My SA and I went to a George Littlechild collage workshop at the Gordon Smith Gallery. I have never been to the gallery before, and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of environment and place-based photographic work up in the gallery. I took note of Aimee Henny Brown, who made these structural collages from nature and architect magazines. I thought it would be a good idea for the prompt of Utopia/Dystopia for my students when brainstorming ideas for the Chesterfields contest at the Polygon.
Back to the George Littlechild workshop:
I learned how do make a trace-mono-type which was super fun. I’ve been wary of printmaking because teachers say it’s messy, and I am unsure of how students can take turns and keep the work flow going. Seeing it happen amongst teachers showed me that other people can work on collages while others can try out the printmaking process.
I like how the facilitator, Amelia, directly mentions a first people principle (learning requires exploration of one’s identity) when beginning the workshop. I would like to make more direct references to the principles in my lesson. She connected Littelchild’s loss-and-finding of Cree identity to me. I’ve always thought it would be hard to relate to Indigenous learning and culture, but it was much easier to understand his use of symbolism and archived photographs as being a part of re-finding of his cultural roots. For me, this would connect to my Chinese heritage, which I feel very little connection to. The book Amelia showed us, “We are All Related” provides great examples of collages students made in the 90s based off Littlechild’s work.
Polygon Gallery
I went to the Polygon and wrote down notes on artists that made an impact on me:
Elizabeth Zvonar
-“Photography Is Hard” is a cheeky title that she named one of her pieces, which play with psychology, history, and technology in a vinyl wall collage/photograph
-this would be a funny theme for students to expand on
-Personal archive/Index. What if students made a collage of a bunch of items and numbered them, with titles? What does it say about commodity, and identity through symbols and objects?
Xan Shian
-Lind Prize contestant
-Water+Space, multimedia installation and photography
-the content of the photo relates to how she destroys the photograph (soaks it in salt water, so that the viewer can see the crystals on the photograph!)
Rebecca Bair
-“Reach and Coil”
-identity without depicting the body
-bodies are tied to assumptions, expectations around race and gender
I don’t think that the Polygon is too tiny and or privileging high-art (not community based). I felt proud to see two of my classmates’ work at the Lind Prize exhibit (Rydel and Lacie, not pictured), and Elizabeth is also an Emily Carr graduate. I think the photos require space, and a special setting to really live.
