Awards Jennifer Lorraine Fraser
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MFA Thesis Exhibition Catalogue
Awards reconceptualises the lives of women in Toronto incarcerated
under the Female Refuges Act (FRA). Creating a space for women, my project offers in depth research into the period following the revision of the FRA (1919-1940), outlining the systemic oppression young women faced when they were asylumed against their wills, and how they were disciplined for reasons such as feeblemindedness, deviance and incorrigibility. Historical information of their incarceration is difficult to attain, lacking or non-existent. However, former inmate Velma Demerson documents her confinement in the 2002 publication Incorrigible. By utilizing the subsequent research that arose from Demerson’s personal narrative of incarceration: newspaper articles, interviews and a PHD Thesis, 2004, highlights the lack of supporting documentation of the exploitation and innocence of other young women.
Awards, incorporates archival reproductions, acknowledgment of
forced labor within asylums, and known lifestyle choices of incarcerated women; along with contemporary artistic practice used to raise questions about societal expectations of women and of their disciplining. Eight artists, respond to the research I have conducted: Ana ÄŒop, Anna Copa Cabanna, Britta Fluevlog, Gillian Dykeman, Jamey Braden, Kristina Guison, Paddy Jane, and Rene Vandenbrink. Resulting in a co-construction of research, contemplation and response to the history of women being unethically incarcerated. The archival materials chosen for Awards, consist of photographs held by the Archives of Toronto, ephemera found in the archives for the CNE, old theses, and old newspaper clippings.
The reading space for visitors to the exhibition, includes books: Incorrigible written by Velma Demerson, The Ward published by Coach House Press, Toronto’s Girl Problem by Carolyn Strange, and The Modern Girl by Jane Nicholas; both published by The University of Toronto Press. Within my research, there is only one personal story told in full, and yet women were incarcerated under the FRA for well over sixty years; where are those stories? As a curator, I cannot claim to know these absent stories, and if I did so it would be further destructive to the people of whom those stories exist. It is only through snapshots of historical knowledge that we can begin to formulate a space for women within the numerous authoritative structures that regulated their bodies. ‘ Encouraging the audience to make their own narrative spaces within the exhibition - to spend time in the space - and to see the purposely positioned threads of an anti-narrative/narrative between the absent feminist archive and the contemporary works. That is the purpose of
Awards.
Thank you: OCADU Department of Graduate Studies, Paula Gardner, Gabby Moser, Darryl Bank, Jazmine Yerbury, Philippa O’Brien, David Finley, Sean O’Brien & Leila Aboud, Barb O’Brien, Alex Murphy, Sean Smith, Krista Bell, Kimberly Barton, Jason McLean, Mary Margaret Gelinas, Michele Landsberg, Velma Demerson, Michael Gibson Gallery, Amy Furness, Andrew Hunter, J. Phillip Nicholson, Linda Cobon, Andrea Fatona, Sayada Akbary, Ana Čop, Anna Copa Cabanna, Britta Fluevlog, Gillian Dykeman, Jamey Braden, Kristina Guison, Paddy Jane, and Rene Vandenbrink. Four Anonymous donors. To all my friends who have supported me over the past couple of years. and to sponsors: The Darling Mansion, Steamwhistle Brewery, Natalie MacFarlane, and to everyone I have missed due to last minute sponsorship.
