Intro

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[Music] [Applause]

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[Music] [Applause]

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[Music] [Applause] uh thank you so much for joining us

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it’s really such a treat to share time and space with you both can we get started with

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um a brief introduction to who you are and how you might summarize your practices

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um i think maybe we could talk about what we each did before we started doing things together and then maybe what we

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do together and why that is so thrilling um

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so i make primarily short experimental

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film and video works um and i guess in this in the spirit of performance for

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the camera and have done that um obsessively since about 1995.

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um i also i guess would you know

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like to suggest that the works are expanded in the form of installations multi-channel installations that are

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multi-sensorial and have also uh experimented recently with fiber

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tactile and vibrational hectics alongside the works for accessibility but also for these more kind of

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i guess corporeally integrated experiences for artists and audiences

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um and have for many years also worked alongside that in parallel running artists run centers like the images

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festival and art site and i now work at v tape which is a video

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art distribution organization you know surrounding myself with like-minded

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people in that sense so that um i can also you know

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uh embark on the dissemination of film and video experimental film and

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video works and the research resources that accompany those works critically and curatorially

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and it worked also with organizations like carfax national media arts ontario place like the film

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farm where i’m also engaged in larger issues related to technologies and politics

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around cultural production and its consumption and about

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yeah i would say when i was working at the images festival i in about 1994 or no six or seven i met allison

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mitchell and the whole world changed well after 10 years well we got together

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10 years after that after we met in 12 2003 we got together

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um and before 2003 and largely into 2003 i

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was working i mean doing performance with a fat activist group called pretty

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porky and pissed off and doing large scale well it didn’t start off as

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large scale but started with small scale craft based activist art stickers scenes performance

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that kind of stuff and then became more large-scale uh installations

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including like a coven of lesbian feminine sasquatches

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and a utopic lesbian library

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so these are kind of like the larger scale things but also still doing smaller piece things and performance and

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video my work has always been very scattered across disciplinary disciplines

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and i’m also a professor in gender and women’s studies at york university

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and my work is often about trying to make

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uh accessible feminist and queer and other social justice or critical

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theories um make them accessible by making them material by creating installations that

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people can experience in the round yeah so there’s lots to say about that but i’m not going to say more and then

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so fast forward 2003 we get together boom shazam i said i’d never collaborate

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with a partner again eventually i get worn down

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and we start they end exhilarated by the idea of starting a feminist art gallery

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together called in our garage in our backyard in toronto

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and um kind of parallel was also this gigantic project called kill joyce

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castle a lesbian feminist haunted house that we collaborated on uh over the past 10 years um almost 10

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years not quite 10 years time stands still yeah uh in toronto

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we did it in los angeles we did it in philadelphia we did a slice of it in london england so

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and we collaborate on that so and now we’ve moved to the country and dot dot dot stuff to

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say about that but that is in a nutshell our practices and how we

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now find ourselves in deep collaborative um

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codependence even though i said i never would and she never was a collaborator i mean my work was all about discomfort

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it’s secret too she when she was working on video stuff i’d be like what are you working on and she’d be like never mind i’d be like golem i’d be like

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well and my practice is completely opposite where i’m like i’m thinking of doing this thing that’s going to

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probably kill me what do you think and i’m like i’ll get the ladder and the first aid kit i’ll be right back

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yeah and we have literally i mean i can say this with total honesty

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almost everything we make is is extremely challenging and very

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complicated from material as well as physical as well as social

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and political and different strategies oh financially bankrupting well not

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quite well not quite that’s true anyway let’s get on to the next question before

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we get into the private finance was there anything we missed so if we’re going to move on to a

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question about um feminism art and feminist art

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maybe the the link to your introductions is um

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something about all of the different kinds of activisms that you’ve you’ve talked about and

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maybe if you could think about that definition

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through the lens of its intersections

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with the other communities and fights that you’re involved in

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but also think about whether there is some way in which feminist art feminism

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stands stands alone in your thinking and in your practice

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yeah i mean uh it depends on what the perspective is on feminism

Feminist Art Gallery

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i mean when we started the feminist art gallery it was intended to be intersectionally feminist

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so it wasn’t what you would call a women’s art project um

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which would be like a single issue kind of politic um but it was always meant to be

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uh a project that was attempting to practice

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intersectional feminism um so it wasn’t just about cisgender

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people it wasn’t just about white women um and so our attempts to

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build an audience and support artists who um

