticism are both essential to sustaining social/relational practices and the communities that generate them.  We believe the OPEN Engagement conference will be a productive place to carry out these investigations.

Contact: http://hideousbeast.com info@hideousbeast.com

Hope Hilton

Hope Hilton was born in Atlanta, Georgia while her badass mom photographed it all. A cum laude graduate of the Atlanta College of Art (2003) and co-founder of the artist collective Dos Pestañeos, Hilton is currently pursuing an MFA at Hunter College in New York City. In May 2005, "Salvation Space", an exhibition space for collaboration and events, opened in her studio in Manhattan. As an artist Hilton curates, collaborates, designs, writes and walks. Recently, Hilton completed a twenty-mile walk in the Southern United States, recognizing the walk a slave named Henry made to announce the birth of her great-great grandmother.(www.therecognitions.blogspot.com)

A silent walk at night. Together.

Last September I was driving out to the ocean with friends in the middle of the night. At around midnight we began seeing people walking along the side of the road. Soon those few people became hundreds of people.  Walking silently. It was amazing. Religious. 

This is what I would like to propose. A silent walk at night. Together.

Kathe Izzo and Sal Randolph 

Born out of the spirit of intense friendship, BE SOMETHING is action as love.  A prototype for flamboyant collaboration that is as old school as it is revolution, Be Something is a rendezvous portal for participation and everyone is invited.  To date, Be Something has initiated a web exhibition of artists instructions (Time Being), an intimate festival of performances for one audience member at a time (one2one), and an evening of making moss terrariums with visitors to a New York gallery.  A collaborative project of Kathe Izzo and Sal Randolph, Be Something's focus is art as hospitality, gift, and shared experience. Both artists work and show internationally, Kathe using love as a performance medium ( http://trueloveproject.com, http://publicloveproject.com ) and Sal with social architectures and gift economies ( http://salrandolph.com ). 

Empty Room

 Art making is so frequently about adding objects to the world, but in this workshop we will examine way of making art with nothing, exploring the question of what we carry with us when we walk into an empty room and the possibilities inherent in removals, lack, quiet, and receiving.  As Cage would offer, "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it."

In the movie "The Lives of Others,"  the Stasi put a playwright under surveillance. While eavesdropping, the appointed policeman is so moved by the depth & texture of the artist's daily life – cooking, entertaining, romance, poetry – that he begins to secretly protect the artist. The simplest creative acts are so stunning to the policeman that he sits in tears merely listening to the playwright's everyday activities.  An article in the New York Times, "Why We Believe," explored why people continue to believe in various forms of God. People with faith often thrive, l eading happier lives, and this can also be said of those who believe and partake in self-expression and art. Unnecessary activities can certain kind of invisible thriving, an increased quality of life.  How can this invisible value be measured? 

 During EMPTY ROOM, we will begin by physically removing as many objects as possible from the meeting room and cleaning the space together.  In this empty space we will meditate and, led with a few simple instructions, will examine what we carry with us both materially and immaterially (expectations, ideas, habits, memories, capacities).  We will experiment with giving and receiving some of what we have.  The smallest of artistic interactions will be explored, tiny interventions into the field of being. A short closing meditation will close the performance, sealing the transactions.  There will be the opportunity to discuss the exchanges following this closing ritual.

Contact: hello@besomething.org website: http://besomething.org

Adele Jackson

Adele Jackson is a social arts practitioner. A commitment to art for social, personal and environmental well-being and development underpins all of herwork. With a First Class Honours degree in Arts Education and an MA in Global Education through Art, Adele currently works as a Community Arts Project Manger as well as developing collaborative projects with other artists andcommunities in the UK and in India. Current journal articles include:‘Socio-cultural processes of Teaching and Learning’, Education 3-13 and Cultural Diversity through the Art Curriculum’ Development Education Journal. Articles to be published February 2008. 

