FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER: WANDERING ART

VIEW PUBLICATION


Publication text and images are below:



Union Gallery is situated on the ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. 

Ne Union Gallery e’tho nońwe nikanónhsote tsi nońwe ne Haudenasaunee tánon Anishinaabek tehatihsnónhsahere ne óhontsa. Gimaakwe Gchi-gkinoomaagegamig atemagad Naadowe miinwaa Anishinaabe aking. 

It is our understanding that this territory is included in the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Confederacy of the Ojibwe and Allied Nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Today, this meeting place is still home to many Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island and beyond. To acknowledge territory is to recognize its longer history, one predating the establishment of the earliest European colonies. To acknowledge territory is to recognize and respect the leadership of the land's original inhabitants. We recognize Union Gallery's own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and violent legacy. We acknowledge our collective responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty, and towards a respectful relationship with this place. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land with respect and care.




THOUGHTS ON FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER, or PUBLIC ART (AGAIN)

GHY Cheung

From One Place to Another: Wandering Art was a public art project that took place during the spring and summer of 2022. The project mobilized Union Gallery’s new Wandering Art Station as an itinerant site from which artists could engage publics and public spaces in Katarokwi-Kingston, beyond gallery walls. Over the last weekend of July, Lee Jones and Greta Grip invited friends, acquaintances and a broader “accidental audience” to participate in their project Unraveling: it’s up to you! in Victoria Park.[1]

More than just a stage for public art, the Wandering Art Station also functioned as a base for site research and a workspace for creation. The provision of a post from which artists could ideate and create precisely where they intended to present their work was meant to encourage, facilitate and normalize more sustained considerations of site, which within current discourses on the art-site relationship can no longer be thought only in relation to place, but also to territory and environment, as well as audiences, communities and publics in place. This foregrounding of site-specificity as a commitment for public art was central to this project. Holding to the notion that siting art in public is inherently political, we asked how new models of site-specificity, reconfigured across an evolving range of resonances and savvy to the social, economic and cultural processes that organize urban space, might retain for public art a critical edge.

Realized with financial support from the City of Kingston Arts Fund Adapt Grant, the project was no doubt thought timely in a way that satisfied many of the assessment criteria for the one-time funding program, most explicit in its address of pandemic-related closures and capacity limits that presented challenges to creating and presenting artistic work in-gallery. I like to think that the timeliness of the project also has something to do with its contributions to conversations around site-specificity. How public art is responsive to, conscious of, oriented by its site has certainly been on my mind during a time when our creative communities have been at once more in-place due to travel restrictions and more out-of-reach because of barriers to social gatherings.

From One Place to Another’s timeliness must also be thought in relation to existing circumstances of public art in Katarokwi-Kingston. Since at least 2014, through the implementation of its first Public Art Master Plan, the city has supported a robust program of temporary, permanent and community public art projects. Among the work currently on display is Nicholas Crombach’s Horse and Cart, a metal sculpture of a life-sized horse pulling a children’s cart that stood quietly in our view on the day of Lee and Greta’s installation, a distant companion to the Wandering Art Station.

The city’s descriptions of its Public Art Program largely uses “public art” and “art in/for public places” interchangeably. Miwon Kwon suggests in her book One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity that art-in-public-places represents a distinct paradigm in the history of public art practices, one most associated with civic “plop art” and corporate baubles indifferent to location and audience.[2] While this understanding of “art in public places” was not universal, with some artists and art administrators in the early 1970s using the phrase to inversely refer to site-conscious work, the prevalence of the phrase did signify resistance to the notion of anything called “public art.”[3]

I am not suggesting that the continued use of “art in public places” here should be read as any more deliberate than a matter of diction, perhaps even whim and convenience. It is nevertheless a sign of opportunity, one that our project aimed to make the most of, to get over a lingering reluctance towards taking “public” seriously as a qualifier in “public art.” Here, I think, is where the spirit of From One Place to Another derives some of its relevance for this moment, alongside but just askew from the city’s Public Art Program, and aligned with past public and interventionist projects like Parking Art in Parking Lots from 2004 and Acting Out, Claiming Space from 2011. Following Rosalyn Deutsche’s indispensable thinking on the relationship between art, urban space and politics, my hope for this project and its iterations in the future is this: that it builds on a vision of public art not constituted and self-satisfied by its location in so-called public space, a public art that reverses the conferral of publicness implied by the art-in-public-places paradigm as described by Kwon, that raises questions about what publicness means and who gets to occupy and use urban spaces through careful considerations of site, and in doing so activates the potential for these spaces to be public.[4] These are not new ideas, but they are conversations worth having again (and again) as the meaning of publicness continues to change, vital to how public art might be enriching for civic life.

