The White Water Gallery is working with several local artists presenting at the Fair of Alternative Art in Sudbury (FAAS) www.gn-o.org from June 14 – 17, 2023. The Distance Between Us www.distancebetweenus.ca collective of Tara & Clayton Windatt (Sturgeon Falls) and Emilio & Elyse Portal (Sudbury) will be performing, documenting, screening and repeating over multiple days of contemporary arts expression.
The members of Distance Between Us have created a studio for art creation called www.studioproject.ca and are working with the White Water Gallery to present at this year’s FAAS. This performance marks the first in a series of summer pop-up performances entitled “Offerings of Care” which are all explorations of movement and message considering how environment and collective survival can be achieved.
Artists work across boundaries when challenging the status quo. Boundaries of social discourse, relationships, geologies and the subtle expectations of conformity by peers. Making statements about the turbulence and dangers of our current existence is the responsibility of every generation as an act of preservation and survival. This responsibility is a challenge that is manifest through artistic intention, process, material, form and outcome. How does and how can the art work vitally influence individual and societal behaviours?
As artists we struggle with a balance in life. We consider making messages through arts actions and how these arts actions may contribute negatively to our world’s problems. We also consider living in a basic and sustainable manner and how creating well-intended isolation will not make the world’s problems go away. We struggle balancing life and art as impulses lead us to making offerings to our world of care towards a healthy collective future.
Offerings of Care is a series of performative gestures conducted during FAAS which will be documented and screened over future performative gestures. Each performance contributes to the next as the documentation compiled with each new activation. Each work responds to location, context of activation and will include movement, media and sound.
The collective will be working towards creating new work on site during FAAS creating a culminating series of multi-arts performances building to a finale at the end of the festival. All are welcome, go to GNO’s website for festival details. https://gn-o.org/en/programming/faas7-kathleen/
Elyse Portal is a settler, foraging, creating and living on the traditional lands of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and Wahnapitae First Nation. Walking, listening, and care motivate her interdisciplinary ecoart practice. She will be part of a boreal pigment panel with Betty Carpick and Manidoo Bineshiinh as part of the Pigments Revealed International Symposium @pigmentsrevealed_international
Emilio Portal is an experimental sound artist, percussionist, producer and sound engineer. His musical practice revolves around the merging of the analog and digital, the rhythmic and chaotic, the composed and improvised, which is all an expression of their mixed identity, and an embracing of vulnerability and precarity. He is a member of the art collectives ee portal and distance between us. His latest album eau bénite will be released in the summer of 2023.
Clayton Windatt is a curator, multi-arts performer and filmmaker living and working in Ontario. Clayton has an extensive history working in Artist-Run Culture and Community Arts. Clayton is a writer and knowledge broker negotiating between peoples, places and communities. Clayton works in/with community, design, communications, curation, performance, theatre, technology, and is a very active artist.
Tara Windatt is an artist and arts administrator of settler and Indigenous ancestry from Northern Ontario. Her practice includes installation, performance, poetry, media arts, visual arts, photography, and craft. With over a decade of experience in the not-for-profit arts sector, Windatt currently holds administrative positions with both the ON THE EDGE Fringe Festival and Aanmitaagzi Story Makers.