Habitat Constructivism
Habitat Constructivism
An all ages sustainable art workshop
July 23 – 24, 2014 from 12:00 – 8:00 p.m.
McDermot Avenue at Albert Street
Part of the Manitoba Artist-Run Centres Coalition’s “Art on the Fringe”
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. Participants are invited to leave some of their creations behind, to help create a communal artwork.
How do we construct our experience of our habitat, and how does this construction shape future interactions with our surroundings?
In other words, Gallery 1C03 wants you to make art about our land, with our land!
“The Landscape” as an aesthetic and cultural narrative is problematic, and only serves to distance us from our lived experiences of nature. This romanticized vision of our surroundings is abstracted through traditional art media such as paint and film, separating us from a direct and multi-sensory experience or 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.
A selection of the resulting creations from this workshop will be presented in Gallery 1C03 from July 28 – August 1 as a community autobiography, a collective memory of the prairies.
Gallery 1C03 hours:
July 28 – August 1, 2014: 1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Eric Napier Strong is an art historian and recent graduate from the University of Manitoba (B.F.A. Honours, 2014). His primary 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
1st floor, Centennial Hall, The University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Ave, Winnipeg MB R3B 2E9
204.786.9253 | en.strong@uwinnipeg.ca
www.uwinnipeg.ca/art-gallery
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