Migration Parade: Holon
March 26th, 2022 - May 14th, 2022
Main Gallery
Featured Artists:
Alexandra Goodall (Left) and Danielle Savage (Right)
Born in the fall of 2018, “Migration Parade” is an evolving, collaborative body of work and multimedia gallery installation by electroacoustic sound artist, Danielle Savage, and sculptural textile artist, Alexandra Goodall.
"Migration Parade: Holon" is a work that holds a kind of luminous, safe, altered space of inquiry for feeling, thinking, and being in collectives. It explores the individual within the collective and the collective within the individual. It carves out an abstract and sensorial space to explore these phenomena, free of semantic entanglements or polarized political analyses, yet including them as a line of inquiry in the research. It explores collective trauma and healing without being prescriptive. It explores questions surrounding our humanity and intersectional ways of understanding the world without seeking easy answers or playing “find the bad guy”. It allows us to immerse ourselves in a sense of awe about the mind-staggering complexity of collective experience without needing to boil it down to a set perspective (scientific, spiritual, etc.). It is an act of poiesis, a response to our times, that strives to make room for complexity, ambiguity, and interpretation, while owning its subjectivity and unburdening itself from the tendency to rigidly universalize experience. In other words, it aims to offer a highly relational alternative to fundamentalism.
At the same time, when dealing with large collectives, a degree of holism is necessary in order to coordinate movements: the sheer power of 40,000 people all singing the same refrain requires enough common willingness to know and perform a single action. A flock of birds requires complicit-ness in the collective experience to move in tandem. At the micro, small elemental forces coordinate within our bodies to keep our heart beating, fend off pathogens, etc. We supposedly live at the helm of this body, steering the ship so to speak, yet we are made up of a complexity of synchronized experience that defies our ability to understand. Our membership in the larger collectives of our various communities (friends, families, collaborators, political or hobby groups, human, humanoid-animal, earth-bound, sentient, member of the galaxy, etc) is beyond our ability to label the living experience of it. In whole and in parts, the multiplicity of interpretation forms the cohesion.
As a project, our work recently expanded out from a 2-person, close-knit collaboration of textile/sound/sensor art to include movement artists, a cinematographer, and the community writ large. The nature/ theme of the work necessitated this change, and our goal now becomes to hold this container in a cohesive way for a larger group, and the communities that entwine in and around this exploration. We wish to give room for the work to reshape itself now that new artists and others have joined us on the journey, complete with their own ability to create ‘containers’ for exploration, to interpret their own iterations of the work, to engage with themselves vis-à-vis the collective and sit with their own emergent complexity.
The Penticton Art Gallery’s exhibition will feature two performance art collaborations that will take place in the exhibition space among the sculptures and gallery visitors. The first is with award-winning Lebanese/Canadian dance artist and choreographer, Charlie Prince, who will be working with 6 local dancers to create a durational performance piece entitled “Migration Parade: Helical Song” in response to and among the work. This piece will be documented in the form of an art film by Montreal film-maker Kristen Brown, and the resulting media piece will be available to future galleries as an optional element to the exhibition.
The second is a collaboration with mezzo soprano, Mia Harris, called “Vocal Improvisation and Motion-Activated Electronic Sound (VIMES)”. Mia will be conducting vocal and movement research in the installation using costume technology from Dr. Bob Pritchard's Tracking and Smart Textiles Environment (TASTE) project at the University of British Columbia (such as the "light spine", a harness with user activated LED loops - "vertebrae" - that are triggered to flash, fade and change colour in response to motion).
Both of these examples illustrate the nature of the project as a dynamic and evolving conversation that is receptive and contributory in its very nature. We want it to be a living mirror, a reflection of each unique and vibrant community we engage with.
The Migration Parade: Holon project was supported by the amazing production team consisting of: Jasmine Leblond-Chartrand, Programmer and Consultant, Winona Rae, Process Photographer and Media Art Documentation, Jenny "Moon" Makepeace, Textile Studio Assistant/Technician, Matthew Oviatt, Lighting Design and Consultation
MIGRATION PARADE AS A LIVING COLLECTIVE
In the lead-up to this exhibition a noted choreographer Charlie Prince along with a 6 person movement ensemble will work alongside and collaboratively with the Danielle Savage and Alexandra Goodall in an open studio residency format.
From February 20th - 26th, Charlie Prince will be conducting a residency in preparation for a durational performance that will take place in the completed Migration Parade : Holon exhibition. Charlie will be using this time to conduct choreographic and somatic research with a 6 person movement ensemble (Gita Harris, Maiya Robbie, Jess Glavina, Nikos Theodosakis, Peter Kok, Julie Fowler). Visitors are invited to witness this research in action on February 24th when the main gallery will be open to the public.
The ensemble will then return to the gallery space from March 27-April 3rd to create the final movement piece. Visitors are encouraged to come down and take in both the sculptural exhibition and the durational performance piece as it is created in real-time. You can interact with the sculptures yourself, or watch as the ensemble moves, discusses, and performs their work in a transparent-to-the-public, research-creation process.
Alexandra Goodall and Danielle Savage will be in the studio from March 7th onwards. Gallery visitors will be welcome to join them and watch their process on Thursday, March 10th and Thursday, March 17 from 1-5 pm. They invite you to observe their working process, share impressions, ask questions, or just take in the space as the exhibition is installed.
Danielle Savage works with electroacoustic and acoustic music & sound. She is interested in creating participatory experiences which transmute art-asconsumption: sound as speculation, practice, communication, research, ritual. She has studied composition with Georges Dimitrov, Sandeep
Bhagwati, Rosemary Mountain, and José Luis Hurtado. She has had works performed and presented at: San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Festival la Mansión de la Cantante Muda, Mixtape #IWA, Festival Muchas Músicas, Foro De Música Nueva, Visiones Sonoras, 60x60 festival, Montreal/ New Musics, Festival Días Diseño, Radio WWOZ New Orleans, ArtsWells Festival, Lux Magna Festival, Kulaks Woodshed Hollywood, and more. She obtained a BFA Specialization in Composition followed by a BFA in Electroacoustics at Concordia University in Montréal, QC, where she currently resides.
Alexandra Goodall is a multidisciplinary artist, arts-based facilitator and psychotherapist living in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. In all her work, she aims to bridge the disciplines of art, relationship, psychology and bodily presence. Her current explorations centre around creating immersive environments, interactive worlds of cloth and kin. She has exhibited throughout British Columbia and Internationally with solo and shared exhibitions in public galleries/artist spaces. She holds a Masters Degree in Intermodal Arts from the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Her undergraduate work was in Costume Studies at Dalhousie University.