Developing a socially engaged practice: an artist’s reflections

Adele will offer an illustrated presentation mapping the development of her practice towards being socially engaged. The presentation will chart a paradigm shift away from the creation of paintings reflectingan inward-facing perspective towards engagement with socio-political perspectives of disablement and empowerment through to the concept of art as a visual language and avehicle for people to articulate and represent their own voices and lives. During the presentation Adele aims to articulate poignant questions and concerns that she has faced and to acknowledge the artists, writers that have influenced and informed her thinking. 

Contact: studio_adele@yahoo.co.uk

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Hannah Miami Jickling, Helen Reed and Jen Weih 

Hannah Miami Jickling spends most of her time between Dawson City and Toronto. In recent years, she has been developing her practice as a snow shoveller, hairdresser, tropical stylist and exotic vacationer. She works individually and collaboratively with a soft spot for free and found materials.  

Helen Reed enjoys company and coworkers. She co-facilitates the web-based project DOUBLEBOUNCE, which archives the documentation of long distance performance work, with occasional shows and publications. Last summer she ran an artist residency program out of her tent trailer called “The Weekenders.”  She is particularly interested in social activity and the potential of being with. www.doublebounce.org www.theweekenders.org  

Jen Weih is an artist and organizer of things, events, and ideas.  Her work ranges from site specific installation, to media arts programming, myspace, both high tech and low-fi public interventions, community festivals andfictional public spaces. She has recently returned to Vancouver from NewYork City. 

FREE PIZZA!!!

For all that you have done, and all that you have yet to do. 

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Jessie Kahnweiler

Jessie Kahnweiler was born in Cincinnati, OH on February 8th 1985.Five years later she moved to Atlanta, Ga where lived until she moved to California to attend the University of Redlands. Jessie's film education began during the summer of 2003 when she attended Girls Film School in Sante Fe, NM. Along with working at Girls Film School the following summer, Jessie has interned at multiple independent production companies in New York City as well as served as a production assistant on various film sets. During her college career Jessie produced a number of documentary film projects, photographic essays, and non-fiction short stories. Jessie is the co-founder of TOPAS (Transformation of People and Space) an art collective focusing on the practice of non-traditional art exhibition. Jessie is part ofthe Johnston Center for Integrative studies where she is expected to graduate with a BA in May of 2007 with an emphasis entitled "The Active Documentary; Self, Space, and Society". 

Little America

Documentary, 18 Mintues "Little America" explores the lives of truck drivers in and around southern California.  Our culture is so dependent on trucks for all ofour consumer goods yet truck drivers remain completely invisible within society. This film travels around the southwest interviewing truck drivers from all walks of life. What drives these men and women to spend the majority of their lives inside a truck? How does our society contribute to the social taboo against truck drivers? In a world where what you do defines who you are, "Little America" gives visibility to the people behind the wheel. 

Contact: Jbk840@gmail.com

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kanarinka

kanarinka aka Catherine D'Ignazio is a new media artist and occasional curator. She has a BA in International Relations from Tufts University and an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art. Her research interests include the politics of digital information, site-specific and locative media, feminist performance art, participatory culture and the emotional landscape of Homeland Insecurity. She works collaboratively to create drawings, performances, software, and experimental social gatherings both online and off. She is Co-Director of the non-profit collective iKatun, member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and teaches at RISD’s Digital+Media Graduate Program and Emerson College. kanarinka also collaborates with groups like spurse and Sifting the Inner Belt. www.ikatun.com www.infinitelysmallthings.net  

All The Things We Didn't Say 

A conference is about talking to each other. But over the course ofthis conference, I propose to record the spaces and times where no one is talking. I will focus particularly on the very brief, momentary lull of conversation at mealtimes when we eat together, but I may also gather short sounds from spots of "silence" (or non-talking) in the conference rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms. These moments will be strung together to form one sound piece. Ideally,there would be a time towards the end of the conference to do a collaborative listening event where we, all together, listen to the things we didn't say. I will also post the piece on my website for people to listen or download via podcast after the conference.

