Opisiyik [Performance Continuation]
Ivanie Aubin-Malo

Oposiyik [Performance Continuation] represents Montreal-based Maliseet dancer and performer Ivanie Aubin-Malo’s first still image work. The photograph of a pink sticky note containing the Wolastoqey word “oposiyik” is positioned in relation to her performance Où sont les ancêtres?, and is understood as a “continuation” of the gestures and movements that occur within that work. Deliberately left un-translated, this act of public labeling stems from the artist’s recent journey to Tobique, where she began a process of reclaiming her Wolastoqey language. At the initial meeting with her language teacher Allan Tremblay, Aubin-Malo wrote the first Wolastoqey word that was spoken to her on a sticky note, and attached it to the object that it named. Six weeks later, words covered every surface.

[Continues to the left. Approaches a glass door at the top of a long ramp. Pulls. Muffled sounds of group activity. To the left of a reception desk, a flat screen monitor on the wall playing a video: A body pushing through a glass door. Hands resting interlocked. Feet balancing precariously on a ladder…]



Loose Ends
Molly Teitelbaum
1 minute (loop)
Single channel video, silent
2018

Teitelbaum’s Loose Ends anticipates a viewer that is moving from point A to point B, presenting a flurry of detailed handheld images that each last no more than a couple of seconds. Moving with the grammars and velocities of advertising, a close proximity to the bodies of strangers is established and held as they are seen pushing, pulling, reaching, and jumping in a range of independent acts, deftly observed by the artist and her zoom lens. The result is a video that is muscular in its effects, as the transitional flux of daily life becomes woven tightly into a sustained, collective flexing.

[Continues to the right. An elevator taken to the main floor. An open lobby space. Wide steps ascending up to a café. People in groups talking. Children playing. On the wall, a bright neon sign with the image of a bulldog. To its right, a projection screen playing a video: A light approaches from a distance. As it gets closer it appears as the headlights on a moving vehicle. It drives past the camera shining light into the lens and creating a brief flash. The sounds of a vehicle passing is amplified inside the lobby.]



(Un)Stills
Phil Rose
54 minutes (loop)
Single channel video, with sound
2018

Rose’s patient approach to the moving image calls for passersby to pause and share in durational, protracted observation. The images in (Un)Stills were diligently accumulated over the course of 2017, when the artist committed to a weekly schedule of shooting one minute of static video footage in and around Ottawa. Within this self-imposed constraint, a calendrical video sequence emerges, depicting scenes that range from generic sites to hypnotic and ambiguous visual textures. Soundscapes from the imaged spaces are amplified through the lobby’s speaker system, temporarily introducing exterior resonances into the building’s main transitional space.

[Continues into a brightly lit hallway to the right of the screen. The muffled sounds of the lobby space fade. A door at end of a corridor. Pushes. A large resonant stairwell flooded with bright fluorescent light. A staircase painted blue. Door closes in behind. Slams. Sound booms up the concrete walls. Ascends. Dissipates. Softer sounds emerge. From a speaker on the left, mounted high on the wall, voices speaking: “annotate, intonate, internet, alternate…” Turns towards to the speaker.]



Stanzas (or the Law of the Good Neighbour)
Henry Andersen
120 minutes (looped)
Sound installation, two channels
2017-ongoing

Andersen’s language-based sound composition was one of three works installed in Artscape Youngplace’s resonant Stairwell B, spanning its height with two speakers positioned on the first and third floor platforms. The content of Andersen’s work is the result of an ongoing private word game that the artist has been playing for several years. Unfettered by sense and syntax, Andersen’s accumulative lexicon is propelled by the pleasures of pronunciation, where one word conjures another through the inherent trajectories of their sonic properties or associations, step by step. The expansive two-hour edit of the work featured five recorded performances in which the artist directed pairs of close friends to read sections of his list in an attempt at perfect unison. Utilizing the unique patina of the space, in which sound is transmitted and amplified with ease through the architecture’s hard surfaces, Andersen’s encyclopedic vocabulary subtly participates in the already active soundscape of the stairwell, inviting audiences—who may be ascending, descending, or pausing on a platform—to engage with the work as a playful stream of content, or otherwise move through it as a distant, tonal rhythm.

[Voices fade. Speaker goes silent. An empty humming. Nothingness. Another sound emerges from further up the stairwell. A light clicking. A beat that is out of time. Inconsistent. Continues up the stairs. Every movement resonates throughout the space. Arrives at a flat platform. The source of the clicking sound comes into view. Approaches the device hanging in the corner of the platform. Gets close. Leans in.]



