#evannsiebens

Don’t miss the third and final Special Sunday Supper of the season featuring the work of Evann Siebens on Sunday, August 13 at 7:30pm. For those of you who have never attended one of these events, the Sunday Suppers are an outdoor potluck dinner and artist talk. These events are a collaboration between everyone who attends, and are nothing short of magical. Plus, it is free of charge and inclusive to all.

Evann Siebens makes media with movement. She has exhibited her projects at galleries such as Eyebeam and Centre Pompidou, while her documentaries have been screened at MOMA and on PBS. A former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and Bonn Ballet, Evann graduated from New York University. Now based in Vancouver, she has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, UNIT/PITT and ACME with Keith Doyle. Evann recently won the ID/Identities Istanbul Best Video Prize and performed at Western Front, Vancouver. Recent exhibitions include MediaArtLab/Urban Screen, Russia, Burrard Arts Foundation, Gallery 295 and ISEA2015 Vancouver. In 2017 she performed at the New Media Gallery, New Westminster and screened a film at Lincoln Centre Film Society, New York, as part of Dance on Camera’s Experimental program. She is represented by Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver.

Don’t miss the third and final Special Sunday Supper of the season featuring the work of Evann Siebens on Sunday, August 13 at 7:30pm. For those of you who have never attended one of these events, the Sunday Suppers are an outdoor potluck dinner and artist talk. These events are a collaboration between everyone who attends, and are nothing short of magical. Plus, it is free of charge and inclusive to all.

Evann Siebens makes media with movement. She has exhibited her projects at galleries such as Eyebeam and Centre Pompidou, while her documentaries have been screened at MOMA and on PBS. A former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and Bonn Ballet, Evann graduated from New York University. Now based in Vancouver, she has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, UNIT/PITT and ACME with Keith Doyle. Evann recently won the ID/Identities Istanbul Best Video Prize and performed at Western Front, Vancouver. Recent exhibitions include MediaArtLab/Urban Screen, Russia, Burrard Arts Foundation, Gallery 295 and ISEA2015 Vancouver. In 2017 she performed at the New Media Gallery, New Westminster and screened a film at Lincoln Centre Film Society, New York, as part of Dance on Camera’s Experimental program. She is represented by Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver.

An abstract on The Indexical, Alphabetized, Mediated, Archival Dance-a-Thon! by Sunshine Frère

**This abstract was originally written and published as a risograph publication in collaboration with Erica Wilk of Moniker Press and WAAP (Wil Aballe Art Projects).  All Exhibition documentation images by Michael Love.  More information about Evann Siebens’ practice can be found here: http://evannsiebens.com/**

Impulse. Neurons fire, electrochemical pulsing, eyes blink and focus, legs leap, arms reach, heart is beating, veins are constricting, lungs exhale, throat burns, sweat trickles down. Go, stop.

Intertwine thought with movement and affect, venture deep into the unconscious. Deconstruct this process so intensely that any vestiges of thought are obliterated, there is only room for action. Muscles seize the minutiae of each gesture from the brain. Movement is monumental. To dance is to perform a complex technological act.

What is elastic? What can be updated, abandoned, protected, activated and eternally reinterpreted? What invokes memory recall and identity projection simultaneously? From the socio-political to the technological and cultural, what vibrates amongst a multiplicity of intersecting constructs? It is old, young, outdated and contemporarily relevant. Photographs, registers, diaries, film, video and ephemera... History, mythologies, people and places. The archive is alive.

Look. Listen. I want you to see and hear this. Most important- ly, commit it to memory. This is a movement, a call to action. This, is a modus operandi. It is not like anything that has come before. It is bold, earnest and unapologetic. It means some- thing, right here, right now. Allow this new line to be drawn. Let the decay of past technologies and timeworn methodologies to serve as a marker. That, was how they did it. It is not how it will be done from today. Nor how we will do it in the future. Look. Listen. I want you to understand.

Frozen, attention, closeup, sign, signifier, symbolic, emblematic, problematic, representing, resembling, copy, original, doppelgänger, looking, feeling, observed, inferred, inherent, icon, iconic, visionary, sustaining, suggestive, reductive, distilled, gesture.

Collaboration is acknowledging the interval. The space be- tween your idea and another’s. It is about recognizing the gaps between intention, reality and perception. Deep connectivity is rare and fleeting. It is impossible to describe the exploding energy between one body and another as plural actions become unified. When this happens, it feels as though ideas propagate themselves.

Endurance is a conversation with a situation. By nature, situations are circular yet also iterative and generative. Conversations are omnidirectional. Time is the sole score-keeper. There are no differences between the obsolescence of technology, the stamina of a dancer, the degradation of a film, the propagation of ideas and the rules of inertia. 

The core of TMA (The Mediated Archive) is a hybrid structure dedicated to illuminating multiple composites of the archive. Location, time and performers are presented concurrently but not synchronously. TMA incorporates digital and analog technologies. It is activated across 26 monitors and media players. Each screen acts as a reflexive mirror against the two dimensional lexicon index presented on an adjacent wall. The archive is comprised of a decades’ worth of dance footage (film and video), captured solely by the archivist. Each film in the archive is not a film, it is a collaboration. The camera, a part of the archivist’s corporeal schema, is not following the dancer, nor is the dancer following the camera/archivist, they move in unison, there is no male or female gaze, there are only moments of intensity and sequences of connectivity. The core of TMA acts as a surface zero for the entire archive. All layers, materials, planes, light rays and sound waves radiate outwards from the structure. Gestures and sequencing on each monitor act as free agents, intermingling with the debris of lived experience, a multiplicity of transient pasts and projected expectations.

The corps de ballet is a powerful and collaborative machine. It consists of approximately twenty-four corps (dancers). Each is integrally bonded to all other members. Like a set of lungs, the stage circumference of the corps synchronously expands and contracts. Proprioceptive shifts are detected, measured and adjusted in real time. Collective layers of information are mediated through individual gestures. Any slight variance in delineation, acceleration or stance is immediately noticeable. Each individual is a body within a body. The corps de ballet is a networked and fully integrated, protoplasmic circuit.

Spark. Electricity, wires, cables, connections, circuits, capacitors, limiters, memory, drives, files, code, programming, processing, switches, screens, sound waves, movement, light rays. One, zero. On, Off.

EPILOGUE

Alpha was never clear how to get from A to Z. She always got lost around L,M,N,O,P and no one had ever taken the time to explain the importance of navigating H and Q. Her manual was of no use, it could not transpose phoneme coordinates in any sort of legible manner. Additionally, it never provided a proper structural schematic. Her research became so frustrating that she thought, I’ll never find it. I might as well take it apart and put it away. So that is what she did. She dismantled each component, carefully inspecting how it was positioned and integrated into the system. She took meticulous notes and drafted hundreds of diagrams. The data accumulated for years. Every position was logged and every perspective notated. This deconstruction led to new insight. She presented her findings to the Phonemographical Society, the Lexicon Coven Corpus and the Linguistic Masons. Each party had reservations about different parameters of the experiment. Collectively they all said, “Ms. Bet, this is not a controlled experiment, it will never work.” She persevered. There is no such thing as a controlled experiment, she thought. There is always trace residue, there are always fingerprints. They connect to other maps.

It was only ten years later, after her mysterious disappearance, that her work became known as the canon for language mapping. Alpha never told anyone, but she found Z. She had mapped out the route. It was as clear as day. She laughed that no one had ever seen it before, as it was always there.