Far Away So Close Part III

PART III

Alana Bartol Mike Bourscheid David Semeniuk

September 12–October 31, 2015 Access Gallery Curated by Kimberly Phillips

PART III

Alana Bartol Mike Bourscheid David Semeniuk

September 12–October 31, 2015 Access Gallery Curated by Kimberly Phillips

4

Acknowledgements

9

The Unreasonable Silence of the World Kimberly Phillips

21

Put some tea tree oil on it Steffanie Ling

32

Untitled (

)

Tanya Lukin Linklater 36

Images

74

List of Works

79

Biographies

Acknowledgements Kimberly Phillips: I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Alana Bartol, Mike Bourscheid, and David Semeniuk, whose supple, witty practices have offered such fertile ground for myself as curator and for our audiences. We were fortunate to enjoy a languid pace for the development of this project, and I am also thankful for each artist’s ability and willingness, over many months, to share knowledge and converse about the web of ideas and elements that inform their work. This project has been greatly enriched by the writings of Tanya Lukin Linklater and Steffanie Ling, and I thank them for their generous engagement. Access gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of BC through the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming, the City of Vancouver, the Burrard Arts Foundation, and that of our committed donors, members, and volunteers. Heartfelt thanks also go to the Or Gallery for the loan of their slide projector. Finally I wish to thank Access Gallery’s committed board of directors, and my fantastic staff for their assistance in the realization of this project, particularly curatorial assistant Emma Metcalfe Hurst, exhibitions intern Elizabeth Ellis, preparator Neil Chung, photographer Alina Senchenko, Emma Metcalfe Hurst, and Ross Kelly, and book designer Chelsey Doyle, whose layout has brought a quiet intelligence to this lasting record of the Far Away So Close series.

4

Alana Bartol: I would like to thank my brother, Brigham Bartol, who is one of the only people who can capture Ghillie on camera. Thanks to Nancy Nelson, for sparking my interest in dowsing and for sharing our family's story. Many thanks to my sister Franklynn Bartol for contributing her dowsing and drawing skills, and for the summer walks and talks.

Thank you to The Banff Centre for the opportunity to begin The Dowsing Project through a residency this past winter, which allowed me to create the ceramic dowsing rods in the exhibition. Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their grant support. For her superb curatorial skills and strong vision, thank you to Kimberly Phillips for putting this series together and inviting me to participate. Thank you also to Emma Metcalfe-Hurst and the staff and volunteers at Access Gallery. Lastly, thank you to my partner, Adam Fox for his continuous support.

David Semeniuk: I extend my gratitude to Kimberly Phillips and Access Gallery for the invitation to participate in Far Away So Close, Part III; to Emma Metcalfe Hurst, Elizabeth Ellis and Neil Chung for installing the work; and to the scientists who contributed the images: Elizabeth Asher, Kristina Brown, Joel Byersdorfer, Chris Payne, Nina Schuback, Rebecca Taylor, and Kang Wang.

Mike Bourscheid: I thank my wife, Vanessa, and my Canadian Family, Lorne, Julia, Chris and Jean.

5

The Unreasonable Silence of the World Kimberly Phillips

Blankly I walked there a double decade after,

When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,

And I hear the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter

At the lot of men, and all the vapoury

Things that be.

— Thomas Hardy

Far Away So Close is a series of exhibitions, publications, and events that explores the idea of distance, considers the bridging of distance as an ultimately quixotic gesture, and investigates the particular relationship of this gesture to art making. Presented over the course of 2014–15, each installment features emergent artists who draw upon a variety of modes, materials, and methodologies, and whose practices are scattered across the globe. Part III of Far Away So Close turns its attention to the non-human world, and to three artists—Alana Bartol, Mike Bourscheid, and David Semeniuk—who examine the elaborate proxies we invent in our attempt to capture, represent or claim an “authentic” natural experience. * In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes the feeling that arises from experiencing the irreconcilable divide between our human need to seek meaning and our existence in a world that itself has no meaning, and which is unbearably indifferent to us. “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting,” Camus offers, “is properly 1

the feeling of absurdity.” The number of contemporary artists—even in my immediate vicinity—whose work has addressed humankind’s desire for proximity to, communion with, or representations of the natural world, is so great that the focus might be better understood as a cultural fixation.

