In association with the Manitoba Artist-Run Centres Coalition (MARCC), Gallery 1C03 is pleased to present Habitat Constructivism, a free, drop-in, all ages sustainable art workshop. The workshop will take place during the Fringe Festival in MARCC’s pop up gallery, located at the corner of McDermot Avenue and Albert Street (one block south of Old Market Square).
Habitat Constructivism is both a free workshop and a participatory artwork. Gallery 1C03 summer intern Eric Napier Strong will fill the pop up gallery with natural materials responsibly gathered from areas around Winnipeg.
He will arrange these materials to create a topographic representation of the city’s green spaces, thereby mapping his individual experience of our shared landscape. Visitors will be invited to interact with this artwork, choosing elements from the installation and reconfiguring them into new works of art which reflect their own personal experiences with the land. The gradual de-forestation of Napier Strong’s “map” of Winnipeg by participants echoes the process of urbanization and the loss of green spaces, highlighting the role we all play in this destruction.
“The Landscape” as an aesthetic and cultural narrative is problematic as it can distance us from our lived experiences of nature. Romanticized visions of our surroundings have long been expressed through traditional art media such as paint and film that separate us from a direct, multi-sensory encounter with and expression of the land. The aim of this project is to create landscape-based art which is honest to nature: to represent our engagement with the landscape (our personal geographic memories) directly and in a tactile way, rather than through the environmentally destructive, industrial intermediaries of chemical pigments and materials. In other words, Gallery 1C03 wants you to make art about our land, with our land!
Participants will be encouraged to leave some of their creations behind to help create a communal artwork which will be presented back in Gallery 1C03 from July 28 – August 1 as a collective memory of the prairies.
Gallery 1C03 hours for communal artwork presentation:
July 28 – August 1, 2014: 1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Eric Napier Strong is a recent graduate from the University of Manitoba (B.F.A. Honours, History of Art). His main areas of research are Yoga aesthetics, and the role art plays in shaping spiritual and religious experiences. His artistic practice is informed primarily by his love of gardening and immersion in nature. He is continuing his studies at The University of Winnipeg this fall, with a focus on art conservation.
The production of Habitat Constructivism has been made possible in part through a contribution from the Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations program, Department of Canadian Heritage.
For more information, contact:
Eric Napier Strong, Summer Intern, Gallery 1C03
204.786.9253 | en.strong@uwinnipeg.ca