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were outside of those categories um

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was us trying to also learn as white cis queer women settlers

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how to [Music] unlearn what we

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knew recognize our privileges and also

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where we couldn’t see or know because of our limited

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education and exposure or you know intentional white

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supremacist colonial perspectives

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that had been we’ve been brought up in so i feel like was really for us

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personally some of the beginning steps of trying to figure out how to undo that and when we entered it we thought it was

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largely through or unlearn that and learn different things and

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we were using we borrowed some methods from feminist organizing that we knew of

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and queer organizing like trying to de-center

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uh ourselves so that there’s two pieces that can

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demonstrate that one at the beginning of the process of creating the feminist art

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gallery we invited a community of people to come in to our house and

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workshop with us what that could be like a community consultation there were some very interesting ideas i

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had to tell you that uh and do you want to say those ideas yeah well

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i think one of the things that was explosive for me was that there were so many ideas for what one could be like

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and you know my tendency is to draw out ideas through desperation and

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frustration so my frustration as a cultural worker with this museum system

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was extra extreme at one point in my life and i really felt physically

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that museums were beyond inaccessible they were actually a form of oppression so i was

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i was always involved in organizations and projects that would trouble those

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systems find alternatives to those systems the artist run center system is is one but

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then became over many years like baby versions of museums which and

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big public galleries which it is in my mind a great loss the maverick

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spirit of those organizations almost automatically through the funding system mechanic you know we need

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money it’s like actually you just need a couch you don’t really need money you can drag a couch out of the garbage you need gathering spaces unique

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conversations any debate so um the feminist arc out the idea that

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people had effervescent and radical ideas for what a feminist art gallery could

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could do for in particular emerging bypack artists was

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liberating we also just so were clear popped a fortune out of a fortune cookie

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that said you can always depend on the trust of the collective and we blew it up really big and we like

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we’re talking super sized and we put it on the wall in our house and we thought about it for a long time

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and realized that it would have to be a collective effort so many

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or a collective entity and in many ways we don’t mean that like a collective ran it but that we literally would

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would give it the shape that it that was demanded by an artist or a uh

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someone who wanted to come and do a writing retreat or someone who wanted to have a show or something that just wanted to have dinner and meet some

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curators and some interesting people and you know before you knew it on christmas eve people were like is the

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gallery open you know um so you know we had to keep we had to keep undoing it

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over time we also um developed a mantra that i think was very valuable

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and created banners for that mantra and um carried them in protests many times

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and the the primary one that we like to just throw out on the table is

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that we can’t compete so it leads to this question of refusing to

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compete in a system that you don’t believe in and to try and operate a gallery under those pretenses was very

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complicated thing to try to do yeah and so back to that question

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michelle too around um like some of the things that we

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try to do are things that are kind of obvious like

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bringing trans bipac to the full front

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offering them exhibitions supporting those exhibitions with space with funding with

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food and gathering community so that was kind of the most

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obvious and clunky part and to try to do that without doing it

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in a tokenizing way but is consistent and um not just once in a while

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for optics um and then like to so we’re telling you

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the story about the beginning and then i wanted to like kind of wrap it up by talking about what we did at the end of

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when we were kind of like wrapping up feminist the feminist art gallery which was for the last year we

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literally handed it over to somebody else so we gave the gallery space over

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to a curatorial collective called younger than beyonce um who was

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uh i’m not sure if they’re still practicing actually i’m so out of it due to covid but not that i have covet but i

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mean covet culture i’m not uh up on the art world in that way right now but they were

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they’d lost their space they had this really cool space um and they’re they were getting kicked out

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for someone who would be paying rent and um it was always meant to be temporary they always wanted to be a

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nomadic space and so we were like why don’t you take our space for a year we don’t want

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to be the curators we don’t want to be the directors we want somebody else to move it with

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different vision and so like they’re younger than us they’re

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many more people than us they’re you know different than us in lots of ways so

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that was what we did as kind of like a final gesture

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with that physical space and one more quick um

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addition when we were invited to do things outside of the feminist art gallery which we often were

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um we would kind of take the model with us and so whenever we were invited to

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somewhere we would to have an exhibition we would bring the artist with us we

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would ask the institution to purchase something which often went over like a lead balloon

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but it did happen um and where we would um get into their

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collection and um bring forward forward a kind of a feminist critique

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of those collections we would um continue to try to advocate for the artists that or not advocate but

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try to defer the tendency to come to us as the people

