PART 5
You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death - PART 5
Water (2024)
12-HOUR EVENT DECEMBER 12, 2024
In-person and streaming from the artLAB at the Department of Visual Arts, Western University, London, Ontario.
"Water (Deshkan Ziibi)” is curated by Christof Migone, Sheri Osden Nault, and Ruth Skinner.
Out of the blue, blue planet, into the molecular, cellular. Time’s involved. Time runs through it. Hydrophonics, hydrojams. Glistening gestures. Swimsink. Cloud seeding, drought, contamination, advisories. Nautical sea, nausea. Leagues under. Deep diver. Pearl mother. Mariana. We quickly see this could go on forever, for, as Yve Lomax put it in Sounding the Event: “Yes, this noisy restless sea is pure multiplicity: it is mixture, it is contingency and it is turbulent.” Or, put even more succinctly, as Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar realizes: “isolating a wave is not easy.”
This year’s event, the 5th edition in the 12-part annual series, will willingly wade the time away, in eddies, in sinks, in drains, in backwaters, through root systems, capillaries, infiltrating, inundating our "humid brains" (Isabelle Stengers).
The last 20 minutes of every hour will feature 12 bodies of water as part of the Place (Dis) series. A body of water may be an ocean, a sea, a glacier, a lake, a river, a stream, a steam, a swamp, a well, a swell, a pond, a puddle, a spittle, a sniffle, a rill, a creek, a tear, a molecule. It may be part of a flood or spill, a drip or drop. It may be dammed, bottled, glassed. It can flow, freeze, steam, or boil. It can help grow or drown. It can wave or stagnate. It can be part of juice, tea, coffee, sauce. It can cause mould or just be moist. It can seep, leak, ooze. A body of water is a place that displaces.
"The Anishinaabek People refer to the Thames River as Deshkan Ziibi (which means Antler River in Ojibwe / Anishnaabemowin language). The river has also been called Askunessippi (Antlered River) by the Neutrals and La Tranchée (later La Tranche, which means the Trench) by early French explorers, settlers and fur traders. In 1793, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe named the river the Thames River after the River Thames in England." (Source: Upper Thames River Conservation Authority).
Western University is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Neutral (Chonnonton) peoples, on lands connected to several Treaties including Treaty 6 London Township, Treaty 7 Sombra Township, Treaty 21 Longwoods and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum. This place continues to be home to diverse Indigenous peoples who are recognized as contemporary stewards of the land and vital contributors to society.
LINKS:
- Chippewas of the Thames First Nation
- Oneida Nation of the Thames
- Delaware Nation
PRESENTED BY
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
RADIOS & STREAMERS
PROGRAMME
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 1
9 PST, 12 EST, 17 GMT, 18 CET, 4 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 2
10 PST, 13 EST, 18 GMT, 19 CET, 5 AEDT
Glenfiddich Artists in Residence PRESENTS Penelope Cain
Rimlands
Rimlands are peripheries to centres. The term ‘Rimlands’ was coined by WWI British politician, Halford John Mackinder, to describe that which was not the centre, the heartland. Rimlands by Penelope Cain was filmed in the Cromarty Firth, a watery body off the Black Isle, Northern Scotland. With a 5,500 year old Neolithic settlement on the landward side and a line of oil rigs on the seaward, as they overwinter in the Cromerty Firth awaiting oil price fluctuations, the site speaks of human oceanside activities, harvests and extractions across 8000 years. This video is a brief meditation and performative action, walking the point calculated to be halfway between high tide and low along this coastal intersection of time, site and human infrastructure.
The works featured during this hour consider two peripheral and over-the-horizon watery sites, a remote coastline in far North Scotland (Rimlands), and an even more remote saltpan in the Atacama desert (Before Air There Was Water, see below). Linked by a shared past as the global ocean, before oceanic names and geopolitical boundaries. These two works are also linked by their simultaneous tenuous state of watery periphery while connected through real-world power struggles to geopolitical and earth-bound centres.
The Glenfiddich Artists in Residence program invites breakthrough and award-winning artists from all over the world – Canada, China, Scotland, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States of America – to the historic setting of the Glenfiddich Distillery, deep in the highlands of Scotland, to create original pieces of art. Every summer since 2002, we bring bright new talent to stay with us. Penelope Cain was the artist-in-residence in 2019 representing Australia.
Place (Dis) - 2
The last twenty minutes of the 2nd hour features Penelope Cain's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.
