Research + Creation
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Description: Ken Lum’s recent survey at the Vancouver Art Gallery is reviewed by Jamie Hilder, who traces a distinct continuity in Lum’s employment of strategies that engage the viewer in a self-conscious and, at times, discomforting reading of his work. Lum demonstrates a particular propensity towards combining humour with sobering sociocultural issues that result in work that is immediately approachable yet provocatively disorienting.Date: 2011
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Description: By posting this page, we submit that we are an artist, cultural worker, or a supporter thereof and declare the following: we are no longer interested in participating in consultancies, asset maps, or activities that offer us “promotional opportunities” in absence of clear financial or strategic gain. We will not support the exploitation of artists or other cultural workers or their works for the sole purpose of further municipal or economic planning, fundraising, or marketing. We refuse to acknowledge the existence of the politically-invented term, creative economy, which lumps together practicing artists with video cassette duplication services. We can no longer participate in activities that knowingly disadvantage artists with less experience and we vow to make accessible opportunities that we have to these same artists. We hereby decide to stop playing prescribed games and to start making it up for ourselves. Henceforth, we will support one another by adhering to this declaration.Date: 2018
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Description: This essay by Richard William Hill is included in the exhibition catalogue for TURTLE/Television Island Exhibit, featuring the work of James Luna and ssipsis, at USM Art Gallery, Gorham, September 24 - November 10, 2010, curated by Carolyn Eyler. "They live on opposite shores of this continent natives call TURTLE ISLAND. James Luna, internationally recognized performance and installation artist and member of the Puyoukitchem [Luiseño] tribe based in La Jolla, California; and ssipsis, a Penobscot author and the only woman birch bark artist from Maine, challenge us with their art and activism" -- Cover. "Date: 2010
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Description: Exhibition review of Alex Janvier's retrospective, Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), May 18 - August 19, 2012.Date: 2013
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Description: Commissioned by AKA Artist-Run and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter initiative, Locals Only is a large-scale multi-year art project that explores food security, community led resource development, and intergenerational exchange in the core Saskatoon neighbourhood of Riversdale. As one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city, Riversdale hosts some of the most diverse and culturally rich communities in the region, and yet is simultaneously facing unprecedented pressures from encroaching gentrification along with long-standing issues related to accessing locally-sourced sustenance. In response, Locals Only takes the form of a mobile food service that deploys socially engaged art, local knowledge, and long-form hospitality to cultivate a community-based exploration of reciprocity by redeploying symbolic representations of gentrification into the hands of longtime community residents. Through a collaborative partnership with AKA Artist-Run and CHEP Good Food Inc., a 25-year old Riversdale-based organization with significant expertise in food-based community development through working with children, families and communities to improve access to good food and promoting food security, Locals Only will operate as an elder-guided, artist-designed, and youth-operated mobile programming space in the shape of a food service truck. Locals Only will also serve as a platform for intercultural dialogue and intergenerational capacity building by sharing traditional knowledge around food, hospitality, and community development from long-time Riversdale residents of Indigenous, Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian, and Francophone backgrounds. Importantly, this prioritisation of local history acts as a key instigator for intentional, yet immaterial, outcomes that result from the project in the form of empowerment, authorship, and securing visibility and verbal and visual space for marginalized residents. Locals Only is one of 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter initiative. With this $35 million initiative, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada. Locals Only was developed with preliminary research funding from the Saskatchewan Arts Board Artists in Communities grant. Thank you to Saskatoon residents, small businesses, artists and academics who generously gave of their time and knowledge in the first research stage of Locals Only. Locals Only is curated by Tarin Dehod, organized with Yvonne Hanson.Date: 2017
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Description: Exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Street Meet Festival in Saskatoon, Decisions, Decisions is a temporary and interactive text-based installation. The statements for Decisions, Decisions are based on exaggerations and distortions of familiar rhetoric from community consultations, urban development, campaign slogans, and protest placards. The text is ambiguous or unsettled, designed to encourage a plurality of understandings, highlighting the diversity of our own interests and affinities in a public space. However, each statement is also more complex than it might appear at first glance, aiming to offer a sense of instability or shifting priorities for the viewer. Drawing on this kind of language, the poster series also interjects other logics and potentials by encouraging participation based on either agreement, disagreement, or ambivalence, using small sticker dots normally found in asset mapping activities and based on added complications based on footnoted questions in a corresponding booklet. Decisions, Decisions aims to capture a sense of possibility and power in the language we use to describe ongoing, and yet subtle, political struggle.Date: 2015
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Description: Kent Monkman’s work fascinates. An artist of Cree origin he revisits North American historical events and western cultural representations, often under the guise of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, his alter ego, the sexy and extravagant diva warrior. His aesthetics and drama have the effect of drawing out both what has been erased and concealed in the historical inscription of aboriginal culture the repressed desire and troubled fascination that have paradoxically contributed to shaping it. In Interpellations. Three Essays on Kent Monkman the art historians Jonathan D. Katz, Richard W. Hill and Todd Porterfield offer perspectives and analyses on Monkman’s work that address history and genre painting, the queered Romantic landscape, the shifting and unfixed subject, race, sexuality, conquest and sovereignty, and modern versus discontinuous temporality.Date: 2012
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Description: Exhibition review of Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, May 17 - September 2, 2013.Date: 2013
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Description: Sometimes image, sometimes word, and often both or neither, concrete poetry emerged out of an era of ground-breaking social and technological developments. Television, nuclear weapons, radio transistors, space travel, and colour photography all combined to drastically alter the representation of the world in the period following the Second World War. While never fully embraced as poetry or as visual art, and often criticized for an aesthetic that veers too closely to commercial design, concrete poetry is an ambitious critical project that strives to break free of national languages and narrow literary traditions. Crossing national and disciplinary borders to highlight connections between poems and a variety of other cultural material, in this book--the first major study of concrete poetry's international character--Jamie Hilder asks fundamental questions about the ways in which the work has been critically received over the past fifty years. Designed Words for a Designed World positions the work of the movement within a new global context, pointing out how its international character predates and initiates some trends now associated with globalization. Hilder places concrete poetry alongside such transformative projects as the modernist city of Bras©Ưlia, the development of computers, and the rise of conceptual art in order to accentuate its significance as one of the major poetic movements of the twentieth century.Date: 2016
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Description: A publication that documents the presentation of To refuse/To wait/To sleep and M&A beginning on January 12, 2017, and continuing until complete. Jamie Hilder contributes an essay about KP Brehmer.Date: 2017