----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- "Boost Presume I’m Gonna Breathe Grieved” is a collaboration between myself and artist Lorna Mills, curated by Rea McNamara for Hyperallergic* as part of a series looking at how aspects of digital feminisms can inform better online curatorial practices. https://hyperallergic.com/616656/a-doomscroll-antidote-somber-and-wistful-gifs-to-help-process-the-lockdown/
We (Lorna Mills and Sally McKay) are friends and colleagues with a history of being intermittently influenced by each other's work. So we didn't overthink this pandemic-era collaboration. We both made some new gifs and showed them to each other. We liked them. And so we agreed to mash them together. Lorna coded the layout of the gifs in html, and she brought in the Karen Carpenter soundtrack. Sally produced the copy for the text scroll, using a thesaurus to riff off the phrase "I think I'm gonna be sad." We are both quite happy with the outcome, which we chose to title, "Boost Presume I’m Gonna Breathe Grieved.” What follows are my thoughts only, bouncing off this lovely collaborative moment and back into my ongoing research. The gifs I contribued to this piece are hand-drawn, inspired by covid isolation but also by a wetland restoration project that I am involved with at McMaster University. Artist Patricia Johanson is working on a design for a series of wetlands that will replace what is currently a parking lot. I have personally been spending quite a bit of time on the parking lot hanging out with killdeer, taking photos and shooting video. I have also been walking through the watershed, getting to know the creek that flows by our site from its headwaters to it mouth. I've heard from several net artists lately who, like myself, are bemused by the current pandemic-induced rush to program online art. Online art exhibitions inhabit the same space as other line activities, such as zoom meetings and social media. It is an embodied space (as my eye-strain and back pains can attest). Artists who work with the internet as a medium bring as much craft and nuance to their perceptual explorations as artists working with any other media. It's been an interesting teaching time, as my students are much more open to engagement with digital art than they have been in previous, non-Covid years. That said, I am mostly interested in the watershed, the creek, and the parking lot as active interspecies matrices (so-called native plants and so called invasive plants both struggle to survive in a riparian buffer zone drenched with salt from the parkling lot.) There are so many so-called stakeholders. What an awful word. It's all so colonial, so posthuman, so pandemic. Everything is super-charged, damaged, intermingled, reslient, vulnerable. Colonial white supremacy is a global disaster and there is a lot of work to do. (* Boost Presume I’m Gonna Breathe Grieved has been subsequently picked up by Erandy Vergara for her Oboro online exhibition, Critical Proximity. https://www.oboro.net/en/activity/critical-proximity-something-about-human-connections-can-happen-when-there-fissure) _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