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running the feminist art gallery instead of the the artists that we were trying to

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um put forward in the in the model and we often also got lots of money to come

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from those institutions and go to the artist directly as opposed to that thing that happens where it goes through the

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sieve of the institution and by the time it gets to the artist it’s almost all gone so other methodologies along with

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the gallery um were productive up to a point but

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eventually we just realized too that everyone wanted to talk to us about the

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feminist art gallery not as much to the artists that we wanted to to foreground so

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or to support so it didn’t it didn’t that sense kind of skitter fail

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i didn’t get it babe you get

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anyway that’s the answer and we left the beginning of the end and we left the gallery

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but it was all about trying we were trying to learn how to do something differently and we didn’t really know

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exactly what we were doing a lot of it was learning by practice

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we made mistakes as we tried to figure it out but it was also like a huge project that we were

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doing alongside our own our own art practices and our own jobs which um

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are heavy loads so um you know maybe the feminist art

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gallery would have been differently practiced if it was our soul

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or our soul attention was on it but also it was expansive partly because our

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lives are so stretched out it means our

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the net we throw out to that’s like a bad metaphor i don’t know like the

LandBased Practices

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the that please come join us or hang out with us call

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is uh it’s more expansive because of where our

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our our feelers are out into the world through hillsborough’s castle through our own practices and through our jobs

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i love this and it feels like a a kind of brilliant setup to

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where you’re going or where you are now and i was wondering if you could take us from

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the handing over a the moving away from toronto

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and perhaps in that summary of your movement we could talk about land-based

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practices pedagogies imaginations for the future yeah yeah

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so he gave away the gallery for a year that was really interesting and yeah good luck learned lots from that

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and then we did killjoy’s castle in philadelphia which took about a year and a half to do

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and then we came home and then the pandemic happened among other

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circumstances and we had actually made a life plan about five years ago which we’re trying

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to like figure out where are we going what are we doing not that we’re trying to

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control it or direct it but just like what are we hoping for what do we want to tend towards and one thing was that

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in five years we wanted to have

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a place in the world that was more green and less urban than where we were

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i was also having major climate change um

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terror depression yeah terror and um i

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was i became and i think it’s very common i was like how do i get off the grid

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what can i do like we do have an individual responsibility to do something right and if you and and

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when you we came out of this incredible materiality of the killjoy’s castle project in fact we left the entire thing

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in a storage locker in cherry hill new jersey and it is still there um and we’re not really sure when we’re

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ever going to get it just keep playing the rent it it’s a huge material object it’s full of people i mean you know

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we’re talking hundreds of people we’re in not hundreds over 100 people were involved

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in the creation of the collaboration of and the performance performance of kojo’s

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castle in philly um but you know

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it’s it you know in contrast to that i think artists are being asked to make

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decisions about their the equity and the um

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and the impact of their artistic production and so i had started to feel very

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conflicted we’d had started feeling quite conflicted about owning property uh having

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uh urban lives making giant material objects

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however and and temporary ones um and however you want to

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like add it up we were just starting to sort of settle back into toronto when

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uh our organization like york and v tape closed in early march

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and the life plan had said you know um in five years we wanted to have

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something out of the city i mean we may not look it but we’re in our 50s yeah we’re in our 50s i’m actually late 50s

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almost right i’m pushing 15. you know we look like we’re in our late 20s but

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the thing is we also want and and it also and there are also issues there

Resistance

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for us around aging but we’ll put a pin in we needed i needed to make a decision

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about what i thought i could do to con to contribute to some sort of

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conscious um so resistance

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so so we got a place in the country it is on conservation protected land so

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it can’t be developed it can’t even really be farmed um we have a modest home you can see in

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the background and uh on our land there’s also a barn and a wood shop

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and potential for lots of stuff we also have a big vegetable garden and we have a couple of

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chickens and we have a couple guinea fowl not recommended and

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and so you know it’s we are our our plan and it’s actually

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already happening is to start uh art residency program slash land art

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slash we don’t know lots of different things project and we’ve landed on the name of far

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feminist art residency like feminist art gallery um also we’re excited about that name

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because it can act as an acronym for all kinds of stuff like

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fatties are rad to [Music] feminist artists respite

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all kinds of stuff we thought there were more but there’s some

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well it’s also i mean we have enough space to do big projects land our projects

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ideally permanent or temporary land art projects we do have already an artist in

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residence our first artist in residence started last week yes who’s