The Contemporary Flâneuse: Traversing Real and Virtual Urban Space in the Work of Gillian Dykeman Kimberly Barton “She is the vigilant watcher, not so much detached as impartial, not apathetic but unbiased in her interest. She has shed, when she picked up her umbrella and her gloves, when she knotted the laces on her good stout shoes, the requirements of errand and destination, prepared to take on the imprimatur of sensory awareness, sight and sound, smell and taste and touch available as intermediaries. Urban space and energy, proliferative and even metastasizing, gives birth to the flâneuse.” (Van Herk, 2007) The presence and mobility of women within the public sphere is perhaps something taken for granted in recent history. Females, like our male counterparts, easily and regularly traverse the urban streets of the cities we inhabit as a means to navigate our way through the duties of daily life; as a valued faction of the workforce, as students, as consumers. Though to consider this occupation of public space as having always been equal, or that is indeed equally occupied today would be a naïve assumption. The now infamous video 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman, released in 2014 by the activist anti-street harassment organization Hollaback! offers some insight to such inequalities as faced by a conservatively dressed woman walking silently through the urban landscape. Having gone viral with over four million views on YouTube, there were reportedly 108 instances of street harassment recorded over the ten hour period, including “catcalls” or comments on the young woman’s appearance, unprovoked attempts to initiate conversations, and being followed for several minutes by complete strangers. While the video along with its creator Rob Bliss have been strongly criticized for its characterization of the incidents featured and furthermore its demonstration of an ostensible racial bias, Shoshana Roberts nevertheless perseveres in illuminating a number of distressing social issues in her lengthy stroll through dissonant urban space. To walk at such leisure, without apparent motive or particular destination is indeed a relatively new phenomenon of the metropolis, tracing its lineage back to the highly modern figure of Baudelaire’s flâneur. In The Painter of Modern Life (1859-60) the modernist poet describes this epitomized embodiment of the modern age as an impersonally engaged bystander, who is at once both anonymous and yet wholly immersed in public life. “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home, to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world- such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.”
The flâneur of the nineteenth-century held such a position of privilege in the public sphere, as could only be attained by the male sex according to social standards of the time. Indeed, for women to appear alone in public, unattended by a proper chaperone would likely relegate her to be perceived as belonging to one of a few unsavory positions as suggested by literature of the period. Baudelaire features numerous women in his poems, making visible “a number of categories of female city-dwellers. Among those most prominent in these texts are: the prostitute, the widow, the old lady, the lesbian, the murder victim, and the passing unknown woman. […] But none of these women meet the poet as their equal. They are subjects of his gaze, objects of his ‘botanizing’.” In this way, women are made virtually imperceptible, as their own experiences of the urban space are made to seem inferior, inconsequential and otherwise marginalized in comparison to the privileged male gaze. In her text The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity, Janet Wolff seeks to uncover the experiential accounts of women in modernity which would have indeed had sociological value despite the increasing segregation of the sexes into respective public and private realms in the nineteenth century. It is only through deception, dressing as a boy, that French novelist George Sand found the means to enjoy the anonymity of modernity, for “the disguise made the life if the flâneur available to her; as she knew very well she could not adopt the non-existent role of a flâneuse. Women could not stroll alone in the city.” That such a role could be adopted by women, to practice flâneuserie, is denied by Wolff’s appraisal of the “real situation” and sociological standards set in the second half of the nineteenth century. And yet, in regards to the figure of the contemporary flâneuse, this is a highly contested assertion. Toronto-based artist Gillian Dykeman investigates the idea of women adopting the role of flâneuse in her audio work Walking Women (2011). The sound installation features a cacophony of mixed sounds, voices and snippets of conversation taken from a recording of a half hour walk along the boardwalk while visiting fellow artist Nana Debois Buhl. The ‘aesthetic of pedestrianism’ embraced Dykeman comprises a poetic involvement of the body itself, not in the visual capacity, but rather by other sensorial engagementthe highly affective aural dimension comprising a new ontological awareness for the audience of Walking Women. The pedestrian aesthetic is described by visual critic Marsha Meskimmon as being: “about the condition of knowing space through embodiment … Conceptually, the pedestrian differs from the flâneur in locatedness and physicality. She has a body and a situation in space, but not in the sense of any form of biological essentialism. The ‘body’ in this context is not a biological given or imperative but the site at which biology and cultural productions meet and produce a sense of identity or subjectivity. The pedestrian’s body and embodiment are themselves a space which permits engaged interaction with the world around her. She is not a disembodied eye like the rhetorical flâneur who wanders through the city ‘invisibly’ and untouched, but a sentient participant in the city. She realizes boundaries as embodied and refutes the flâneur’s privileged boundary transcendence and Utopian, unified city.”
