This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term from April to September. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
Food guides and official wisdom have been telling us for years to think about food visually and spatially. Protein should resemble a deck of cards, cheese: two fingers, a potato: your fist. And in the end, your daily intake should resemble a pyramid. To compliment these visual food serving size parameters is the optical understanding of what our bodies are supposed to look like as a result of this compliance.
Highly public figures like the United States’ First Lady and British Chef Jamie Oliver have been aggressively crusading to change the way people eat, and what they think of as appealing to ingest. It’s worth thinking about what the political and the official guidance has to offer us, or, what is does to us. As we move closer to the food-themed performative explorations that will take place at VisualEyez, up for discussion now is the way in which food can be a tool for understanding how we come to be ourselves. How do we see, and how do we perform, our sense of autonomy and uniqueness?
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term from April to September. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
It’s just barely more than two weeks before the start of VisualEyez, Latitude 53’s performance art festival, so I think it’s time to start cultivating some anticipation and to talk about food, embodiment, and why your presence there is significant. But wait a minute. Will I see you there?
Performance as a widely recognized genre of art began around the sixties with “Happenings’, Dan Flavin, and recognizable names like Yoko Ono, but we can trace the lineage back to the birth of Dada. Exiled artists who fled Europe and hid out in Switzerland for the duration of World War One had gibberish poetry and lobster-esque costumes as a cornerstone of the movement. Thinking of this lineage in the context of the age-old traditions of drag and how a law still stands on the French books that women can’t wear pants, as a species we have these conflicting desires to control each other’s bodies and to also be deviant in the face of those impositions.
Embodiment is further complicated by the ways in which we work on each other’s bodies through fashion trends, beauty standards, and underhanded comments.
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term from April to September. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
On Saturday I found out that it’s possible to create a museum exhibition about natural selection without making direct mention of the word evolution more than twice.
Over the past couple of years, the media and visual culture have been telling stories of Darwin to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. My requisite lawn-mowing podcast, CBC’s “Ideas”, has recently been presenting a multi-part series on the evolution pioneer. Two years ago, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) exhibition “Evolution Revolution,” was presented without the aid of the museum’s regular corporate sponsors and found their turn with the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition instead funded by the Humanist Association of Canada and the United Church of Canada.
Last Saturday I was catching up with a friend while on a visit to the AGA. She told me there was a show about natural selection at our Royal Alberta Museum. Who knew? After reading the paragraph about the show on their website, I knew something was amiss, and suddenly my previous ignorance of the exhibition’s existence began to make sense:
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term from April to September. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
During my lunch break on Saturday I found myself perched on a stool in the back room of the commercial gallery I work for, just like every Saturday. My idle skimming of the latest on Twitter, scrolling down at a disinterested speedy pace, was abruptly halted as I read the latest tweet from LACMA, the moniker by which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is commonly known:
“Me. LACMA. Today, 2 p.m. - I’ll be next to the painting w/ the pretentious name that looks like a goblin threw up on the canvas,” it said.
I squinted at my cell phone. Am I reading that correctly? I scrolled down further to discover another:
“Our artists are simply pre-modern reductivists in a post-ironic milieu seeking to blah blah blah (fart),” said LACMA.
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
Like every other child who grew up with parents in possession of a television, my Saturday mornings were spent in front of it, watching a coyote get pancaked onto Arizona valleys after unfortunate falls from the hills above, a rabbit who is a terrible tease (especially when faced with the ever-gullible Elmer Fudd), and a doe-eyed little penguin in constant need of rescue. Throw into the equation a parent in love with popular culture from the era in which the original cartoons were made, and you have all you need to create a child’s religious dedication to the Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show.
The famous and highly memorable Fudd-Bugs “Kill the Wabbit” opera does speak to a creative complexity beyond the televisual norm in its fusion of a medium easily accessible to children and Wagner. However, despite all attempts at careful consideration of the artistic merit and my intense nostalgia for Bugs and all this fictional conspirators, I struggle to understand why Warner Brothers has an exhibition at my provincial art gallery.
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
The other day my grandmother revealed to me how little I have learned about reading people’s artistic preferences when she visited me at my commercial gallery job. I figured that a well-dressed octogenarian with a predilection for sumptuous floral prints and afternoons spent in the garden amongst her flowers would love the delicate, elegant watercolour lily or the bombastic pinks in an electric garden on canvas.
She kept saying to me, “Carolyn, I want something restful.”
I showed her about a dozen images pulled from the back rooms before she verbalized what she really wanted in a way that I could understand:
“I want a scene.”
As she described her desire to sit in her sunroom and gaze at a space that she could travel through on the wings of her imagination, I came to realize that she wanted to buy art in preparation for her increasingly sedentary life.
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
This post comes to you after having numerous conversations over the past month about Edmonton’s arts community. So the following is a reflection on why I think it’s important to grow and nurture relationships in this scene, not just for the evolution of your own development, but for the good and betterment of the visual arts where we live. It’s hard to talk about the importance of community without falling into one of two types of platitudes:
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
Memorials have a finite quality to them – we go to services to celebrate the lives of friends and family members when they pass away, and to monuments in remembrance of the devastation caused by atrocities. When memorializing events, there is a need to hold on to the remembrance as a resolve to never let a similar event ever happen again.
The question of creating a permanent memorial to homelessness has been up for debate again in the chambers of City Hall. What does it mean to create a memorial to a problem faced by our city that, as far as I can tell, isn’t going away any time soon? Memorials have an element of celebration, or of relief that the horror is over. According to Scott McKeen’s Edmonton Journal article a couple weeks ago, it is estimated that 45 people died on Edmonton streets last year. We have a long way to go before we consider homelessness in our city a thing of the past.
On my way home from working downtown one day, I decided I wasn’t up to the 10 kilometre ride, so I hauled my bicycle into the elevator that goes to the LRT station below Enterprise Square. The slow descent downwards was accompanied by the distinct, pungent smell of urine. It would be easy to be angry for having my senses assaulted, but I don’t think that I am the one who suffered the real indignity. That lies with whomever it was that peed in the elevator.
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
“We don’t usually do that for student volunteers,” she said to me, with some confusion.
I had just met the department liaison for the conference where I was presenting my exhibition. Apparently when you are an undergraduate student curating an art show at an academic conference, even when you are invited to do so, you are still a student volunteer. Even when you get a substantial travel grant from your university to fly across the country to do so, you are still a student volunteer.
I’m glad that this and the subsequent series of misunderstandings happened. It couldn’t have been a better learning experience about the challenges and significance of facilitating creative projects outside the “appropriate” institutional setting, like a gallery, museum, or art festival. In retrospect I realize how easy it is to make assumptions about how much work, thought, and creativity go into curating and coordinating a show. I assumed it was obvious to people who invite art to their events that these things require expertise and don’t assemble themselves. They had no idea. I get the sense that they still don’t.