2

But it is precisely the incongruity or gap Camus describes, that irresolvable distance between the human actor and his or her natural setting—and the resultant longing or feeling of absurdity produced as a result—that might be said to link the

9

practices of the three artists whose works comprise this final episode of Far Away So Close.

Mike Bourscheid’s sculpture- and performance-based practice, which often involves his fabrication of ungainly or ridiculous appendages and prosthetics, channels alternate personae as a device for addressing aspects of his own Luxembourgian heritage, as well as notions of masculinity, European pomposity, and patriarchal power. In much of Bourscheid’s work, the actions and accoutrement of these personae are uncomfortably (and thus Mike Bourscheid CAS; Dominique Baum's Journey, 2012 Detail Image courtesy of the artist

hilariously) out of step with their environment. Both CAS; Dominique Baumʼs Journey (2012) and Der Hammel von Kouver: Introducing Myself to the Canada Geese (2012) enact misdirected attempts to lay claim to or communicate with their natural surroundings. In Dominique Baum’s Journey, slide after projected slide records a solitary male figure posing with a strangely phallic flag-prosthetic in a variety of rugged mountain settings. As Baum treks from site to site, from mountaintop to rushing river, his claim to space becomes no more convincing, and his actions both invoke and belittle the myth of the heroic wanderer and the entire project of European colonization. In Der Hammel von Kouver,

10

Bourscheid offers a musical composition performed on a

bespoke set of leather bagpipes. The work parodies the seriousness of bird enthusiasts (“I play it by flapping my arms like this, like a goose,” explained the artist as he demonstrated the mechanics of the instrument to me), the well-meaning missteps of cultural tourists, and the West Coast’s own smug convictions about its closeness to nature.

In David Semeniuk’s site-dependent, durational installation Mechanical Weathering (2013–ongoing), the absurd performance shifts from artist to curator. Seminiuk’s practice is concerned with the ways that histories of capital and scientific knowledge have influenced the production of photographic objects, as well as with the way meaning is constructed through photographs and their exhibition. Here, Semeniuk trains his focus on issues

Mike Bourscheid Der Hammel von Kouver: Introducing myself to the Canada Geese, 2012 Detail Photo credit Alina Senchenko

of causality and and temporality in representations: the spatial and temporal scales of environmental changes, how we experience these changes, and ways of representing them. Hundreds of 6 x 4 inch, black & white plotter prints 3

of landscapes are affixed to the gallery wall using a temporary adhesive, to produce the illusion of a singular cohesive mountainscape. Two fans are placed in front of the landscape and activated for a pre-determined period of time. As the fans blow, the prints begin to lift off the surface

11

of the wall, drift around in the currents of air, and clutter the floor. Once the initial act of “weathering” is complete, the fans are removed, and the curator selects a set of prints still fixed to the wall to remain for the duration of the exhibition. The rest, bent, curled and trod upon, are removed. The laborious and ultimately sabotaged exercise of installation—painstakingly selecting and fixing hundreds of prints to the wall, only for them to be blown off and swept away—is suggestive of the sheer “thinness” David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Detail (Access Gallery installation, day 18) Photo credit Ross Kelly

of our engagement with nature through our insatiable desires to make representations of it.

