Cold Waters Symposium & Media Arts Festival

Review, August 15, 2019 by Imogen Clendinning

In mid-June I was graciously invited to North Bay, Ontario to attend this year’s Media Arts Network Ontario (MANO) conference, the Cold Waters Symposium & Media Arts Festival. I was contacted a month earlier and invited to participate in the Remote Studios program, a kind of free form residency, artist camp. This two day experiment allowed emerging and mid-career makers and artists from the Northern Ontario region and beyond to meet, collaborate and share their ideas. As part of the residency, artists were given access to a monastery turned arts institution— affiliated with Nipissing University. At the end of the two days, attendees of the media conference were invited to an Open Studio event where the participating residents had the opportunity to share our practices and conceptual framing.

Photo courtesy of Vanessa Tignanelli

On the first day of Cold Waters I met thirty artists from North Bay, Thunder Bay, Sault St. Marie, Souix Lookout and a number of other locations. We shared our backgrounds with one another, our conceptual interests, and discussed the nuances of creating safe space (this is no small feet). This conversation embodied part of my more general experience at Cold Waters 2019: the conference encouraged difficult and necessary dialogue to develop between artists and administrators from across Canada, yet these conversations were often limited by allotting only an hour or two for discussion. This kind of tight scheduling created a tension of feeling; somewhere between optimism and frustration. The fact that these complex issues were being addressed frankly was motivating. Just as I would find myself enriched by one discussion or thought, the hour would end and everything was reset. This often hindered deeper discussion of complex issues. Through powerful group dynamics and well formed panels MANO was able to bring to the forefront several sociopolitical issues, but there was less time dedicated to brainstorming nuanced solutions or possibilities. This critique is not strictly relative to the Cold Water Symposium, I often feel that the strict timelines imposed by the structure of conferences can potentially inhibit thorough discussion.

Over the next two days, I would fruitlessly scour the old monastery for technology or supplies. The overachiever that I am, I was compelled to use this as an opportunity to make something new, something that could in some way respond to this experience and place. I filmed a short video, messed around with an old episode of Star Trek on tape and attempted to make something clever with an Anne Rice audiobook on cassette. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to marry Anne Rice to Star Trek. My error was in attempting to respond to the Remote Studio as a short-term residency, rather than an opportunity to develop a community of emerging makers through this experience. On the final day, thirty artists gathered over two floors. Some gave short artist talks (notably artists Jeremy Saya and Tyler Levesque), some screened short films (including Cole Forest Stevens, who is currently beginning a project sponsored by ImagiNative). Performance artist Tejhler Leadbeater, video/performance artist Katie Huckson and myself set up in the basement and offered more casual drop-in experiences with our arts practices.

During the Remote Studio program I was fortunate to connect with Taylor Jolin, an Ojibwe artist from Baawaating (Sault St. Marie). Jolin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often explores themes of non-verbal communication, banality and paranoia. Jolin is currently working with The Indigenous Women’s Anti-Violence Taskforce, an Indigenous-led group dedicated to restoring and protecting the honour and value of Indigenous women, 2SLGBTQQIA+ and gender diverse people in Baawaating. I contacted her after Cold Waters had ended. I wanted to speak with another emerging artist about their experience at the Remote Studio, and learn more about their practice.

Jolin had opted to give an artist talk on the final day of the Remote Studio, telling me that as casual as the short residency was, it was the most publicly she had ever spoken about her work. Certainly, this section of the conference allowed artists of different ages, backgrounds and practices to occupy time and space at the Cold Waters Symposium. This led to a feeling of overarching support at the conference; as a young maker I felt that my art was relevant and my labour was respected. Jolin similarly expressed that she was anticipating that the event could help legitimize her practice. The ability to present her work during the conference led to a fruitful peer critique, and the opportunity to network. Jolin says that forming these connections can be so vital to one’s art practice, especially for those who live in smaller Northern communities.

