RED: City, Square and Safety Pin
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada June 19-July 1 , 2014
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada June 19-July 1 , 2014
Installation by Mary Joyce
Reception: June 21, 2014, 2-4 PM.
The Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts
9925-118 Avenue, Edmonton, T5G 0K6
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada June 19-July 1 , 2014
Red: City, Square and Safety Pin
In the red.
A quarter-million people thronged through Montreal streets in spring 2012. "Nous sommes équerrement dans la rouge!" – we are squarely in the red – came the response of students and families to tuition increases and debt. They called for the right to higher education. Education rights are like social safety pins – they hold our future together.
Art for the sake of social movement happens in the streets. A red felt square – secured to coats with a safety pin – became the small symbol of mass student protests and social advocacy mobilized in Montreal streets and all over Quebec. And only a year later Alberta’s students wore red squares to confront massive public funding cuts.
I decided to research that spring’s momentous events even as my studio practices as an artist began to change. In a state of shift, I searched for immediate news accounts from the street just as I abandoned paint brushes for new tools, combed media reports and photo-documentation, and searched websites to sift sources, rethink news, and see social change in its many visual and embodied forms.
Red and squares emerged as my route to explore social transformation. I took up Kandinsky’s views on the rightness of the square for the colour red as much as his views on art and the human spirit. He considered the fluctuating power of art a gauge to spiritual health for the people. I was also reminded of Françoise Sullivan’s use of red in automatisme contexts within Refus Global’s call for modernism. And art writer John Berger’s social conscience of the sixties as well as Joseph Beuys’ in the seventies, along with Janet Mitchell’s street scenes.
“Know and claim social rights” writes John Berger in Permanent Red. “There is no alternative than a permanent search for freedom, and more and more freedom,” encourages Joseph Beuys. Transform a simple shape and colour into popular language. Generate art and human spirit in the streets. Honour, mark, document social rights.
A huge square of red felt hangs suspended from oversize brass safety pins. It defines a narrow corridor in the gallery installation. Viewers enact a march through a crowded city street – hugged by soft and comforting felt around their shoulders – seeing images of struggle in square paintings. The physical and political experience of this performance is what I give to viewers, who could well be people wearing red felt squares, hoisting a large uplifted square of red fabric into the centre of a street procession. Or carrying a red balloon.
The installation Red: City, Square and Safety Pin is my salute to rising social movements, political mobilization, and citizen engagement. At once local and global, national and international, activism in Canada is growing and ongoing. As an artist, I work to call attention to social and political change, to potential for art and life-altering consequences. As art and people in the streets call for rights, so I wish to bring the streets into art and art into living.
Mary Joyce, 2014
Statement co-written with Dr. PearlAnn Reichwein
Red: City, Square and Safety Pin
In the red.
A quarter-million people thronged through Montreal streets in spring 2012. "Nous sommes équerrement dans la rouge!" – we are squarely in the red – came the response of students and families to tuition increases and debt. They called for the right to higher education. Education rights are like social safety pins – they hold our future together.
Art for the sake of social movement happens in the streets. A red felt square – secured to coats with a safety pin – became the small symbol of mass student protests and social advocacy mobilized in Montreal streets and all over Quebec. And only a year later Alberta’s students wore red squares to confront massive public funding cuts.
I decided to research that spring’s momentous events even as my studio practices as an artist began to change. In a state of shift, I searched for immediate news accounts from the street just as I abandoned paint brushes for new tools, combed media reports and photo-documentation, and searched websites to sift sources, rethink news, and see social change in its many visual and embodied forms.
Red and squares emerged as my route to explore social transformation. I took up Kandinsky’s views on the rightness of the square for the colour red as much as his views on art and the human spirit. He considered the fluctuating power of art a gauge to spiritual health for the people. I was also reminded of Françoise Sullivan’s use of red in automatisme contexts within Refus Global’s call for modernism. And art writer John Berger’s social conscience of the sixties as well as Joseph Beuys’ in the seventies, along with Janet Mitchell’s street scenes.
“Know and claim social rights” writes John Berger in Permanent Red. “There is no alternative than a permanent search for freedom, and more and more freedom,” encourages Joseph Beuys. Transform a simple shape and colour into popular language. Generate art and human spirit in the streets. Honour, mark, document social rights.
A huge square of red felt hangs suspended from oversize brass safety pins. It defines a narrow corridor in the gallery installation. Viewers enact a march through a crowded city street – hugged by soft and comforting felt around their shoulders – seeing images of struggle in square paintings. The physical and political experience of this performance is what I give to viewers, who could well be people wearing red felt squares, hoisting a large uplifted square of red fabric into the centre of a street procession. Or carrying a red balloon.
The installation Red: City, Square and Safety Pin is my salute to rising social movements, political mobilization, and citizen engagement. At once local and global, national and international, activism in Canada is growing and ongoing. As an artist, I work to call attention to social and political change, to potential for art and life-altering consequences. As art and people in the streets call for rights, so I wish to bring the streets into art and art into living.
Mary Joyce, 2014
Statement co-written with Dr. PearlAnn Reichwein