centre d'artistes.artist run centre
January – April 2009
In collaboration with Head & Hands
Public presentation: mon 06/04/09 at 6pm at Cagibi 5490 St. Laurent
Over a three-month period, musician Rae Spoon and multidisciplinary artist Jessica MacCormack are facilitating a series of workshops for youth using experimental animation and sound/music to explore ideas surrounding institutions and gender identities. With support from articule, they will work at Head and Hands with groups of at-risk youth and young parents who access their programming and weekly group workshops. The participants will work with Jessica and Rae in a collaborative process to create animated videos and sound works. Interested in encouraging an exploration of how participants’ personal lives intersect with gender identity(s) and social control, an examination of the politics of popular media and music will take place in conjunction with the production. A presentation of the works created through this process will be presented as part of articule’s animation event in June 2009.
Jessica MacCormack's art combines various elements of interactivity, performance, intervention, installation and video to investigate social spaces. Her work implicates the viewer/participant in the process to destabilize ideas of high culture and to create a politically/socially engaged content. Through institutional critique and a self-reflexive approach to her practice, her projects aim to disrupt concepts of normalcy and function as catalysts for dialogue. Over the past eight years she has played an active part in artist-run culture, performance collectives and in collaborations with other artists. Jessica MacCormack has also been working with women and youth who are dealing with issues of criminalization through the creation of art projects in prisons, and is currently working with Crossing Communities Art Project in Winnipeg. In 2008, she completed an MFA through the Public Art and New Artistic Strategies program at Bauhaus University in Weimar (Germany).
Rae Spoon is a Canadian musician who has spent most of the past five years on the road. His music, previously in the bluegrass/country vein, is more recently a blend of indie folk/rock. It is deeply introspective and often investigates the implications of being a transgendered individual in Canadian culture, as well as class politics and ongoing colonial issues. Rae has also worked on multimedia and community art projects, as well as film sound tracks.