U-Hall: The Urban Canada Foto Kollective

Urban Canada Foto Kollective's Wild Life:

The Urban Canada Foto Kollective (UCFK) are photographers who are interested in the cityscape, the ebb and flow of life on the street, and the ways people affect their environment. UCFK aims to make photography more present in Calgary, and continue a critical dialogue about image making and urban life.

In past exhibitions, UCFK has examined themes dealing with the connections and disconnections of urban living a simultaneous yearning for wild nature amidst vain attempts to civilize it. With Wild Life, UCFK have turned their attention to the animals in our urban environment.

In this exhibition Angela Inglis’ photographs are a continuation of her practice of documenting urban scenes captured with a point and shoot approach while travelling through London, San Diego and on home turf, Calgary. This time her images bear witness to the undulating movement of seagulls and pigeons as they rise and fall for bread crumbs and cheezies; winter geese nestled in an industrialized area of the Elbow River; and a sombre encounter with a woodland creature provides a comic yet endearing glimpse into a

moment in time.

Melody Jacobson’s photographs also come from travels to Spain, London and in her new hometown of Vancouver. The subjects in her photos are pensive and watchful, peering at the viewer like the crow on the wire, or the girl in the street scene in Barcelona. The puppy in this photo looks content with her sleeping master, however, the pity on the skateboarding boy’s face speaks volumes to the uneasiness society has with nonconforming behaviours, such as the men sleeping in the street. Her photos also highlight the animal nature of humans, with office workers sitting by the Thames River in London on their lunch hour, by juxtaposing a similar scene with ducks resting by a swimming pool closed for winter. The photos are printed on Canadian birchwood, further merging themes of nature with street photography.

Cat Schick’s contribution to this exhibition is different from what she’s done before in that it is more than straight photography. Her pieces are 11x14” color photographs with images of animals cut out of them, combining the street art vernacular of stencil with the medium of photography. The animals chosen are all those who live or have lived on the prairies and are literally cut out of or removed from the city landscape – those that were here before us and have adapted to the urban environment (rattlesnake, bat, hare, bird) and those who have been driven further and further away, only to be challenged and possibly killed when venturing back into the city (cougar, moose, deer). The buffalo has not been seen on the prairies for many decades and is slowly being reintroduced back into national parks in some provinces. The work aims to question our relationship to animals and our ability to share the environment with other beings. As a collective of female photographers observing our urban environment, UCFK consciously creates images to remind us of the subtle power of nature. The images examine the durability and fragility of these moments, when the city noise quiets and we’re struck by the beauty of an image of nature: where we came from and where we’re going all in the same moment.

UCFK is Angela Inglis, Melody Jacobson, and Cat Schick, who have been working together as a collective since 2009. Street photography is our focus, and we have exhibited in Hot Wax Records, Brulee Bakery, Sugar Shack, the Sugar Cube, and the EPCOR Centre and Untitled Art Society +15 window galleries. Explore more of our works at: ucfk.wordpress.com

DOCUMENTATION: Marvels of the Ages

Documentation of Robyn Moody & Denton Fredrickson's Marvels of the Ages Calling Forth Lost Spirits of Information

ESSAY: Marvels of the Ages

Gentle Reader,   
I look forward to Marvels of the Ages Calling Forth Lost Spirits of Information at Truck. Last summer, I saw the bodies of the main characters, the player pianos, eviscerated on Robyn Moody’s back lawn.  Since then, I’ve studied the on-line clip of the first performance on the pedestrian courtyard outside the Sunalta Transit Station in September 2013.  That was shortly before the tercentenary of the birthday of French philosopher and writer, Denis Diderot, whose seminal encyclopedia informs the nerve centre of the project.   

Intrigued, I sought out the collaborators, Robyn Moody and Denton Fredrickson, to talk about the ideas and the making of the work as they finish preparations for the next stage. The germ of the idea for this piece began as Robyn bought a musical scroll for a player piano in Oxford, and realized he had no way of knowing what it contains.   

The installation promises to be smart, magical and wondrously wrought. I will enjoy decoding, but expect that even close observation won’t reveal all.  Information will not equal knowledge.  I imagine it will gnaw and ultimately haunt me.   