[1] I borrow the term “accidental audience” from the title of off\site collective’s 1999 publication Accidental Audience: Urban Interventions by Artists. 
[2] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 60. 
[3] The argument against the term “public art” at the time, well-rehearsed but not entirely convincing, was that all art is public, and it was therefore unnecessary to distinguish certain work as more public. Further, if both galleries and the streets could be considered public, a transition from one location to the other only required artists to site their work “in public places” rather than developing a new category of practice called “public art,” a logic that betrays the taken-for-grantedness of what public means. See David Harding, Decadent: Public Art, Contentious Term and Contested Practice (Glasgow: Glasgow School of Art, 1997), 13. 



REFLECTIONS

Greta Grip + Lee Jones



Introduction

We have spent the past two and a half years being exposed to charts, graphs, and data through our screens that keep us up to date on the latest pandemic changes. These various data sources have been a source of anxiety and panic, and in this work we wanted to unpack our feelings around this time to reflect on what we have learned.

In this participatory installation we collectively unraveled the pandemic. For this installation we produced three panels with nine knitted images and texts gathered from responses to questions we asked our community on how this time has changed us, as well as what things remained the same. The three panels were layered with knitted images and text that the audience unraveled. As the knitted panels began to disappear, new knitting appeared from underneath. In this interactive performance the viewer was the audience as well as the performer, and was able to determine how quickly the work unraveled.



Understanding Pandemic Experiences

We spent the spring getting reflections on people’s experience of the pandemic. We sent out a survey in collaboration with Union Gallery that included questions about what people learned about their city through this experience. These included the changes that the pandemic brought on, such as masks and social distancing, but also what individuals began to value more, such as the connections with others and our natural surroundings.



The Knitted Panels

The knitted panels were layered with knitting that the audience would tug on (both manually and through automatic sensors). The top layer of knitting to unravel was in black and white and included the mask, the city name, and the Coronavirus molecule. Underneath were icons in full colour that highlighted what we discovered and learned from this time. These included: an eye for visibility, people for community, distance between two places was for the path we took, trees for nature, water for lake, and hands holding a heart for kindness.



Participant Interactions: Building the yarn winder 

In this work we explored the fabrication structure of knitting, which uses one continuous thread. As a result of this structure, a knitted piece can be easily created by machines, which might change how we feel about its destruction or unraveling. A handknitted item takes a long time to create, and the human effort involved makes it precious. In this work we wanted to ask “When something is knitted by a machine, do we still feel the same way? Will individuals feel hesitant to take it apart?”

By adding an unwinding machine, we wanted to take away some of the responsibility from participants. Though their presence would cause the machine to unravel the artwork, they were not the ones actively taking the piece apart. To do so, we programmed a microcontroller to turn a motor that would wind up the yarn when individuals stood in front of the artwork to look at it. This involved a month of practice with knitted panels to tweak the machine so that it responded appropriately—slowly winding up the yarn.



Installation Reflections

During the installation in Victoria Park, individuals walking through the park would pass by the Wandering Art Station. We noticed that individuals always unraveled passively with the machine before actively unraveling the works by hand. The machine seemed to give them permission to unravel, instructing them on what interactions were allowed in the space, and subverting gallery conventions where touching the artworks is often prohibited. We noticed that children especially felt less self-conscioius than adults when causing the work to unravel, freely approaching the machine and expressing delight in the process. Adults often started unraveling but expressed hesitancy to “unravel too much” and to “save some for others”. One group of knitters that passed by refused to unravel, saying it “hurt”, and reflecting on the effort involved in creating their own knitted pieces. This public experiment in unraveling highlights the discomfort we feel in taking things apart, and watching a crafted item disappear, even when it is made by a machine.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Thank you to: 
Artists Greta Grip + Lee Jones and artist-assistant Lauren Smart, for creating Unraveling.

Jennifer Demitor, for designing and building the Wandering Art Station.

Niki Boytchuk-Hale and Carina Magazzeni, for administrative assistance and keeping timelines on our collective minds. 

Abby Nowakowski, for designing the event poster and bringing the enthusiasm, always.  

Talib Ali and Simon Matthews, for lending your perspectives and expertise in documenting Unraveling.  





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Greta Grip + Lee Jones

Greta Grip and Lee Jones have been an artist duo since 2019. They enjoy engaging with the community with participatory artworks that evolve over time and require involvement from the audience. They live in a world in which data mining is a hidden practice, and the digital traces we leave behind are collected and used without our knowledge. By contrast, their textile artworks are transparent in their conversion of selected data into something tactile. In their projects the data sources have varied from human activity, biofeedback, to environmental sensors.

SPECIAL THANKS

From One Place to Another: Wandering Art is generously funded by the Kingston Arts Council and the City of Kingston through the City of Kingston Arts Funds (CKAF) Adapt Grant.

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