Contact: kanarinka@ikatun.com 

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Mike Keller

Mike Keller practices art and Shambhala Buddhism in Tucson, Arizona. Previously he exhibited visual art in juried exhibitions around the U.S., exploring the terrain of art. Unfulfilled by that work, he has grown a relational practice that invites others to greater self-understanding and openness. He earned the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.  For more information, please see www.dawachodrak.com 

Invitation to Acceptance 

This project invites conference participants to explore meanings and experiences of open engagement. Engage has various meanings: To bring troops into conflict with an enemy? aggressive, seeking to dominate. Or, to attract and hold fast, involving another in some activity? which can also hold some aggressiveness, if one's intent is to gain something from the other. Engage may also be used as in the French word, engager? to invite? suggesting an openness toward another and having the potential of being without aggression. To be open is to be free from obstructions? obstructions to oneself and obstructions to others. Practicing openness may result inacceptance of oneself and others, ultimately unconditional acceptance. Participants in this project will listen to themselves and others as ameans of practicing openness. To listen to themselves, participants will contemplate their ownself-acceptance:  What in themselves do they unconditionally accept? What do they not? Then, participants will listen to people of Regina not involved in the conference.  Members of the public will be invited to be listened to? without judgment or evaluation, with out preconceived notions, without interruption, but with the full attention of the listener.  Each participant will listen one-on-one to a number of individuals. Then, participants will gather to discuss their experiences of listening to themselves during contemplation and listening to others. An informal presentation of the fruition of the project will be made to conference participants. Participants are asked to register in advance of the conference by sending an email to Mike@dawachodrak.com 

Contact: Mike@dawachodrak.com

Lynn Marie Kirby

Lynn Marie Kirby's multimedia practice celebrates the magic of ever-day life. Her work is shown in galleries, museums and festivals, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pompidou Centre, Paris, Manege, St. Petersburg; Portland Museum of Art; the Getty, in LA; Cinematheque and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She is the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Djerassi Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts. She is a Professor of graduate and undergraduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts and lives in San Francisco.

Project from Chisinau, Moldova/ Small Archeology of our Pockets

I propose to present the work that I will have done in June 2007 in Chisinau Moldova. I have been invited as part of the Americans Abroad program to do a project in Moldova. My project is a small intervention into ordinary life, the lives of the general population and children in institutional settings.

Living inside a culture we often overlook the ordinary objects that surround us as them seem "too ordinary" to be special. This project underlines the importance of the ordinary in our lives.

The scan is a way to mark the passage of daily life and remember the little objects that serve at once as an archeology of daily life at a particular time, and the containers of our memories. Different from photographing an object, we can, during scanning, record through movement, our relation to the object we scan.

I will be working with a cross section of the Chisinau community, from school children to professionals, public employees to wine merchants. I will work with each participant to scan her or his object, exploring/ exposing its emotional undercurrent

In addition to working with members of the Chisinau community I will do a series of scans in an orphanage or home for children whose parents are away. Because of the high state of unemployment in Moldova, many parents must leave to find work outside the country. When leaving to find work many are obliged to leave their children in orphanages/ homes to be looked after while they are away. I will be working with these children, scanning the objects that they will have brought with them from home.

For the presentation at Open Engagement: Art After Aesthetic Distance, I would like to show and talk about the work that gets made in these workshops in Moldova. If possible I would like to ask conference goers to participate in a scanning session as they enter the conference. I would ask anyone who is interested, to scan something precious that they are carrying with them. I will project these images as portraits of the conference attendees.

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Lois Klassen 

Lois Klassen has lived and made art in rural Manitoba and Vancouver. A habitual community worker, she established a rural arts centre in Hamiota, Manitoba; she helped to initiate ‘Artist Trading Cards’ in Vancouver; she is helps organize open-screening nights at Video In; and she has been an organizer of mail art events since the 1990’s. Her video installations and performances have been exhibited at Video In, The Western Front, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba; Berlin, Cuba; and countless alternative sites throughout the mail art world. She has just completed a Diploma of Art History from UBC.

Comforter Art-Action: a Long-Range Investigation into Bedding and Displacement

 In October 2001 the US invaded Afghanistan causing the displacement of over 1 million people. All of this was happening in a place where an estimated 4 million were already displaced from two previous decades of conflict. These numbers and the seeming futility of the escalating violence motivated Lois Klassen, in 2001, to begin a life-long social habit. She decided to take up her mother’s habit of making humanitarian blankets for those displaced by war and disaster, but to make the habit operational within an art community context. Described as an on-going art intervention, Comforter Art-Action brings together artists, friends, children, community groups to produce humanitarian blankets and to develop a dialogue about the issues surrounding human displacement and humanitarianism.

