F.F.F.F. (2023) — in collab with Paul Kajander
This was my first full-scale collaboration project. He’s in Halifax, I’m in Montreal. We made this animated video together called F.F.F.F. Neither of us have ever worked in animation. We recorded most of our parts (the lemons) over Zoom in our home studios in separate cities. We showed it Unit 17 in Vancouver in Summer 2023- we closed out the place, actually, as the gallery is now located downtown. Here’s one clip from F.F.F.F. 5 more clips on the EXTRACTS page.
Bathroom Classroom: collaborative install at Franz Kaka, Toronto (2021)
HaeAhn Kwon invited me, Amy Lam, Kirby Mages, and IBanJiHa to contribute to her installation around women, shame, pissing, dry erase markers and education. I was the first artist in the rotation. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I’ve never collaborated before. HaeAhn brought me into the project when it was already well under way (she had drawings, and objects, some finished— photos of which she shared with me online). So I’d classify it as a partial collaboration. A starting point. A rehearsal for what I’d want a fuller collab to be like, feel like?
I brought yellow plasticine, a couple videos built around scanned dry erase texts, and some other texts which ended up written on the wall or on adhesive dry erase rolls that we crumpled. From the point of view of collaboration, the videos were a cop-out. I mean, I responded to some conditions (work & material & thoughts for the show HaeAhn had shared with me), on my own in my apartment. I had a small window of time to come up with something, and I feared massively slowing things down by communicating to someone else what I was doing in detail, or asking HaeAhn to co-write the videos with me so late in the game. The plasticine was probably the most genuinely collaborative of my elements — I did it on the fly, as HaeAhn & I arranged and re-arranged her sculptures & my additions in the gallery.
I did enjoy the process of making work so quickly — something I haven’t done in over 10 years or so— felt like presenting sketches or drafts to the public. But, I missed that terrible/wonderful pressure of sinking a year or more into a work. The futility, arrogance, privilege, and danger of doing that. So ideally, next time I collaborate, it’s from the ground up, on a large project in which my collaborator & I invest a year… and we have the funding to invest so much time into it!
The photos below are from the first rotation (the first week) of the show. Photo credit: LF documentation. I also included my favourite of the dry-erase videos below (it’s silent).
