Week of May 16, 2007, Issue #604
ARTS
VisualEyez 2007 brings in artists to respond to 'the city'
CHRISTA O'KEEFE / marychrista@vueweekly.com
‘We have a boom economy. ‘The City’ is the curatorial theme partly as a response to that,” explains Latitude 53’s Todd Janes, founder and curator of VisualEyez, the only annual performance art festival in Canada.
“We’re bringing in artists from all over to respond to the theme—not necessarily ‘the city’ as an entity in and of itself, but urban behaviour and patterns of activity, such as transit systems or gridding streets. VisualEyez is ideally suited to talking about these things because it’s a different model—most festivals here are about creating the ‘festival environment’ in a place you come to. VisualEyez is a festival that brings art to the people rather than people to the art.”
Janes admits to selecting artists who committed to engaging Edmonton audiences outside the gallery context.
“Latitude was the centre for a lot of work last year, and that was good, but wasn’t the original vision. What makes us original is that the work of artists is presented in a different way to Edmonton, with multiple points of entry to engage with work.”
The VisualEyez artists range in experience, provenance and practice, reflecting Janes’s care in inviting a diversity of preoccupations and voices.
Some performance descriptions could be a Wes Anderson trope (Lori Weidenhammer’s Madame Beespeaker Project invites participants to pass messages and questions to bees via her time-travelling animal communicator character), while others combine sound and vision (Jackson 2Bears mashes-up Aboriginal pop culture media references in Iron Tomahawks; Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato drive a soundsystem van playing their own music in The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression in Listening) or even urban food foraging (Nicole Fournier’s “live dining” creates a kitchen environment outdoors).
“Now, in this boom city, people are asking themselves questions like, ‘Why should I live here? Why not rural Saskatchewan or somewhere cheap, or a city like Montréal that’s dense with culture and has a rich urban environment. It’s important to pause and think about what you are doing and how you are doing it. The theme of ‘the city’ hopefully provokes questions that look at urban existence in Edmonton right now.” Janes laughs, “I’m still romantic enough to stay here.” V
Fri, May 18 - Mon, May 28
VISUALEYEZ 2007:
Eighth Annual Festival of Performance Art
Curated by Todd Janes
With various Artists
Latitude 53/Performances take place throughout the city