Before Air There Was Water
The Atacama salare is a salt-plain in the driest of deserts, where the annual rainfall is 15 mm (0.6 in.) per year. A deep-time land-locked sea, now dehydrated, molecularly recalling memories of past oceans through its deep salty bed, up to hundreds of meters deep. Thirty per cent (30%) of the world's lithium is sourced from here, by pumping lithium rich salty groundwater up to 100 meters below the ground, to evaporate in shallow ponds. Saline groundwater is one of the few free forms of water in Chile so the economics of dehydrating groundwater meet the Global North's demand for low priced lithium to power a green energy revolution. A site encompassing a complexity of contested water; needed by the uniquely coevolved ecosystem and demanded by energy transition needs, to help address human induced climate change. This video and sound work meditates via these complexities on this site and its watery oceanic deep-time memories.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 3
11 PST, 14 EST, 19 GMT, 20 CET, 6 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 4
12 PST, 15 EST, 20 GMT, 21 CET, 7 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 5
13 PST, 16 EST, 21 GMT, 22 CET, 8 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 6
14 PST, 17 EST, 22 GMT, 23 CET, 9 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 7
15 PST, 18 EST, 23 GMT, 00 CET, 10 AEDT
Thames Art Gallery PRESENTS Patrick Mahon, Dickson Bou, Sharmistha Kar, Thomas Mahon, Valerie Mills-Milde, & Quinn Smallboy
Shiprwreckiana
Shipwrecks figure in our cultural and ‘aqueous’ imaginaries for myriad reasons. Arguably, the notion of voyages gone awry takes on increased significance in our time when climate disasters and their affects, and the deleterious results of colonialism (which has relied so significantly on shipping) are everyday realities. Yet shipwrecks are also suggestive of other narratives: reminders that, historically, transformation has often arisen alongside tragedy and disaster, whether real or metaphorical. A recent volume, The Ancient Sea: The Utopian and Catastrophic in Classical Narratives and their Reception (2022) , edited by Hamish Williams and Ross Clare, is filled with texts suggesting more complex ways that watery wreckage tales might be construed. Shiprwreckiana is a multi-medium project that is comprised of a combination of recorded video and sound, it will include real time interventions deploying sculptural materials, lighting, spoken word, and water itself. Patrick Mahon and collaborators, some of whom have worked with him before on the project, GardenShip and State, will present an allusive event where references to water and shipwrecks forge abstracted spaces marked by trouble, beauty and difference.
The Thames Art Gallery (TAG) is a non-profit gallery dedicated to promoting the understanding, appreciation, conservation, and enjoyment of the visual arts in the community of Chatham-Kent for present and future generations. TAG's primary curatorial activity is the interpretation of contemporary Canadian art and its history, with a focus on artists from the region of south-western Ontario. We research and produce exhibitions in a range of media, and aspire to be responsive to the challenges of presenting high quality, innovative art in all forms, including installations, electronic and interactive works, websites, film, video and performance, both within the Gallery and off-site. The exhibitions program is designed to provoke, inspire and encourage reflection on the particularities of our locale and population, and extend the definition of art as it relates to broader contemporary culture.
Place (Dis) - 7
The last twenty minutes of the 7th hour features the contribution of the Shipwreckiana Collective to the Place (Dis) series.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 8
16 PST, 19 EST, 00 GMT, 01 CET, 11 AEDT
Futura Resistenza PRESENTS Christof Migone
Temper (Length Wave)
Premiere of a new piece featuring twelve vintage electronic metronomes. They are all set to the slowest speed, and are arranged in a wavy line. They will be manipulated and mixed so that they no longer demarcate time but scramble it, stir it, muddle it. Each metronome sounds a bit differently, due to wear and tear, plus the fact that there are various models and brands. Some don’t keep time steadily, others emit a noticeably loud electrical hum. None of them can be depended on for accuracy, in fact, they each exude an idiosyncratic character. It’s clear that each one much prefers to be on its own wavelength.
The above describes the live version that will be presented in the artLAB. Simultaneously, the online version will stream a prerecorded version that will be mixed with the work The Release Into Motion - see description below.
Performed by Masha Kouznetsova and Ellen Moffat.
A mouth holding a tomato frozen into a block of ice until both melt and fall off. At the onset the teeth can barely hold, the block is so hard, so cold, hands out of frame help. Slowly but surely the teeth sink in. The pace is so protracted a good part of the face is in pain from the bite of the frost. As the ice melts drops of water fall down into a metal bucket. Each drop makes a ting and marks time. Eventually the ice block falls off and all that’s left is a mouth holding on to a melting and leaking tomato. The jaws are more active now because they can bite down deeper. The tomato eventually splits open and gravity has its way. The abject scene is of a protruding tongue in the process of escaping from the mouth.
2023 remix (audio and video) of 2000 piece. Four different mixes are included on Wet Water (Let’s Dance), a 2xCD published in 2023 by Futura Resistenza.
For this event, the 2023 version will be mixed with Temper (Length Wave) - see description above.