Alana Bartol, in contrast, does not suggest that any of the subjects forming the focus of her work are absurd. Rather, she enacts practices at the periphery of accepted reason, and which may or may not be read as such, particularly given their presentation (or re-presentation) in the context of the gallery. Throughout her work, Bartol investigates ideas of visibility, transformation, and survival through our relationships with the non-human world, and with one another, thus exploring alternate epistemologies within and beyond the human body. Forms of Awareness: Ghillie Suit (2012–ongoing) is an ongoing performance series wherein the artist dons a handmade ghillie suit—a

12

type of camouflage designed to resemble heavy foliage—

constructed from synthetic fibres and local flora. While snipers, hunters, and nature photographers wear ghillie suits in order to conceal themselves within their environment, Bartol’s ghillie traverses urban and suburban realms, appearing in various green spaces such as parks, naturalized trails, and spaces slated for development. Though the ghillie suit’s precise purpose is to blend in, Bartol’s version is out of step with its environment. In this way, she effectively exposes both how our “communion” with nature is frequently performed for the purpose of inflicting violence and control, as well as the vast distance between our human world and the natural one.

Alana Bartol Un-camouflaging #12, 2012–ongoing Photo courtesy of the artist

Much of Bartol’s practice aims to make visible that which remains invisible in our own environments. During the winter of 2014–15, while in residence at the Banff Centre, Bartol began to explore dowsing as a creative method and aesthetic practice. Dowsing or “water-witching” is a form of divination that uses “Y” or “L” shaped rods (often a bent coat hanger or found branch) to locate underground water without the use of scientific technology. During a trip to Nova Scotia, Bartol learned that the women in her mother’s family had long been regarded for their “water witching” abilities. While there is no scientific evidence that dowsing is effective or accurate, fascination with this pseudoscience

13

persists. For Bartol, the practice of dowsing might offer a process for shifting perceptions about our relationships with nature. In her wrestling with the absurd—with practices that attempt to close the gap between our own existence and that of the world’s, but are dismissed as dissonant or out of harmony with majority culture—Bartol enacts a leap of faith.

Camus was not the first to come to the conclusion that “the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” constitutes an absurd existence. But other thinkers on the subject, he claimed, such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoyesvsky, and Sartre, were too eager to flee “that last crossroad where thought 4

hesitates.” They had discovered the absurd only to seek refuge or escape by insisting on some absolute truth or value.

For Camus, instead, to persist in the condition of the absurd is to make a crucial act of revolt. “The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion,” he insists. “Rebellion is born in the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and 5

incomprehensible condition.” It is this act of rebellion, I would argue, that sits at the core of Alana Bartol’s, Mike Bourscheid’s, and David Semeniuk’s engagement with that which may be close at hand, and yet remains so far away.

14

Alana Bartol The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015–ongoing Photo courtesy of the artist

Postscript Following the format established in Parts I and II of Far Away So Close, here again I invited two writers—Vancouver-based Steffanie Ling and northern-Ontario-based Tanya Lukin Linklater—to each contribute a text that considers the ideas of the exhibition, without necessarily approaching the artists’ works themselves. My desire was that their words might sit alongside these works, however uncomfortably, and “thicken” the experience of the project as a whole.

There is, for me, a rather dark irony that lies beneath the substrate of Part III, which Ling and Linklater’s contributions have in fact helped to expose. The concept of absurdity to which I refer in the above pages is one pursued by western thinkers (Camus acknowledges a substantial lineage before him). That the West would recognize the “silence” of the world as “unreasonable” is itself absurd. This separation has been brutally sought: through industrialization, the pursuit of capital, and through the calculated marginalization (and in many cases obliteration) of so many Indigenous systems of thought and practice, for which the non-human world is always already entangled with our own, and anything but silent.

16

Notes 1

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1955), 6.

2

Consider, among many others, Liz Magor’s examinations of seclusion and fugitive psychology, Althea Thauberger’s solitary, forest-bound adolescent (not afraid to die, 2001, single channel video projection), Kevin Schmidt’s examinations of the sublime, Karin Bubas’ largescale photographs of enigmatic, lone female figures, Tim Gardner’s holiday snapshot watercolours and, most recently, the Everything Company’s landscape-viewing apparatus, exhibited at Access in 2013 (The Everything Company: Three Wrongs Don’t Make a Right. November 16–December 28, 2013, Access Gallery).