 This illustrated talk explains how Comforter Art-Action makes use of Mail Art networks, how it involves small gatherings of artists and supporters in Vancouver, and how documentation and correspondence materialize the action on an international scale. Through a look at artists’ use of the bed and bedding as a subject, the presentation will consider strategies of activation through bed linens. From Manet’s bedded but activated nude to Rauschenberg’s paint soaked blankets to the unmade bed in the billboards of Felix Gonzales-Torres, bedding as an art subject confronts security and demands a response.

 This presentation will involve the distribution of instructions for making the patchwork blankets that are accepted by relief organizations and a call for participation in Comforter Art-Action through sharing of fabrics or the making of a blanket top. It coincides with the launch of the third bookwork that acts as documentation of Comforter Art-Action events and participants. Finally, Lois Klassen will gather fabric from the participants and experiences of Open Engagement. This residue will become a commemorative blanket for distribution to a relief organization soon after the conference. An image of the completed blanket will be sent to contributors.

Contact: loiszing@telus.net   and http://loiszing.blogs.com

Lee Knuttila

Lee Knuttila is one of the handful of students in York University’s graduate program in Cinema and Media studies. Before coming to Toronto he finished a BA hons in Film Studies and a B.A. in English at the University of Regina. His proposed thesis is on the relationship between memory and adaptation utilizing Virginia Woolf and Sally Potter’s respective treatments of Orlando. For his undergraduate honours paper, he constructed a gender regime in four of Gus Van Sant’s films to discuss masculinity, authorship, and representation in contemporary cinema. 

Les Vampires: Cinema and Contemporary Viewership

Philippe Guérande, the wily journalist, spends the majority of Louis Feuillade’s “Les Vampires” (1915) attempting to decode and decipher a band of criminals who terrorize France’s bourgeois elite. Throughout the seven-hour silent crime serial the criminal band, known as the Vampires, climb through windows, disappear down alleyways, scale roofs and elude authorities with illusions. Although perhaps the vampires greatest feat is to provide an extended allegory for film before 1915, the cinema spectator, and the anxieties about the relationship between artwork and audience. Before the rise of filmmaking as industry, the normalizing of linear narrative film language, and the disassociation from vaudeville, cinema offered an exhibition space marked by direct address and visual curiosity that supplied pleasure through public spectacle and interaction rather than private voyeurism and narrative absorption. Using the allegory of cinema as vampire, my paper will chart the similarities between the ‘cinema of attractions’ as presented by the on-screen ‘magic’ of the criminals and how the threat to the bourgeoisie was really the threat of cinema’s proletarian public sphere, which broke away from the class restrictions of high art, and the then unpredicted embrace women and a wide array of ethnic groups had in these public event. 

Given the scope and aim of “Open Engagement”, I would like to produce a form of presentation that mirrors my paper’s content. Although open to collaboration and change, one possibility is to handout copies of the paper to audience members at the Regina Public Library theatre. Marked by a vaudeville inspired poster at the marquee, cinemagoers would be connected to Feuillade’s film and audiences of the past, while maintaining their spatial relations to contemporary film and audience practices. The second would be to set up a screening space for “Les Vampires”, where I would sit and play the role of vaudeville exhibitionist, drawing attention to elements of my paper like the film’s borderless vampires, chaotic storyline, zones of thematic anxieties, and its relationship to audiences then and now. Through an active model, I hope to engage in art and everyday experience, using a historical moment elucidated by a film, in order to discuss the state of cinema and contemporary viewership. 