Photo courtesy of Taylor Jolin

One of the more fruitful aspects of the Remote Studio program was the ability to learn about each other’s art making. I was particularly interested in Jolin’s Remote Viewing series. A collection of still images captured by Jolin of different snapshots taken from online surveillance cameras documenting natural environments; what looked to me like a kind of Big Brother tourism. In speaking about the project Jolin said, “Remote Viewing is so nebulous to me right now, which feels appropriate because that's also how I perceive the nature of the surveillance cameras. New ones pop up and disappear every day, the placement of some seemingly arbitrary, but I can't dedicate enough time to track the behaviour to know for sure.” The mysterious nature of these floating cameras is sometimes interrupted by architectural and industrial landmarks like wind turbines, which embody human presence. She states further that, “As an Indigenous person who wasn't raised with traditional land-based teachings I've struggled with my relationship to land and place. I don’t feel connected to the ‘yours to discover’ camping and nationalism narrative, or the land is medicine spirituality.” Her investigation of disparate places speaks to a disassociation with more familiar natural landscape. To Jolin, it is possible that she feels more connected to disparate places than to home. These different relationships with place are vital. One of the more nuanced elements of the symposium was the recognition that artists in the North do not relate to the land in the same kinds of ways, nor do we have idyllic relationships with it.

Near the end of the conference I attended a screening of short films, all created by artists and filmmakers from the Northern Ontario region. I was particularly struck by the wit and honesty at play in Amanda Lindenbach’s video-work Oui, je suis une pute. I contacted her after the weekend had ended to speak about her experience at the Remote Studio program— and to learn more about her film. Lindenbach is a “queer, fat, Mad, (dis)abled, spooning, francophone, sex worker, porn maker and interdisciplinary artist. She is a student of fine arts, sociology and electronics; committed to pleasure activism, neuro-inclusivity, slut celebration and the expansion of video art” (Lindenbach). Similar to myself and Jolin, Lindenbach emphasized the prevalence of this being a unique opportunity to formally present her work to a group of peers of young artists and curators. She says, “So much of my energy is focused on creating, producing, exporting and I rarely take the time to hold and care for the work.”

Photo courtesy of Amanda Lindenbach

In Oui, je suis une pute, Lindenbach uses her form, dramatic lighting and spoken word (spoken French and English subtitle), to recount her experience as a pornography artist and sex worker. The video was born from Lindenbach’s response to a particular critique that referenced her work as a pornmaker and sex worker, rather than the art being discussed. I wanted to know more about the different advantages of using digital media to tell stories and share lived experience. Lindenbach responded by saying that “digital media for storytelling provides a constellation. I enjoy the effectiveness of telling digital stories with image, audio, text and all of the interconnected narratives - conscious and subconscious - that appear within the mix.” The effectiveness of intermedia practice to communicate cerebral function and human experience was used by several artists at the Cold Waters Symposium, including Lindenbach.

I also was interested in the presence of translation in the video. Why include the French language with English subtitles in the film? Lindenbach explained that the video is in French because it is her first language. The process for this piece began with bilingual video journaling in both French and English. “I decided to share the French parts because I first learned sex-negativism and slut-shaming in that language.” Lindenbach’s video piece was one of the only representations of French language at the symposium, and it used language as a marker of identity. Lindenbach’s video used individual history as a mechanism for storytelling, effectively intertwined with stylistic effects, dramatic lighting and the performative.

The Remote Studios program allowed me the opportunity to meet these artists, among many others, learn about their processes and ask questions. The richest aspect of this event was the space and time to meet other young folks who continue to make relatable, challenging and critical work, and to meet arts administrators who are dedicated to collaboration. It’s electric to take a break from a failing art experiment, to then stumble into an invaluable conversation about funding a media arts project, or to enter a discussion investigating the importance of decolonizing the artist-run centre. Every lunch break was a mind warp.