3

In a nod to Semeniuk’s other occupation (he holds a PhD in oceanography), Mechanical Weathering’s landscape photographs have been sourced from seven scientists (Elizabeth Asher, Kristina Brown, Joel Byersdorfer, Chris Payne, Nina Schuback, Rebecca Taylor, and Kang Wang), and originate from seven continents.

4

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 9.

5

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956), 10.

17

Put some tea tree oil on it Steffanie Ling

“A man and woman enroll in a couple’s retreat in order to save their relationship, and it is going very, very, well. At one point, they split off from the other couples during a hike designed to progress from a pleasant stroll through the woods to what might be considered intermediate rock climbing. It was developed by a team of landscape architects and psychiatrists assembled by The Couples Retreat Centre to ease couples into scenarios that call upon their communication skills, which they’ve been rebuilding all week, to combat the risks of controlled and mildly compromised personal safety. In amorous spontaneity, the man and woman, the couple that the show focuses on—I haven’t worked out what they look like yet, but I don’t really want to leave it in the hands of the casting director though you know. They always get obscenely attractive people, and I don’t really think that obscenely attractive people will work with the story. Along the designated path, they agree that rebelling from the bonding hike to have sex in the woods is probably better for their relationship than intermediate rock climbing.”

“Ha, okay. Keep going.”

“Great, tender kissing in the shade ensues and so on. In post coitus, the woman hands the man a rolled cigarette. Earlier in the season he had promised to quit, but she prepared it in the hours preceding the hike to demonstrate her willingness to make more concessions in their relationship.

It’s pretty touching. But the camera will pause on the man’s face, wearing an expression that communicates to viewers at home that the cigarette is rolled badly—much too loose.

21

It’s still touching though and their relationship is basically saved, so he doesn’t want to critique her rolling abilities, nor does he want to put emphasis on how clumsily it is rolled by attempting to smoke it. So instead, he declares to her that he’s not going to smoke it, but will keep it as a token of their repaired relationship. They kiss some more.”

“That’s not the end is it?”

“What? What do you take me for? Of course not. Their faces are very close and romance has impaired their spatial awareness. Naked, save for his socks and hiking boots, the man rolls away from his partner to reach for his pants, cargo shorts actually, which in the throws of passion were flung much farther away than he anticipated. So he gets up to look for his pants; he even walks past his boxers because he really wants to put the cigarette in a safe place. His mind is on pants. The slack of the cargo pocket will hopefully keep the fragile cigarette from getting crushed. He finds his shorts a couple of feet away and starts hopping on one leg as he tries to maneuver his hiking boot through the pant sleeve. Normally, he would take the shoes off because there is no way he would be able to get his boot through his city pants—his preference is a tapered business casual style, which you would see from earlier scenes in the show, when the couple are bickering in a nice restaurant. But with cargo shorts, he thought a little wriggling might do without having to confront the ordeal of unlacing his boots. Surely, the legs of the cargo shorts were sufficiently wide enough because he certainly didn’t 22

achieve his nudity by tearing them off. So he’s hopping

on one leg for a comical amount of time, I’m not sure how long this would go on for—not too long, but long enough to be funny. So in the distance, his partner is laughing, and viewers at home would be chuckling too, hopefully.”

“I think the humor would have to be carried through the editing. Make note of that.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t you find it funny? What if it were me?”

“Well, yeah I’d find it amusing, but you, cargo shorts, and me?”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“You know, I thought about ‘doing it’ in the woods once before and that thought ended with how satisfied I was with these bed sheets I got from a secondhand store. Sex in the woods just made me think about bugs, and through bugs, I arrived at the possibility of bed bugs, which I didn’t get from those sheets.”

“Insects are just perverts to you aren’t they?”

“They’re physically predisposed to be sneaky and liable to enter our orifices, just saying. You know, we eat something like eighty spiders in our lifetime just from them crawling into our mouths. I got a spider bite on my inner thigh just last week.”

“It’s eight, and it’s a year, so if you live until you’re ten then yes, but that’s a myth that flies in the face of both spider and human biology.”

