Recollective — Archival Intuitions and Annotations

Sat. 03.11.18 / 1 pm Archival Intuitions and Annotations

Cindy Mochizuki, Elizabeth MacKenzie, and Laiwan in response to Christine D'Onofrio's project Intuition Commons and the Belkin Gallery Archives
The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

Cindy Mochizuki, Harvest with Care (Response to Roy Kiyooka fonds, Pear Tree Pomes, 1987) at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham 
Cindy Mochizuki, Harvest with Care (Response to Roy Kiyooka fonds, Pear Tree Pomes, 1987) at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham 
Cindy Mochizuki, Harvest with Care (Response to Roy Kiyooka fonds, Pear Tree Pomes, 1987) at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham 
Cindy Mochizuki, Harvest with Care (Response to Roy Kiyooka fonds, Pear Tree Pomes, 1987) at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham 
Cindy Mochizuki, Harvest with Care (Response to Roy Kiyooka fonds, Pear Tree Pomes, 1987) at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham 
Elizabeth MacKenzie, Acknowledging Influence (Response to Christine D’Onofrio, Intuition Commons, 2018), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts Sept 4 – Dec 2, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Elizabeth MacKenzie, Acknowledging Influence (Response to Christine D’Onofrio, Intuition Commons, 2018), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts Sept 4 – Dec 2, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Elizabeth MacKenzie, Acknowledging Influence (Response to Christine D’Onofrio, Intuition Commons, 2018), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts Sept 4 – Dec 2, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Elizabeth MacKenzie, Acknowledging Influence (Response to Christine D’Onofrio, Intuition Commons, 2018), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts Sept 4 – Dec 2, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Elizabeth MacKenzie, Acknowledging Influence (Response to Christine D’Onofrio, Intuition Commons, 2018), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts Sept 4 – Dec 2, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Elizabeth MacKenzie, Acknowledging Influence (Response to Christine D’Onofrio, Intuition Commons, 2018), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts Sept 4 – Dec 2, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Laiwan, Letters to (N)on Com (Response to Vancouver Association for Noncommercial Culture fonds), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Laiwan, Letters to (N)on Com (Response to Vancouver Association for Noncommercial Culture fonds), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham
Laiwan, Letters to (N)on Com (Response to Vancouver Association for Noncommercial Culture fonds), at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC. November 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.  Photo: Rachel Topham

How do we respond to archives both public and private? In this come-and-go event, artists Laiwan, Elizabeth MacKenzie, and Cindy Mochizuki contributed three individual responses to the Belkin Gallery Archives and in relation to artist Christine D'Onofrio's online project, Intuition Commons. The responses were open for viewing, listening and conversations throughout the event.

Intuition Commons is a growing, interactive database of female influences that destabilizes the bias to individualism in art. Projected in a gallery installation, contributors nominate their influencers with visual connections, overlapping stories, keywords, and links, creating a rhizomatic archive. It is part of the exhibition, Beginning with the 70s: Collective Acts (Sept 4 - Dec 2, 2018) curated by Lorna Brown.

Venue

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
1825 Main Mall

Bios

Christine D'Onofrio is an artist and teaches lens-based practices in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of BC. Her interests include the contradictions and ambiguities of liberty, especially under capitalism. Her involvement with Art+Feminism, an international campaign to improve the coverage of women on Wikipedia, is related to her current work.

Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation, and drawings. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its relationship to site-specificity, invisible histories, archives, and memory work. Her artistic process moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, chance, improvisation and engaging communities. She has exhibited, performed and screened her work in Canada, the US, and Asia.

Elizabeth MacKenzie draws the same thing over and over again. She uses drawing to explore the productive aspects of uncertainty through the use of repetition, interrogations of portraiture and considerations of intersubjective experience. Her drawing installations have been exhibited across Canada and her videos have been presented in numerous screenings, festivals and exhibitions internationally. She maintains an ongoing commitment to collaborative and community-engaged art practices, critical writing, and teaching.

Laiwan is an artist and writer with a practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. She founded OR Gallery in 1983. Laiwan has been investigating embodiment through performativity, audio, music, improvisation, and other media. Recent commissions focus on current questions of the environment and built cityscape of Vancouver. She teaches Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, Port Townsend, WA, and is based in Vancouver.

Responses

Elizabeth MacKenzie

Acknowledging Influence, Nov 2018

Following the premise of Christine D’Onofrio’s Intuition Commons (2018), visitors were invited to acknowledge women-identified artists and thinkers who have inspired influential moments of thinking, knowing, living and making within their creative lives.

Alphabet stamps were used to record the names of the participants' influencers within this shared, materialized archive. Traces of pear tree leaves and twigs (from Cindy Mochizuki’s Harvest with Care) are visible across the surface of the paper. Ink produced from these materials were used to outline individual names. Stories associated with the names were shared through conversations around the table.

The artist acknowledges these creative influences in the development of this activity: Christine D’Onofrio, Jin-me Yoon, Cyndy Chwelos, Jasna Guy, Cindy Mochizuki, Laiwan, Alice MacKenzie's The World Café, Suzanne Lacy's Crystal Quilt (1985-1987), Julie Lebel's Tricoter (2016), Ann Newdigate's unwound (nd), Yoko Ono's Line Piece (2015), and Angela Roger's Drawing Conversations (2015).

In response to Christine D'Onofrio's Intuition Commons, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. 

Laiwan

Letters to (N)on Com, Nov 2018

Response to Vancouver Association for Noncommercial Culture fonds. Courtesy of the artist. 

The (N)on Commercial Gallery was started in 1984 with an aim to “reclaim a portion of the public sphere for commentary from its constituents,” where such commentary can facilitate “a critical awareness of culture and possibilities of change.”

Letters to (N)on Com invited participants to write a letter / proposal to the (N)on Com, keeping in mind the year and the era surrounding 1984, recalling what it is you would have liked to have said, what you couldn’t have said–nor could you have foretold, looking back from the vantage point of 2018. By doing so, we revisited the (N)on Com’s endeavour bringing this forward into the future. Letters to (N)on Com was an opportunity to update what we know as non-commercial, nonconsumptive enterprise, with insight into what we are facing today—the threat of climate change, the consequences of disaster capitalism, the peak of resource extraction, the rise of extremes, etc.

Participants were invited to type via analog typewriters, to handwrite, or draw their letters / proposals on the supplied paper.

Full Responses (PDFs):

View Response

Cindy Mochizuki

Harvest with Care, Nov 2018

In this 13 minute audio-led experience, you’ll harvest seeds from the artist’s pear tree. The tree, graphed from at least four kinds of pears found in the yards of East Vancouver neighbourhoods since the 1980s, was cared for by Mochizuki’s grandparents, her father, and then by her.

Harvest with Care makes reference to Roy Kiyooka’s Pear Tree Pomes and photographs Cleaning Up the Pear Tree located in the Roy Kiyooka fonds at the Belkin Gallery Archives. The actions of harvesting and caring for plant-life, gardens and living things make connections to mother tongues, the cyclical cycle of life and death, and how to live beside intuitive commons on an everyday basis. This experience finished with a pear green tea made with pears from the tree.

Roy Kiyooka (1924-1994) was a poet, multi-media artist, sculptor painter, and writer whose meticulous use of poetry, language, and spirit has been an influencing factor to Mochizuki's artistic process and practice.

The artist acknowledges Antoine Bedard for the sound design and Alix Rodrigues of Nut Hut for dehydrating pears for the tea.

Archival Intuitions and Annotations

Program Handout (PDF)