Dykeman’s embodied experience of the urban landscape she traverses in Walking Women is simultaneously both real and virtual, transient and immutable, rhythmic and irregular. The metrical pattering of shoes along the boardwalk anchors the listener in a vague sense of temporal reality while seemingly unrelated fragments of conversation schizophrenically constitute an imagined atmosphere. In this way, the visceral experience embodied within the listener’s capacity to intuit the aural dimension lends to the highly subjective creation of their own imagined environment, just as the flâneuse who is now made quite literally invisible, is capable of intuiting in her affective journey through the urban landscape. The city itself is mutable for the contemporary flâneuse who navigates her way through concrete space which becomes- in equal parts both a physical and mental construct. As James Donald argues, “Of course there are real cities… But why reduce the reality of cities to their thingness, or their thingness to a question of bricks and mortar? States of mind have material consequences.” As the artists own body becomes a site for knowing the world in its engagement with culture in the public sphere, so too does the body of the listener, acquiring new knowledge through the worlding experience offered by alternative sensorial perception. In her elimination of the optical presence of the flâneuse in Women Walking, Dykeman removes the possibility of the objectifying flâneurial gaze. Female voices comment on the things they observe in their stroll, the architecture they pass by, the thingness of the city, and yet remain anonymous to us despite occupying a space directly in our midst. The flâneuse is then made free of the dangers of being visually associated with the persona of the fallen woman who walks the streets alone, as she is no longer present for the scrutiny of viewership. Her imperceptible presence facilitates the mobility she desires within public space, and without fear of unwanted solicitation. It is in this way that Dykeman’s flâneuse becomes integral to the public space she occupies, offering an alternate possibility for encounters of the everyday and alternatives to real and virtual perceptions of the urban environment.
Artiha Van Herk, “Street Walking: The New Flâneuse in the New City,” Western Humanities Review, 2007, Vol. 61, Issue 3. 24. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” in Art in Theory 1815- 1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 496. Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture & Society, 1985, Vol. 2, Issue 3. 41-42. Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse,” 41. Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse,” 44. Marsha Meskimmon, Engendering the City: Women Artists and Urban Space. London: Scarlett Press, 1997. 21. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 8.
Kristina Guison, Parabolic Speaker, 2016 made for Gillian Dykeman’s soundpiece Walking Women, 2011 http://www.gilliandykeman.com/archives/509
Uncovering presence; Women, Archiving and the Contemporary Curator Jennifer Lorraine Fraser; December 11, 2015 There is a need for libraries, museums and art galleries to become more in dialogue with one another. I am interested in uncovering ways, or methods of display that could utilize the library as another option for contemporary art. For my MFA thesis project, Awards, I am coming up against an absence of archival materials in my attempt to tell a story of women incarcerated in Toronto between the years of 1919 and 1940. Due to the lack of and the destruction of archival material, I am in a position to literally, imagine what life was like for women during the period in question. This research essay will attempt to uncover reasons for the discrepancy and erasure in women’s archives. It will question, how can archivists, curators, artists and storytellers work together to ensure the cessation of making women’s stories absent from the archive? Research questions consist of how to connect contemporary curatorial practice to historical archival destruction and how we can change this practice moving forward within cultural institutions?
Revisiting past course work, it is my plan to curate this paper as a collection of what I have studied over the past year and a half. To begin, I will discuss the role of the museum in creating community, Secondly, my paper will lead into a discussion on the idea of autonomy and more specifically why women need to continue to embrace agency within historical archival research. For my case study, there will be a discussion of the exhibition Fallen Woman, on display at the Foundling Museum, curated by art historian Lynda Nead. In utilizing archival materials, and commissioning contemporary artists, Nead and the curators of the Foundling Museum, subtly shows the interconnectedness of difference that makes up history-telling and gives agency to women long thought to no longer matter; Victorian women who gave up their children due to poverty, unwedded sexual encounters and rape. History is a construction, and it is not until it is dismantled can we begin to hear the oppressed through their own words. By working through systemic oppression, and separating apart the linearity of