“Well I’d love to hear all about the website you read that on, but do you want to finish your pitch?”

23

“Okay, so he ends up hopping off a cliff. No pause for dramatic effect. The camera just cuts back to the woman’s face, which is drained of colour, naturally, and she starts sprinting towards the cliff, picking up her strewn garments on the way over.”

“What? No! Why is she more concerned about being naked, in the woods, where there isn’t a single person to judge her, than about her lover who’s just disappeared over a cliff?”

“I was going to write her sprinting naked through the woods, but the producers said the other writers have maxed out on nudity for the other episodes approved for shooting this season. We’ve got too many sex scenes in the city, everything always goes for something way too sultry, the set designer gets all these red lamps…it’s just too awkward for primetime television. An obscenely attractive person goes down on another obscenely attractive person and the next thing you know you’re watching an ad for Febreze.”

“Febreze? Just leave it in! Just tell your producers the emotions make no sense at all without the nudity.”

“Alright, but it will just make the pitch meeting drag on…

May I continue? Luckily it’s a short cliff, but at the bottom of the cliff, he has crashed through a roof of a Modernist house—one of those houses made mostly of glass, couched in the wilderness. The house looks like it is overgrown with vines but it’s landscaped that way to obscure the house from view. He has survived the fall, but he is peppered with small bits of glass. He gets up, and continues hopping 24

around, still naked save for his hiking boots, to see if he’s

broken any bones. Nothing seems to be, so after the initial shock of falling and the reassurance of being more or less intact, a big smile spreads across his face and he starts laughing maniacally—That’s a reasonable reaction right?”

“I guess so, and if it isn’t, television will reinforce the myth.”

“Right, thought so. Alright, so the house belongs to a mushroom burial suit manufacturer.”

“Sorry? Mushroom. Burial. Suit. Manufacturer?”

“It looks a bit like a HAZMAT uniform actually. People are getting waitlisted to be buried in them as an alternative to coffins or getting cremated. But the suit is embedded with these mushroom spores that cleanse your corpse of the toxins left in your dead body, accumulated over a lifetime of eating canned food and drinking bottled water.

The spores help break your flesh down into nutrients for the earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson wants one when he dies.”

“Oh, well that makes sense.”

“The mushroom burial suit manufacturer is not home because he has gotten into his hybrid and driven towards the Couples Retreat Centre to complain about the sex noises that echo into the ravine that his house overlooks.

He is steaming, and his knuckles are white, because this is a regular thing. He has asked them to build fences, or enforce fines, or create a policy that dissuades, but the proprietors of the Couples Retreat Centre reproach his suggestions; they’re bad for business. Prior to the Couples Retreat Centre, the mushroom burial suit manufacturer had this house built

25

because the mushrooms whose spores are embedded in the burial suits are native to the surrounding woods. The vine I mentioned earlier was cultivated on his property in order to shroud this house from the couples that hike the path, but also because but it is also known to ward off the insects prone to feeding on the local mushrooms. Also, living in the area is good PR for his manufacturing company. The woman looks over the cliff and can’t see anything except for the jagged glass hole that her lover just created. She yells out his name—I don't know, Davis, how about—So she goes, DAVIS!!! DAYYYYYYY-VIIIIIIIS! And all she can hear in response is intensifying hysterical laughing. Davis is having an allergic reaction to this vine resulting in some psychosis and blurred vision. The voice calling his name, he believes, is God, and to his amazement, the voice is female, and to his rapture, it sounds just like his lovely girlfriend. This brings him to tears. His girlfriend—Sierra, lets call her—who is still perched over the cliff, is scared and confused because his laughing has turned into a mix of wailing and awe. Davis is thinking, oh my goddess, I’ve been fucking Mother Nature.

I’m in bed with Mother Nature. Holy shit, oh my goddess, my GODDESS! MY goddess! I’m not worthy! Not even close!!!