Contact: 

Lee Knuttila

MA Student in Cinema and Media Studies, York University

Email: Knuttila@mac.com

Website: http://web.mac.com/knuttila/

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Jessica James Lansdon

Jessica James Lansdon is an artist living in Arizona.  Jessica makes things out of a surfeit of discarded material goods and ideas.  She is interested in the environmental and emotional perils of consumerism, the appeal of knickknacks, new age philosophies, planned obsolescence, imperialism, & fantasy.  She is currently completing her MFA in Visual Communications at the University of Arizona.

www.jessicajames.org

Supine Dome:  a reenactment early geodesic dome experiments

First a brief presentation on the history of geodesic domes as the structure relates to institutionalized art instruction & the rise & fall of mid century optimism. 

Information will be distrbuted on the first failed dome experiments of Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, the dome fever which swept art & architecture departments,  its implementation in the commune & back to earth movements, & subsequent abandonment as domes were found to be impractical & problematic. The dome is a pertinent metaphor & instance of community endeavors: provisional, utopian, & beautiful.

 Secondly participants will be asked to perform a historical reenactment of Buckminster Fuller's initial experiments with geodesic domes.  "Bucky" came to Black Mountain in 1948. Shortly after arriving Fuller enlisted the help of those present to create a first large version of a geodesic structure which was to be built of non-rigid metal struts from venetian blinds.  In spite of the help of many students the 48 foot dome would not stand up,  & it was nicknamed the "Supine Dome".  Fuller wrote:

"Buildings are being built as fortresses, historically, really, the heavier, bigger the better. You cannot make many experiments with big stone blocks, they're going to kill you....  So I told them I want to build a building that they're not afraid at having it collapse because it's so light it can't hurt anybody, it's like confetti." 

 Then & now we are infused with a sense of expectation & potential about the necessity for community involvement and cohesive effective societal structures.  In contrast the impetus for our call for social change has drastically changed since modernism's hay day;  today we are moved not so much by the promise of technology but by the threat of technological determinism. In our reanactment each individual is responsible for a portion of the structure but must interact and cooperate with fellow participants to construct the dome.  Our supine dome will be built in less time and will be smaller than the one attempted in 1948.  It will be unstable, & likely crooked, but it will stand.  

Contact: optimistclub@gmail.com www.jessicajames.org

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Charity Marsh & Darci Anderson

Dr. Charity Marsh holds the Canada Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at University of Regina. Dr. Marsh's current research focuses on how interactive media and performance contribute to dialogues concerning regionalism, cultural identity, and community in western and northern Canada, with an emphasis on DJ culture(s) and Canadian Indigenous hip hop.

Darci Anderson is completing her doctorate in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her research interests include post-colonial theory, Indigenous/ Non-Indigenous Ethico-Political relations, psychoanalysis, and the work of Hannah Arendt.

No Limits

Seven Deadly Sins, Fifty-Two Artists, Ten Mentors, and an Artistic Director: (Re)Considering Culture and Performance at the 2005 Canada Summer Games Charity Marsh and Darci Anderson

In 1999 the National Artist Program was introduced as a component of the Canada Summer Games as a way to inject the games with more "culture." Since that time this initiative has continued to present conventional forms of performance similar to galas or variety shows, showcasing individual artistic talent, and subsequently containing each performance within the borders of its particular discipline. To date, the outcome of such an initiative has unfortunately maintained rather than dismantled strict divisions within the artistic disciplines presented by the artists, as well as between the disciplines of sport and culture. Unlike in past years, the National Artist Program of the 2005 Canada Summer Games introduced an artistic director whose vision moved the performance away from such conventional forms towards a process that provoked "a new form of performance which [was] unique, experimental, and widely unpredictable." This process included the challenge of having "to create and stage a unified and fully realized event of performance within the two-week timelines of the games, utilizing the collective resources of 52-pan Canadian emerging artists and creative athletes." Through analyses of the creative process and the final performance of the 2005 National Artist Program, these papers offer critical readings concerning how culture was produced, represented and performed at the 2005 Canada Summer Games in Regina, SK.

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Barbara Meneley

 Barbara Meneley is a dedicated member of many artist collectives and collaborations, and she likes to do things alone too.

 Past activities include day jobs and modern dance. Current activities include day jobs and visual arts.

 Future activities, only time will tell.

 'Yes'

 In the fall of 1966, view