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painting drawing and writing a book in a week the artist’s name is cyrus marcus ware

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and um we have also been um brainstorming with a couple of other

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really interesting uh thinkers who have worked at institutions before do work for

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institutions now but who have run residency programs so we’ve been doing some brainstorming with an artist

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uh johnson know and have had a couple of different folks walk through

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who have given us some really great ideas and opportunities including emily schanger who’s now at the agnes

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etherington also known as the agnes and so you know we’re bringing in people

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to kind of inform the process oh and also want to mention too that like a lot of the win in the winter time we did a

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lot of reading about permaculture and artist residencies but in the permaculture literature

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i mean it’s so interesting which is like about uh living

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in a way that supports the land not the land supporting you right um but

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in all the reading it’s like why is all this stuff attributed to white european dudes thinkers and knew that

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there was a piece missing or that is indigenous knowledge um

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that is so obvious so now we’re thinking alongside

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authors like canadian artist dolene manning who’s an indigenous

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writer and you know works with multiple um kind of like areas around art and knowledge

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including disability arts and indigenous art and uh feminist queer

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stuff so her work and so we’re gonna have a brainstorming session

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not as big as because we can’t um in september with these folks here in this

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place to with emily dolene johnson and potentially a couple other folks to

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think through around and cyrus sorry to think through around what will

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our art residency be and how will what will it be like so

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it’s meant to we are ours right now it’s it’s unformed but

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in our minds we were hoping it would be something that is like acts as

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a place of support of respect respite relaxation no demands no production

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required how can we support you for a week or whatever the amount of

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time is but that’s what we’re thinking now but we haven’t had our brainstorming yet so we’ll likely

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shift and move because we’re not we don’t want to be stuck with where our tiny minds

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start entered the dream we want the dream to be expanded by the connection with others

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and since leaving toronto we’ve been able to do things like think about what it means to regulate and adjust

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or you know think about um the moving from pattern to details

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things that permaculture informs or indigenous knowledge informs

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you um through instead of trying to figure out why the queen street car is not coming

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and it’s been an hour and 15 minutes you know like we’ve gotten ourselves out of that that i mean i don’t it’s not a

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hustle and bustle large cities right now are kind of imploding uh toronto is a city

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in a state of destruction in some ways so you know to be able to leave that for some green space really

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is helping us recalibrate so that we can actually move forward as

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artists and continue to make art or find ways to create sustainable

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uh communities gathered around some of the things that we value so most about

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cultural production to me that is the art making yeah like that not making material objects i have no interest in

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doing that anymore right now but it’s the the art making right now is

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this you know what they call some people call world making yeah um

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where it’s about trying new ways of being in the world experimenting taking some risks

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uh in a social outside

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way some of the ways that the pandemic has pushed us towards but also in the

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ways that a lot of social justice movements have been

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pushing us towards for a long time yeah so hot that hybridity of art and

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activism that we kind of experimented with with has now moved into another kind of next

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level version of that and ultimately

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uh you know questions of land ownership of course and um trying to understand

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our role will be more infinitely more complicated here than it

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would have been in an urban center because in an urban center well it’s because it it’s

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think about where we were in parkdale in relation to yes neighbors and i don’t know i think

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that was as complicated i know i you know well i guess what i’m thinking those is that at this time in our lives

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based on what we know and what we’ve done and now looking at the choices that we made

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it’s like it almost um

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i guess it begs the question what are we going to do and in the city it seemed like we were

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always too busy to ask you know where to have the space and the

After 25 years

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the clarity or the the the um oxygen

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around you to ask the question after you know making art for 25 years what are we gonna do yeah

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yeah with what we know with what we know which is a lot

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of um there’s a lot of options what do you think

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can can i just um tie what you’re saying back to

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something that you said last april when we first talked to you about the feminist art

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field school at that point we were thinking that the pandemic would end

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quickly enough for us to host the field school in um in person in victoria in the summer

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and you said that you would come but that you wanted to do nothing um so you’ve started to hint at

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that in in your current commentary um but to put the

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question in a succinct way um have you figured out how how to do nothing and is is doing

31:17

a feminist uh gesture or practice

Doing nothing

31:23

well we were just talking about this yesterday in fact um

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and i was even talking to somebody who i’m working with doing some counseling right now that

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doing nothing [Music] understanding what that means

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i mean the privilege of being able to bow out that i think comes at

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uh comes through whiteness and our age that we

