making peace, making waves is a group exhibition developed as a space to reflect on the social, political, and cultural conditions of contemporary life and late capitalism. The exhibition opens space for reconnecting with one’s self and surroundings through embodied, multisensory experiences, with artists who explore deep listening as a strategy for resisting the distractions and demands of the attention economy. making peace, making waves builds on the shift in art history to the primacy of the body and the senses as vehicles for understanding and experiencing the world. In her introduction to Precarious Visualities, Christine Ross attributes the proliferation of practices that move beyond the two-dimensional picture plane to the growing distrust of the image over the course of the 20th century, when the visible world was, recalling Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, “increasingly confirming itself in its spectacular dimension, as a confusing mixture of fantasy and reality, appearance and truth.”[i]
Detroit-based artist Frances Mendes Levitin invites audiences into an immersive environment in making peace, making waves with her multimedia work living-archive_branch-2022-05. The site-specific work features an audio-visual composition projected onto upcycled fabrics, exploring the emergent and poetic shape of sound and image in conversation and in movement.
Winnipeg-based Tlicho Dene artist Casey Koyczan’s Waves is a video exploring wave-like woodgrains of chopped willow logs through animation. The work was realized when Koyczan noticed patterns in the wood that were reminiscent of waves flowing in a lake or at sea. He explains,
“I began to see movement in still objects, and pictured myself floating on a massive bed of wood that moved like water. Waves is an invitation to allow us to experience our surroundings in different ways; to alter perceptions, feelings, and disassociate ingrained rules in order to allow for new realms of understanding.”[ii]
Vancouver-based artist Alexis Simoneau contemplates the construction of online image culture, virtual experiences, and the “increasingly blurry lines between physical and virtual representation” with paintings, murals, and installations.[iii] Simoneau’s light box painting of an infinite technological landscape, Collide, mimics both the illumination and endless scroll of phone and computer screens, engaging with the sensory experiences as well as the dissociative effects of living online.
Transcending the solely visual, the works in making peace, making waves provide the audience multiple access points, such as sound, light, touch, and movement, prioritizing audience perspectives that are multiple, intersectional, and experiential. Montreal-based multisensory artist Salima Punjani’s sculptural installation Progression invites audiences to “open up to the possibility of connection, empathy and understanding through a multiplicity of senses, whether feeling through sound or listening to tip of the fingers.”[iv] The work features stories and brain scans from people living with multiple sclerosis that can be listened to, looked at, or felt through vibration.
Works gathered in the exhibition often use moments of quiet to encourage slow observation, mindfulness, and heightened awareness, creating a space that operates by a different logic than our discordant world.
Splatsin-based Secwépemc artist Aaron Leon is inspired by the quiet sounds of nature and the ways “slowing down and engaging thoughtfully with our environments leads to new, deeper understanding.”[v]
Leon’s installation 7⟨ʔ⟩ : Reciprocity Values builds on his exploration of time, light, and wavelength with four videos of the recorded within the landscapes of Secwepemcúlecw over the course of several hours, inviting audiences to become active participants in reflecting on “the land as a teacher and Knowledge Keeper.”[vi] The accompanying audio features field recordings of the wind and land, and reflects Leon’s work in preserving the Splatsin language, with the voice of his grandmother speaking words in Secwepemctsín and English. To Leon, deep listening and quiet form the space from which wisdom and guidance emerge.
With works that welcome rest and reflection as a means of reception, making peace, making waves ultimately advances a more sustainable model for building social, cultural, and political agency. The exhibition offers grounding in the moment as an anecdote to consumption, to tiring cycles of participation and burnout, with the hope this presence of being extends beyond the walls of the gallery through audience embodiment and transmission.
ENDNOTES
1 Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux, and Christine Ross, Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014), p. 6
2 Correspondence with the artist
3 https://www.alexispearl.ca/about
4 https://www.ada-x.org/activities/progression-salima-punjani/
5 https://www.saobserver.net/news/embracing-their-heritage/
6 Ibid