I’ve hit a wall with my thesis project.
my teachers are asking: What is my mission? Why do I need to do something fictional? What is the reason? Am i still the curator if I am also the artist? How will I negotiate these two roles?
I am thinking now that I might now be curating a show and commission other artists.
ba hum bug. I have much more to vent about, think about, but no time to do it now.
My mother has a love of the written word. I don’t mean that she loves to read – although she does – but rather that she loves words. This love turned into a collection of dictionaries, thesauruses (thesauri?), maps, books and magazines meant for cutting up. Naturally this love of words, and maps, and old books fell to me too. So when my friend sent me a link for this artist, I just fell in love. I might have a new use for the shelf full of old cut up books on my shelf…
His name is Brian Dettmer.
just gorgeous….
My dear friend Marissa over at tinygrants (an amazing project!) and the author of art blog the last place on earth you probably want to be sent me an email when she came across an artist she knew i would just love.
and she was right.
Neil Pardington’s works are beautiful. I remember visiting a museum in Banff as a child and being fascinated with the darkness of their museum – and it was full of dead stuffed animals. There is something both eerie and magical in that type of feeling, and these photographs capture it:
fantastic collections, in this case held by our public collectors….
In revisiting the film The Gleaners and I, I discovered that there is mention of an interesting artist Louis Pons. I have not been able to find much about him, other than he collects junk and creates beautiful collages out of them, and that he is from France.
If anyone does know or come across anything on him, please let me know.
I love his displays of collections of junk:
They remind me alot alot alot of Louise Nevelson who made similar collages of junk. Here is her piece, eerily similar:
and another:
the idea that I love about both of these artists and their philosophies is the notion that all of these objects that they collect, junk they turn into art, was someone elses before, has lived another life, has another history.
that’s a lovely idea.
Perhaps one of my favorite artists, I fell in love with Nick Bantock’s works after my high school art teacher introduced me to him. She handed me his artistic biography – The Artful Dodger. I immediately went out and purchased several of his other books – most importantly to me, Griffin and Sabine.
This is the description he gives on his (poorly designed) website:
“Few books are more romantic than this trilogy, nor more surreal. Griffin Moss is a rather doleful, lonesome, gaunt, and haunted postcard designer in London. Sabine Strohem is an illustrator of stamps living on an island in the South Pacific. One day Griffin gets an extraordinary letter from Sabine revealing that she knows all kinds of things about his life and work–somehow, she can share his soul from afar. They start exchanging love letters, yet it remains an open question whether Griffin and Sabine are two hearts that mystically beat as one, or simply illusory. “You’re a figment of my imagination,” Griffin accuses Sabine. “You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened,” Sabine replies. Phantom or soul mate, Sabine is pursued across the globe by Griffin in an increasingly impassioned fashion, and the mysteries deepen”
The amazing part is that Nick Bantock has two distinct style of art making - one that he assigns to Sabine and the other to Griffin. These styles come through in the post cards and letters he crafts to be exchanged between these two characters. The book is lovely too, in that on some pages there are envelopes with letters that need to be pulled out and unfolded in order to be read. The narrative of these two characters spans a series of several books, and it well worth the read.
In fact he has several other books that are also beautiful, artistic and worth the read. I think I own all of his books, and there isn’t one that I don’t love.
In fact this book taps into my love for the post, mail and postcards. Several years ago my mother purchased someone’s stamp collection from a yardsale for 5$. It’s a huge binder, with stamps from all over the around from the 50’s. There are letters to, and they are all beautiful. I’m sure it would be worth a fortune, but I like to leaf through them from time to time, and use them in collages and art pieces. That adds more value to me.
There are several other books that fit nicely into this vein. ‘Post Secret’, which is a lovely concept – writing your deepest secret on a handmade postcard and sending them in to be published in a book or on the website. The books (i believe there are two now) are a wonderful simple read – some are funny, some are sad, some are scary and you would be surprised at how many you could relate to.
‘Postal Seance’ is another fantastic book. It is a ’scientific investigation into the possibility of a postlife postal existence’. It explores, with a series of beautiful postcards, the possibility of sending postcards to dead people through a postal portal. You can see and read more about it here.
Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, two canadian artists created a performance art piece that was a hilarious semi-fake tour of the wilderness. 
