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"What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?" @ Latitude 53, Edmonton, September 6 - October 26, 2019
More information on the Latitude 53 website
September 6 - October 26, 2019
Latitude 53
10242 - 106 Street
Edmonton, AB, Canada
T5J 1H7
info@latitude53.org
780.423.5353
EXHIBITION PROGRAMME:
OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, September 5, 2019
7:00 – 10:00pm
Artist Talk
Saturday, September 7, 2019
1:00pm
What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?
What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?, is a project by multidisciplinary artists Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau that challenges ideas of perception and mobility as they relate to invisible disability. First presented in the FOFA Gallery at Concordia University in Montréal, the project builds on themes previously explored in, Is It The Sun Or The Asphalt All I See Is Bright Black (2017). In light of Chloë Lum’s recently-diagnosed chronic illness, What Do Stones Smell Like focuses on the inability of others to understand the immobilizing effects of an illness that cannot be seen. Featuring a two-channel video installation with quadraphonic sound, the exhibition investigates the material nature of the body and the transformative power that objects have on the senses.
Fashioned as an opera, What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? tells the story of Golem, a character whose diminishing mobility results in a misunderstanding between her and her able-bodied social circle; the Choir. As Golem’s disability becomes worse, her perceptive abilities begin to relocate to her other senses including her sense of touch and smell. Golem learns to find solace in the objects that are nearest to her and her sensory connection with them grows.
What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? ultimately serves as an inquiry into the ways that bodily difference can become an arena for new modes of research that seek to expand the notion of the human condition beyond the self.
Becoming Unreal
Becoming Unreal is a gestural and vocal score interpreted by Toronto-based artist Xuan Ye; it is a duet between a performing body and the objects that support its gestures and weight.
Written as a response to the sculptural installation Of, In or Under by Jasmine Reimer, Becoming Unreal presents an imaginary dialogue within an artist’s head about the ethics of their sculptural practice; how uncanny the act of representing the natural world with unnatural materials is in the context of the global environmental collapse.
About the performer of Becoming Unreal:
Xuan Ye is the prototype of many objects. Through diagrammatic processes and multimedial translations, X engineers installations and performances about systemic violence and distributed subjectivity in various interconnected networks. More recently, X has collaborated with artificial intelligence and other non-human agents to co-author forms of media poetics. X’s art projects have been featured, exhibited and commissioned in international contexts such as Supermarket Art Fair (SE), InterAccess (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM International (GE), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (US), Trinity Square Video (CA), AGYU(CA), the Wrong Biennale (URL), Times Museum (CN), Galleri CC (SE), among others. X’s sound and body improvisation has been lauded as “one of Canada’s most exciting voices in textural soma” by OBEY Convention.