At Cold Waters the respect for diverse opinions, culture and lived experience was palpable. This recognition and openness was part of what allowed for these innovative conversations to take place. The event exposed arts administrators and artists from urban hubs to the mind-bending work that is being produced outside of these sectors. In more rural places in Canada, it is easy to feel as though you might slip into obscurity, or as though you are tragically disconnected. MANO’s Cold Water Symposium seemingly celebrated difference, and sought to build a bridge.

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Imogen Clendinning is a media artist and arts administrator who lives in Windsor ON, and hails from North Bay ON. Clendinning identifies as a cisgender femme maker whose found-footage videos deconstruct tropes and signifiers used in cult cinema. Clendinning acts as the Programming Coordinator at Artcite Inc., an artist-run centre focused on bringing contemporary arts to the Windsor-Essex region.

Taylor Jolin
https://www.taylorjolin.ca

Amanda Lindenbach
https://almond.format.com

In Conversation with the Curator: I Can Boogie but I Need a Certain Song at Artcite Inc.

June 2 - July 13, 2019

Interview, July 13, 2019 by Luke Maddaford

Off centre’s Luke Maddaford sat down with Artcite Inc’s Executive Director Lucas Cabral to talk about the exhibition he curated, I Can Boogie but I Need a Certain Song. The exhibition, featuring video work by Amie Siegel, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Bearbara, Maya Ben David, and John Greyson, explores music as a material and language in artmaking. The exhibition ran from June 2 - July 13, 2019 at Artcite Inc. in Windsor, ON.

Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.

Off Centre: So, the exhibition. Do you want to start by giving a little bit of information about it?

Lucas Cabral: Sure. So, “I Can Boogie but I Need a Certain Song’ looks at how artists use music as a form of language that comes with predetermined understandings and connotations, that ensures an ease of understanding..

OC: Like an entry point for a viewer that maybe isn’t used to art language.

LC: Yeah, there’s a shared experience that is associated with certain songs - or a certain kind of emotional connection. The relatability is there and then you can build off of it, or diverge from it in order to show what you want to show. But at the same time, artists are people reflecting the way that people in general do this. They use music to proclaim or to demonstrate emotion to others about themselves in the world.

OC: Even to show a bit of their identity to somebody right?

LC: Yeah, absolutely

OC: That’s cool. Can you talk about the title for a bit…

LC: Yeah

OC: ...cause I really like it. And I think it’s funny and smart.

LC: So, it kind of runs parallel to the way I make a lot of my own work as an artist, borrowing from song lyrics, metaphors, figures of speech, and playing with them to point out something that is there, but not necessarily the most obvious. And as I’ve been living my warmer weather life and getting into disco and Pride, the song, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” by Baccara has been coming up over and over again, and within it the singer says, “I can boogie but I need a certain song/I can boogie all night long” So boogie-ing is the engagement or the connection, but the lyrics also acknowledge the personal specificity required to trigger it. It was a nice way to borrow from music to name the exhibition while also pointing to what’s actually happening in a lot of the work itself.

OC: Cool, let’s talk about the work.

LC: The exhibition includes, Amie Siegel who is based out of New York, Bearbara who is a Canadian artist, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsey who is Canadian based now in Scotland, John Greyson, and Maya Ben David from Toronto.

OC: It’s a very wide range of artists, who have very different practices, so it’s really interesting to see them all in one show.

LC: I wanted to show that this is a strategy that’s used to communicate universally, not just specifically about music or the production of music, it’s getting into all kinds of interests. Maya Ben David has two works in the show and both of them are fairly different. One of them is from a series, or an ongoing body of work where she is developing cosplay characters, and that’s Air Canada Gal. In that video she takes the selloffvacations.com jingle and slows it down and when she does it becomes kind of sexy and alluring and sultry. So she is using music to communicate the identity of this character they are creating, but also at the same time pointing at this romanticization or glamourization of travel and world travel and how ooh-ah-ah travel is, right? Also looking to advertising, all the sexy images of people sprawled out on beaches and the sun beating down and all of that. Applying those tropes to this character through music paints the bigger picture of what this character is. Simultaneously reclaiming, or using it in a tongue and cheek way, to reclaim what she faces online as a woman who is involved in this culture which is a lot of sexism, which is a lot of misogyny. That piece does a lot.

