Here is write up sent to me by the director of "Visual Arts Alberta". It details each individual artist in the coming "Trumpet" exhibition which shows at the Latitude 53 gallery here in Edmonton. I placed my section in red, have not read it as that sort of "ME" thingy makes me rather uncomfortable.
The Opening night is June 3 at 8pm.
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Trumpet
"With the pride of the artist,
you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of
your defiance."
Norman Mailer
The exhibition
Trumpet
is framed by defiance: a reaction to the political climate in which we find ourselves
and our need to be heard. Each artist shown use their work as a megaphone: to
give warning, to speak out, to increase the power of their message.
Trumpet sought work by Alberta Artists who use their work
to question new political realities, on a local, national, and
international scale, and who may have a unique perspective that is
under-represented or unrecognized within current exhibition and curatorial
practices. The six selected artists - Barbara Amos, Lee Deranger, Kazumi
Marthiensen, M.E.D.I.U.M., Alice Schoenberg and Gerry Yaum - question the world
order in some way. Their art trumpets. It can be a loud lament about an issue,
a call to action, a direct challenge to assumptions and oppressive power
structures, a vehicle to further understanding or a way to redefine the world
around us.
Barbara Amos raises questions,
stimulates new conversations and possibly new actions; she offers a new way for
people to engage with the world. Since establishing a studio in the Crowsnest
Pass area of Alberta, Amos has sought out and engaged with the environmental
groups that are fighting to preserve the trees on the eastern slopes of the
Canadian Rockies - an area experiencing the world’s highest rate of
deforestation. Amos collaborates with others “in the field” to make political
environmental statements. In the gallery, Amos use concepts of beauty (a moment
of receptivity) to open us up to new connections and to an exchange of ideas.
Lee
Deranger is a First Nations artist based out of Calgary, whose politics are at
the heart of her creative practice. Deranger’s “Reconcile This” confronts a 268
year old “scalp law” that is still on the books in Nova Scotia. She offers the
viewer three scalps: one for the British, one for Canada and one for Nova
Scotia. Created after 2015’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and exhibited
here in the year of Canada’s 150th birthday, Deranger’s “Reconcile This”
challenges privileged narratives and assumptions, and reveals the many blind
spots in the dominant cultural discourse regarding the relationship between
Canada’s colonial history and First Nations and Metis lives and history. This
work slaps the viewer across the face; the slap is totally justified.
Kazumi Marthiensen has been exploring
and questioning the environmental destruction and crime arising from the
establishment of the American military base in Okinawa, Japan. Marthiensen
recognizes and addresses the lack of understanding of the post-war experience
in Okinawa by offering us a written explanation, a didactic statement that is
all the more poignant for its simplicity. This simplicity and attention
to detail extends to the work itself, and presents an arresting testament to
what is (still) happening on this small island 755 kilometers south of
Nagasaki. This work has a stillness, a silence about it, that underscores
this under-told story, and exposes the complexities surrounding the defeat of
Japan in the Second World War and the resulting American colonialism.
M.E.D.I.U.M.
(Metaphysical Explorations, Divination, and Investigations Utilizing Magic) is
a Lethbridge-based quartet comprised of Frater Tham, Madame Symona, Char Latan,
and Dr. I. M. Auftenhazie. The performative personas are adopted by the quartet
to subvert the notion of artistic “ego,” and take “authority,” out of the
equation when making art. The collective is very much engaged in the world’s
political issues, and use allegory, symbolism and magic to explore (and
subvert) notions of what real or concrete truth is. The video and artifacts
“Reduce, Reuse, Re-psychic” present us with an alternative “ritual curse and
healing narrative” to heal the planet and the creatures upon it, including
humans. M.E.D.I.U.M. provides us with new ways to both relate and react to our
current political reality, and seek lasting change for the better.
Alice Schoenberg uses her body to
create art that attempts to simultaneously divert and analyze the male gaze. As
a queer female artist, Schoenberg sexualizes the representation of her embodied
self, but retains control of this sexualization. “Miss Dressup,” employs
a childlike aesthetic to both expose and subvert the common cultural narratives
around sexualized female bodies. These versions of self are not her - they are
fragments of version of stories about what it means to inhabit a queer female
shape that wishes to define itself on its own terms. Schoenberg’s art provokes
a conversation about power, identity, control, sexuality, and how these forces
impact our bodies.
Gerry Yaum is a traditional documentary
photographer who works outside his culture and his comfort zone. This place of
discomfort allows Yaum to do more than observe his subject; he strives to see
them on their own terms. By the second or third visit to a place, Yaum notes,
the people he photographs “know you are no longer a tourist.” Like the
artists in M.E.D.I.U.M., Yaum has adopted a ‘persona’ in an attempt to focus
greater attention on the issues and ideas conveyed through his images (Yaum is
a pseudonym). As records of lived experience, “the Families of the Dump” series
presents a deeply uncomfortable vision of the world, the intention of which
Yaum describes as wanting to “slap [the viewer] out of their indifference.”
People living in ‘first world’ countries will likely never experience the
extreme poverty captured in these photographs. The intent here is to provoke a
level of discomfort that will lead us to question not only the present world
order, but our own complicity in it.
Trumpet player Christian Scott describes
his instrument as a political weapon; "I
don't just play the trumpet because it's something that resonates with me: I
play the trumpet because it's a means to help free a lot of people that ain't
free." Like Scott, to get their message out, the artists of Trumpet
ask
us to question what we hold to be true. They force us to listen. They are
Advocates, Activists, and Artists.
Chris W. C.
May 2017
