FADO is pleased to announce A Way of Making, a First Nations performance art residency project featuring artists Bently Spang and Rebecca Belmore, and curated by Reona Brass.
Audience is invited to view the artists’ creative process during daily open studio hours from March 11 to 14. The performance being created in this residency is entitled Tongue River, will take place on the evening of March 14. The artists will be available on March 15 to discuss their work. All events are free.
SCHEDULE
Open studio: March 11–14 @ 11:00am
Performance: March 14 @ 7:30pm
Artist discussion: March 15 @ 11:00am
Curator Reona Brass writes of this project:
A Way of Making brings together Northern Cheyenne artist Bently Spang and Anishnabe artist Rebecca Belmore in a residency that examines how ritual in performance art functions in fashioning a new self within the cultural body. Taking up residence in a studio at OCAD University, the artists will explore the boundary between what we understand as “authentic experience” and what is “merely performed” to discover how this practice functions in creating a cycle of cultural desire, resistance and fertility.
Sharing a desire to address several communities at once with their work, these artists maintain a delicate relationship with the world that surrounds and encroaches upon the world that they were raised in and return to frequently. For these artists, to walk between, negotiate and address these two worlds is simply a necessity they accept, balancing as they do between yesterday and tomorrow. Their interdisciplinary practices, flexible vehicles for engaging very different audiences in a dialogue about the reality of contemporary indigenous life, entail an ancient way of making that assists them in making this connection between the past and the future.
While primarily installation artists, both artists revert to the medium of performance art when the need arises, usually to address barriers and establish signposts of cultural change. Belmore and Spang use their performance work to aggressively, and sometimes humorously, move the viewer away from the defining frame of native people within the colonialist construct of North American society. Creating acts of political defiance and cultural determination with their performance work, Spang and Belmore deliberately subvert the classical values of traditional native art for the flux of contemporary reality. Striking a complicated balance between the aesthetic and the political, the monumental and the transitory, the works of these artists ultimately serve as crucial indicators in the rapid and continual renegotiation of contemporary indigenous identity.
© Rebecca Belmore & Bently Spang, Tongue River, 2003. Photo Miklos Legrady.
