Feet on The Ground | A Participatory Group Performance Art Collaboration

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Feet on The Ground, 2016

Maria Hupfield

Join us for this special performance, part of the grunt gallery's exhibition, #callresponse.

When

Oct 28, 2016 1:00pm – 4:00pm

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Part of the grunt gallery's exhitibion #callresponse, the Faculty of Culture + Community has invited Maria Hupfield, Esther Neff, and IV Castellanos to Emily Carr for a special participatory performance of Feet on The Ground.

October 28, 2016
1:30 - 3:50pm
Motion Capture Studio, Room 285e
Seating is limited, RSVP to pluriversitas@gmail.com.

Please note: the grunt gallery will be filming/photographing this participatory performance. By attending this event, you consent to your image being used by the grunt gallery for promotional purposes.

Feet on The Ground is a participatory group performance art collaboration on how to decolonize yourself featuring a custom made toolbox designed by the artists. Using a combination of individual and collective actions the artists will demo and invite participation by the audience to empower the absurd and irrational, using items from the tool box. Conducted as an ongoing series of workshop style performances across multiple venues this project is based on survival strategies with politically minded performance artists. Audience members will be encouraged to contribute everyday items to the toolbox and guided on how to assemble their own tools for decolonization. A take away handout will accompany this performance. Objects in the toolbox are comprised of an assortment of items including mirrors, folded survival blankets, surveyor tape, sharpies, rulers, and lipstick. Unlike the military term “boots on the ground” the title Feet on The Ground is one where the liberation of the undressed foot takes priority over combat.

Feet on The Ground is presented in partnership with #callresponse. Strategically centering Indigenous women as vital presences across multiple platforms, #callresponse is a multifaceted project which includes a website, social media platform, touring exhibition and catalogue. The project brings together five local art commissions by Indigenous women artists from across Canada, including Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory. Each artist has invited a guest to respond to their work, including Isaac Murdoch, IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Marcia Crosby and Tanya Tagaq.

Use the hashtag #callresponse to get involved in the conversation!

Artist Bio's

Maria Hupfield is a member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, currently based in Brooklyn NY. Selected for SITELINES, SITE Santa Fe 2016, Hupfield received national recognition in the USA from the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation for her hand-sewn industrial felt sculptures. Her nine-foot birchbark canoe made of industrial felt was performed in Venice, Italy for the premiere of Jiimaan, coinciding with the Venice Biennale 2015. Recent projects include The House of Dust by Alison Knowles, James Gallery CUNY, free play, Trestle Projects Brooklyn with Jason Lujan, and Chez BKLYN, an exhibition highlighting the fluidity of individual and group dynamics of collective art practices across native, non-native, and immigrant experience; conceived by artists in Brooklyn and relayed at Galerie SE Konst, Sweden. She was a guest speaker for the Distinguished Visiting Artist Program, University of British Columbia, Indigenous Feminist Activism & Performance, Yale, Native American Cultural Center and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Indigenous Rights/Indigenous Oppression symposium with Tanya Tagaq at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, MD. Like her mother and settler accomplice father before her, Hupfield is an advocate of community arts and activism. The founder of 7th Generation Image Makers, Native Child and Family Services of Toronto, a native youth arts and mural outreach program in downtown Toronto she is Co-owner of the blog Native Art Department International.

IV Castellanos - "Abstract performance art has been the vein for my physical memory to thrive. Simply, I create objects and destroy them. In creating this gesture I am able to articulate ideas that I shifted and bottle necked down one resonating path. All of the information is channeled but visually clear, concise and often under 15 minutes. The interest is in transforming energy and the route has been moulded over the course of performing by trimming the fat and getting the job done. Labor is a source for my work, the physical body moving through day to day direction and carrying an othered body under constant critique and observation. There is power in focused action. Timing allows the intensity to maintain saturation for the viewer to barely digest in the moment."

Esther Neff is the founder and co-director of Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL), a collective making operas-of-operations and a laboratory site for performance projects. She is a collaborative and solo performance artist and independent theorist and a member of Feminist Art Group, Social Health Performance Club and Organizers Against Imperialist Culture. Her current work and research is a series of operations entitled Embarrassed of the Whole.