In early 2021, The Works was tasked with adapting our volunteer art interpretation training program TART to a remote context. With fewer volunteer opportunities this year, the program was expanded from its traditional scope of volunteer training to a program for those interested in art interpretation, or early in their careers in fields requiring art interpretation and writing. 

An online program seemed a given, but the question of platform and format were top of mind. This was when we came upon Twine: a platform for writing and coding interactive, text-based games. The prospect of an asynchronous, interactive game to deliver art interpretation education was appealing—in the throes of Zoom fatigue, we longed to interact with art interpretation remotely in a way that was low pressure yet still engaging. 

We set to work adapting the program to Twine, and in early June launched Creative Outlet: Why is Writing About Art So Hard? Participants can choose their own paths through the text-based program, which alternates between critical exploration of the world of art writing, opportunities for writing practice and reading other participants’ responses, and more traditional role-playing game elements (drawing parallels between outlet malls and art institutions). The program also features video contributions by artists and writers Sanaa Humayun and Preston Pavlis reading selections from their writing and sharing advice. Play Part 1 of Creative Outlet here. 

As Creative Outlet was developed, another mainstay of The Works’ programming required a remote-work facelift: the Works to Work Summer Internship Group Art Project. As part of the internship, which offers students and emerging arts professionals mentorship and practical work experience, the Group Art Project implores interns to collaboratively produce an artwork in a limited time frame. The Works to Work Summer Internship began remotely, and the assignment needed adaptation so interns could collaborate online to create their artworks. Twine once again proved a promising platform, where interns could be challenged to learn the program and combine artistic forces over only six hours. 

In small groups, interns produced four excellent, unique and thoroughly entertaining Twine artworks. Explore these works below. 

Desert Island Escape

Sean Herbert, Anica Neiman, and Paige Cooper

In this game you are faced with a series of choices to escape a desert island. On your journey will you encounter pirates, talking animals, or the witch named Greselda?

PLAY

Fortune of Fate

Ariadne Belle, Michael Conforti, and Terri Le Gear

You can’t run away from fate. A mysterious fortune awaits.

PLAY

Nomad's guide to the inner world

Caitlin Davis, Manpreet Singh, and Mika Haykowsky

This personality quiz will take you on a journey inward - toward the deeper meanings behind your behaviors and choices. Examine yourself and determine what your inner landscape looks like. Artwork created by Mika Haykowsky using photographs and drawing by all 3 contributors.

PLAY

the bridge

kev Liang and liisa otchie

You are on a long, straight, iron bridge, floating above a brown coloured river stream. At one end, you see tall skyscraping monuments towering over you. At the other end, you see clusters of greenery leading to the river. Where will your first adventure take you?

PLAY

By: Claire MacMahon, Production Assistant.

Drawn In, Stephanie Medford, 2019

Before coming to work with The Works as a production intern, I can’t say I ever thought about the logistics of making a festival tent into a professional art gallery, but accomplishing this task is one of the most important parts of festival set up and take down. Luckily for my fellow interns and I, there were years of interns before us who figured out the logistics. We just had to learn them. So, here is what you need and how it works:

What you will need and how it works!

1) The walls

When lining a 20 by 20 ft tent with portable walls, one of the most important tools is teamwork. The walls each weigh over 150lbs so lifting them into place is impossible to accomplish on one’s own. Through teamwork, with some people in front, some behind and some even on ladders, we accomplished our task. This is when I realized how much of a team the production interns had really become. It was incredible to go from hardly knowing each other and ever imagining putting up a wall, to feeling comfortable putting them up as a cohesive team.

2) Paint tape and lots of Magic Erasers

Once the walls are up, the next step is a lot of fine tuning. When one thinks of a professional art gallery, pristine white walls usually come to mind. There are few tricks and tools we use to get as close to this as possible. The first is tape. Our walls are only four feet long, so we are left with a lot of seams to distract from the art. A quick solution is to cover them with white tape. Add a little paint on top and it could almost be part of the wall. Finally, when it comes to getting that pristine art gallery look, a box full of Magic Erasers can take the walls from looking worn and old to art ready.

3) Clip lights and a web of extension cords

When working outdoors, lighting can be unpredictable. On a nice sunny day the art may be very well lit, but when the clouds blow in, it is a very different story. Clip lights can help. Clip lights give us the ability to clamp them to the cables at the top of the tent, but there is only one plugin per tent. Extension cords are very useful and through the magic of a lot of winding and tucking of cords, we now have our gallery lit with minimal exposed cords.

One of our cleanest and most pristine galleries holds Stephanie Medford’s piece Drawn In, not because you can see all the details and hard work that I mentioned above, but because you can’t. It is beautifully lit with clean white walls, which if done right doesn’t draw your attention, but instead focuses it on the art. It is very rewarding to create an atmosphere where people can appreciate great artists and the art that we have within the gallery walls.

