Erica Stocking

Contemporary Art Practices: Visual Arts Summer Intensive is a three-week full scholarship program for young artists aged 15 to 19. Hosted by [Arts Umbrella](https://www.artsumbrella.com/programs/art/scholarship-programs/visual-art-summer-intensive/) and the Contemporary Art Gallery, the course supports participants in developing an art practice that critically engages with the world around them.

*In this space* showcases the individual artworks of the program’s 2020 cohort, both here online and as printed matter available for free at either at CAG’s bookshop or Arts Umbrella. Rather than gathering in a communal studio environment, participants worked this year via video discussions from home, exploring with guest artists the broad theme of art and everyday life. Responding collectively to the current global state under the COVID-19 pandemic, the participants’ final projects reflect on the familiar environments—physical and otherwise—we often take for granted.

### Participating Artists

Deborah Yang, Adrienne Neufeld, Grey Jones, Emily Munro, Simon Tanglao, Natalia Patola Moosmann, Christine Kuo, Sarah Pullen

### Facilitating Artists

Hyung-Min Yoon and Kit Liu

### Guest Artists

Erica Stocking and Karilynn Ming Ho

### Organized by

Roxanne Gagnon, Danielle Green, Jocelyn Sanchez


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Visual Arts Summer Intensive 2020

In this space

Due to Erica Stocking’s play being canceled as a result of COVID-19, the artist has proposed an alternative way of connecting in this moment, presenting an open rehearsal of the play which will take place via an audio conference call and available for listeners to dial in.

The work is presented by Erica Stocking in collaboration with Kara Uzelman, Tabitha Osler, Sydney Hermant, Shyla Seller, Justine A. Chambers, Alexa Mardon, Alison Denham, Rianne Svelnis, Kaia Shukin, Daisy Thompson, Amber Barton, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, HaeAhn Kwon, Julie Morstad, Christy Nyiri, and the Contemporary Art Gallery.

*The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom: A choreographic statement on autobiographical art making* is a framework for exploring the contemporary condition of attention/distraction through an experience of motherhood. By evoking this particular experience as a form to be inhabited, Stocking explores how we can be both autonomous and non-autonomous subjects within a network. As an iterative process, the artwork is working, breathing, being, offering a space for collective inhabitation. In our intensified political and ecological moment, how do we be together amidst spatial and temporal distances?

Following the old avant-garde call for the collapsing of art and life often found within artistic practices at key moments in history, *The Artist’s Studio Is Her Bedroom: A choreographed statement of autobiographical art-making* responds to our intensified political and ecological moment by exploring the potential of art to offer both political and private relevance.

The play offers a framework to inhabit a grammar of motherhood which reflects a contemporary condition of oscillation between attention and distraction. Stocking proposes artwork as an organism that moves in the world, an organism to inhabit within the world, and an organism as a fiction to understand the world.

Inspiration for the costumes comes from WWI when the allies began to paint their ships in dazzle – a pseudo-science camouflage previously untested in the field, whereby painting bold patterns on the ship exterior made it difficult to confirm the depth of field or direction the ship was moving in with accuracy, leading to miscalculations of the ship’s anticipated position and thus protecting the ship from U-boat attacks. This work was mostly done by women and artists, and is utilized as a context to don while navigating womanhood now.

Feel free to listen, or participate by following along with the action [here](http://www.ericastocking.com/march-24th-7pm).

The stage directions will be read including the titles of the acts, and you can orient yourself using the index provided [here](https://cag-cms-cdn.sfo3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/strapi-uploads/9a8351dd293a56fcf8fe03e83fbe87e4.pdf).


An image of a stage set framed by theatre curtains with brown curtains in the background. On stage is a set of a bedroom containing a bed, carpets, a small table, a room divider, and lounge chair.

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Erica Stocking: The Artist’s Studio Is Her Bedroom: a choreographed statement of autobiographical art making

Performance

Join us to take part in an open, informal reading of Erica Stocking’s script *The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom: a choreographed statement on autobiographical art making* within the exhibition installation.


An image of a white bed foregrounding a projector screen. The screen shows the image of a stage set. On stage is a set of a bedroom containing a bed, carpets, a small table, a room divider, and a lounge chair.

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The Artist's Studio is Her Bedroom

Read-Through

A detail of various-shaped white ceramic vases sparsely placed on a white plinth. 

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Join all ten exhibiting artists in an informal conversation about how artistic practices can be carved out of unlikely times and spaces, and how generative questions arise from constraints.

The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom

Artist’s Roundtable

*The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom* is a group exhibition that challenges assumptions shaped by our patriarchal, capitalist society about where and by what means “serious” artwork gets produced. The exhibition shares the perspectives of ten Canada-based artists whose practices are attentive to these assumptions, and to the very real temporal, spatial and monetary constraints that bind and shape their work.

Their contributions to the show address a multitude of labours — whether physical, emotional, reproductive or otherwise — that are often inextricable from artistic production. Some question myths of the studio and the “magical” labour of the artist. Others explore unconventional models of authorship, including the entanglement of childcare and creative work. Each, in different ways, asks how we navigate (or resist) our artistic and political inheritances, and how we might seek out alternate role models and alliances through which to better strengthen our creative communities.

Together, the works in *The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom* assert the generative potential of these other spaces and cadences of creation, addressing artists’ feelings of distraction and constraints, and call for acknowledgement of and solidarity in different ways of being —a nd making art — in the world.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

CAG acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts towards artists' travel.

ProgramGuideWinter2020.pdf

ExhibitionGuideTheArtistsStudio.pdf

BibliographyTheArtistsStudio.pdf

An image of a stage set framed by theatre curtains with brown curtains in the background. On stage is a set of a bedroom containing a bed, carpets, a small table, a room divider, and lounge chair. 

