Broad: Say Less and Documents by Autumn Knight

Engaging with the university community and the public has been an integral part of the artist’s time here and these performances follow a period of research, creation and presentation for the ECU communities and beyond.

Part 1: Broad: Say Less

Broad: Say Less is an improvisational duo by sound and performance artists Lisa E. Harris and Autumn Knight. In this experimental sound performance, Knight and Harris minimize the use of words as language and maximize the ability of explorative sound to connect with each other and the audience.

Part 2: Documents

Troubling the division of labour between the performer and the audience, Documents involves a public reading of the documentation that serves to authenticate or legitimize one's right to exist. Central to this work is a filing cabinet that both holds the props required for the performance, while also serving as a portrait or trace of the artist. The interactive reading of the documents in the files addresses the embodied specificities of race, class, gender, and sexuality to contest whether these categories accurately reflect the bodies they are meant to represent—while underlining how different audiences and relationships to power may influence this reading.

Interdisciplinary artist, musician, and researcher Li(sa E.) Harris uses voice, theremin, electronics, movement, improvisation, meditation, and new media to explore healing in performance and living. The founder/creative director of the multidisciplinary creative arts studio Studio Enertia, Li has been the recipient of numerous awards that include a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts and the 2021 Dorothea Tanning Award in Music/Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Unlit: Sof Landin (Ballroom Marfa, 2023), D.R.E.A.M.= A Way to Afram (Diverse Works, 2023), and This is the Day (Lawndale Art Center, 2024).

Autumn Knight is a New York based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, video, sound and text. Her work has been on view at various institutions including Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) Shedhalle (Zurich), The Whitney Museum of American Art, PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art) The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Museum Ostwall (Germany) BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Performance Space New York, REDCAT (LA). She has worked across Canada with FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto), Optica (Montreal), and SAW Video Media Arts Centre (Ottawa) and The Western Front (Vancouver). Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired for the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors and fellowships including Art Matters Grant, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship and most recently the Trellis Art Fund.

The Audain Distinguished Artist in Residence program has been hosted by the Libby Leshgold Gallery and Emily Carr University since 2013. The program brings internationally renowned artists to Vancouver to support engagement with local communities and the creation of new works. Operating at the interstices of the teaching and learning environment, the gallery and the studio, the residency encourages experimentation, collaboration and meaningful international exchange.