Sinéad O’Donnell

Chaos
Ireland
Saturday, September 24th, 2011, 11AM to 3PM
Firehall Arts Centre (280 E. Cordova), enter using the side gate on Gore.

Chaos is presented in conjunction with the Firehall Arts Centre

Chaos is a series of performance interventions developed for ‘LIVE’ by Sinéad O’Donnell (Ire), Judith Price (B.C), Margaret Dragu (BC) and Grace Salez (BC). All four artists will work during the ‘LIVE’ festival as a collective investigating the place of the festival and its relationship to social space. The artists are using the duration of the festival as a residential time to further interrogate the territory of site specific performance by making an action a day that will be accessible to audience through the ‘LIVE’ website. All artists will perform finally at a location in Vancouver on the Saturday the 24th of September.

These artists expose the absurdity and inflated expectations of the accelerated lifestyles we have come to accept as compulsory. Women, particularly European and North American women, who’ve been told that they can “have it all”, have become intimately familiar with the nature of chaos. The continual juggling of tasks and personas at work and at home has put women in a unique position to identify practical applications of chaos, not just as an intellectual construct. These women will explore the underlying structures and complexities of chaos by playing in it and with it.

We going to work site based in Vancouver for the duration of the LIVE festival. We will not need a studio in a traditional way because we are going to use the urbanity of Vancouver as ‘place’ to research, resource, play, think and devise ideas into actions. We will present time and site based performance work to announced audience all day Saturday the 24th of September at a site we like or many sites. We will use the LIVE website to update our findings, processes and unfolding actions each day.

Biogrpahy

Sinéad O’Donnell

I am a dyslexic artist originally from Dublin and based in Belfast since 1995. My work has been presented in Asia, Canada, Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North and South America.

My performance practice is nomadic and patterns of travel have broadened my cultural perceptions and influenced my artistic sensibilities regarding time and space. I am also highly active in the Belfast performance art scene working with local organisations to foster performance art activity and support emerging artists in my community. The critical and artistic core of my solo work explores identity through immediate and mediated encounters with territory and the territorial. I have also developed an international curatorial practice that enables exchange between local and international artists. I am interested in creating collaborative experiences in which artists can develop a current evaluation of performance art history parallel to the cultivation of a cultural common ground within the context of visual and live art praxis.

Judith Price

(Victoria, British Columbia) I live in Victoria on Vancouver Island where I teach post-secondary courses in time-based art (performance, video and film), as well as sculpture, at Camosun College. My body of work includes performance pieces, performative videos, video installations, site-specific installations and short films. I merge my parallel backgrounds in visual arts and modern dance to explore non-verbal physical and gestural language as tools of communication and intervention. I am interested in creating liminal spaces through performance; interstices within which an event can move and shift in unexpected patterns of communication.

My performances display my ongoing exploration of site-specific street actions, interventions, and interactive, collaborative and durational works. Interactivity for me has its source in my desire for viewers to actively contribute to the outcome of a performance, to actively experience the way in which their presence alters the relationships of objects or people to one another and to the site. I am also involved with Open Action, a group of Victoria artists who do monthly performances in public sites.

Margaret Dragu

(Richmond, British Columbia) My first discipline was dance. In 1971, I moved to New York to study dance but became immersed in the experimental art scene with painters, composers, sculptors, photographers, conceptual and performance artists (although there was no word for ‘performance art’ at the time). I received a scholarship to study dance in Montreal but became engrossed in the artists’ community of Galerie Vehicule. While researching “found” movement patterns, I began working in striptease/burlesque: this ‘experiment’ lasted 20 years and continues to inform both my art practice and my politics. At Vehicule, I worked with experimental filmmakers from NFB including Bozo Moyle who introduced me to the ‘new’ B/W videotape port-o-pack. I also began a 10+ year collaboration with Tom Dean who coined the term “art dancer” to describe me for two reasons: my solo work employed sculpture, photography, video, found-sound music collages, etc. and looked more like visual art than dance; and because I collaborated with so many visual artists.

I moved to Toronto first meeting and choreographing for General Idea then collaborating with Rodney Werden, Colin Campbell, Kate Craig, Elizabeth Chitty, etc. I made work that was durational and big-scale eg. “X’s & O’s for the Longest Day of the Year”. I made solo, low-tech work for small galleries eg. “Joy of Multi-Discipline”. I made site-specific work, community-based work, and agit-prop. I worked in commercial film, television and radio as an actor, producer, writer, and director. I choreographed for theatre, film and television. I worked as a performance art and dance curator. I began writing about art, culture and politics. In 1986, I moved to Vancouver. I continued to work in performance and video. In 1990, I began working in installation/performance as well as new media. My solo work draws on relational and community-engaged practices, personae/embodiment practice, politically engaged practice… and still dance… my first discipline informs and deepens all my work.

Grace Salez

(Victoria, British Columbia) Since 2006 I have been engaged in performance art with fellow performance artists in Victoria at various events at Open Space. In 2008 I participated in 3 Street Actions, funded by the City of Victoria, and curated by Judith Price. Currently, since September 2010, I has been participating in, OPEN ACTION, with John Boeheme, Judith Price and Brenda Petays, a once a month performance action event at various public sites in the greater Victoria area. As a performance artist I am interested in exploring durational unscripted random situations in public or private sites/spaces. My encounters with specific sites trigger memory that intuitively leads to an interaction between site, pedestrian/spectator, and myself. My intention is to create for pedestrian/spectator and myself a time for contemplative and/or conflicted random interaction. We travel through space with scripted bodies, scripted voices, scripted assumptions — I see my actions as disruptive elements in scripted spaces that engage the pedestrian/spectator to “re consider” their position to my action/presence.