Place des Montréalaises Summer garden Studies

Winning the international design compétition Place Des Montréalaises PDM with Lemay in 2018 in a significant geographic public space has a mandate to pay tribute to twenty-one women as selected by the council of women in Montreal. The complexity and politically charged mandate in commemorating twenty-one women has allowed me to continue my explorations through text and language-based methods archaeologies of inscription developed from my practice applying these at the intersection of gender and social justice commemorative strategies. PDM is a laboratory to continue testing ideas in relation to language, text, materials and the body in public urban space.

Place des Montréalaises

winter garden studies

Leading in the commemorative direction of our winning concept this project poetically merges architecture, landscape design and art methodologies creating a series of commemorative moments refocusing the lens to women’s previously unacknowledged contributions to city building. This interdisciplinary collaboration reshapes our understanding of the role of women’s historical contributions and amplifies social awareness in acknowledging the history of Montreal’s development.

The primary design gesture in an architectural blade transforming the site from its former use as a highway into a perennial meadow. The International jury articulated the engine of the project is the perennial meadow, a landscape slope rising towards the south, defining the horizon and framing the administrative city.  

Place des Montréalaises

TEXT studies

Place des Montréalaises

text studies

Place des Montréalaises

TEXT studies

 ECHOLALIA

Using a collection of plastic typewriter tape as a material I carve out and redefine architectural space creating a transparent ceiling. I chemically removed the black coating to reveal a transparent membrane with etched text where a typist had hit a key. It is a record, memory and archive of the Keystrokes of language. Although the content and former meaning is lost, the residue of language wrought from the interaction body and instrument is reconstituted.

 IBM TAPE

SELF PORTRAIT

Expanding on ideas of language, I perform obsolete technology, reworking moribund writing artifacts, seeking to investigate the performance of communication itself. My research, in all its disciplines, engages orality. This is through the implicit desire to bring text, however distorted and fragmented, into sound. This tension between text and the body’s production of sound, and the meaning implicit in that tension, is a catalyst for the work. Mark-making using a typewriter ball as both metaphor and instrument. Using the mouth as the tool, I replaced the production of speech for the production of drawing. I was curious about the mouths ability to create a drawing, wondering what kind of drawing my mouth would produce as an instrument with a typewriter ball on carbon paper.

TERCET BROOKLYN

Tercet. 2009. DAC Dumbo Arts Under the Bridge Festival. Brooklyn, New York.

This work acts critically on the interface between urbanity and infrastructure. Tercet usurps a Portable Electronic Message Board (PEMB) offering a moment of poetic disruption for car commuters and pedestrians. This body of work subtly parasitically inserts poetics into urban infrastructure transforming banal machinery into moments of subversive poetics.

Selected for 13th annual Art Under the Bridge Festival. DUMBO ARTS CENTER, Corner of Water and Main Street, Brooklyn, New York. September 25- 27, Published POESIS, EGS PRESS May 2010.

TERCET MONTREAL

2009

 ACCRETION

Performance and Residency. An excessive accumulation of marks through hitting the typewriter balls on carbon paper. The residue of the carbon paper becomes another layer to the sixty-foot drawing. Working with a choreography class. One-month residency. FOFA Gallery Vitrines, Concordia University Montreal January- February, 2009.

I pull language taut by smashing it physically through a hand-held typewriter ball re-purposed as a drawing tool onto carbon paper against the wall. A vast dark drawing spills across the membrane of the wall, traces of letters slip, collide and collapse.

 TYPEWRITER

 SCRIM

RED THREAD BOOK

2004

image by Scott Lee

A labor intensive work in which each sentence has been sewn to obscure the text. Italian novella, thread. 28 x 22 x 15 mm Taking a 1950’s Italian paperback, through Red Thread Book, I sewed myself into my surroundings through a rich accumulation of labour. My sewing machine exhaled a linear path, red threaded lines burying the Italian words of the typeface, these lines, quickly tangled and spread like corporeal veins becoming their own unruly system overtaking the surface of the pages. Selected for Cambridge Galleries Fiberworks BIennial 2006 and subsequently purchased for its permanent collection.

 DNA BOOK

 RESIDUUM

My work verges on the literary, with dreams of writing new alphabets built from alternative sounds for our organs of speech to produce, providing us with unconventional tools to decipher and re-interpret our comprehension in the world. The practice of prying language systems apart, phenome by phenome, is for me a way of creating a momento mori of a languages finite cycle, a recognition that all languages and communication systems are structural processes.

According to the writer Daniel Heller–Roazen in his book Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language he states, “Sooner or later, every language loses its sounds. There is nothing to be done about it. The phenomenon can be observed not only diachonically, during the centuries a tongue develops, decays and disappears” (Heller-Roazer 27). I am comprised not of a singular notion of a pure language but a composite of several. My tongue and organs of speech are trans-generational, with the residue of many linguistic ghosts German and Inuit echoing and reverberating corporeally. One of two hundred and fifty text wrapped spools. Selected for the Pittsburgh International 07 triennial, Cambridge Galleries Fiberworks awarded an honorable mention in 2008 Shown at the Open Studio in Toronto, Visual Studies Gallery at SUNY Buffalo, reviewed in Surface Design in 2008.

BLIND WRITING

2006

Based on Helene Cioux’s Eponymous essay, I began a cycle of performative works within my practice. Arising from my interest in the connection between handwriting and memory, I had questions about the nature of writing, concerning the biomechanics of the hand in relation to visual perception. I was curious about the hands memory, if the hand could remember writing with no visual cues. Blindfolded, I sought a tactile insight into memory solidifying my interest in the oscillation between sight and blindness. Performed twice, in New York on May 9 and Open Studio during Nuit Blanche in Toronto on September 30, 2006. Photography credit: Autumn Swisher.

 WORD POWERED ART

Four lines of text describing vocal phrases such as a hole in the voice and standing waves that appeared on two large Digital billboards for a three week period subversively emerging randomly between advertisements of luxurious goods commissioned for WORDFEST the International Writers festival in Banff -Calgary. Donated billboard time through Pattison Advertising.

 ETYM

Questions within my work arise from the force between two systems of language as verbally expressed brushing against written text and the space that exists between the two adjacent systems of communication. The idea of metamorphosis is a driving force in this work looking to transform the well-behaved book into something more unruly materially.

The fifteen shredded dictionaries accumulated to resemble something between a hay field and a shag carpet. Etym commissioned for TRUCK Gallery it was exhibited at Services Canada at Harbourfront Center in Toronto and featured on the cover of View, the international magazine to promote the Alberta College of Art and Design.

 PHOTOGRAPHY