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already have established networks so to bow out or to do nothing

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has less implications um you know like the politics of refusal

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can be uh usually comes can often come from a

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place of entitlement so there’s that piece to think about

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um [Music] and but also like trying to understand you know like i’m

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saying that even and i had recounted our conversation about wanting to do nothing

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and how you had said yeah that sounds good but then we would still go there

32:34

to do nothing which i don’t even really know what that means and like what’s the carbon impact of flying to victoria

32:42

to do nothing it seems like it’d be better to be here put a green screen behind us with like

32:48

cadbury bay and and then we were joking around like what

32:54

would it mean in an interview with youtube to do nothing like

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it’d be a bit like that but then we could really we could really

How quickly nothing becomes something

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follow that path and think like what comes from that right like i’m genuinely interested in some of those questions

33:19

and possibilities for all of the ways in which even the field school is trying to break out of

33:24

traditional disciplinary modes and models and to democratize the platforms and to think

33:31

collectively about what a field school even is or what these categories and containers like feminism and art and

33:38

practice mean we’re still congealing into familiar modes and forms

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and i’m really really interested in the tensions and the pushes and pulls or the suggestions of

33:50

nothing and then thinking how quickly nothing becomes something yeah and so it leads me through

33:56

some way yeah right how do you do nothing well or how do you do nothing in a way that will

34:02

feel satisfying i mean it’s all at all different versions of a trap but it it strikes me that

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you know one of the things that we’re trying to think out loud about in the field school together is you know the

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role of institutions and and i and i wonder you know what role if any you

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think institutions however we might want to define that word can play in crafting

34:25

better futures yeah better futures

The wanting to do nothing

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well first of all i don’t know what’s good and what’s bad second of all i don’t know what future

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is but also a better one um well and did well okay let me just

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pick up a piece of the wanting to do nothing is also about not wanting to participate

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in an environmentally destructive white supremacist colonial

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system that’s a piece about the doing nothing um

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that we’re trying to look at having less impact in those ways that are through

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consumerism professionalization of artists and thinkers and

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the co-optation of our ideas and this is often the thing

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that institutions or even incredible beautiful rad people within institutions

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are like okay i’m in this place of power i mean i know i do it at the university all the time what can i do with that

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that will stop a gatekeeping system open

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opportunities for people allow people to access what they think that they want to access

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how can i leverage what i have access to to shift

35:52

the system but then [Music] it feels kind of like actually

Doing nothing is still something

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a fool’s errand sometimes or like you’re just doing

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the good job of indoctrinating a new generation into that pace and

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into the belief of trying to attain those goals of whether it’s like

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grants or exhibitions or public programming or web content all that

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stuff exposure fame all that jazz

36:34

well and here’s the rub too is that doing nothing is still something so you

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know i mean not that this happens but it happens to us all the time it’s like we’re gonna do nothing it’s like that

36:45

sounds great can you send us a description and then you’re like oh god okay i gotta write a description and oh my god i was

36:51

supposed to send that two days ago and i have this thing i’m a loser my computer knows like my friend dad

36:57

thing in my computer it’s like you’re this is five days overdue i’ll never be a guard talk to me

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so you know there’s this thing that starts to happen where you know so maybe it’s not really about doing nothing it’s

37:09

about the stopping the doing

37:14

of the things that are perpetual better that perpetuate a kind of expectation

37:20

so if we double back all the way back to the reasons that i became involved in

37:26

artistry and culture was to upset that system and i have done nothing if if

37:32

i’ve done anything i’ve done nothing really to ultimately challenge that

37:38

i have i’ve critiqued it i’ve i’ve been public about my disappointment

37:44

in that system we dedicated 10 years of our lives to a gallery that was set up to trouble that

37:51

notion but really i’ve just become part of that just the unpaid lesser

37:58

least important part of that right so uh the squeaky wheel

38:04

does not get the grease it gets the uh it gets a wall built up you know

38:10

between the institution that um doesn’t want to hear it and you so you

38:16

know in some ways it creates a kind of scar tissue right you continue to try to build

38:23

something out of uh like a critique and you end up

38:30

um part of that critique but that was our i feel like partly that was like

The paranoid reading

38:36

generational for us to learn about critique and

38:42

what some people call the paranoid reading or the

38:47

you know trying to show people that there’s a problem i do think that back to your question

38:53

about how we can make a better world or how institutions can be involved in that and

