Earthly Tents

2019

“While we live in these earthly tents, we groan and sigh”

An event featuring 5 acts reflecting on the failing body. In each of the pieces in Earthly Tents the artists contemplate their relationship to bodily dysfunction, crisis, breakdown, and failure. Featuring works by Alberta-based artists Cindy Baker, Blair Brennan, Carlene LaRue, Kelly Ruth (performing with Mary-Anne McTrowe and Shanell Papp), and Bradley Necyk.

Curiously, whenever I make a new performance, after all the conceptualizing, research, writing, planning, and production, it’s not until I actually perform the work that I remember how very PHYSICAL performance is. And how much of a toll it takes on my body, especially when I fail to plan for exactly what the impact/effect of those actions on my body will be and their longer-term implications. As someone who routinely makes work that can be described as durational and endurance-based, AND as someone living with disability who has a keen interest in critical disability theory, I should be considering the impact my performance takes on my body before it happens in order to minimize or mitigate the risks and long-term damage. Somewhere along the way, though, I’ve picked up some bad ideas about what it means to be a SERIOUS and COMMITTED artist, (that the value of my work is judged on my equivalence to the physical capabilities of people with thinner, more muscular, younger, more “able” bodies); and I’ve picked up some bad habits taught to me by a culture that says that my (fat, disabled, female) body must prove its value by committing to the physical labour of performance; by demonstrating through endurance of pain and visibly difficult work that I am a GOOD artist.

Lately, I’ve been trying to make work that allows my body to do what it is capable of on any given day; which respects the limitations of my own body. Some of the artists in this event are making work that exploits their body’s failings as a central characteristic or theme of the work. Some make work about bodies or disability or fragility or failure within their greater practice and some usually do not. I hesitate to fall back on descriptions of these works as “vulnerable” or “strong” or “poignant;” these words have a tendency to fetishize marginalized bodies. Our culture charges us with a moral imperative to be “productive” and “beautiful;” in a society in which beauty is equal to productivity, failing bodies are markers of moral decrepitude. I wanted to create a space for artists to explore failure as a concept and a reality that did not require them to be confronted by fetishism or the productivity imperative. 

Another fascinating and entirely predictable feature of programming work about failing bodies with artists who are thinking about bodily failure is that they have bodies which are experiencing various types of failure. As someone who is apparently incapable of learning that performance is extremely physical, this has meant being less than prepared, logistically, for the inevitable lineup changes, cancellations, changes in plan, and incessant uncertainty, while wholeheartedly embracing these things as sources of strengths of the project, and inherently on-theme.

In the creation of an intimate an accessible space, the event will be very quiet. There will be no music aside from the audio performance by Ruth, McTrowe, and Papp, and the audio elements of each of the other projects is minimal, subdued, soft.

Cindy Baker

Cindy Baker’s work is informed by a fierce commitment to ethical community engagement and critical social inquiry drawn from queer, gender, race, disability, fat and art theories. Her interdisciplinary research-based practice moves fluently between the arts, humanities, and social sciences and drawing from two decades of experience in art, queer, and fat communities.

Holding an MFA from the University of Lethbridge where she received a SSHRC grant for her research in performance in the absence of the artist's body, Baker has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally. She is represented by dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton.

Blair Brennan  

Blair Brennan practices his own brand of quasi-mystical anarchism from his home in Edmonton. His drawings, sculpture and installation art have been exhibited internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Brennan has contributed articles to a number of national arts and cultural publications. His favorite Ramones song is "Strength to Endure".  

Carlene Larue

Carlene La Rue was raised outside of Edmonton on an acreage and spent most of her childhood trying to befriend any animals that didn’t run away when she approached.  She began her artistic career at Red Deer College, with aspirations to work in ceramic and sculpture.  While there, she received a diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos, a connective tissue disorder, and invisible disability.  She completed her BFA at the University of Alberta, during which she created work that helped her come to terms with and better understand her prognosis.  Currently she works in her studio in Sylvan Lake, while also developing and running art programs in conjunction with the Ronald McDonald House of Central Alberta and the Red Deer Regional Hospital.

Brad Necyk

Brad Necyk is a multimedia artist and writer whose practice engages with issues of medicine, mental health, and precarious populations. His works include drawings and paintings, still and motion film, sculpture, 3D imaging and printing, virtual reality, performance, and narrative writing. He is completing an arts-based, research-creation Ph.D. in Psychiatry. Currently, he is a visiting artist-researcher at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and had a studio residency at Workman Arts, Toronto. His current work focuses on patient experience, auto-ethnography, psychiatry, pharmaceutics, and biopolitics. His artistic work was included in the 2015 Alberta Biennial, and has been shown internationally, most recently in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Chicago, IL. Brad sits on the boards of several professional bodies, and is a Scholar at the Integrative Health Institute at the University of Alberta. 

Kelly Ruth 

Kelly Ruth is a textile and new media artist activating her textiles and tools with electronics and sound. She has presented several bodies of work using fibre, weaving, and extensive knowledge of natural plant dyes. Her installations and improvisational sound performances explore the shifting relationship that humans have with technology and the land. Using contact microphones and digital effects on her loom since 2014, she released a debut solo album, Forms, in January 2019. Kelly is a founding member of Civvie, and moved from Winnipeg to Edmonton in 2017. 

Mary-Anne McTrowe

Mary-Anne McTrowe was born and raised in southern Alberta. She earned her B.F.A. at the University of Lethbridge in 1998 and went on to pursue graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal, receiving her M.F.A. in studio art in 2001. McTrowe was a member of the now retired art-ernative band The Cedar Tavern Singers AKA Les Phonoréalistes with Daniel Wong, was a founding member of Trap\door Artist Run Centre, and currently works as a technician in the Art Department at the University of Lethbridge.  Her formal and conceptual textile explorations include weaving, felting, sewing, and crochet.

Shanell Papp

Shanell Papp is based in Lethbridge, Alberta. Papp earned a BFA from the University of Lethbridge in 2006 and her MFA from the University of Saskatchewan in 2010. Papp works in textiles (knitting, crochet, felting, macramé, machine knitting, embroidery, weaving), sculpture, photography, and drawing. She has an impressive exhibition history, online following, interviews and published works. Her work continues to edit the boundaries of textile craft and fine art.