Futura Resistenza operates somewhere on the edges of performance, music and the visual arts. Interdisciplinary at its core, for Futura Resistenza a concert is never just a concert and a record reaches far beyond just what meets the ear. The label invites musicians and artists with direct personal connections within its community, as well as people who they simply admire and want to see published or on stage.
Place (Dis) - 8
The last twenty minutes of the 8th hour features Christof Migone's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.
Empty (Bucket)
I drown myself in a shallow bucket as opposed to an endless ocean. I am inundated by a few drops. I dunk my head over and over until all the water has spilled out of the bucket onto the floor. The slosh of the water mixes with the gasps for air. Asphyxiated, I learn how not to breathe. Suffocated, I learn to answer my own question: is a wound with no trace really a wound or is it simply thirsty?
2023 remix (audio and video) of 1997 piece. The most recent mix is included on Wet Water (Let’s Dance), a 2xCD published in 2023 by Futura Resistenza.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 9
17 PST, 20 EST, 01 GMT, 21 CET, 12 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 10
18 PST, 21 EST, 02 GMT, 03 CET, 13 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 11
19 PST, 22 EST, 02 GMT, 03 CET, 14 AEDT
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WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 12
20 PST, 23 EST, 03 GMT, 04 CET, 15 AEDT
New Adventures in Sound Art and Other Sights PRESENT Brady Marks & Mark Timmings (Wetland Project)
Wetland Project
Wetland Project is a multipart, multidisciplinary study of an environmental soundscape. Its inspiration lies in a tiny bit of Earth and the sounds that emanate from it: the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in W̱SÁNEĆ territory (Saturna Island, British Columbia). For ten years, this beautiful, reverberant soundscape featuring birds, frogs and airplanes has been investigated by artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, and musicologist Stephen Morris, and shared with audiences around the world in the form of slow radio broadcasts, new-media installations, musical performances and an artists’ book. Each iteration of Wetland Project delineates a distinct path to knowledge, a means by which the sonorous source is investigated in all of its dynamic, life-affirming power. The project’s conceptual base is rooted in an original algorithm that transforms the sound frequencies from a 24-hour field recording of the marsh into pure colour fields in flux. This metamorphosis, achieved using a colour scale that maps the pitch range in the recording onto the visible light spectrum, produces a spontaneous visual expression of the entire circadian rhythm. The synesthetic experience it provides sparks forces of apperception that re-enchant our awareness of the wetland and, by extension, of the environments we inhabit.
The artists wish to thank recording engineer Eric Lamontagne and programmer Gabrielle Odowichuk for their enormous contributions to Wetland Project.
New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) is a non-profit media arts organization that operates the NAISA North Media Arts Centre and Café in South River, Ontario, Canada. Arts presentation with a focus on sound and listening are the basis of its year-round exhibitions, online broadcasts and performances. NAISA is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinabewaki peoples covered by the Williams Treaty (1923) and Robinson-Huron Treaty (1850). NAISA recognizes the significant ongoing contributions of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples to aural culture in Canada.
Based in BC’s Lower Mainland, Other Sights is a collective whose many art projects consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public spaces and public life. The concerns of regional waterways, of the foreshore, and newly piloted studios on wheels can be found at currentsandwaves.ca.
Place (Dis) - 12
The last twenty minutes of the 12th hour features Wetland Project 's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.
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PARTICIPANTS
Dickson Bou is an interdisciplinary artist working out of London ON. His work relies on the connection he makes to the land through traveling on his bicycle. He holds a BFA from Western University and MFA from University of Victoria. He is also part of a noise/sound performance group called "Eights".
Penelope Cain’s artistic practice centres around land, water and air storytellings from the Anthropocene and Post-Carbon; these occupied, colonised, extracted and transformed lands. Informed by her biological science background, her research-based art practice is located between scientific knowledge and unearthing connective untold narratives in the world. She works across media and knowledge streams, with scientists, datasets, people and residues, drawing on more-than-human entry points to speculate on planetary storytellings and near/future mythologies, as they emerge in end-Holocene times.
Shannon Cooney is a Canadian dance artist, choreographer, dance educator, creative facilitator and Craniosacral practitioner based in Berlin since 2006. She has been creating and touring her choreographic work since 1992 which encompasses stage, installations and landscape art. She danced and toured with Toronto’s Dancemakers from 1994-2006 and continues to collaborate with independent choreographers. She created a teaching practice, Dynamic Expansion/Moveable Cinema, which are embodiment approaches that meld her experiences of contemporary dance, movement research, performance, Craniosacral bodywork and Nature. She teaches in universties, art institutions, dance companies, and movement training centres.
