There’s no work in the arts, but so much to be done.
Curated by Liuba González de Armas
Oct 4–NoV 16, 2024
Opening Reception Friday, Oct 4th, 7-10 PM
Image credit: Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, 10 SIGNS OF BURNOUT, Screenprint on paper, 11” x 17”, 2023
FEATURED ARTISTS
Moriah Crocker
Emily Davidson
Alyson Davies
Daniel Ennett
Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott
Lan “Florence” Yee.
Curatorial Statement
According to the 2021 census, there were 42,685 Albertans employed in arts, entertainment and recreation. In 2023, the visual and applied arts and live performance industries contributed about $1.58 billion in GDP in Alberta, and had the largest sector increase (7.1%) in GDP compared to 2022. However, artists' median income ($28,500) is 51% lower than that of all Alberta workers ($52,400) and artists with undergraduate degrees earn about 55% less ($30,300) than workers with the same level of education ($66,500).
The image of the artist as an independent creative worker in the studio no longer holds. Artists’ working conditions more closely resemble those of gig workers: short-term contract work offering no paid time off, workers’ compensation, pension plan, or health or dental insurance. Canada’s public funding model for visual artists, which relies on one-time project creation and presentation grants, does little to remedy these conditions of precarity and uncertainty. Artists face lengthy bureaucratic application processes, competing against hundreds of peers for limited resources and with no guarantee that their work will be remunerated. Within this model, artists must assume a myriad of administrative roles – as accountant, grant writer, project manager, publicist, etc… – in order to secure the resources to sustain their practice. If a thriving arts sector is, as research consistently suggests, in the public interest, who benefits from this state of affairs? We know who suffers: arts workers do.
While artwork epitomises the labour of the artist, the vast majority of artists’ work goes unseen and unpaid. This exhibition aims to render visible the work that artists (and other workers) do in order to produce artworks and sustain artistic practices. The artworks on display render visible the material costs, time, and (at times emotional) labour required to produce artworks. These works situate artists as workers and within networks of skilled workers in order to articulate common struggles and interests, both historically and contemporary. Many of the featured artists support themselves and their practices through other formal and informal labour, including research, teaching, design, and administrative and care work.
In the spirit of transparency, Latitude 53 staff and exhibition contributors have consented to keep the gallery open to the public during installation Oct 1-4 and to make publicly accessible key documents related to the production of this exhibition, including the exhibition budget and curator, artist, and presenter contracts.
About the Artists
Moriah Crocker (she/her/wiya) is a Métis beadworker and researcher from amiskwacîwâskihikan. She began beading in 2020 for family and friends. In 2022, she graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Arts. She is currently pursuing a Masters of Art in History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture. Her research-creation Master’s thesis is focused on the labour of Indigenous beadwork and is SSHRC funded. She lives is in amiskwacîwâskihikan.
Artist Statement
Moriah Crocker’s research explores Indigenous beadwork and beadwork processes, labour, and negotiating alternative economic relationships embedded in Indigenous (Métis/nehiyaw) relationality. Her work is grounded in her personal beadworking practice, and in documenting the labour involved in beading through photography.
Through durational beadwork performances, her work asks people to engage with the work of beading. Considering the historical importance of trade in creating miyo-wîcihitowin, she posits the labour of the artist and the time of visitor as a trading, reciprocal relationship.
Emily Davidson situates herself within a network of workers involved in the production of the artwork, tracing raw materials from extraction through processing, shipping, and installation.
Alyson Davies Alyson Davies is a visual artist based in Edmonton, Alberta. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art and Design from the University of Alberta.
Davies’ recent Edmonton based solo exhibitions include "Flower of the Fern" at Studio Hager (2024), "Seedlings" at Miller Gallery (2023), and "Imagining the Heartland" at Studio Hager (2022). Her work will be featured in forthcoming group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta and DHART Space in 2025 and 2024, respectively.
She has contributed to public art projects like "Blue Earth Tarot" for the Capture Photography Festival at Lafarge Lake - Douglas Skytrain Station in Coquitlam, BC (2023) and murals for Salem Art Works in New York (2018) and Arts Hab in Edmonton (2016).
Residencies have played a significant role in Davies’ career. She participated in the Canadian Wilderness Artist Residency on the Yukon River (2018), Salem Art Works in New York (2018), Elsewhere Studios Residency in Colorado (2015 & 2017) and at ArtsHab’s Mcluhan House (2016-2017).
Her publications include the "Blue Earth Tarot" and several editions of "Earth Child Tarot". Both of which have been collected worldwide. Davies work has been featured in various media outlets, such as CBC Arts, Chatelaine Magazine, Geist Magazine, and Canadian Art Magazine.