You can read more about them here.
I love the ‘realness’ and professionalism added by the uniforms and an organized tour! Perhaps it will help me think about my own fake tour through my own fake setting.
So, there are a handful of historic Toronto sites and museums, opperated by Toronto Culture, that I will have to investigate:
Colborne Lodge, Fort York, The Gibson House, The Zion School House, The Mackenzie House, Montgommery;s Inn, Scarborough Historical Museum, The Spadina Museum, Todmorden Mills Heritage Museum & Art Centre, and the York museum.
I will of course also have to visit the ROM, the AGO, The Toronto Archives, The Bata Shoe Museum, The Toronto Police Museum, Casa Loma, University of Toronto, Black Creek Pioneer Village and anywhere else I can think of!
At each of these historic sites of museums, I would like to take a tour if a tour is offered, so I can start to think about locations that may be interested or willing to participate in my project, and so that I can think about displays, didactics, objects and narratives to help in creating my own!
This project is inspired in part, by my interest in archeology. Growing up in an old little hamlet, there were several foundations of houses around and rumours of unmarked graves. My sister and I used to stage archeological digs, using brushes and chisles and documenting our finds. This is where my love of Mark Dion’s piece Tate Thames Dig. It was a staged archeological dig, with all of the objects them displayed at the Tate in a very ethnographic, anthropological setting and display method.
I’d love to read a catalogue or listing as to the objects exactly in the collection.
And so shall begin my archeological dig into these historic sites, to see what I can dig up! I’ll have to get my camera fixed so that I can capture images to share along the way!
so yesterday I promised to write about what my thesis project might be. I realize now that it is very difficult to articulate, particularly after a couple glasses of wine…but I’ll fill you in, regardless. bare with me.
i would like to create a realistic, historic, museum like setting and in it display the belongings of a character (that I have yet to create) and provide a narrative (fictional) and history to this character, as to who they were, why they had these things and so on. Picture visiting Casa Loma, on a smaller, slightly more bizarre scale. This fictional historic display will also potentially have a tour component, making it curationa, installation and performance.
This type of project ties up every loose end that I was striving to include. It toys with truth and fiction. The authority of the curator and the authority of the institution. It includes collections and collecting in order to create a character and a narrative. It includes personal histories. As it will be a fake museum setting, it will include display, a catalogue/archive, catalogue numbers, labels, didactics, textual information, …and it includes fiction and a narrative, both things I am very fond of!
Now, this is the very very initial stage. I have lot’s of research to do – both reading, but also taking tours and visiting historic sites. I have lot’s of crazy logistics to figure out -where will the show be held? A house? My house? A gallery? The university? Partner with a historic society? And how? What will it include?
But regardless of all of that hullaballoo, i am so thrilled to have a direction and a starting point, because now I can get creative!
Today I had a meeting with one of my profs. I expressed feeling a little lost and starting to get a bit freaked out about which direction to focus in on for my thesis proposal, for which the deadline is fast approaching. I walked away feeling refreshed and relieved, having tied up alot of loose ends and incorporating almost everything i love and am inspired by into one big exhibtion/installation/historic tour/catalog/archive/show/book thing.
However I had a very long day at school followed by a fairly short, however still exhausting night at work, and I just cannot wrap my brain around trying to explain it right now. It’s probably for the best, ideas always need to simmer a bit before they come out in any sort of rational and reasonable way.
I will say that a couple things crossed my mind today that I have been meaning to mention. They may turn into longer and more interesting posts at a later date, but until then…
The movie Wall-e has a fantastic scene showing off Wall-e’s amazing collection. Having lived alone on an abandoned earth for 700 years, he has collected all sort of interesting, odd, quirky and funny objects and keeps them in a shipping container type thing. It’s a wonderful collection. The following link is the best I could find – it’s the first 11 minutes of the movie, but you only need to start watching about 6 minutes into it:
Also, Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck -she makes beautiful works out of collections of buttons and multiples of sweaters. Have i already mentioned her?
Mark Dion’s archeological dig is also of great interest to me at the moment.
More on all of these later…
Also, my Leanne Shapton book arrived at Chapters. I’ll be picking it up tomorrow (i hope!) and let you know how it goes.
night all!