I Don’t Know (Corner Flip)
Anna Queen
30 seconds, looped
Video and sculpture
2019

Similar to Henry Andersen’s audio composition that bookends the stairwell, Queen’s sculptural practice of “location-tweaking” is propelled by tangential experimentation, creating new formal arrangements that respond to, incorporate, and extend the pre-existing materials, objects, and colour palettes that are found in the site of installation. Composing the work from afar at her studio in Rockland, Maine, Queen collected images and videos of the stairwell platform from the exhibition’s curator, and through this research acquired a convex security mirror (an element repeated elsewhere throughout the stairwell) and began working with a tarp identical in hue to the strong blue motif of the stairwell paint job. Reflected in the disorientating spherical gaze of the mirror, Queen’s iPhone is centrally located on the tarp. A spectral presence taps buttons on the screen; its clicking creating a beat by diligently selecting the first word that is offered up by the phone’s predictive text algorithm, which is designed to learn the vocabulary and texting habits of its user in an attempt to help finish their sentences. Unlike Andersen’s ever-expanding word game, the algorithm soon exposes the limits of its associative abilities, tripping over its own syntax and becoming caught in an infinitely affirmative refrain: you can do it for you and you can do it for you and you can do it for you…

[Voices are heard again, echoing now from above and below. Language pulsing. A choral ambience. The clicks beat perpetually. New sounds are heard fading in from above. Exterior spaces. Cityscapes. Tinkling bells. A brief orchestral swell. Hard cuts like channel surfing. Continues up the stairs. Arrives at another platform. Turns back towards the stairwell. A convex mirror on the opposite wall. Two fluorescent lights on either side. Above this, a wall with a video projection playing a video: the moon being captured by a handheld video camera…]



Spherical Awakening
Mara Eagle
15 minutes (looped)
Single channel video
2017-ongoing

If Henry Andersen’s stairwell audio work is the result of free play and association, and Anna Queen’s iPhone loop arises from obsession and repetition, then Eagle’s Spherical Awakening is caught somewhere between these polarities. Eagle’s committed system conjures an effect that is both searching and spiraling, strangely pleasurable yet deeply predictable, accumulating momentum while somehow remaining static—a videographic elliptical machine. Through her growing database of clips, Eagle presents the viewer with a stream of spherical objects that have happened to pass before her lens—tennis balls, bubbles, the biosphere—capturing their manifold behaviours and states: bouncing, hovering, being chased, being held. This absurdist field research sets off an unending, rolling supercut of all things round, where gumballs and the moon are held in common, and the comical and the cosmic collide. Sharing a single speaker with Andersen’s composition, the related sound content from Eagle’s video behaves as if in orbit, fading in and out of transmission at steady ten-minute intervals.

[Pulls door. Exits stairwell. Continues left into a dimly lit hallway. Turns right when the hallway meets a wider corridor. A door opened wide with the word “Critical” written vertically. Continues through the door. Enters a small space. A long shelf with documents on the wall. A flat-screen TV mounted on the wall to the left. Bright projections further inside the space. A person typing at a desk. Words of welcome. Idle chats. Peruses printed materials.]



Video in the Public Sphere Reading Lists

In October 2018, SAW Video launched Knot Projections, a unique capacity-building commissioning project designed to support media artists in Ottawa seeking to explore public, outdoor contexts as sites for video projection. Funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the initiative involved five regional artists who received financial, technical, and curatorial support in the production of video works that were projected onto pre-existing public surfaces in Ottawa in summer and fall 2019 as an extended exhibition. In lead up to these presentations, the Video in the Public Sphere Speaker Series was created to open and sustain a discursive space in which the wider Ottawa community could engage with notions of “publics” or “publicness” through critical lenses and contemporary concerns. A series of visiting artists, critics, and curators were invited to deliver substantial presentations that engage with the complexities of this terrain from various points of entry, and at times conduct follow up seminars. Each of these visiting presenters, Patricia Reed, Dave Colangelo, Monika Kin Gagnon, Amanda Beech and Dylan Robinson, also offered reading lists featuring texts related to their research and practice.

[Light from the flat screen TV flickers in peripheral vision. Turns from printed materials towards the image. Reads a subtitle: “Something, perhaps a stone, falls into the water.” In the image: an object falls into water. Reads: “New image.” A new image appears. Reads: “A field of ice fills the screen.” A field of ice fills the screen. Continues to monitor. Headphones on.]