38:59

one of the things that comes to mind that feels like the only way is to

39:06

open up those places so that they’re not controlled by white

39:12

settlers they’re not controlled by cis men um

39:17

that there are more people giving who people have been

39:22

intentionally kept out of the leadership and direction or even

39:27

when they were brought in was just for optics and they actually had no power and couldn’t make things

39:34

happen or they got like burnt out by trying or you know all those things that the only

39:42

way that institutions can contribute to making a better world is to

39:48

get white people white settler people to move aside

39:54

give up the power and i give the land back

40:00

give the museums back give the universities back

40:05

everything just like stop hoarding stop controlling and stop

40:12

um you know open up the coffers open up your wallets

40:17

uh all that stuff just like stop doing that the carbon footprint of museums and

Whats next

40:24

the waste generating cycles of museums are extraordinary uh i mean apart not apart from but in

40:30

addition to the critique around whiteness and the institution come all these other really complicated

40:39

narratives around their ecology yeah it’s beyond just like complaining that there’s too much group of seven

40:44

exhibitions it’s like much bigger than that yeah so

40:49

you know back to the the so the art we were thrilled when you accepted our proposition of doing nothing

40:55

but we’re kind of hardwired to do something and or maybe

41:01

the nothing is a kind of um stopping doing the same thing that we

41:08

were doing in favor of giving space and air and time

41:14

around the consideration of what to do or how to do what’s next um

41:20

i think that our move here was um it’s fraught and complicated in many

41:25

ways as we’ve already mentioned because we now own 64 acres of conservation protected land that we need to figure

41:32

out how to i mean we’ve already tried to do a little bit of research on how you actually do give it back which is

41:38

apparently very complicated it’s not easy it can take 25 years or longer so maybe that’s where we should focus some

41:44

of our artistic energy but um but also you know getting back to the idea of it

41:49

being a space for for people to come um and just i don’t know help

41:56

not help uh to figure out for themselves the same thing that we’re trying to figure out

42:01

and that can be a combination of making art having a

42:07

workshop reading writing sleeping

42:13

and so ultimately we’re here to try to or we’re trying to manifest

42:19

um something that’s still a bit unknown to us and the so there’s a nothing there’s a nothing space there that if we

42:25

don’t we don’t we’re just trying not to fill it let it be alone

42:31

if we fill it with something we might might miss the opportunity to figure it out better

Outro

42:37

and i want to say one more thing which is that like something we’ve learned from the teaching

42:43

that from lessons that we’ve learned from cyrus marcus where and his

42:49

uh perspective which is this idea that we have to be able to um

42:58

dream and imagine and let our minds open up to be able to know what that future

43:05

could possibly be because if we’re stuck in a rat race or spinning our wheels around productivity

43:14

and all those kinds of things then we’ll never be able to contribute to making a better world

43:38

the other thing that cyrus always says is that we have to make the revolution irresistible

43:44

yeah yeah yeah can you say that can you can you quote him in the chat so that when

43:50

people are looking at that that would be that’s actually a really that’s the best last word for sure

43:55

that’s a great lesson and thank you for um for helping to do that

44:03

thanks for joining us we would like to continue to we would like to continue to talk to the two of you about this and i

44:09

know that the feminist field school is something that you have attached to the art gallery of

44:15

greater victoria and you’re working out on the west coast um

44:21

but you know we would be very open to the feminist field school doing something here we’d be very open to both of you coming

44:27

here of course separately and or together um you can gather around you people that

44:34

you um would like to spend time with that maybe no one i mean i’m dry and dying i’m like hi

44:40

cyrus i was like leave him alone he’s been very he’s been in there

44:46

like literally alone for um five days now he comes and has dinner i know but it’s just it’s

44:52

beautiful to see that kind of focus it’s interesting to figure out it’s also interesting to figure out like how do we

44:58

support you without bugging you so it’s like text we’re gonna have dinner around

45:04

eight o’clock if you want to join us you know it’s like not like hey

45:10

what you doing i know but maybe i guess in the just as it’s not i could continue

45:15

this conversation forever but i gotta go but you gotta go but i just wanted to say sometimes of doing nothing

45:21

is in when you can do nothing you should do nothing because like to leave cyrus alone is the

45:27

best thing that that’s what cyrus wants and to pay attention to why how hard your impulse too

45:32

i’m a pleasing and just like let amazing addict connect recognize it

45:38

and rub your own shoulders rub your own shoulders rub your own shoulders

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