Sharmistha Kar is an artist from India, currently living in Montreal, Quebec. She did her MFA from Western University and is currently a doctoral student at Concordia University. Kar’s early education began in West Bengal, India, and she pursued higher education in Fine Arts at the University of Hyderabad. She continued her studio practice and worked as a lecturer in Hyderabad. She was awarded SSHRC 2024, Peter N. Thomson Graduate Scholarship, 2023, Concordia Merit Scholarship 2022, Charles Wallace India Trust Award, 2013; the Graduate Thesis Research Award, 2018 at Western University. She had exhibited in India, the United Kingdom, the USA, Finland, and Canada.
Patrick Mahon is an artist, a writer/curator, and a Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at Western University, in London, Canada. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Recent solo and group exhibitions include, Patrick Mahon: Messagers’ Forum, Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, On (2020-21); Written on the Earth, McIntosh Gallery, London, ON, curated by Helen Gregory, (group exhibition, 2021); and GardenShip and State, Museum London, London, ON, co-curated by Patrick Mahon and Jeff Thomas, (group exhibition, 2021; a second presentation at Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, 2024). The exhibition was one of two finalists for the Ontario Galleries Exhibition of the Year in 2022. Patrick’s work is included in numerous private, corporate, and museum collections.
Thomas Mahon is a designer and architect based in Brooklyn. He has worked across a wide range of projects and media, from graphic design to urban scale initiatives, with an interest in ecology and environmental equity. Past work in this area includes a wetland revitalization project for the Jordan River with EcoPeace Middle East, and the master plan of a sustainable community on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He received a Bachelor in Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University, where he studied architectural integration methods for urban farming.
Brady Marks is a computational artist who lives and works in xwməθkwəy’əm, səlilwətaɬ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territories (Vancouver, BC). She holds a M.Sc. in Interactive Arts from Simon Fraser University and teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Marks is concerned with our technological entanglement and creates media configurations that express a middle way between technological fetishism and dystopian fantasies. She works with technology and against technological thinking. Her specialization exploring sound, light and interaction is informed by a broad understanding of the contemporary issues and technologies driving our computer-mediated world.
Christof Migone‘s research delves into language & voice, bodies & performance, intimacy & complicity, sound & silence, rhythmics & kinetics, translation & referentiality, stillness & imperceptibility, structure & improvisation, play & pathos, pedagogy & unlearning, failure & endurance. Current and ongoing investigations: microphone hitting, book flipping, tongue extruding, record releasing, word hyphenating, para-pedagogical positioning, careless curating, noise making, sequitur following, paper passing, interval counting, rhythm repeating, phone licking, machine fingering, playlist compiling, and silence listening.
Valerie Mills-Milde is the author of the novel “After Drowning”, (Inanna Publications) which won the 2017 Silver Ippy (Independent Publisher Books Award) for Contemporary Fiction. Her second novel, “The Land’s Long Reach”, (Inanna Publications, 2018) received a “Very Best” Award from the Miramichi Reader. Valerie’s short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, and a collection of these was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award. Her latest novel, “The Current Between”, is set over the days of the Great Storm of 1913 in Huron and Bruce counties and was recently released through AOS Publishing.
Sheri Osden Nault is an artist, community worker, and Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Western Ontario. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. Through this, they consider embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous futurist framework. Methodologically, they prioritize tactile ways of knowing and learning from more than human kin. Their research engages anti-colonial, queer, Indigenous feminist, and ecological theory and praxis. They are also a tattooer the Indigenous tattoo revival movement in so-called Canada, and run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
Ruth Skinner works as an arts organizer, researcher, curator, publisher and educator in London, Ontario. Her research encompasses experimental publishing practices and artists' books; forensics and clairvoyance; histories, theories of representation & spectatorship; digital & media literacy, archival practices & access; artist-run culture in Canada. She has operated as the art imprint Edna Press since 2017, and is a co-organizer of Support project space alongside Tegan Moore and Liza Eurich. She is the current Director of Forest City Gallery, is part of the Advisory Circle for the newly revitalized Embassy Cultural House, and was a cofounder of Good Sport Gallery.
Currently, Quinn Smallboy’s artistic practice investigates what it means to be a “contemporary Indigenous artist.” Specifically, he questions how customary symbols and icons of Indigenous culture translate into painting, sculpture, and installation. Smallboy’s drum-related works are a flip on a familiar shape within Indigenous culture. For Quinn, this idea of flipping or reshaping familiar objects provides a new look at Indigenous storytelling.
Mark Timmings is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer who explores perceptions of place by gathering environmental data from around his home on TEḴTEḴSEN (Saturna Island, BC) and enfolding them into the domains of art and music. Timmings creates bodies of work that operate as conceptual machines driven by algorithmic systems. His works intimate an infinite and vital web of interconnecting natural cycles and human patterns by transforming field observations and aspects of science into aesthetic considerations and contemplative experiences. These challenging and magical transformations resonate far beyond the source material.