Let’s pretend I am one of the first visitors. It is humid as I enter the greenhouse structure where the Oriental rug and two turn-of-the- century player pianos reinforce my sense of a Victorian parlour. Are the pianos on a form of life support, their original bellows replaced with tubing and mechanical vacuum-forming apparatus? Each is hooked up to an overhanging grid of lights.    

As single squares light up, a letter or number appears below, a key of the piano moves, a note sounds. Both pianos play, tentatively at first.  With effort, they speed up, seemingly anxious to communicate.   I believe I can discern a chord or a phrase, a bit of coherent musical language and a sequence of letters that forms a word. Beneath their notes, I hear muffled wheezing sounds that carry the rhythm of human speech.   

Perhaps these elders have already crossed to the other side, and I am in the midst of a séance, an attempt to communicate with and through a bygone information delivery system?  Mist descends from the ceiling and wraithlike images from all branches of human study appear and disappear – illustrations, diagrams, works of art.  Bolstered by the recognition of images, I try to make sense of the spectral sights and sounds, hoping for a clearer understanding, but they exhaust themselves and return to silence.   

I look for connections. Is there a clue in the numbers: 88 keys on the piano, 101 keys on a keyboard?  What generates the sequence of letters and numbers?  I learn that one piano channels Diderot’s Encyclopedia, completed in 1772, and the other Wikipedia, launched in 2001, both built on the philosophy that access to information can help to build knowledge and benefit all.   

From Denton Fredrickson, I learn that University of Lethbridge students selected the text.  Acting as the medium behind the curtain, they followed their interests in the encyclopedia and hyperlinks in Wikipedia. They themselves operate at a turning point in the mechanics of reading, presumably still literate as “long form text” readers, and certainly fluent in hypertext.  I recall a story from the head of Archives at the Glenbow Museum.  When he showed letters from soldiers at the front in WWI to university students in Calgary one recognized the object as a letter, but was unable to read the cursive writing.  It’s not taught in school anymore.   

From Robyn Moody I learned that when phonographs, the new marvel of the day, replaced player pianos, many of the grand old instruments were burned for firewood. If Y2K made me aware of how dependent we are on computer technology, I believe the slow leak of information loss as technologies become obsolete is now a more insidious danger.

Sincerely yours,   
Katherine Ylitalo Calgary, December 2014 

About the Writer: 
Katherine Ylitalois an independent curator, writer, garden historian, horticulturalist and educator based in Calgary with extensive experience as a museum professional in Canada. Her most recent project, “Made in Calgary, 2000’s,” was the final chapter in the Glenbow Museum 5-part series celebrating the artists of this city. “Made in Calgary, 2000’s” took the form of two sister exhibitions held at the Glenbow Museum and the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary in fall, 2014.   
Ylitalo earned her Bachelor’s and Master of Arts Degrees from Stanford University in California in fine arts and education.  She taught at Chemeketa College, St. Lawrence College, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the University of Regina and worked as a ceramic artist in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Oregon and Saskatchewan before making Alberta her home in 1986.  In Calgary, she worked as a curator of contemporary art at the Glenbow Museum and the Nickle Arts Museum and taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design, Mt. Royal College and the University of Calgary.  She has been involved in curatorial projects at several galleries across the country including the Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Walter Phillips Gallery.

DOCUMENTATION: New New Monuments

Documentation from Alexis Dirks' New New Monuments

ESSAY: On New Monument(ality)

“Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present.” [1]
Robert Smithson’s essay ‘Entropy And The New Monuments’ published in Artforum in 1966 lays the ground work for thinking through the monumental works made by artists involved with conceptualism – Judd, Morris, LeWitt, Flavin et al – and their use of materials that caused us to forget the future. Using science-fiction as an example Smithson outlines that the architecture described in this genre, has nothing to do with fiction nor science, but instead a new kind of monumentality. Artists employing plastics, chromes, and electric light, reduce time down to the very moment, by collapsing the historical assumptions of materials that were once used to build great monuments; sandstone Corinth columns; granite facades; vast marble flooring.
Smithson’s assertion of a new monumentality actualized through the work of the conceptualists is also discussed through the elimination of time and decay in these materials. On the occasion of New New Monuments, Yellowknife-based artist Alexis Dirks, employs Smithson’s antithetical relationship to time and materiality in various ways throughout her exhibition. By pairing materials that counter each other – old and new; man-made and natural – it is evident that there is an alchemic fascination present in Dirks’ practice.

