Making Room
Saturday December 2nd & Sunday December 3rd 2006
In a fabulous 30,000 square foot open space, independent curator/artist Heather Nicol is producing Making Room, an event featuring major works by over 50 established and emerging artists. It's a one-weekend art event including and evening of music and performance as well as an ongoing video program selected by Paulette Philips, and presentations by Darbot Toronto
A Canadian native who spent over twenty years as a practicing artist in New York City, this is Heather Nicol's inaugural project since moving to Toronto two years ago. Seizing a unique yet time-sensitive opportunity. Heather has operated on a shoestring budget at lightning speed to coordinate this extraordinary event.
Making Room for you, making room for me, making room for more, making room for bigger, stronger, sassier, sexier, making room for sculpure, installation, performance, new media, making room for music, video, drawing and painting, making room for Dorkbot, making room for eating and drinking beer and exchanging ideas, fan mail, phone numbers and manifestos...For more details click here
What's the Use?
November 7 to December 15, 2002
The John Paul Slusser Gallery, University of Michigan School of Art and Design
www.art-design.umich.eduCurated by Heather Nicol, with artists Ann Agee, Roger Andersson, Suzanne Bocanegra and Morgan Puett, Ken Butler, Paula Hayes, Ben Kinmont, Robin Kahn, Chrysanne Stathacos.
This show explores the notion of use in aesthetic experience. Many artists since Duchamp have altered the everyday object by placing it within the art viewing arena, often distorting or otherwise stripping it of its original function. “What’s the Use?” investigates the flip side of this phenomena, where, in our fast-paced lives, the art experience doubles up and attempts to fulfill some other need as well. While the masses have been “serviced” by certain artists in the public domain, this exhibition focuses on projects of a more personal, private nature. Stepping aside from more familiar expectations of art (the purely aesthetic/formal, the introspective or psychological, the politically informative/activist, etc.) in an often playful way, the artists here may be asking of the art object, "What have you done for me lately?" At what point is it no longer art? What is the use of the aesthetic experience at all?
Ann Agee’s elegant drawings explore the intersection between home decor and “high art”, challenging the ways we value aesthetic production. Displayed like rolls of wallpaper, they incorporate details from common household products into floral bouquets. These works mimic collage, adding another layer of complexity to her discourse on expectation.
Robin Kahn’s Headdress, flower-filled ceramic vases in the form of 50s inspired women’s heads, humorously address feminine servitude and historical notions of woman-as-vessel.
Paula Hayes brings us a living plant sculpture, A Moveable Land, in which the hand of the caretaker/horticulturalist and that of the artist overlap in unexpected ways. A live Web link expands the process beyond the gallery walls.
Chrysanne Stathacos’s Wish Machines, reconstructed vending machines complete with offerings of text/collage/scent packets, guide viewers through multisensory experience toward meditation on fulfilling their desires. Her inflatable Rose Pillows offer comfort to viewers as they may contemplate issues of beauty and decay.
Ben Kinmont’s performance work expands the viewer’s role by engaging him or her as an integral part of the artwork, where giving and receiving are central. On view is his recent project created for Documenta 2002, Moveable type no documenta, which questions art’s relationship to important things in the lives of ten (nonartist) collaborators.
On a certain level, all of these artists are exploring ways to engage or fulfill their viewers by extending the art experience beyond the usual expectations. Yet by incorporating the functional, or by providing some service in the everyday, the work presented here takes the risk of not being considered art at all. When the show asks “What’s the Use?”, it questions these boundaries, often with humor and pleasure as the underlying approach.