In her spare time, Davies enjoys being with nature through gardening, smelling tomatoes, hiking, canoeing, and rock climbing.
Artist Statement
[Excerpted from my MFA thesis]
Ancestors’ hands, deft at their trades, created gorgeous craft works. I research Dutch woodcarving traditions, as Opa Jonker (my paternal Great Grandpa) has passed and can’t tell me about his influences. My grandmothers’ needlework, quilts, knits all from a linage of knowing and passing. I imagine that their muscle memory is within my hands […] I built a quilt because my GG (maternal Great Grandmother) quilted […] Over Thanksgiving I mended one of GG’s quilts. She made it from her curtains. The fabric is cream and blue and aqua and has slivers of silver threads moving through like waves. The work is an embodiment of history and lineage, of quiet moments of contemplation and revelry and connection with nature. On my own quilt, hands two hands encircle a shaft of wheat, the wheat from Grandma’s urn, or from when Dad used to tell me to chew the raw grains until it turned into chewing gum in my mouth, or from my community which knows, by touch, the weight of a bushel.
Daniel Ennett is an artist, filmmaker, and advocate from Amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton. He holds a first-class BA Honours in Psychology from the University of Alberta and has been working in film for over a decade. Daniel hosted three seasons of the web-series 'Invincible' and the short film 'Beneath the Surface'; both projects followed his adventures as an above-elbow/knee quadruple amputee where he tried various adaptive sports like skiing, skydiving, and scuba diving with sharks. He worked as an artist/producer on a 35mm minute-long art film, Form and Function. Daniel has an art film, “Flesh Ballet” in development: a visual commentary on ableism. He also has a docu-series in development with Accessible Media Inc, “The Crip Trip”, a punk rock buddy road trip on the intricacies of care work, where he talks with other disabled artists about the archaic systemic structures Disabled people have to interact with. He just finished directing seasons 1 and 2 of "PUSH" for CBC, a series that follows a cast of Disabled participants in Edmonton, as well as "Pain and Offering", a short online series for TELUS that explores chronic illness and the arts in a Western Canadian context. Daniel maintains a thriving painting and photography practice focusing on figuration and bringing light to Disabled experiences.
Artist Statement
Crip Carnage (Preview), 2024.
Disabled people are angry and artist Daniel Ennett wants to platform that rage by mixing in-situ documentation with contrived set-pieces, capturing on-the-road life in extraordinarily precarious circumstances. The present work previews a larger body of works under the title Crip Carnage produced alongside the documentary Crip Trip, where Daniel, filmmaker friend Fred (Frederick Kroetsch), and a small crew will drive a modified accessible 80s RV from Edmonton to New York over a gruelling 50-day journey to meet with, interview, and photograph disabled artists. The RV has a converted kitchenette transformed into a darkroom, where each photograph is meticulously developed. The vehicle serves as a powerful symbol of the physical and emotional wear experienced by care workers who support disabled individuals, and the attrition that institutions inflict on disabled people.
Leaning into high-contrast black-and-white film photography with flash, Daniel elevates the grittiness of 70s Punk to contrive scenes of anti-institution crip-militancy. These photographs present disabled artists and activists in their rage against systemic neglect and institutionalization. The textured paper, combined with the images’ stark contrast, create a striking visual narrative that echoes a DIY punk ethos prevalent in the disabled arts community. Power wheelchair users throwing molotov cocktails and burning effigies of the medical industrial complex. Capturing disabled intimacy. Spray painting activist slogans. These are not inspiration-porn addled shots meant to motivate the ‘ableds’ to get off their ass – these are shots from the trenches on the frontline of the Disabled Revolutionary Front.
Camille -Zoé Valcourt-Synnott (she/her) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and arts worker from Quebec (QC). She graduated with a BFA (Print Media) from Concordia University in 2018 and an MFA from NSCAD University in 2020. Her performances reflect on the value of the artist’s work, perceptions of productivity and where life and art meet. Referencing everyday tasks, (un)remunerated work and invisible labor, her practice points to the flaws already present within the arts but that are, too often, not acknowledged. She is interested in the intersections between labor, gender and class dynamics, and how they all play a part in making certain audiences feel welcome in different art spaces. Her performances and text-based works have been shown in artist-run centers and galleries across Canada.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott brings you backstage of “living and succeeding as an emerging artist”: making to-do-lists, sending emails, writing grant applications, responding to calls for submissions and writing cover letters for jobs in the arts. The work remains truthful to the outcomes of those processes by not editing out moments of failure, self-criticism and self-doubt. This honesty and vulnerability paired with humour is what makes the work so relatable. The work looks at the skill-less labour in periphery of any current artistic practice and approaches this bureaucratic labour as a way to legitimize art making. The administration of the work becomes the work itself.
