#winnipegwindow

window is pleased to welcome Noor Bhangu, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, and Sarah Nesbitt as co-curators of window 2019. Commencing in April, the curatorial team will present a series of exhibitions that investigate the intersection of gender and space. 

From January to March, Muñoz Gomez will curate works by Francesca Carella Arfinengo and Luther Konadu on behalf of Collecting, Citing, Curating (CCC), a research cluster based at the University of Manitoba, with funding from the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities. More details coming soon! 


 Bios:

NB: Can you tell me a little bit about your arts practice and current methodologies?

SK: I employ two different methodologies in my work. The first is working with recognizable tropes to create a point of access for viewers and then to create a moment of surprise and vulnerability. This can be a new way of approaching important topics around identity, which tend to go around in circles. Through the moment of surprise, I feel that a rupture is created that can lead to conversations we haven’t had before.

My second method is more obtuse. It is not so much about access but about working more intuitively. It is installation-based and through it I embrace my lack of knowledge and resources. For example, I’ve started using wood even though I don’t know how to use wood. Since enrolling at RISD, I have access to wood but the wood shop terrifies me. As a women of colour, I don’t like asking for help because everybody there already thinks that I don’t know anything. So it’s weird that I’m in an institutional space with and without access. Also, installations that are tenuous and break over time can reflect the precarity of institutions so, in that sense, my second method responds to POC survivorship in a broader sense.

I would love for these two bodies of work to crossover at some point and the bindis feel like a good start. With them, I am also thinking of creating an installation of a desi dukan, which can be a space for our culture and future.

NB: Your work, especially the installation-based projects, has been attributed to disrupting the “unseen boundaries and tacit assumptions” of the art world – can you speak to this?

SK: We have a lot of issues at macro level – who are white people, who comprises the institution, and who is inside and outside the lines? I’m interested in interrogating these in specific ways. While I too have responsibility in these structures, I have the tendency to bite the hand that feeds me and to ask at what cost it is feeding me? The real work doesn't get done until we start disrupting the art world and the broader world. Some of the people I’ve worked with are trying to be disruptive but they’re ultimately still inside these systems. So, how do we refuse has been refused to us? We have to at least try. I’m not sure what art can be outside of institutional spaces and that’s dangerous.

NB: When you first announced this project on your instagram page, you expressed some hesitation in making public your “fake kinda funny kinda poignant products.” Can you unpack this hesitation a little bit and the binary between commercial and serious work that it essentially points to? Is this work starting to make sense within your larger practice?

SK: I’m thinking about going to India, but don’t want to bring a colonized lens to India because I didn’t grow up in that culture. I’m asking myself: How can I not fetishize my own culture? How aware am I about my white instagram audiences? I want to document my travel, but I have to be responsible too. With the bindis and dukan, it’s the same thing. How do I make white people uncomfortable when they feel so entitled to it? I don’t know how to do this and that’s my hesitancy. The bindis are for a specific audience and I’m thinking about how to realistically control they ways in which they can be accessed.

NB: What are some other projects you’re currently working on?

SK: One of the bigger projects is in Seattle, where I’m working with two Indigenous curators (Tracy Rector and Asia Tail) to curate a show that will open at Kingstreet Station in November 2018 and will be open until February 2019. There is an open call for Indigenous artists from Pacific Northwest and out of these artists ten to fifteen will be selected for mentorship. We will also commission artists for site-specific work.

WINNIPEG’S ONLY 24 HOUR ARTIST-RUN CENTRE PRESENTS KRISTIN NELSON

Location: Artspace Building, corner of Bannatyne @ Arthur [sidewalk level]

window is please to present our thirty-second installation, Dear Cheryl (2017), by Kristin Nelson

Statement

The name, Cheryl Lashek, in its particular and cursive font, is familiar, and rests on the tip of our local and collective tongues. This ‘feeling of knowing’ becomes a unity of culture, or meme, borrowing its form from what is seemingly insignificant.

While the physical machinations of our world are attended to on earth, by architects and by engineers, our necks crane ever higher.

Cheryl Lashek is a professional engineer who works for the City of Winnipeg in the position of Director, Inspection and Technical Services. Her name and signature font is recognizable on valid elevator permits across Manitoba. Cheryl Lashek remains unavailable for comment.

About the Artist