Richmond BC, Canada #richmondartgallerybc
What are our supports, amidst current conditions of environmental, social and political precarity? How do artists draw attention to the underrecognized supports — material and relational, temporary and foundational – that sustain contexts for artistic communities, gift economy, and incidental encounters in our commons, amidst the increased privatization of public life? Are there ways to re-inhabit seemingly outdated support structures to embody different futures? What is the role of practice in relation to ongoing struggle?
This anthology, based on a series of artist’s projects in a downtown Vancouver park curated by Joni Low in 2018, reflects on the urgency of these questions now intensified by a global pandemic and human-induced climate crisis. Situated in Germaine Koh’s HMH: Boothy – a telephone booth-like platform and imaginative time-space portal – these projects approach art as quest and friendship as medium, manifesting a critically-engaged pleasure activism. Responding on an intimate register, they made perceptible the embodied support structures and sensorial agency that will continue to guide us through precarity: sensing otherwise, restoring Indigenous worldviews and reciprocity, habituating communal interpersonal rhythms and care, and revealing multiple dimensions of space and time towards incorporeal transformation.
With original artist reflections, invited poems and essays and parallel essay re-prints, the book includes contributions by Germaine Koh, Aron Louis Cohen and Russell Gordon; Emily Neufeld and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss; S F Ho and Elisa Ferrari; DRIL Art Collective with Elisa Ferrari, John Brennan, Justin Patterson, and Michele Helen Mackenzie; Andrew Lee, Khan Lee and Francis Cruz; Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Charlene Vickers, Jeff Derksen, Paula Booker, Jeff O’Brien and Joni Low, and reprinted texts by Celine Condorelli and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. It also features additional artworks by Chantal Gibson and Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Debra Sparrow, and Ron Terada.
Co-edited by Joni Low and Jeff O’Brien
Co-published by Information Office, Doryphore Curators Society, Richmond Art Gallery and Art Metropole
Designed by Information Office