history we are able to find the women’s stories embedded in the shadows. This paper will conclude with a call to more collaborative and/or co-constructed alliances between curators, archivists and librarians. Doing so will reinstate the museum/art gallery as a place not solely one of commerce and entertainment, but also of contemplation. In art, as it is with numerous social constructions, such as, entertainment industries; business; medicine and science, there have been consistent moves to structure historical narratives as linear. A moving forward from specific lines of thought to create a seamless container for secular morality. Morality is a system of values created within communities in order for them to thrive. When questions arise of moral issues of women, they are questions of how women are constructed as moral subjects, by their own hand and by the process of history-making in general. (Buss, p.23) Professor Helen Buss (aka Margaret Clarke) states, “the woman writing their autobiographical account may be representing the sex gender system of her society, she may also be an agent – in constructing a self-representation away from those restrictions.” Much curatorial practice does not fall outside of this realm of normativity. The curator continues to create exhibitions that speak to the history of art historical practice, to theoretical discourse, and to the daily-lived experiences of people; questioning how these experiences have been moulded through and by history as secular ritual. My own understanding of the secular, in accordance with and at the same time independently from reading Carol Duncan’s text, The Art Museum as Ritual, is that which utilizes religious ceremony in a non-religious capacity; a contemplative act fueled by music, art and other creative endeavours, and how these are transcribed into society. The religious uses spiritual allegories to feel a physical connection with the non-physical attributes of belief and faith; and the secular is concerned about contemplative practices that allow an embodied attainment of knowledge. (Fraser)
In the museum, we see this within the separation of space and its mapping, and done so in order for the visitor to navigate around disciplinary beliefs and facts within exhibitions and take them in as their own understanding. (Fraser) Duncan suggests that, “the ideological function of the museum is to act as a container for ritualistic ceremonial practice.” (Duncan, p.11) In paraphrasing, it is my understanding that Duncan “argues for ritual being and continuing to be the primary goal of the museum. Discussions revolve around how ritual constitutes our negotiations within the museum space.” (Fraser) Curator Felix Vogel outlined this continuance as one, recognizing two exhibition histories, the heavy use of theory in academic exhibitions, “neglecting the object” (Vogel) and the reverse of this in the museum, as having “low expectations of research.” (Vogel) Additionally, Vogel reinstates two very structured exhibition discourses as those of a ‘new’ area of study, the “curatorial discourse of exhibition history,” which falls “beyond the university” and those, which sit “outside of the museum.” (Vogel) Resulting in three very distinct categories of exhibition practice, and yet all continuously linear. In all curatorial practices, the curator displaces the art object’s autonomy, “with increased focus on the exhibition itself,” and “by speaking of and for the object, (being the exhibition) as their own production.” (Vogel) Resulting, as a production of creating ritual for the audience through the control of the exhibition space. As Duncan points out, “to control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths.” (Duncan, p.12) High values within communities, as within history and memory-making, have been patriarchal in nature. Cultural information remains to be catalogued, collected and influenced by male dominated and political value systems. In feminist practice, there have been attempts made to open up, to constellate, or to zigzag histories in order to allow more nuanced voices to emerge. To allow an emergence of difference; however, in the case of archival research, history is static, and it anticipates a linear continuance of storytelling. When conducting research in archives, when we cannot find in them, women and other oppressed people, we give up, and revert to continuing history as a linear narrative. Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Diana T. Meyers, suggests, “we silently accommodate ourselves to the incompleteness of the historical record.” (Meyers, p. 8) Time mapping is political, and these politics are interconnected within systems of oppression. In the text, The Archival Turn in Feminism, culture and media studies professor, Kate Eichhorn, admits to their being stasis in collective archives. (Eichhorn, p. xi) Eichhorn’s suggestion is to consider “being in time differently, that is being temporally dispersed across different eras and generations.” (Eichhorn p. x) It is the archivist’s job to transcend temporal boundaries in order to “generate and promote the circulation of ideas.” (Eichhorn, p.4) Initiating transcendence is also the responsibility of the curator, and is a function of creating ritual.
