Here Now or Nowhere: Northern Lights
Neil Goldberg Describing the Cyclone 1998 Video still
Outdoor exhibitions of public artworks have become fixtures in the contemporary art calendar in cities like Toronto and Montreal thanks to the popularity of festivals such as Luminato and Nuit Blanche. While these projects temporarily transform the city into a venue for interactive experiences with art and installations, in some cases, taking contemporary art projects to the streets is a necessity rather than a novelty.
When the roof of the Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie collapsed last year, for instance, local artist Ed Bader took advantage of the art community’s venue dilemma by organizing "Artery": a series of video projections installed in the city’s downtown storefronts throughout the month of January, when residents experience nearly 14 hours of darkness per day.
Adad Hannah Man in a Red Shirt 2008 Video still
This year, Toronto-based artist and curator Micah Lexier expands the second edition of the city’s winter exhibition to include an interactive audio work, a series of weekly newspaper projects, screenings at the local cinema, a free comic book and even a downtown home on loan from a local family for Kelly Mark’s Glow House project. Titled “Here Now or Nowhere” the exhibition brings international artists and newly commissioned projects to the streets of Grande Prairie, encouraging subtler, more nuanced encounters between artists and the public. Recently, Lexier chatted by phone about working as a curator, creating the anti-blockbuster art festival and the importance of intergenerational artistic exchange.
Gabrielle Moser: I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about the inspiration for the title of the show. I noticed it functions as an anagram of the word “nowhere” but was wondering how it might further relate to the theme of the exhibition.
Micah Lexier: Yes, it’s an anagram, which is one of my favourites, but that’s sort of an extra thing. There’s a crazy story about the title—I had to call the gallery to give them a suggested title of the show and as I was walking up Ossington Street in Toronto from my house, I noticed some graffiti which I misread as “Be here now or nowhere,” which I thought was great because it suggested being or living in the moment. So it’s what I suggested to the gallery and then Robert Steven, the Prairie Gallery’s director, said that if we dropped the “be” that it would be a tidier play on words. So in that way it was a collaborative title. It’s also about Grande Prairie being “nowhere” and us bringing in artists from all over the world into the city—playing with boundaries of inside/outside, here/there, the slippages of misunderstanding meanings.
Kelly Mark Glow House 2005 Installation view
GM: In the past few years, you have been increasingly exhibiting your work alongside shows of other artists’ works that you have curated. How does curating fit into your practice as a visual artist?
ML: Lately, it [the curating] has become a much bigger part of my artistic practice. I don’t know if it will continue to develop like that in an ongoing way, though. I think there are a couple of aspects to why I began curating: moving back to Toronto and having a new relationship with the city and the artists in it was certainly one of them, but it was also a realization that when I first lived here I was a younger artist and now I’m not such a young artist. When I was a younger artist, people did me a lot of favours by writing reviews of my work and supporting what I as working on and I realized that doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s the responsibility of more established artists to do these things and to make them happen, and curating is one way of doing that. I also thought, well, I’m a pretty organized guy and a pretty opinionated guy, so I wanted to encourage people to see these artists’ work.
In my own artistic practice, the vitrine exhibitions I’ve been making have really been about using found elements: bits of paper I find or notes and integrating them into the work. There’s a nice correlation between using found items and working as a curator. This show, though, has been very much about me putting on a “curator hat”—not considering it a part of my other work, but seeing it as a distinctly curatorial job. I am increasingly finding my own work and curation merging, or getting closer, however.
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