Exhibition: Monday, October 15, 2012 - Monday, November 5, 2012
Reception & Performance: Thursday, October 25, 2012 — 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Where else could we begin? The body. That which so obviously belongs to us. But this personal and yet inevitably public site has historically and politically been under siege, in question, up for grabs, discussed and dissected. As women artists, with a fraught history of indignities, constraints, and projections upon our persons, where else does the work of deconstruction begin? — but with the body. With our own lived experience, inhabiting these bodies. And we continue to re-imagine an enhanced, improved, adjusted terrain to inhabit. This is our project as artists. We engage in a daily making and re-making of the world. Our first collaborative work, The Autonomous Eye, was our response to the debates surrounding the female body in the 1980s and 1990s.
Works in Between One and Another focus on the experiencing body, using this modus operandi to explore a number of issues, often through performance to camera. Our work is also firmly situated within landscape, where sites and situations are evoked, some political, some heart-felt — all reactions to questions of power often set in the places where we live our lives. We often incorporate sites that are familiar to each of us, that evoke a notion of home and of past generations.
This exhibition gathers key works selected from over 30 years of art production, including significant statements on evolving issues through that time period. While each work naturally emerges from a particular site or situation, common themes emerge: our shared perspective as women, our engagement with the body politic, our need to speak out about issues. The exhibition offers audiences the opportunity for reflection and engagement with these universal concerns.
Sandra Vida’s (Canada) work often embodies an activist impulse, and is based in social issues, especially related to the changing role of women within society. She was born in Calgary and studied English literature as well as Art and Psychology at the University of Calgary. Her work over the past three decades has included photo-based collage, performance, film, video and installation that investigate a range of issues from the perspective of how the personal and political are intertwined.
Vida was an early pioneer in the use of the colour photocopier and continues to explore digital collage in combination with video. A book about her art career was recently produced by EMMEDIA titled Sandra Vida: vision and voice. She returned to film animation with her most recent work, Elegy that combines live video with a variety of animation techniques in 2010.
In addition to her art practice, Vida is known for her dedication to other artists through Calgary’s artist-run centres and as an advocate for the arts regionally and nationally. As coordinator of The New Gallery for over a decade, and as an independent curator, she has facilitated a wide variety of creative projects. She has been nominated twice for a Governor-General’s visual and media arts award, received the Epcor Established Arts award at the Mayor’s Luncheon for Business and the Arts, and was one of three finalists for Alberta’s first Marion Nicoll Visual Art award.
Pauline Cummins (Ireland) is an artist whose work explores the human condition from a feminist perspective. Her interest lies in performance and video work where she examines identity, gender and socio-cultural relations connected to different communities in the society. Her examination of locations questions how the self is constituted and how people act within a group either chosen or determined in social situations such as work, education, leisure time “social activities” or the basic structure of the family.
Pauline attended National College of Art, Dublin, during its turbulent years of Mao-influenced ‘continuous revolution’ and lockouts (1967–1970), which profoundly influenced her work strategies. She moved from painting to photography, performance, sound work and video installations, during the 80s. She was the founding chairperson of the Women Artists Action Group (WAAG), which from 1987–1991 organized exhibitions and conferences in Ireland, and promoted exchange and dialogue internationally.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art Dublin. She has recently renewed a strong commitment to performance that is collaborative, improvised, durational and live, working with The Performance Collective based in Dublin since 2009. She presented her new video work and performance, Sound the Alarm 4, in Victoria, in September 2010. She took part in Right Here Right Now Irish Performance Art in Kilmainham Jail in 2011, and plans 14 days of live performance with The Collective at the Galway Arts Centre, during the Galway Arts Festival in 2012.
