Lisa Myers, still image from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week, 2015.
Walks of Survivance, curated by Srimoyee Mitra, features works by Lisa Meyers and Farrah Miranda.
This exhibition is presented as a part of Mayworks Windsor, an annual festival run by area arts, labour, environmental and social service groups and organizations, and was listed in Canadian Art’s Must-Sees This Week: May 4 to 10, 2017 and Syphon Issue 3.4.
FARRAH MIRANDA – STATEMENT
In Farrah Miranda’s installation, The Produce Party, the ambience of a locally-sourced soiree is breached by a series of interventions. A medley of fruit and vegetable ads jingle softly through the speakers. The idyllic sounds belong to Foodland Ontario, a consumer promotion program of the Ontario government.
Accompanying the nostalgic marketing, a coffin-shaped dining table (fashioned from old fruit-crates), spans the length of the gallery. Thirteen paper plates are bolted to its surface. Inked with anecdotes from migrant farmworkers and the advocates who labour alongside them, each dish comes with a corresponding menu listing the legal, medical, activist and news sources from which these testimonies are drawn.
Looming overhead, four rusty farm wheels, take the shape of a chandelier. Adorned with dirty shoes, gloves, and plastic produce, the fixture implicates viewers in the violence of industrial agriculture, and the difficulties of ‘buying local’.
LISA MYERS – STATEMENT
In 2009, artist Lisa Myers walked with her cousins along the train tracks on the north shore of Lake Huron, retracing the route their grandfather followed when, as young child, he ran away from residential school. Made with blueberries these two alternating videos each convey a different response and interpretation of a moving landscape, the pace of walking encoded with sustenance. The performance for video Blueberry Spoons (2010) unfolds as each berry-dipped spoon is placed next to the other. As if each spoon is the frame of a comic book, this abstracted storytelling suggests the movement of landscape and horizon lines at a walking pace. The animation and from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week (2015) presents berries as the main protagonists morphing between changing landforms and waterways into impressions of mass inhabitation of places and spaces—in all, the berries end up as the beings that exist underground and underwater, leaving a reddish swath. These video works connect and reflect on the food (blueberries) that allowed her grandfather to survive, and contend with the knowledge of land gained through walking. Her own walk in 2009 with her cousins was the way she found her own story using her grandfather’s story as a map that guided their direction.
Farrah Miranda is an Abu-Dhabi-born, Toronto-based artist with an MA in Environmental Studies from York University. Farrah’s transdisciplinary practice emerges from more than a decade of organizing within Canada’s migrant justice movements, and from her training with Jamaican theatre worker and feminist scholar, Honor Ford-Smith. Farrah curated and co-directed Mass Arrival, a project that intervenes in the discourse of illegality surrounding migrant boat arrivals to Canada. Acclaimed for its synthesis of performance, new media and the law, it has exhibited at Whippersnapper Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery and Astérides (Friche Belle de Mai – Marseille); and been featured in numerous publications. Farrah has presented on this work at art and academic institutions in Canada and Europe. She has also contributed to a number of publications, including In the Wake of the Komagata Maru: Transpacific Migration, Race & Contemporary Art, FUSE Magazine, Voz-À-Voz / Voice-À-Voice, and Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.
Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Myers has a Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial practice from OCAD University. Her recent work involves printmaking, stop-motion animation and performance. Since 2010 she has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking, and stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in venues including Urban Shaman (Winnipeg), Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her writing has been published in a number of exhibition publications in addition to the journal Senses and Society, C Magazine and FUSE Magazine. She is currently an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Myers is a member of Beausoleil First Nation and she is based in Port Severn and Toronto, Ontario.
