
Resting, Walking, Place-Making: How Do We Talk About Invisible, Liminal Spaces in Art?
March 23, 2018, 10am – 6pm
Art Hive, McGill University, 3700 McTavish, (1st floor) Montreal
Free and open to the public
Moving across the various spaces in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, this day of reflections will engage in an embodied dialogue around the three themes that have comprised Victoria Stanton’s program in residence (namely Resting, Walking, Place-Making). Investigating how these themes subtly imbue the frameworks we may use for connecting art and education, this culminating event occurring toward the end of her residence invites members of the Faculty of Education, along with artists/scholars from the national and international community to share their explorations in a convivial setting, where performances, demonstrations and conversations can intermingle, and potentially generate new knowledges around the role of these more invisible practices within larger creative processes.
WITH OFFERINGS BY:
→Victoria Stanton – (P. Lantz AiR) – Art Walk on Mount-Royal
Victoria invites you on a silent, collective walk on the mountain. Walking is as mundane an activity as it is profound. Not only does it allow a moment of being with our thoughts – a precious time to process events (big and small) – it also opens a space for breath and time for decompression. Or to leave thoughts behind. Maybe even to notice, and connect with, what is circulating around us. Following up on the heels of the Weekly Art Walk, this subtle, performative group action is a moment to arrive, before jumping into the activities of the day.
→ Lori Beavis (P. Lantz Coordinator) – Making Bannock … a space for contemplation
Lori’s presentation will be part cooking lesson, part dialogue. The food we make is so often connected to family history with recipes handed down from one generation to another. In many ways this has been Lori’s experience and she has made her grandmother’s recipes part of her art practice – this action has opened a space for her to “talk” to her grandmother about thoughts on shared cultural identity as Lori writes out or makes the recipes. During this presentation, as she prepares a round of bannock, she will discuss how one may use the process of preparing food as an opportunity to contemplate memory and identity.
Lori’s presentation enacts a space of collective contemplation, the preparing of food as “performance” becoming an act of witnessing while also creating a suspension of time; a moment of collective rest. Further, the sharing of this recipe – and history/identity – itself becomes an act of education, where transmission (of knowledge, of skills, or histories) is the very basis of the piece; where wellbeing/care, learning and community intersect.
→ Johannes Zits (Artist and Curator, Toronto) – Getting Into Nothing
Johannes’ performance is structured around a series of actions without intention or direction. Inspired by Victoria’s project, as a way to frame these actions, he is working with emptiness, waiting, stillness, rest, inaction, as well as pauses and gaps. These elements explore the possibility that nothing can become something within a given context.
For Johannes, “getting into nothing” means trying to work through the notion of “embodying” as a kind of total approach that shows us as we are, and as we try to exist, learn, think, do… Inevitably struggling with barely being there at all. As a queer (and aging) male, Johannes and his performance invite – while enacting – an embodied consideration of what it means to put oneself totally and quite physically into such situations that strangely celebrate the human condition, in all its guises. The piece also works to symbolically express a certain bare minimum of the human condition, holding various precarious states while engendering knowledge at its foundational level; of where (and how) the body (and all its faculties) may take risks through risking beautiful vulnerability.
→ Robert Luzar (Bath School of Art and Design, Lecturer) – Sanded Steps, Standing Over Stones
Robert proposes a participatory performance: four people stand apart and over an area of sand mixed with debris (e.g. crumbs, pebbles from pavement found and gathered around the education building, spread throughout a room). The work starts over a kind of public square. In plain view, the group gently sweeps the sand – but who notices? Are the four “occupying” the square or room? Or holding a spot, a symbolically private island? The questions are open. The work goes as it appears. Throughout the span of the piece, four people step from one end of the sand to another. Each slowly sweeps away footprints left from the other. Sometimes one person stops walking. Another walks over, moving them on. “Move on” the person says. “Nothing to see!” Another responds. And yet another: “Under the stones is the beach!” These and other statements, and longer texts, are said, echoing words from student demonstrations (c.1968), revolutionary change, and praxis. While this action takes place, the audience (who themselves may become participants) is offered texts printed on paper, and are asked to quietly read out them out. By reading out in hushed tones, like barely heard whispers, the sounds of the sweeping and moving around become pronounced. Sounds of disquiet and unrest. Either way the work goes on, sweeping, stepping, stopping, then walking or pacing again, reading and sounding, and so forth… until all the sand is swept across the stones/the floor. The collective action becomes traceless. Metaphors of change, work, and everyday life are symbolically cleared. The symbolic public square is swept.