OC: Yeah, that piece is one of my favourite pieces in the show. And I’ve shown it to people and talked to other people about it before and they are on either end of it. They either love it and are totally on board with it, or they have no idea what’s going on and think it’s the weirdest thing ever. So, I guess with that kind of work, it’s interesting to see it in a smaller city, and in a smaller space. I think that you are less likely to get people who are going to be on board with it in a city like Windsor. So, I’m kind of interested in how you feel the exhibition operates in a region like Windsor? Why is it important to put together an exhibition like this here?

LC: I think that’s a hard question to answer, because I’ve only been in Windsor for a few months now. I’m not really sure. But what I think is interesting and what I continue to find satisfying with people coming through the exhibition is I can hear them laugh, I can hear them chuckle, I can hear them sing along or hum along as it’s going on. And it’s a different way, it’s not necessarily what people expect when they come into an exhibition.

OC: It’s maybe a little bit less serious than they expect.

LC: it eases you into it and the humour aspect of it allows you to kind of relate to it more.

OC: It offers another entry point, and there is quite a bit of humour in this show. Like, I think almost all the pieces have an element of humour. Which I think is really nice. Bearbara’s video as well is just like, so funny, but it’s a very serious topic. And I think it’s interesting to put those kinds of things in an exhibition, where they’re not necessarily going to be taken seriously at first, but it’s going to offer somebody another way to engage with it, and maybe they will give it a little more time because they are being entertained as well.

Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.

LC: I think it’s kind of a bit of a back and forth in terms of... we are seeing artists using music to communicate aspects of their identity individually, but on a grand scale, it is everyone. So if you look at the Amie Siegel works, My Way 1 and My Way 2, each one pulls videos from YouTube. The one on the left, young kids, mostly girls singing a track from High School Musical, on the right, typically older men doing My Way by Frank Sinatra. And these things that are large emotional gestures, big public things that have been put online for everybody to see, become very very intimate in this viewing. In combining these clips together, personal becomes universal as clips of performances of the song are combined into 12 minutes of the people all singing the same thing. What is perceived as being this unique independent gesture, when they are all brought together like this, is actually not. Your conviction to sing this song and identify yourself by it is something that everybody else is doing. All these people have done the same thing. So what actually becomes more telling in these snippets, in these portraits, are the things in the background: posters, the pictures, what shirt are you wearing?

OC: One of the things that I really like about that piece is, I find that people posting covers that maybe aren’t even that good online is a really vulnerable thing to do and putting them all together creates this shared vulnerability where it’s no longer just you bearing yourself out online, it’s a thing that everybody is doing and it’s not as scary, it’s more of a cultural phenomenon.

LC: It’s in the way the monitors are facing each other, too. We are made aware that it’s something that develops with us. Like it’s not a juvenile gesture done because you don’t have the language or skills to articulate how you feel. You have this older group who are also doing the same thing and with time and money they invest in better audio equipment. You can see it, they have mics on stands. Where in My Way 1 there’s posters of High School Musical or My Little Pony, on the right in My Way 2, there’s Heineken signs, lava lamps, one guy has a gun hanging up in the background. So shared by these very different types of people with different interests is this idea of using music to effectively communicate what you feel, or what you’ve been programmed or told to feel.

Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.

OC: Definitely. Do you want to talk about Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s work?