Her practice sheds light on issues that artists face in a post-capitalist art world dominated by a pressure for productivity in a hustle culture, often leading to burnout. In her work, performance acquires a dual meaning: performativity and performing to high professional standards in order to have a successful career. By making these realities visible, the work exposes the toll of “being creative” when creativity is an idealized and romanticized concept removed from work; a labour of love.
Instagram: @calquecourt
Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto & Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada (2023-24), Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U as a Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholar. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023). Lan is a member of JIA Foundation as curator of the Chinatown House MTL.
Artist Statement
Please Reply, hand-embroidered organza with a pair of cotton gloves, 8.5” x 11”, 2019.
On the top of the cover of the first stack of letter-size organza essays, it reads “i wrote in my grant that this was [supposed to be] healing,” with some words translucently visible from the second page. As a meditation on the expectations of artwork by queer artists of colour, the essays appropriate the stylistic conventions of academia. They highlight the conceptual constraints on a holistic discussion of racialized queerness, currently valorizing work that seek to heal intergenerational trauma, in efforts to respond to very real issues within Indigenous and racialized communities. However, as those of us who have attempted this know, it is an ambitious and lifelong goal that can be tokenized for its grand ideals. Its parameters and methods potentially become flattened by the blanket statement made popular and legible by the vocabulary of governmental funding bodies’ institutionalized idea of “healing.”
At the bottom of the cover, the shadow of my Cantonese name (Cing Gaai) between my legal names embodies the ambiguous place for a name that no one uses. The slower method of creation makes way for a process that uses time and materials to “work through” the restrictive belonging we may seek from language, duty, and (re)presentation. As “hard work” is a main measurement from which racialized and migrant bodies are valued, their practice uses the double-edged sword of visibility and recognition to explore how we may queer desirability. It attempts to step around easy signifiers of legibility with sparse retellings, obscured patterns, and frequent interruptions.
Artwork originally produced in 2019 within the scope of the artist’s Master of Fine Arts thesis, titled “A Labour of Labour”. …
WE WILL NOT (afterlife), single channel video, 2024.
In 2023, The Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre (Hamilton, ON) commissioned Lan and three other artists to create work in response to their newly available archive of twentieth-century banners from various labour organizations. Lan chose to mimic the design of a banner from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), combined with a slogan from the 1912 Eaton’s strike: WE WILL NOT TAKE THE MORSEL OF BREAD FROM THE MOUTHS OF OUR SISTERS (originally in Yiddish).
The strike action began after unionized machine sewers, mostly Jewish men, refused to do the additional hand finishing work for no increase in pay. This labour was typically the non-unionized women’s job. For four months, a boycott of Eaton’s mobilized large parts of Toronto’s immigrant working class in solidarity across gender lines. In 2024, the banner joined the student encampments at the University of Toronto called for divestment from entities sustaining the genocidal attacks on Gaza, as well as the occupation, apartheid, and illegal settlements in Palestine. The slogan’s calls for larger solidarity movements expands on its own origins, while pointing to continued actions, across current labour unions, migrant rights organizations, Indigenous sovereignty movements, queer and trans coalitions, and beyond. When a final threat of police brutality ended the student occupation after 62 days, the banner was lost in the quick clearing. With its whereabouts currently unknown, the video documentation of the banner stands in for the original object, swaying above the encampments’ exterior fence on a sunny day.
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Artwork originally produced in 2023 for the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in Hamilton, Ontario. …
CURATOR
Liuba González de Armas (b. 1994) is an arts worker and early career curator with roots in Ciudad Nuclear and Amiskwaciwâskahikan/Edmonton. She holds a Master’s in Art History from McGill University (2020) and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta (2018). Her previous funded exhibitions include Tropical Gothic (with Excel Garay, Khyber Centre for the Arts, 2023), Tactics for Staying Home in Uncertain Times (MSVU Art Gallery, 2021), and Escape / The Great Indoors (Hermes Gallery, 2021). Together with Ana Ruiz Aguirre, she co-edited Beyond the Gallery: An Anthology of Visual Encounters for Edmonton’s Laberinto Press in 2021. Liuba currently serves on the Board of Directors at Eyelevel Gallery in Kjipuktuk/Halifax.
Photo Credit: Véronica Gut