Tag: Joyce LeeAnn

AGYU and FADO Performance Art Centre welcome you to an on-line artist engagement with Joyce LeeAnn presented as part of the solo exhibition, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective. During our time together, she will lead us on a journey to explore archival processing as performance art.

Joyce LeeAnn is a certified archivist, an interdisciplinary artist, and the founder of Archival Alchemy®. As an archivist, she has worked for a community archive, a corporate archive, a large public library, and a prestigious museum. However, her archival praxis began as a young girl, and as an act of decolonization she centers her innate methods. Through her artistic projects, she is creating an archive of everything that she has conquered and is overcoming. This is the essence of Archival Alchemy®. Created in 2017 and cultivated directly from Joyce LeeAnn’s practice, Archival Alchemy® is a small business that supports institutions and artists to activate and enrich archives.

This artist engagement is presented in community with the AGYU as part of a constellation of talks, perfromances and public engagements for Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective. The AGYU would like to thank: 16 TONNES, ampd*, FADO Performance Art Centre, franklin furnace, Hemispheric encounters (SSHRC), polyjohn, QUEST AV and Sensorium.

WATCH the archived talk on the AGYU website HERE.

Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective
September 2–26, 2021

“Driven by an interest in how one might performatively engage the energetic liveness of archives from polysemous perspectives Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective takes up and takes apart the linear, patriarchal, and authoritative conventions of archive-making impulses. Channeling them instead toward more rhizomatic readings and feminist relationalities, she upcycles her own archive of past performances in ways that constitute her concept of “bendy-time.” The “archive” performs in this exhibition at the same time as it makes sense of (as in making sensate and sensual) an artist’s 25-plus-years of performance art work—including all its material and immaterial remains, reminders, and affective labour. This exhibition demands of archives what we expect from performance: the live encounter of experience in a ritual of transformation. Taking past performances as cues and as clues, this exhibition is a polytemporal, feminist, and queer experience of an archive of possible futurities, open to forever accommodating the always-shifting communities of belonging that Dobkin’s performance practice entails and magically conjures.” ~Emelie Chhangur, curator

ABOUT AGYU
Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) is a socially minded public non-profit contemporary art gallery that is a space for the creation and appreciation of art and culture. It is an affiliated and supported unit of York University, with key funders including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, foundations, embassies, other cultural institutions, and through our membership. Throughout its 32-year history, AGYU has always operated at the forefront of contemporary artistic, curatorial, and art institutional practices.

The Hemispheric Encounters dinner party series is a collaboration between Joyce LeeAnn, Jess Dobkin, Shalon Webber-Heffernan and Justice Walz. 

These gatherings are an offering – and importantly, an experiment – for artists, academics, archivists and activists to gather across borders, language, time zones and cultures for sensory, intimate connection in pandemic times. 

This series of dinner parties were made possible by Hemispheric Encounters, a partnership project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and FADO Performance Art Centre.

Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices is a partnership project that seeks to develop a network of universities, community organizations, artists, and activists across Canada, the US, and Latin America actively working in and with hemispheric performance as a methodology, a pedagogical strategy, and tool for social change. 

For information and to follow projects as they develop, visit the Hemispheric Encounters website.

USA
www.archivalalchemy.com

Joyce LeeAnn is a certified archivist and an interdisciplinary artist. She has worked for a community archive, a corporate archive, a large public library, and a prestigious museum. However, her archival praxis began as a young girl, and as an act of decolonization she centers her innate methods. In 2011, she self-published her archival text, somethymes grief goes for a walk. In 2013, she co-curated The Finding Aid: Black Women at the Intersection of Art and Archiving at the Schomburg Center. She is a House of Noire gem, and was a Create Change fellow with The Laundromat Project, as well as a MoCADA creator in residence. She has performed her work at The Noire Pageant, Laurie Beechman Theatre, House of Yes, New York University, Brooklyn Museum, and many other places. In 2017, she emancipated her labor by cultivating Archival Alchemy®, a small business that supports institutions and artists to activate and enrich archives.