LC: So Benny’s work was really interesting to me durationally. The video was produced in 2002, and it was paired with a letter that was sold to collectors and sealed. The letter was written to Madonna and explains how through making this video and her music, he was able to kind of understand more about himself and this new experience. There’s an interview online where he talks about when he had heard the song when he moved to Berlin from Canada after a heart break and was at this party and was all, “fuck, I hate Madonna, she’s evil incarnate, but this song is telling my story”

He’s talking about how these things are produced to be relatable and be connected to, but also he’s very aware of the opposition. For this show, the framed work replaces what would normally be the sealed letter. So all these years later, his connection with the work and his connection with the song has changed, shown to us through how the work has changed. The letter which was kind of a personal thing between him and Madonna, he has now taken excerpts of it and made it public. And the first couple lines, “Your lyrics became a tool through which to understand my own experiences...”

OC: I think you could apply that to the whole exhibition.

LC: Yeah, and in terms of feeling loneliness and feeling seen, performing this for 16 individual security cameras. Madonna has never seen him, she doesn’t know him but sang this song, produced this song so particularly that it applied so specifically to him that he feels seen. There’s a voyeuristic part to it. But also, within that he is one of many who has also shared that same experience, right? So it’s doing something not so dissimilar from what Amie Siegel is doing. But in a personal way, looking inward, whereas Amy Segal is looking at this outward trend, spotting what people are doing. Does that make sense?

OC: Yeah, I think it does. Should we talk about John Greyson?

LC: Yes. So this piece and the Bearbara one function a little bit different for me in the way I’ve been thinking about the exhibition. I’m interested in how these interventions into song provide space for personal inflection, personal style, right? But also how music is a storytelling tool like what we saw with Benny.

Greyson hasn’t really spun off a song, he’s taking an existing story and applying music to it, he’s reclaiming that story and using music as a way to do so. Similarly with Bearbara who makes music as Bearbara because she feels that her messages of consent are not received when she is not Bearbara. Somehow as this 8-foot tall purple bear, she is taken more seriously and her message is taken more seriously. So at the tail ends of the exhibition this strategy of interrupting the space instead of the song is different. Thinking differently about how the performer can engage a space and audience.

OC: This one, I also feel is much more embedded in a larger social issue, or maybe something more people would have heard about or be aware of than something like Amie Siegel’s work, or especially Maya’s work. I guess it feels like much more of an established commercial work than some of the other ones. And I think that’s very interesting in that it’s another way of engaging with people. When you have this kind of commercial production of something it gives it clout and people are going to take it more seriously.

LC: Absolutely. And getting more into using music and in this sense, this genre of music, comes with it’s own connotations. Right? It’s an opera, you don’t make an opera about your cosplay character.

OC: Maybe you should.

LC: Well yeah, but using storytelling and this specific mode of music storytelling to position this story is seen as this classic and deconstructing all of that classic-ness through opera and through the visual symbols as well.

Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.

Maya Ben David’s take on the John Denver song in Serenading my Apartment reflects our eagerness to connect with music. She takes this John Denver song which is comparing his love for his then-wife to a walk in the rain, a mountain covered in flowers, all these grand metaphors, and as she sits in the mall and makes this very public, grand, gesture of love and affection for her popcorn ceiling in her apartment, she grasps at straws to actually make it apply to her life. So, she’s like “I’ve never been on a mountain of flowers, but I’ve seen the sound of music and it was this and that and whatever da da-da da da-da da”. All of a sudden you are way lost in this dark hole of trying to make this sound really, really, connect with you. At the end, a clip of Denver reflecting on the song after splitting from his wife saying, “I wrote this song for Annie, but this song is for our children, it’s for this, it’s for that, it’s for this person, it’s for this” and it exposes how widely music actually has to be produced in order to make that connection. You think about the ways that music resonates through you and for what reasons.

OC: Do you have anything else to say about the show?

LC: I’m sure I will after you leave.

OC: I think it’s fantastic. It’s really nice to see all these artists in Windsor. I feel that they aren’t necessarily artists that I would expect to see here, or together in one exhibition, but I think it turned out really well, and it’s nice.

LC: Thank-you.