Peta Rake: Do you see your work as dialectical past the materiality? 

Alexis Dirks: Through these material pairings I'm also trying to evoke some connections between the past and the present. There are many pasts to consider. There is a greater past that has more to do with geology and then another past that has more to do with human history. I guess I'm trying to find the connections or intersections of these pasts and think of them both as layers, in the way you would dig down in an excavation. There are connections within rocks and their various functions; as a geological marker of time, architectural material and as a sculptural material for building monuments. My interest is in how these functions overlap and how the material of rock can shift from one function to the next, from history into the present.

PR: Can you tell me a little more about your exhibition title New New Monuments?

AD: The title New New Monuments came after reading Robert Smithson's essay called ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ from 1966. I was thinking about that timeline or trajectory in art history, where there were such distinctive shifts in materiality and what these Minimalist artists were trying to achieve through using 'new' or industrial materials. Thinking about this in relation to my experience of Yellowknife, [I] felt the impulse to make work that combined 'natural' materials of past monuments (granite/wood) with materials that are more processed or industrialized.

I've never lived in a place [Yellowknife] where the natural landscape has been on the fringes of a small city, and there's a lot of overlap between the urban, suburban and the wild. Smithson talks a lot about the suburban experience and the banality of forms in suburban architecture as a way to almost imagine how the forces of entropy will inevitably take over suburbia's system of organized architecture.
I guess I also find it a little bit funny when things are titled with the word ‘new’ in them, because it almost immediately dates it. It is interesting to look back on art history and see what was labeled as 'new' in ideas and art, because it was really forward thinking and things could feel like they were progressing on a timeline. I think there's nostalgia for that minimalism. That's why I used the double 'new' in my title, like real newness can't exist anymore, or it's sort of quaint to try and define what is truly new right now. The 'new' is constantly being updated and replaced with something 'newer' and I sort of like the futility of newness.

PR: Does the remoteness of Yellowknife influence your practice deeper than the geological?

AD: The remoteness of Yellowknife seems to influence my practice in a more practical way. I think [its] because I've only ever been 'dropped off' here by plane from other parts of the country, I don't fully grasp its remoteness because I haven't felt the distance from the ground. But in terms of art-making the remoteness of Yellowknife is evident in the resources, or, most often the case, lack thereof. Materials and tools for making art have to come from either the hardware store or from nature, there is no place to browse for traditional art supplies.

I think that being so close to what we think of when we imagine 'the infinite North' has influenced my work in a lot of ways. I've really based a lot of my work around the geology of the north and the expanses of ancient bedrock, because to me it just has this presence of time attached to it, and because it's almost everywhere in the Northwest Territories, it's a constant reminder of geological time and process.
Just outside the city, it's really easy to feel like nature makes the best sculptures, and I'm reminded of a Walter De Maria quote from On the Importance of Natural Disasters, “Put the best object you know next to the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Redwoods. The big things always win.”

About the Writer:
Peta Rake is Acting Curator at Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre. She writes regularly for C Magazine and her texts have appeared in Canadian Art, Fillip, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Rearviews, Institutions by Artists, On Apology and ElevenEleven Journal.

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1. Smithson, Robert. 1966. “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum. June.
from Unpublished Writings in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. 1996. Ed, Jack Flam.University of California Press. Berkeley: California. 2nd Edition.

DOCUMENTATION: I've committed sins no god could forgive

Documentation from Steven Cottingham's I've committed sins no god could forgive in TRUCK's +15 Project Window in the Epcor Centre for Performing Arts

DOCUMENTATION: A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

The July 22nd CAMPER & CSIF screening of The School of Athens by Allysha Larsen and the feature length experimental documentary A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. Here are a few of the images from the night.