At this point, he sees the hybrid pull into the driveway and he thinks it’s Mother Nature coming home from work, so he hops out of the house to greet his beloved—he’s still hopping. He is physically numbed by a combination of shock, blood loss, joy and allergies because, despite having survived the fall without any broken bones, it 26

is now revealed to viewers at home that a large shard

of glass has been implanted in a semi-non-fatal place on his back, perhaps above the shoulder blade.

The mushroom burial suit manufacturer is about to leave his car when he sees Davis with jutting glass peeking out above his shoulder out of his house. He gets right back in and locks all the doors. Because Davis was expecting Mother Nature, he is totally deflated by the arrival of the mushroom burial suit manufacturer and begins wailing again. From above, Sierra sees the hybrid pull into the driveway and starts yelling at the mushroom burial suit manufacturer, HELP HIM! HELP HIM! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! GET OUT OF THAT CAR! Davis looks up and identifies that his concerned girlfriend, “Mother Nature,” has not abandoned him. Davis is overwhelmed with relief and begins shouting up at Sierra, who he thinks is God or Mother Nature, he switches back and forth: I LOVE YOU, NEVER LEAVE ME, I’LL PROMISE I’LL KEEP GARBAGE SEPARATE FROM COMPOST AND TRADE MY CAR IN FOR A HYBRID! IT WONT BE NICER THAN YOURS! She shouts back: What? I don’t care about that stuff! WOAH. You’re bleeding! You’re bleeding a lot! And to the mushroom burial suit manufacturer: Hey you! What is the matter with you???

Help him! We’ve just rekindled our love! He can’t die now!

I swear to god, I’ll throw myself over this cliff if he bleeds to death, do you want two people to die on your property?!

The mushroom burial suit manufacturer is totally frazzled in his hybrid and starts dialing 911. When he describes the situation to the emergency dispatcher he is asked for clarity on a number of details. He sounds crazy and it’s hilarious,

27

or at least I think it will be. The camera could be positioned behind the driver’s seat, so you can see the mushroom burial suit manufacturer with the phone up to his ear and Davis hopping and yelling through the windshield.

He suspects that this deranged man may be more troubled than actually threatening, but this feeling is surpassed by his instinct to stay in his car. Once he is assured that the police are en route, he rolls the window down and throws a 25 ml bottle of tea tree oil out the window and quickly rolls the window back up. After shouting promises of self-improvement up the cliff, Davis waits for a sign of requited love from Mother Nature.

After shouting for a while at the mushroom burial suit manufacturer, Sierra puts her clothes back on and runs back to the Couples Retreat Centre to call an ambulance.

Davis hears no voice, but he sees the bottle of tea tree oil roll towards him, and shortly after passes out from all that blood loss before he can project meaning onto it. The police arrive, followed by an ambulance, and Davis is taken to the hospital.

When he wakes up, Sierra is sitting at his bedside with another cigarette. It’s rolled tighter this time. She asks him to repeat after her: I will never have another near-death experience again. He looks up from the hospital bed and repeats weakly, I will never have another near-death experience EVER again. And she replies, Ok good, thank you for saying that, let’s go home. Like in a banal “we’re not fighting anymore” kind of way. Davis is cleared to leave the hospital and they live in not marital bliss, because 28

they’re not married, but post-near-death experience

bliss. They recommend The Couples Retreat Centre to all their coupled friends, even the ones in relatively functional relationships. One day, they receive a package from the mushroom burial suit manufacturer, who has written a letter explaining his emotions. He confesses that he felt very cowardly and has sent them a brochure about the mushroom burial suits, accompanied by two vouchers for complimentary mushroom burial suits, for when the time comes. And that’s the end of the season.”

“I keep tea tree oil in my car.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter if she’s naked after all.”

