>>PREVIEW
BODY OF 3
GroundWorks Integrated Arts Collective
Runs until May 13
The Studio (The Grand)
As artists face many stereotypes, it’s refreshing to see a company focusing on work that offers a perspective on community, rather than perpetuating individual artistic temperaments.
GroundWorks Integrated Arts Collective has concentrated on cross-pollination between artistic disciplines to create groundbreaking works from emerging artists. The company collected nine artists from three seemingly different disciplines – music, dance and the visual arts – which have been used to create a body of work about the human body, Body of 3.
"This project is a true collaboration," says managing producer Suzanne Boss. "We’ve seen a lot of kind of artistic co-operations, but this is different because we don’t have one artistic director – every person has a different voice on the project."
The result, Body of 3, is essentially that. The process, fittingly enough, also involved three residencies for the artists involved, including one at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
One of the nine collaborating on the project is visual artist Laurie Steen, whose work is shown in Canada by NewZones Gallery of Contemporary Art, as well as in Europe.
"Much of the project is about process, the dancers being choreographers as well, and the visual artists drawing, painting, and the musicians being composers as well as musicians," Steen says. "I just found that when you break down your art form into process, passion and creative intent, we all end up speaking the same language."
Steen, along with visual artists Carl White and Steven Mack, were grouped with musicians Amir Amiri, Pablo Bonacina and Rebecca Wenham, as well as dancers Julie Coleman, Joanne Baker and Kathryn Pollack. Steen notes that collaborating with artists in different mediums is akin to creating visual art in a temporal form.
"It’s been a real challenge," Steen says, adding that she’s documented her own paintings in the process for a movie format. "You have to place trust in two people that actually end up taking over your work and putting it into a different medium. So it’s so exciting to learn how that happens, as you’re still a visual artist but working in a completely different medium."
Accomplished cellist and musician Rebecca Wenham has worked in close collaboration with Steen and found her process as a composer was enlightened by the marriage of mediums.
"What I found really interesting was generally, when I write music, I am pulling my ideas out of the air, and working closely with a visual artist, I’m drawing my ideas from these images," Wenham says. "I have this tangible thing to be inspired by, and it makes me write music in a totally different way."
Wenham also found the work the dancers did as a response to her music engaging. "When we first did our first residency in Banff, we wrote the music first and then just presented it to everybody. And then, to see something develop out of that was very interesting for me."
One of the dancers/choreographers involved in Body of 3 is GroundWorks Co-founder Julie Coleman, who says the biggest challenge was the decision not to have an artistic director.
"I’m sure there are other groups that have engaged in a collaborative process where there is, in the end, one person who says, ‘Great ideas everyone, we’re using that, that and that, and everything else is gone, thank you very much.’ So what I’ve learned is this process has taken a lot of time, but necessary time."
"And I think one of the important aspects of it is that, as an artist, understanding your medium is one thing, but then comfort is a very dangerous thing," adds White. "So to change that, to break out of your medium, be forced to think of things via different languages, different movement, rhythm via the musicians, really enhances our own practices."
White, a visual artist who works primarily in encaustic paint – a process where pigment is literally heated into molten wax – notes that much of the work in Body of 3 is more centred on the premise of memory, in addition to the figurative body.
"I think it’s been very interesting, from myself as a visual artist, working more as dancers and musicians do, in a collective which is quite foreign to the visual arts," he says. |
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