Impermanent Collections, Temporary Occupations, and Other Gatherings

Saturday, 09 May 2015
Rodman Hall Art Centre
2 PM
Free

Maggie Groat in attendance.

As part of Impermanent Collections, Temporary Occupations, and Other Gatherings, a solo exhibition of the work of Maggie Groat at the Rodman Hall Arts Centre, she will be selecting texts from the Rodman Hall library, working with the material of the institution itself to engender a critical reflection on the shifting terrain of its existence.

Groat’s interdisciplinary practice often challenges assumptions, standards and routines to propose new ways of thinking. In this exhibition, she reflects on the shifting territory of Rodman Hall and the surrounding area by researching the geographic, natural, and art histories of the site. Treating the exhibition period as a self-directed residency, Groat will work on site, inserting her presence into the day-to-day and exerting her systems of classification on the existing order of the gallery. Working to integrate indigenous practices, she will cull objects from the grounds, permanent collection, archives, and offices for a series of temporary installations in the Project Space, bringing into focus things that have previously existed on the margins. Both playful and hopeful, Groat’s work insightfully addresses issues of power and displacement.

Maggie Groat is a visual artist working in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, artists’ books, site-specific interventions, and field studies. Forming an ongoing research-based practice, Groat’s work explores studies for possible futures, salvage practices, and relationships and reconnections to place and ancient knowledge systems, from an Indigenous perspective. Through reconfiguring and recontextualizing found materials, she assembles collages, sculptures and tools that enable moments of envisioning and the potential for action. Maggie studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She is represented by Erin Stump Projects in Toronto.

Special thanks to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for their ongoing support of this project and to Rodman Hall Arts Centre for hosting this salon.

Andrea Fraser’s “Performance or Enactment” as selected by Martha Wilson

Photo credit: Martha Wilson as Barbara Bush by Dennis W. Ho.

Thursday, 16 April 2015 Urbanspace Gallery (Ground floor, 401 Richmond Street West) 3PM Free

As part of the 28th annual Images Festival, this salon will feature Andrea Fraser’s essay “Performance or Enactment” as selected by Martha Wilson.

Martha Wilson in attendance.

As part of the 2015 Images Festival, Wilson will be participating in performance artist Jess Dobkin’s How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb (For Martha Wilson). Taking a direct cue from Wilson’s video The History of Performance Art According to Me, Martha Wilson (2005), Dobkin takes on the complex and riddled history of performance art, defining its terms and conditions, while acknowledging the slippery temperament of her task. This new work will be an attempt to overwhelm the definitions and intersections of performance, documentation, the archive, and image reproduction to investigate the nature of performance itself. As a preface to the performance, which is centred upon enacting a lightbulb joke about performance art, Fraser’s text foregrounds discussion of re-performance of historical works.

Fraser’s essay “Performance or Enactment” can be accessed here. However, please note that it is not necessary to pre-read the text.

MARTHA WILSON is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity.  She has been described by New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.”  In 1976 she founded Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artist books, temporary installation, performance art, as well as online works.  She is represented by P.P.O.W Gallery in New York; and has received fellowships for performance art from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; Bessie and Obie awards for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression; a Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts; a Richard Massey Foundation-White Box Arts and Humanities Award; and in 2013 received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.

Special thanks to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for their ongoing support of this project and the Images Festival for hosting this salon.

Courtesy of the Images Festival.

Courtesy of the Images Festival.