29

Untitled ( Tanya Lukin Linklater

)

I live with the memory of home, of a place I come from a place my ancestors for thousands of years came from this place Afognak some say the first two people fell from the sky in a kayak or were lowered in the bladder of a sea mammal, an incandescent ball on the wind Afognak is an island within an archipelago, an island within a collection of islands we grew there—our families and practices and ways of being and thought and relations to the world we grew from the grasses and driftwood, black sand and salmon berry bushes, creeks and seagulls the tides pulsing against the shores of Afognak we traded and we knew others, their ideas their languages and ways our trajectories our invisible paths written in the land in our bodies and our ways of being with one another were interrupted

by Russian fur traders and priests and the story goes that the Russian fur traders were brutal they enslaved our men and sent them in search of the sea otter

our old stories tell us that the sea otter is our

relative the men were forced to pile sea otter furs high in kayaks that now were constructed with three hatches an innovation by the Russian fur traders 32

to make a hatch for sea otter pelts

they traveled great distances from Afognak in these threehatched kayaks to other parts of Alaska British Columbia Washington Oregon California where they were enslaved by Spanish missionaries and tortured

thousands of miles on the ocean

what kept them, what prompted their continual return to Afognak a place of brutality aching perhaps memories of mothers, fathers, uncles, daughters and sons sustained or broke them as they imagined the people behind enclosures our people separated by their labour what they could produce or what needs they could meet and this is not the story I want to tell about who I am or what I remember of home our memories can’t only be about colonialism but how do we grapple with these histories and the subsequent generations of grief and the distancing that we create in our own lives when we collectively move to forget these difficult histories this is not a theory how can it be poetry a real question I ask what do we remember and what do we forget? why the urgency to forget and to remember? remembering may be far too painful for some, some say remembering may be emancipatory 33

this is one of the first interruptions Afognak experienced and the priests at the time, in my understanding of the stories people tell, those who dare to speak about history, they tell that the priests were writing letters on our behalf to the Russian Czaress, Catherine the Great, who was far too concerned about her Empire and the Metropole to listen about fringe sub-human inhabitants of the territory called alaska—a place only valued for its production of the fur, the remnant of the sea otter our relative how do we reckon with history? how do we reckon with our ancestors’ enslavement? how do we reckon with the choice of our ancestors to be baptized by the Russian Orthodox Church in order to become recognized by the state of Russia as citizens, as human beings with rights? how do we reckon with the collective grief that we (continue to) experience? in the absence of our cultural selves, or the creolization of Afognak that some anthropologists argue for?

I come from a specific place this is about Afognak and it is not about Afognak I wonder about the intellectual traditions of Afognak I wonder about the language and the residues of self and home and place even when we are far, we are so close

34

36

(following pages, 38–39) David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 39 Photo credit Ross Kelly

37

Alana Bartol The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015–ongoing Photo credit Alina Senchenko

Alana Bartol Dowsing Rods, 2015 Detail from The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015–ongoing Photo courtesy of the artist

Alana Bartol The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015–ongoing Photo credit Ross Kelly

Alana Bartol The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015–ongoing Detail Photo credit Ross Kelly

Alana Bartol The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015–ongoing Detail Photo credit Ross Kelly

Alana Bartol Forms of Awareness: Ghillie Suit, A Series of Un-camouflagings, 2012–ongoing Photo credit Ross Kelly

(previous pages, 48–49) Alana Bartol Forms of Awareness: Ghillie Suit, A Series of Un-camouflagings, 2012–ongoing Video still Image courtesy of the artist

50

Alana Bartol Forms of Awareness: Ghillie Suit, A Series of Un-camouflagings, 2012–ongoing Video still Photo courtesy of Brigham Bartol

Mike Bourscheid Der Hammel von Kouver: Introducing myself to the Canada Geese, 2012 Detail Photo credit Ross Kelly

Mike Bourscheid Der Hammel von Kouver: Introducing myself to the Canada Geese, 2012 Detail Photo credit Ross Kelly

Mike Bourscheid Der Hammel von Kouver: Introducing myself to the Canada Geese, 2012 Album release poster Image courtesy of the artist

57

Mike Bourscheid Jean JaurĂŠ in Gemunkel am Mutterhorn, 2012 Photo credit Alina Senchenko

Mike Bourscheid CAS; Dominique Baum始s Journey, 2012 Detail Photo credit Ross Kelly

