PUBLIC SPACE
Nicolas Fleming, Josh Vettivelu, Sahar Te, Waard Waard (with Petrina Ng & Darren Rigo)
March 1 - December 15, 2021
Visual Arts Centre Clarington
What does it mean for a gallery to create community-focused programs that respond to and inquire about art’s role as public engagement? Public Space, a year-long transforming project founded on artistic and cultural collaboration that took place over 2021 included four artists facilitating collaboration-based participatory and community-focused programming for underserved Durham Region groups and non-profit organizations. Public Space represents a new way that artists, community, and galleries can work together for inclusive experiences that specifically serve multiplistic publics. Co-existing as artistic, cultural, and community-collaborations, each artist transformed the VAC Loft Gallery through ongoing architectural interventions that facilitated cooperative skill-sharing workshops, group discussions, and educational opportunities for local equity-seeking groups.
Working with a number of local community non-profit organizations, Nicolas Fleming collaborated with Sahar Te, Josh Vettivelu, and Waard Ward to help design and produce site and project-specific environments for community-activated events. Featuring both individual and collaboratively created artworks, each project’s exhibition/participatory needs (display structures, furniture, physical environments) were co-designed with Fleming and produced within his signature construction material aesthetic. Over the course of the project Fleming recycled, re-adapted, and re-organized building components for each subsequent installation to feature each artist’s site-specific artwork. By featuring an evolving but malleable exhibition model, Public Space marks a radical new shift towards experimental iterative exhibition-making within VAC programming.
Josh Vettivelu’s Wax Hands installation features slowly melting, aromatic cinnamon and beeswax candle casts of his Tamil grandmother’s hands on heated plinths, each replenished when one dissipates. Vettivelu and Fleming will collaborate on designing 7 heated plinths, loft space-long shelving to display the hundreds of replacement hands, and church pew seating for community discussion. Wafting sweet aromas refence cinnamon being the main economic impetus of Dutch East India Company’s reason to colonize the island, resulting in the subsequent establishment of Western Catholicism. Vettivelu investigates the scent’s relationship to memory and its ability to elicit conflicting ideas of nostalgia and trauma. The wax hands operate as incense & reliquary - memorials representing the complex issue of Catholic salvation/redemption between the bloody history of Tamil colonization and ensuing colonized communities of Sri Lanken Tamil Catholics.
The practice of Waard Ward places emphasis on community and collaboration but does so as a means for social justice. Collectively led by Syrian florist Abd Al-Mounim, community organizer Hanen Nanaa, educator Laura Ritacca, curator/educator Patricia Ritacca, and artist Petrina Ng, Waard Ward invites newcomers to train as florists and imagine social-entrepreneurial futures. Waard Ward‘s exhibited work presents collaboration in floral arrangement, decolonial research, as well as newcomer community building. In itself, Waard Ward's name proposes the idea of a diasporic flower district; "waard" is a romanization of the Arabic word for flower. Throughout September 2021, at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Waard Ward collective offered a series of workshops to Arabic-speaking refugees and newcomers to develop flower-arranging skills. The gallery displayed each workshop's floral arrangements, with new flowers added and vessels continuously re-arranged weekly. Darren Rigo was also invited to collaborate as both photographer and artist, which resulted in the exhibited work in Re/flex. Through these multiple collaborations, Waard Ward’s practice utilizes photography to document the social interactions at the heart of their project. In doing so, they foreground how documentary photography is not solely rooted in the historic but can also be forward-thinking and hopeful. Here, Waard Ward’s exhibited work provides an alternative method for documenting the learning process of cultural collaboration.
As the seasons change and decay of our prolonged year catalyzes. Installed in the VAC Loft Gallery, Sahar Te (with the fabrication and sculptural hand of Nicolas Fleming) situate Incubator, a mushroom incubator that demonstrates and teaches alternative-adaptive models of community care and growth. Encouraging others to bear witness and internalize the processes of mushroom growth and prosperity, Te proposes that we adopt mycelial systems of progress and knowledge proliferation to mobilize radical systemic change. Similar to mushrooms, our knowledge perforates the walls of the gallery and permeates the community. As a community, proliferate and become invasive to normalcy. As a supplement to the physical space of the incubator, Te brings the voices of: Meech Boakye, August Klintberg, Emily DiCarlo, Craig Fahner, JP King, Chris Mendoza, Liam Mullen, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Miles Rufelds, and Tosca Téran together to guide us as we navigate systems of knowledge and engage in radical collaborative projects and workshops to build and share new knowledge that focus on systems of care, alternative communication networks, and the resistance of tradition.