The importance of crossing temporal boundaries is in the acknowledgement of the feminist age-old phrase of the personal is political, and by doing so allowing for absent voices within historical archives to speak. The political, roughly, is also a system of values disseminated into the community for which they serve, and are used as a mechanism for control. It is common knowledge that the politics of patriarchal value systems have and still control women and their life stories. “Women’s papers often survive only because they have been preserved in the papers of persons or organizations whose public significance extends value to their correspondents or members.” (Meyers, p. 15) Accordingly, when we dig deeper into feminist research we begin to uncover hints of the lives of women; and we can begin to give autonomy to them as agents in their own right, within the political realm of individual lives. Stemming from Meyer’s phrase, “autonomy competency,” (Barbakoff, p. 4) librarian Audrey Barbakoff considers the role of the library to be a place to build autonomy. Accomplishing this structure is by acknowledging that autonomy is not individualistic or independent, (Barbakoff, p.2) but is a self-governing fluidity “reliant upon intellectual freedom,” (Barbakoff, p. 4) which flows between individuals, communities and social constructions. This self-governance encourages people, finding themselves removed from their communities, to find ways to connect with and to interact in social situations. (Barbakoff, p.6) Autonomy is fostered, nourished, and continues to grow within the library system. The librarian, in Barbakoff’s opinion takes on the role of caretaker, as one being the catalyst encouraging women to take control of their own life experiences and knowledges; the librarian works as “social support and in construction,” (Barbakoff, p.5) of autonomy building. A caretaker to encourage, “access to information about many life possibilities, self-reflection, critical thinking, self-work and a willingness and an ability to act.” (Barbakoff, p.4) In making archival work an offshoot of caretaking, Barbakoff suggests cultural and moral emphasis should be placed into the hands of the researchers; by what they can access in the library. Researchers construct agency with supportof what “the services the library offers.” (Barbakoff, p. 4) In Barbakoff’s text, rereading as a call for acknowledging autonomy when confronting personal choices; in what to choose to learn; and in how the librarian directs this responsibly; I see the correlation between a caretaker and a curator. To curate means to care for and to work as a curator means to care for: art, artists, the galleries, the museums, and above all else, the audience for whom we exhibit. It is also the responsibility of the curator, to instigate access into difficult subject matter; art historical records; and culturally moral interrogations. Curators also function as caretakers in building autonomy. We do this by juxtaposing historical facts with contemporary and political artistic practice -- in order to reveal and celebrate life stories.
To illustrate this idea, I wish to speak of the exhibition The Fallen Women held at the Foundling Museum in London, UK, September 20, 2015 – January 6, 2016. The Foundling Museum, one of the England’s first public art galleries, was initially a hospital and orphanage for presumably unwanted children. Beginning in the eighteenth century, single women of a certain class, were encouraged to give up their babies to the hospital. Victorian expert, Professor Lynda Nead was invited to rearticulate the history of the Foundling Museum during the period of the mid-nineteenth century. Collaborating with both the Library of London and the museum, and its curators, Nead was able to create an exhibition that offers agency to the women long forgotten; and to those women who became myth and did not have autonomy in life. The juxtaposition of archival papers, women’s own testimonies as to why they could not care for their babies and administrative petitions of adoption, with paintings from the Victorian era depicting the fallen woman; allows for an opening up of a more accurate story. The majority of the accounts found, Mothers’ speak of their children being illegitimate due to seduction, rape, and violence. (Nead) Commissioning musician Steve Lewinson, the museum asks for a conjuring up of the absent voices of the women, the mothers who were distraught and responsible for giving over the care of their children to the hospital. (Foundling Museum) Lewinson created a sound work in collaboration with actors reading from the actual testimonies found in the Library’s archives. Separated from the mythic paintings and in a small room curatorially cluttered with historical sketches and transcripts -recorded voices bring the women to life. They are no longer solely unwed mothers giving up their babies out of desperation; they are doing so with the hope their children would receive proper care in the hospital, and away from a life tormented by alcoholism, poverty, violence and rape. The sound work completes the idea of an archive, in that it literally gives voice to historical narratives, resulting in revisiting reasons why and how, throughout history, women have been blamed as being those to fall from grace through their sexual encounters. The Fallen Woman deconstructs the linearity of history and reconstructs it as being part of a constellated truth. My research, for this paper, stems from the curatorial decision of using archival materials from libraries and art galleries to create new ways of looking at the world around us. In The Fallen Woman, Lynda Nead was able to create a nuanced experience of the archive by juxtaposing archival research with contemporary art. Recognizing the need for a diversity of voices, influences and writes the exhibition -- it allows for diversity and growth within communities. (Fraser) Regardless, of the ‘interferance with the authorship and authority of the curator, and combining temporarally disparite materials allows new narratives to be told and new voices to be heard” (Flinn. p.45).
