Art Moves
A billboard project organized for Nuit Blanche by Paul Butler, the exhibition took place in dozens of 4 x 6 ft advertising poster-frames throughout downtown Toronto for one night only in October, 2009.
Invited artists were instructed to email someone of their choosing and ask them to describe in detail, a single work of art that most moved or inspired them. I corresponded with my friend Laine Gabel.
These emails were then be reproduced as serigraph prints in a mono edition and and exhibited in and outside 24 hr. convenience stores.
See How They Shine: A Simon and Garfunkel Choir (Dedicated to Lori Gordon)
In October of 2007 I was overseeing a major project and felt incredibly overwhelmed and stressed out. I was in a car with Lori Gordon, driving to an event that was part of the project. We were running late and I was in a panic. As we arrived at our destination “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on the radio. We paused and started to sing along, and by the end of the song our own rendition had an equally big finish. See How They Shine: A Simon and Garfunkel Choir (Dedicated to Lori Gordon) is a tribute to one of my closest friends, and frequent artistic collaborator, Lori Gordon. A choir comprised of Simon and Garfunkel fans in addition to Lori’s friends and family will be brought together to sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Lori and I don’t have the kind of strained, unstable working relationship that comes to mind when you think of Simon and Garfunkel. There is no power imbalance, no struggle to be the focus of attention. Since 2006 we have worked together on a variety of projects, while also finding ways to push forward the work we do as individuals. This performance, which coincides with a solo-exhibition of Lori’s work at Ampersand International Arts, is no exception.
“You will never be as shiny as today” is my favorite quote from Lori’s Snippets project. For me it speaks to the kind of person that she is and the way that comes through in her artwork. She lets you see your value and the value of others. Her work asks you to appreciate the people around you, whether they be friends, loved ones or strangers who you overhear in public. In the words of Simon and Garfunkel, she lets us see that our time has come to shine.
Neighborhood Chorus
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because group singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue. -Brian Eno
A door to door survey took place in the Sherwood Village area, knocking on doors and asking the homeowners to take the time to fill out a music questionnaire which included the question “What is your favorite song?” Using the information culled from the surveys, choirs of people learned the favorite songs of several members the Sherwood Village area together. A twist on caroling, we returned back to a selection of the homes of the residents who answered the questionnaire and sang them their favorite songs.
Neighborhood Chorus took place the week of June 16-20, 2009. Four songs in total were performed: Left and Leaving by The Weakerthans, God Only Knows by The Beach Boys, I Woke Up Today by Port O’Brien, and I’m On Fire by Bruce Springsteen. Video documentation of the performances are on view at the Dunlop Sherwood Village Branch Gallery from August 1-October 11.
Thank You: Megan Codilan, Eric Hill, Katherine Boyer, Jason Wright, Barbara Meneley, Jeff Nye, Andrea Young, Devon Dozlaw, Braden Henrie, Lauren Fournier, Justin Young, Amanda Scandrett, Nick Bonokoski, Michelle Kruger, Jenelle Remple, Madamme Katz and her grade 3 class, and everyone else that participated in the Neighborhood Chorus.
You Can Have it All
"If you want, want my time, take it baby. And if you want my last dime, take it baby. You can have it all."
— Yo La Tengo
As part of the exhibition No Gallery Left Behind for one day in the gallery a rotating group of musicians played Yo La Tengo’s You Can Have It All and accompanied visitors to the space who wanted to join in and sing.
Remaking Rumours
Remaking Rumours brought together over 50 people to recreate the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours. For two weeks a recording studio was filled with individuals and bands, many meeting for the first time, each there to rerecord a track from Rumours. Before I started this project, I talked to a curator friend of mine about what I was planning to do. He felt that the project would be more compelling if I had just one group of people recreate the album in its entirety. I told him that for me it was not about remaking the struggle of a small group of specific individuals, but using Rumours as a way of showing the broader difficulties of relationships and working together, while simultaneously highlighting the inspiring results that it can produce.
Sample track from Remaking Rumours album:
Ukulele, vocals: Emily McGlynn
Guitar, vocals: Nate Ndosi
Vocals: Sarah Glaser
Mixed: Bennett Smith, Jen Delos Reyes
Block Party, 2009
A collaborative exhibition with Lori Gordon and Jessica James Lansdon
My work explores connections, relationships and interactions through situating participation, sharing, group work and collaborations within an artistic discourse.*
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.**
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
** Jessica James Lansdon, artist statement, 2009