Something Happened
Tamworth Central, Tamworth, ON
August 2024
Full online catalog of residency structure here.
Something Happened is the culminating exhibition of an artist residency platform of the same name, which took place at Tamworth Central throughout July. The project’s design, developed by artist-curator Neven Lochhead, was initiated and commissioned through Malini Guha’s SSHRC-funded research project “On Traction: Moving Images and Their Realities,” which is returning to a longstanding relationship between cinema and reality. The Something Happened residency used sound, video, and writing to question the idea of ‘retreat’ and ‘reflection’ that are common in artist residency programming structures, re-tuning situated artistic activity for a more determinate set of attitudes. Its invited group participants developed and expanded the shared avatars of The Investigator and The MacGuffin through week-long stays in Tamworth. Through sound workshops in the barn, material research in and around the area, the shooting of a film, and critical writing processes of lateral influence between participants emerged that gradually thickened the program’s persistent narrative pressure: Everything had already taken place. What was left to do was lead back to the cause.
During her stay in Tamworth, filmmaker Bojana Babic turned the residency platform inside out. The strangeness of being an uninvited guest in the village, charged with unveiling an unspoken reality in the locale, motivated a process of improvised character development, which she captures here on camera. In and around Tamworth, Babic prompts curator Neven Lochhead, re-cast here in the role of The Investigator, to carry out absurdist dramatizations of processes of inquiry. Curious, aimless, itinerant, but proceeding with the determined certainty that there is something there, Babic’s quasi-noir film creates a refractive instrument through which to see, hear, and activate the environment, from a safe and alien distance.
The immersive material research methods of multidisciplinary artist Noah Scheinman found resonance with the collection of machinery offcuts and infrastructural castaways that populate the Tamworth Central Barn. These are the raw materials that motivate the design practice of Carolyn Butts, owner of Tamworth Central, which become borrowed here by Scheinman in the production of an array of sculptural gestures. In dialogue with the village and surrounding landscape, the artist creates a taxonomy of forms, divided across three groups – tools, dwellings, and monuments – which translate into minimalist object compositions resting on the barn floor. Scheinman’s process of sorting, summation, and synthesis results in a legend of sorts to an oblique cartography. These forms to navigate with, from the barn back out to the habitat.
Bookending the investigations of Babic and Scheinman were two writing intensives in Tamworth by film scholar Malini Guha. In her resulting text, “Loops and Liberation (Between two Banks),” included in the final exhibition, Guha writes from a proximity to experimental practice, as a scholar embedded closely in the artistic research methods of Something Happened. The opening line of her essay, “I wanted to pick up a camera,” recounting an affecting moment while standing at the Salmon River, becomes a point of departure for Guha to consider how a disciplinary transformation of film studies could more adequately attend to the relationship between cinema and reality. Guha’s collection of notes builds a speculative argument that seeks to comprehend the idea of cinema as a tension between traction and flight, while leaving us on a perpetual cliffhanger.
Booked!
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
December 2023 – January 2024
Download to The Official Handbook to Booking Studies
A side effect of artist doctorate-ness, Booked! posits and projects a new quasi-academic discipline, “Booking Studies,” where the sloping topologies of Bookings are harnessed as forward-leaning inclinations for setting immersive research cultures in motion, and building resonant educational dwellings. Spinning at the centre of Lochhead’s PhD dissertation and portfolio, “An Artist’s Almanac to Research, Organization, Education and Bookings,” the Booked! exhibition warps its writing about artistic knowledge, organizational theory, sound studies and curriculum design around an unruly gravity, while delivering a crash course on the operative vocabularies of Booking Studies, such as Booker-Resource Relations, Counter-Itineraries, the Site of Actual Realization, and Hyperbolic Cognition, outlining their various applications. Learn it in a heartbeat!
a guest + a host = a ghost / Paranormal Curation
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
February 8 – May 8, 2022
Archive of Paranormal Curation research platform + working groups
Paranormal Curation is an open access artistic learning platform, designed as a set of overlapping in-person and online activities that allow for its participants to collectively explore ideas and methodologies of “haunting” through contemporary curatorial practices and alternative exhibition-making formats. The floating platform is designed to work adjacent to existing projects, groups, sites and institutions, with its first iteration in early 2022 stemming from an investigation of the historic Etherington House in Kingston, Ontario – the original site of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the University Gallery of Queen’s University. This initial iteration of the platform will aim to build and nurture assemblages of participants drawn from members of two simultaneous art-educational clusters: the Agnes Etherington’s ‘Rehoming Agnes’ Playgroup and Queen’s University’s ‘Situating the Curatorial’ Graduate Seminar. Beyond these core groups, other ‘Wanderers’ will be added to the mix as the platform evolves and transmits itself.
This artistic learning platform was designed as part of my contribution as co-curator to the micro-residency and exhibition project A guest + a host = a ghost at Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, which is situated in the gallery’s historic Etherington House and open to the public from Feb. 8 – May. 8, 2022. The platform’s themes and interest in “haunting” were mobilised through various early discussions with the initiators of that project, including Sunny Kerr, Michelle Bunton, Dylan Robinson and Hadley Howes. A core concern that arose around those discussions was the difficulty and trouble of approaching the Etherington House – fraught as it is with its colonial architecture – as an hospitable site for discursive exhibition practices, artistic production, contemplation, and acts of collective flourishing. It has been continuously discussed and emphasised, from various angles and positions, how the consistent “colonial loudness” of the historic house can not only make it a stifling environment for artistic thinking, but also produces an act of violence and erasure through its insistent Victorian architectural desires. How can we productively work from within such a charged site, as artists, curators, and organisers? How could this place become more hospitable to diverse voices and practices?
From the vibe out
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
February 20 – May 30, 2021
From the vibe out is a solo exhibition by Kingston-based artist and curator Neven Lochhead featuring an installation of video and sound. Bringing together his language-propelled approach to the moving image with his curatorial “space-making” practice, Lochhead’s new project summons a semi-fictional, artist-led research institute as its interlocutor. Borrowing and bending the grammars of group-visioning exercises, a restless chorus of spectral art workers plot from their nascent organisational position. Utterances find a sense of traction by tethering themselves to a concrete, local referent: an empty art space in downtown Kingston. With this room as its anchor, Lochhead’s exhibition spins out an active “instituting” process that constructs not from the top down, nor the bottom up, but laterally, from the vibe out. Occupying two additional neighbouring rooms at Agnes, the exhibition’s “spatial stereoscopy” conjures an operative image by taking up two senses of projection: as the sculptural display of the moving image, and as a mode for inferring a future course by extrapolating from the dynamics of an immediate locale.