Thicker Realities, 2019
Video in the Public Sphere Working Group
(Pansee Atta, Sasha Phipps, Hélene Lefebvre,
Maayke Schurer, Matthieu Halle, Malini Guha, Wanda Fitzgerald)
Single-channel video on a flat-screen monitor
7 minutes

Thicker Realities is the result of a series of collective activities taken up by the Video in the Public Sphere (VIPS) Working Group—a consortium of artists, scholars, critics, and curators in Ottawa who, from October 2018-May 2019, engaged in thinking through the between publicness and the moving image. In shaping this work, the VIPS Working Group first attended a theatrical presentation of Kevin Jerome Everson’s observational documentary Tonsler Park (2017) which was screened at SAW Video’s Common Cinema on December 6th, 2018. The Monday following, VIPS Resident Critic Malini Guha moderated a three-hour discussion group with six artists that delved into Everson’s film through claims made in a text by film scholar Erika Balsom titled “The Reality-Based Community,” published by e-flux in 2017. Guha unpacked a range of terms and methods: the observational mode, thick description, the unmasterable, associative labour, etc. Following this, the participating artists reflected on the complexity and irreducibility of site by visiting locations in Ottawa to shoot protracted takes of spaces and surfaces, and record ambient, environmental sound.

The VIPS Working Group later assembled in the empty Common Cinema with their material as raw, unedited media. Over the course of three hours, they engaged in a process of collective editing: videos were projected large and experienced together, sound was diffused around the room, some images took precedent and established a tone, others were discussed but ultimately discarded, affinities were formed, concessions were made, sound from one image bled into another, artists and critics arrived and departed, drafts were observed in silence, and an edit took shape. The sequence was then sent to Descriptive Audio/Video Describer Wanda Fitzgerald, who spent time with the images and sounds, and described what she saw and heard. Transcripts and recordings were sent back to Ottawa. Voice and captions were placed in the timline. A reality thickened.

[Headphones off. A voice heard from further inside the space. Continues towards the voice. Enters a darkened space. Two objects of identical rectangular shape. Heavy-looking and deep forms. They sit on the ground, stable from their own weight and thickness. Angled slightly towards each other but not facing directly. On each object there is a video projection. On one screen a woman eats a mango. On another, a woman presses words against her image. Subtitles appear in the images. The left screen reads: “Timelines do not always run parallel.” The right reads: “Nit leyic.”]



Between Pieces of our Pasts
naakita feldman-kiss + Ivanie Aubin-Malo
Two-channel video
24 minutes

This two-channel video installation is a collaborative project originating from a series of programming events at SAW Video in July 2018, which brought together four artists exploring intergenerational exchange in their respective practices: naakita feldman-kiss, Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Nelly Matorina, and Laura Taler. The week began with a performance by Aubin-Malo in response to feldman-kiss’ five-channel video installation, Wednesdays, Before Piano, produced through SAW Video’s Jumpstart Mentorship program, and developed over a series of weekends that the artist spent with her grandmother in Ottawa. Through the close proximity and frequency of these visits, their familial dialogue evolved into a series of collaborative performances that spoke to ways in which narratives are inherited and embodied. Utilizing the screen architecture and platforms developed for feldman-kiss’ immersive exhibition, Aubin-Malo staged an iteration of her performance Où sont les ancêtres?, an ongoing project that draws upon the artist’s Maliseet dances and songs, and stems from her recent trip to Tobique where she began to re-learn her native Wolastoqey language. As seen here, as well as continued on the Shaw Street billboard, Aubin-Malo’s performance involves attaching a series of pink sticky notes—each containing individual Wolastoqey words—onto surfaces within the room, naming or describing the objects onto which they are placed. During Aubin-Malo’s performance at SAW Video, this act of labelling made contact with the objects and images of feldman-kiss’ installation, creating a temporary, tactile encounter in their distinct but overlapping journeys of intergenerational learning, healing, and remembrance. 

Made especially for Public Syntax, Between Pieces of our Pasts brings this encounter into a new form, and is the result of the two artists engaging in a collective editing process that took place over several months, through which the duration, pace, and sonic foregrounding of the images was negotiated, shared, and balanced by the artists. These mediated strategies resulted in the coexistence of two timelines that run together in parallel, at times becoming entangled and finding a common resonance, but never fully collapsing into the other. In committing to intergenerational exchange and the durational work that it calls for, Between Pieces of our Pasts explores how inherited timelines can be held together, their weight becoming shared, becoming light, and projecting into a future.

[Leaves the space. Retraces path to exit the building. Stairwell. Spheres. Clicks. Words in rhythm. Hears: “Trembling, treble, timbre…” Lobby space. Sounds of activity. Children playing. Exits the building. Down the ramp towards the sidewalk. A street-side billboard at the base of a large tree. On it is the image of a pink post-it note with a hand-written word. Reads: “Oposiyik.”]