Rene Vandenbrink, Trying not to Sink, Detail 2015 Diversity in The Fallen Woman is depicted in the archival touch of the found materials juxtaposed with collected paintings, and the commissioning of a contemporary artist to rearticulate -- to voice the exhibited historical papers. This idea to rearticulate the archive, suggests the ability to give agency to absent voices -- uplifting women who were once oppressed, and once only living as myth. Looking to studies in library science, my hope is to use public librarian, Audrey Barbakoff’s thesis “libraries build autonomy,” (Barbakoff) as a suggestion for curators to revisit the idea of autonomy, not in art creation but in artistic articulation, dissemination and practice. The librarians’ role is to encourage people to take responsibility with their own knowledge, and their own autonomy in being part of a collective, a community, and my suggestion is the curator holds that same role towards their audience. Curatorial projects should encourage an engagement with the subject matter emphasizing self-learning, and self-reflection within social constructions. Barbakoff states, “the library can help dismantle the oppressive socialization which causes people to experience and internalize differences as social disabilities.” (Barbakoff, p.3) This dismantling is done when access to archival information is open to different types of researchers, those in academia, for personal intellectual growth and to curators.
Considering the function of the museum and library in the context of exhibition, it is my suggestion that archivists, curators and librarians should strive to work co-constructively with one another. In doing so, opening up a fourth and more nuanced exhibition platform and away from Vogel’s theatre of three, allows for contemplation into all aspects of the exhibition, the object, the research and the subjects doing/of inquiry.
Works Cited: Barbakoff, Audrey. "Libraries Build Autonomy: A Philosophical Perspective on the Social Role of Libraries and Librarians." Library Philosophy and Practice 2010 (e-journal) (2010). University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. Buss, Helen M. "Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity." Working in Women's Archives Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2001. Web. Duncan, Carol. “The Art Museum as Ritual.” Civilizing Rituals Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Rutledge, 2003. 7-20. Print Eichhorn, Kate. "Introduction." The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Print. Flinn, A. "Independent Community Archives and Community-Generated Content: 'Writing, Saving and Sharing Our Histories'" Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2010): 39-51. Web. 17 Nov. 2015. Fraser, Jennifer Lorraine. “Go Transit Art.” Class Presentation. Nov. 18 2015 “Duncan and Rice.” Class Reading Presentation Summary. Feb. 2015 Meyers, Diana Tietjens. "Personal Autonomy and the Paradox of Feminine Socialization." The Journal of Philosophy 84.11 (1987): 619-28. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. Nead, Lynda. “Foreword.” The Fallen Woman - Exhibition Guide. Http:// foundlingmuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Fallen-Woman-exhibition-guide.pdf. The Foundling Museum, 20 Sept. 2015. Web. 6 Dec. 2015. The Fallen Woman - Exhibition Guide. Http://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Fallen-Woman-exhibition-guide.pdf. The Foundling Museum, 20 Sept. 2015. Web. 6 Dec. 2015. Vogel, Felix. "Notes on Exhibition History in Curatorial Discourse." On Curating 21.A4 (2013): 46-54. Oncurating.org. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. Thank you to Amy Furnass for directing me towards scholarship in feminist archival practice.
Artist Biographies: Jamey Braden is an interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, textiles, performance and video. Performing and/or making sculptures through performative explorations in the studio or in participatory environments that engage the audience are a central part of her practice. Drawing and writing are also integral: text appears again and again, congealing, mutating, sublimating, dissipating. Humor and the influence of pop culture are undeniable explored them with pleasure. Braden investigates the potential dialogs between artist and materials, movement and matter with a philosophy that attempts to subvert dominant ideas of human-centered subjectivity. Improvisation in the studio and performances have proven to be an essential and surprising strategy in this liberatory work. Braden is a graduate of University of British Columbia’s MFA program whose work has been shown in the Unitied States and Canada. Ana Čop was born in Zagreb, and currently lives and works in Toronto. She immigrated in Canada in the early 1990s, during the Croatian post-war period. In 2007, Čop decided to completely change her career and embarked upon a transformation into a visual artist. Before entering the School of Image Arts, she secured a Certificate of Photographic Studies from Ryerson’s Chang School, where she was the 2010 recipient of the Hamish Kippen Excellence in Arts Award. Ana Čop has won numerous awards for her work in Canada, the USA and Europe. While she was finishing her BFA at Ryerson Image Arts, she won the SNAP!Star 2011 Award. In summer of 2011, as the sole Canadian winner she was nominated Photographer of the Year, 2011” in the L’Iris D’Or Sony World Photography Awards, in London, UK, securing second place in the Fine Art-Conceptual category. Shortly thereafter, Ana Čop was selected as one of the winners of the PDN’s Annual Photography Awards in New York City. Anna Copa Cabanna is an Australian showgirl icon who has performed her choreography, played her xylophone, and roller skated in venues around the world. She was the face and twirling body of THE DEBASER on The Pixies “Doolittle Tour”, sings in an ACDC cover band, and is the official go go dancer of the New York Rock and Roll Underground. Anna was recently named one of “10 offbeat artists keeping the old, weird New York alive” by Flavorpill along with Yoko Ono and Bill Cunningham. An established singer-songwriter in New York City, she reflects on everyday issues with her little xylophone, voracious voice, and fabulous imagination. The truth- in a sequin leotard.