Mike Bourscheid CAS; Dominique Baum始s Journey, 2012 Detail Photo credit Ross Kelly

Mike Bourscheid CAS; Dominique Baum始s Journey, 2012 Detail Image courtesy of the artist

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 1 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 5 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 1 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 11 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 11 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 11 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 14 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 35 Photo credit Emma Metcalfe Hurst

David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing Access Gallery installation, day 39 Photo credit Ross Kelly

— Alana Bartol The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015–ongoing dowsing rods (willow), ceramics (raku)

Forms of Awareness: Ghillie Suit, A Series of Un-camouflagings, 2012 performance, HD Video 2 min 54 sec

The Dowsing Project or In Blood and Bone, 2015 ink on paper

— David Semeniuk Mechanical Weathering, 2013–ongoing floor fans, plotter prints, putty

74

— Mike Bourscheid Der Hammel von Kouver Introducing myself to the Canada Geese, 2012 poster, bespoke leather instrument, performance

CAS; Dominique Baumʼs Journey, 2012 slides, projector, toque Our thanks to the Or Gallery for kindly loaning the slide projector for this installation.

Jean Jauré in Gemunkel am Mutterhorn, 2012 carved oak, peach schnapps, leather shoe, wool sock 75

Alana Bartol Alana Bartol is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator from Windsor, Ontario, currently based in Calgary, Alberta. Her collaborative and individual works explore concepts of visibility and survival through our relationships with nature and each other. Bartol holds an MFA from Wayne State University (Detroit), where she developed and taught the first Performance Art course in the Department of Art, co-founded the first student-run gallery, and received a Thomas C Rumble Fellowship.

79

Mike Bourscheid Mike Bourscheid lives and works in Luxembourg and Vancouver. He holds an MFA from the University of Arts Berlin (UdK). In his present body of work, Bourscheid translates his heritage through sculpture, photography, and performance. His work operates to express darker social and political concerns through the device of humour. He was recently nominated for the Robert Schuman Award for Emerging Artists (Luxembourg).

80

David Semeniuk David Semeniuk is a formally trained scientist and a self-trained artist. His art practice addresses how the histories of capital and the production of scientific knowledge have influenced the production of photographic objects, the construction of meaning in photographic images, and the exhibition of photographic works. He is also interested in using art objects to investigate spatial and temporal scales of environmental changes, how we experience these changes, and ways of representing them. Semeniuk is based in Vancouver.

81

Steffanie Ling Steffanie Ling is a writer, mostly. Her essays, criticism and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in-print and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. Currently, she is writing a book of letters and stories that weigh in on banality, social awkwardness and smoking.

82

Tanya Lukin Linklater Tanya Lukin Linklater's practice spans experimental choreography, performance, video, and text. Her work has been performed and exhibited internationally, and her poetry and essays have been published in numerous journals and catalogues. She studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours), and was awarded the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Literature in 2013. Linklater is Alutiiq with family from the Native Villages of Port Lions and Afognak in southern Alaska, and she makes her home in northern Ontario.

83

222 East Georgia Street Vancouver, British Columbia v6a 1z7 accessgallery.ca Access Gallery is a platform for emergent and experimental art practices. We enable critical conversations and risk taking through new configurations of audience, artists and community.

Access gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of BC through the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming, the City of Vancouver, the Burrard Arts Foundation, Art Contraste, our donors, members, and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

Published by Access Gallery

isbn 978-0-9866688-9-0

Kimberly Phillips, Director/Curator Edition of 75 to accompany the exhibition

Series editor: Kimberly Phillips Layout: Chelsey Doyle

Far Away So Close: Part III

Photography: Alina Senchenko, Ross Kelly,

Alana Bartol

Emma Metcalfe Hurst

Mike Bourscheid

Printed in Canada by Bond Reproductions

David Semeniuk Copyright Š Access Gallery and the September 12–October 31, 2015

contributing authors and artists, 2015.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips

Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express written permission from the publisher.