Mitchell Chalifoux | Pairs
September 25, 2020–January 31, 2021
Featuring Collaborators: Aasttha Khajuria, Brandon Wint, Heath Birkholz, niuboi, Sapphoria & Toña
Mending and Textiles Care Workshop with Katelin Karbonik | February 6 at 1pm | Zoom link
Pairs is an exploration of new collaborative partnerships, between Mitchell Chalifoux and other performance-based artists.
While exhibiting during a global pandemic, Chalifoux will hold space, and devote time, and labour to experimentation with artists whose capacities for live performance have been upended. Each partnership will negotiate its own working parameters, goals, and artistic exchanges, while Chalifoux seeks how to manifest one another’s dreams and fantasies. Using textiles, performance, and other forms to uplift, the artists will explore worldbuilding, future gazing, and garment creation, with and without performance personas. Over the duration, the space will evolve, wandering between studio, exhibition, performance, and stage. Pairs will culminate in a series of overlapping performance duets.
Collaborators include: Aasttha Khajuria, Brandon Wint, Heath Birkholz, niuboi, Sapphoria & Toña.
Exhibition Text by Katelin Karbonik
This project is a decentralized, iterative and collaborative endeavour-in-progress by Mitchell Chalifoux and collaborators Aasttha Khajuria, Sapphoria, Brandon Wint, Toña, niuboi and Heath Birkholz. The installation is the fruit of the encounters between Chalifoux and each collaborating artist. Presented during a time of changing, pandemic-related social guidelines, this exhibition is an exploration of the dynamics of creative dialogue: waiting, listening, and supporting each other’s needs. Themes of these dialogues include transformation, dialogue, intimacy, gender and performance.
In collaborative work, each artist brings a particular agenda and perspective to the project. These divergences can be managed to stay true to the original vision of the organizing artist. A hierarchical approach might save time, but what happens when the performance artist seeks to decentralize themselves?
The process of making art in dialogue means letting self-imposed expectations and requirements become secondary. Breathing the empty spaces, not doing as a necessary preparation for doing, when the time is right. In giving time and space to others, can we feed each other, creatively and bodily? Can we find a way to make each other feel good in our bodies?
Katelin Karbonik is an Edmonton-based dress historian and textiles-based maker. She is currently finishing her MA in Material Culture focusing on making and wearing as ways of knowing.
Video Performances from the Exhibition:
Ablish Gimprotica Bitch (05:16)
Another reveal another nail (08:08)
Fibrous Hoop Skirt (08:08)
Purgatory dreams from the edge of a cliff (10:31)
Mitchell Chalifoux (any pronouns) is an artist based in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory. They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta. Their art practice contemplates resourcefulness, hobby forms, decoration, and femininities, frequently using performance and craft media. Working with existing materials in a contradicting scarce and abundant present is core to Mitchell’s methods. Their work has appeared in SNAPline, and in exhibitions across Canada, including Idea Exchange (Cambridge, ON), and Alberta Printmakers (Calgary, AB). Most recently, Mitchell has participated in the Venice International Performance Art Week (Venice, ITA), and in the Zero Gravity Performance Art Workshop (Edmonton, AB). They will be performing in a new movement work by choreographer Peggy Baker and CRIPSiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton) in 2021. While not making art, Mitchell spends their time baking and waiting for summer blooms.
This initiative has been made possible with funding assistance from the Edmonton Arts Council’s Connections & Exchanges Initiatives Grant. This program supports artistic experiments, organizational development, strategic planning and other activities that connect to the Aims, Ambitions and Actions outlined in Connections & Exchanges: A 10-Year Plan to Transform Arts and Heritage in Edmonton.