Jamey Braden. Banger Loop - still, 2014
Ana ﾄ経p Reclining Nudes Here and Now, First of the series, 2010
Gillian Dykeman is a Canadian artist whose research and projects describe the sexual politics of landscape through and an intersectional feminist and post-colonial framework. Dykeman seeks inroads to subjectivity and agency by working across mediums and disciplines such as performance, sound, installation, and art criticism. Direct engagement with and and its politics sits at the core of her practice. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad, and she is the host and producer of Working (it) Out, the ArtSlant podcast. Dykeman graduates from the University of Toronto with a Masters of Visual Studies in Studio Art this spring, and will return to her home province of New Brunswick to pursue her practice with the land she knows best. Britta Fluevog -- I am, maternally, a third generation artist; my grandmother was a printmaker, my mother is an art therapist/ mixed media artist, and my father is a designer. Inspiration comes from the creative household environment that my growing up entailed. I received my Bachelors in Interdisciplinary Fine Art from NSCAD University. Upon graduation, I established a small ceramic co-op in Ghana, West Africa. I received Master’s ofApplied Art from Emily Carr, studying with Ruth Beer. Kristina Guison is a Manila-born, Filipino-Canadian artist based in Toronto. She is currently working on her BFA major in Sculpture/Installation and minor in Integrated Media. The subject matter of her works revolve around the personal, psychological, socio-cultural and political impacts and drives that constitute our perception of presence and absence in the heavily globalized and precarious, 21st century, socio-political landscape. She explores the state of “fragmented existence” through her sounds sculptures, process-based sculptural installations and immersive light installations. Paddy Jane is a Toronto based photographer, videographer, Captain of the No Pants Society, and former radio show host for Sex, Outlaws and Rock and Roll. She specializes in boudoir photography, reminiscent of the arcade cards of the turn of the twentieth century. Inspired by her Grandmother, Paddy Browne, a comedienne, diseuse and vaudeville hostess for Britain’s celebrated Windmill Theatre, during the 1930s, Jane is also a burlesque performer. Red Zeppelin, presents the audience the beauty of the tease, which was a popular trope of the 1920s vaudeville circuit. Paddy Browne will also be making an appearance in Awards.
Anna Copa Cabanna
Britta Fluevog 1. I Took Pride in My Work: transnational Labour, Blacklisted Seamstress, 2015 2. Residual Defiance, Detail 2014
Kristina Guison, Presence of Absence, 2014
Paddy Browne
Paddy Jane
RenÊ Vandenbrink lives in London, Ontario and holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Western Ontario. Her practice process based work in textiles explores collecting, interactions with nature, surface design and forms of assemblage as tools for breathing new life into discarded/obsolete objects and underrepresented modes of making/traditions that typically involve the handmade, recycling and supporting sustainably made materials. Commissioned works for Awards deal with the everyday challenges of working within the constructs of society while trying to maintain balance and happiness– though women may have more freedoms than ever before, there are still so many challenges that are difficult to navigate, especially when you are going it alone.
Rene Vandenbrink, Some Things can’t be Unbroken, detail, 2016
Rene Vandenbrink, Trying to Turn it Around, 2015/2016