Here, Robert’s piece engages education and pedagogy via the combined act of sand sweeping, reading and passing on – of texts, actions, and reflections. The act of people/students passing in and out of this space means turning the location into a kind of peripatetic environment where individual and collective reflection occurs via the passing of something; where students and the public at large would be handed printed pages from books (emancipatory pedagogy such as Paolo Friere and related radical literature, for example Fanon, Weil, Horkheimer/Adorno) by authors whose ideas have engaged with education, freedom and equality.
→ Jessica Giambagno (McGill, B.Ed) – The Community Within
Jessica, a pre-service teacher and ongoing participant in Victoria’s project, will be leading a participatory discussion that looks at the interest in creating much needed spaces of dialogue within the university setting. Beyond meetings that take place formally (for example in the completion of group class projects) or informally (having coffee between classes) the idea here is to collectively draft a spontaneously constructed “plan of action” – taking suggestions from the audience in a kind of brainstorming session where we collectively communicate common (or divergent) desires around tools for building community – in whatever context we might find ourselves. Here, place-making is addressed in relation to a specific context (being an undergraduate student in Education at McGill) but one that could easily relate to other contexts as well.
Inviting Jessica to be part of this event and lead a discussion on The Community Within stems from a creative dialogue which began during the fall semester. What started as the seed for a classroom project turned into an ongoing an evolving exchange, where the foundational components of Victoria’s project (as intersecting with Jessica’s assignment) emerged to demonstrate how art, when brought into the realm of the social, the experiential and the environmental, is not only an object that stands outside us to be contemplated in a detached way but may come directly into dialogue with education itself; how invisible processes in the everyday can become creative and impact learning.
→ Maren Gube (McGill, PhD Candidate, Department of Educational & Counselling Psychology) – Understanding Creativity
In leading up to a workshop on Creativity that Victoria would be facilitating during the winter semester in Maren’s course (Education of Talented and Gifted Students), Maren and Victoria have been regularly meeting to discuss the form and content of this lesson. Going on walks, sharing readings and talking in the Art Hive have characterized their encounters, which began during the fall semester. Taking an otherwise “ordinary” formula of preparation, the two agreed to capitalize on both Maren’s research as a PhD student (namely the role of affective and motivational processes in supporting creative thinking) and the themes of Victoria’s residence to underline the possibility for (and importance of) highlighting a process of preparation – seeing the “leading up to” as just as important as the event itself (Victoria giving a workshop in Maren’s class).
Together they will discuss their process of creating this space of exchange as a consciously inhabited structure, deliberately framing this experience (as art, as part of Victoria’s overall project) in order to demonstrate a living and breathing process of creativity in action; of seeing the quality of the way we spend time together, while an unquantifiable element, as elemental in approaching not only art making but teaching about artistic & creative process.
Performance presentations will be followed by informal discussion/Q & A. Victoria will moderate all discussions post presentation. Light refreshments will be provided.
Schedule (subject to change)
• 10am… arrival and prepare to go out again for:
• 10:30am – 11:30am Art Walk With Victoria
Location: Circuit up on Mont-Royal
• 11:45am – 12:45pm: Lori Beavis – Making Bannock
Location: Art Hive
• 12:45pm – 1:30pm: Lunch break (bring a lunch; light snacks & juice provided)
Location: Art Hive & surrounding spaces
• 1:30pm – 2:30pm: Robert Luzar – Sanded Steps
Location: Library (raw space next to Art Hive)
• 2:45pm – 3:45pm: Johannes Zits – Getting Into Nothing
Location: Coach House, room 200
• 4pm – 5pm: Jessica Giambagno – The Community Within
Location: Art Hive
• 5:15 – 6pm: Maren Gube – Understanding Creativity
Location: Art Hive
• 6pm: snacks & beverages, informal chat
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This event is being presented by: the McGill Faculty of Education, the McGill Institute for Human Development and Well-Being, the McGill Art Hive Initiative, and the P. Lantz Initiative for Excellence in Education and the Arts.