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A stack of prints on pink paper sits on top of a white plinth. The prints are of handwritten notes scrawled across the page. 

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Ten ceramic sculptures of various shaped bottles sit on top of a long rectangular plinth. Behind the plinth, a large black and white painting hangs and another sculpture on a tall plinth to the right.

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Two framed drawings on paper hanging on a gallery wall. The one to the right side is larger with blue markings, and the one on the right side is smaller with pink markings.

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Sand is piled against a V-shaped plinth on a gallery floor. Lining the top of the plinth are small colourful sculptures. Behind a large black & white vinyl print of a photo collage hangs on the wall. 

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Three woven, rectangular artworks hang horizontally on the wall. The weavings are made of white paper printed with black marks. 

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A ceramic bowl, wooden sculpture and two colourful glass lampshades sit on a three tier plinth made out of light wood.

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Large blue text on the wall of a gallery space that reads “I’M WORKING BUT I’M NOT WORKING FOR YOU.”

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A TV monitor hangs on the wall with a pair of headphones hanging beside it to the left. There is a wooden stool in front of the monitor. The video  on the screen shows four hands holding each other.  

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In the center of a gallery are mattresses piled with pillows. Behind a curtain with a printed photo of a bedroom stage set hangs from the ceiling and a large stuffed animal bunny lies on the floor. 

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Steven Brekelmans, Justine A. Chambers, Brady Cranfield, Maura Doyle, Claire Greenshaw, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley), Annie MacDonell, Erica Stocking, Damla Tamer

This exhibition explores the traditional genre of still life and how it is a sustained practice within contemporary visual art making. The number of artists and works is large for the exhibition spaces of the Contemporary Art Gallery, and yet it seems small in relation to the subject. The quantity of works reflects this genre’s continued importance in current art production and discourse, and is conceptually tied to conventional formal aspects of still life, gathering together many objects for contemplation in a constructed setting.

Many of the artworks in this exhibition were chosen because they stick closely to the familiar conventions and typical subject matter of still life. The first part of the title of this exhibition is an appropriation of one of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s photographs from their Equilibres series made in the mid 1980s. The triumph of the carrot is linked to the success of still life, as well as the genre's formal properties, namely its use of humble objects. The second part of the title is linked to a question first posed by art historian Thomas Crow, who questioned how an archaic and hierarchical system such as the genres can still be important for understanding contemporary art. In bringing together this group of works that spans generations and crosses mediums, the CAG traces the persistence of still life, in an attempt to understand how it operates differently now than it has in the past, examining the current circumstances and naming some particularities.


Detail image of fruits on a plate carved out of wood. The entire sculpture is coloured black.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks are installed throughout the gallery. There is a mix of photographs, sculptures and a light box mounted on a freestanding wall.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks, such as paintings, framed photographs, a lightbox mounted on a wall, and sculptures, are installed throughout the gallery.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks, paintings, framed photographs, a lightbox, sculptures, and a tv monitor on a plinth, are installed throughout the gallery.

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Four framed photographs hang on either side of a corner wall in a gallery. A small table with a brown top and black legs sits in the middle. A smaller object sits on top of the table.

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Two framed photographs hang on one side of a corner wall. Three photographs hang on the other side. A small, skull-like object sits on the floor in the corner. A TV sits on a black plinth to the right.

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A monitor mounted on a wall in a dimly lit gallery displays an image. A black bench sits in the center of the room.

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A bright, projected image appears to lean against the wall of a dimly lit gallery. The image displays several objects scattered on a floor. A black bench sits in the center of the room. 

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A small area under the stairs of a gallery is installed to appear as a living room. A burgundy couch with matching ottoman, a lounge chair, a sideboard, a lamp, and three rugs occupy the space.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks installed in a gallery space, from framed photographs on the wall, sculptural objects on plinths to colourful objects on a table.

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Robert Arndt, Eric Cameron, James Carl, Gerald Ferguson, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Rodney Graham, Jay Isaac, Elad Lassry, Evan Lee, Arvo Leo, Kelly Lycan, Liz Magor, Kelly Mark, Damian Moppett, Ron Moppett, Brad Phillips, Jayce Salloum, Erica Stocking, Zin Taylor, Ron Tran, Lesley Vance, Jeff Wall, Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky, Sam Taylor-Wood

Triumphant Carrot: The Persistence of Still Life

*STILL LIFE* is the second in a series of three publications that used the petit genres of landscape, still life and portraiture to reflect programming at the Contemporary Art Gallery which framed tendencies in contemporary art.

It was published by the Contemporary Art Gallery in 2010 in conjunction with the exhibition *Triumphant Carrot: The Persistence of Still Life*, and contains essays by Evan Lee, Jenifer Papararo and Trevor Mahovsky. Jenifer Papararo looks at the continued relevance of this genre and its relation to the development of the avant-garde. Also included are texts by two of the artists in the exhibition. Trevor Mahovsky draws parallels between recent theoretical interests in the everyday and the value of still life; and Evan Lee uses the dollar store to discuss the complex relations between the consumption of objects and what a still life represents.

#### Other publications from this series:

*LANDSCAPE*

*PORTRAIT*

Purchase all three publications for $25 below.


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petit genres

STILL LIFE

*Birgit* is a limited edition bookwork by Hans Peter Feldmann, published by the Contemporary Art Gallery in 2006 and released in conjunction with Feldmann’s first solo exhibition in Canada at CAG, June 9 – August 20, 2006. The publication is comprised of 72 successive colour snapshots of a woman applying her make-up from beginning to end, and is accompanied by a comprehensive text by the exhibition’s curator, Roy Arden.


Erica Stocking

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