_____________________

About the author: Claire MacMahon is a mixed media artist who primarily works in sculpture. She is entering into her third year at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, where she has started exploring medias such as glass blowing and metal work. Recently Claire has been mixing new medias such as video and projection with traditional mediums like glass blowing and ceramics to create immersive environments within her work. Another passion of Claire’s that has started to bleed into her art is researching sea life and aquatic plants: she has incorporated this into her ceramic work. 

By: Callum McKenzie, Production Assistant.

Working for The Works is a lot of work. Especially in the week and half leading up to festival. You learn a lot about things you weren’t expecting to learn a lot about. Like wood, screws, prerequisites for Instagram swipe links and Verified status, and office acronyms. Problem solving becomes second nature to you, or you at least learn how to hum and haw in ways that inspire others in their problem solving. Production interns are instrumental in preparing for, setting up, and running a free art festival. You contribute to an awesome experience for so many people, but the week leading up to festival feels less than awesome. There are many things you learn through experience, in-class sessions and conversations with your peers. However, there are some things you can not truly grasp until you experience them. The pre-festival scramble is a great indicator of things you did not know that you did not know, or that you did not know how best to prepare for. So, I have put together a list of a three key festival survival tips to help you prepare:

1. Whether it’s rain or shine, prepare for the weather.

Who knew just how blinding white paint is when it’s reflecting full sun? You did not until you were squinting your way through a paint-job on a FTP (I still don’t fully know what that stands for, but I know it’s a wall…). Painting white walls or plinths or other miscellaneous objects in the glaring sun is a lot less painful with sunglasses and sunscreen. Sunscreen is vital, so you don’t get crispy fried working outside in the sun for most of the day… and you are outside a lot.

Rain can also be a pain, but for other reasons. It makes you cold and damp if you’re not dressed for it. There is a significant difference between water resistant and water proof. I hope you don’t learn this the hard way. Having a good rain jacket on hand is very useful, but also grab a few extra layers for underneath. Maybe some water repellant pants while you’re at it. You never know when you’ll be lying beneath an uncovered stair case in the pouring rain to secure the lower steps.

2. Tell your friends, family and even your dog that you might not be able to reliably be there for them.

Everyone in at the Works gets in a lot of overtime leading up to and during the festival. Some projects take a lot longer than anticipated or complications arise, so you need to be prepared to stick around and help your team. It’s inevitable that this overtime gets in the way of your social life and that’s okay. Be aware that you might have to cancel or postpone plans so just keep the people in your life updated. Tell your mom you’ll be late for dinner, tell your friends you might need to hang out another day, tell your pet that you value and love them unconditionally but they might have to eat a little later in the evening.

3. Take care of yourself.

You are a human being and you have basic needs. Fulfill them. Eat enough food, drink enough water, get enough sleep. It’s easier said than done, but making sure you’re well rested and energized makes the long work days so much easier to get through. Bring snacks to fend off the hunger and stabilize your energy levels but try to avoid snacks that are high in sugar so your energy doesn’t crash an hour after eating them. If you have the capacity to do so, bring some snacks to share with your team. You’ll help them stay functioning and you’ll all be happy together.

Those were just a few tips that are useful and applicable to every festival since the specific festival requirements change every year. They’re mostly common sense, but sometimes stress makes common sense less common. In those kind of stressful situations, little reminders can be useful.

_____________________________

About the author: Callum McKenzie is a visual communication design and printmaking student at the University of Alberta. He has shown work at various galleries and exhibitions including the Change Climate exhibition and a group show at Coral Plaza in his hometown of Edmonton. Callum explores the intersections of masculinity, queerness and emotional expression through his print work. He hopes to highlight alternative and healthy forms of masculinity. In addition to design and printmaking, Callum practices his drawing skills and obsesses over paper. He combines his passions in the practice of bookbinding. To see some of his work, check out his Instagram profile, @humdrum_and_callum.

By: Brittany Gergel, Curatorial Coordinator.

Image: Scrub, by Stacey Cann. 

A figure in a red, polka-dotted dress emerges from the wings of The Works Art & Design Festival’s Capital Plaza. She carries a mop bucket and tucks a duster against the small of her back. Her heeled loafers tap delicately against the tiled ground. A pause. The figure falls to her knees. She removes a sponge from her bucket and scrubs the well-traversed tile before her. Without fanfare, Deliver has begun.

Stacey Cann’s durational performance explores the gendered expectations of labour. Through publicly enacting the gestures of domestic labour⁠—coordinating tasks, organizing and cleaning up after⁠—Cann bears and amplifies the weight of these gestures. Her body tenses with each scrubbing and dusting motion. Sweat beads on her brow, no doubt exacerbated by her gendered polyester garb. She is all at once exaggeratedly deliberate and skillfully subtle.

In the tradition of the performance of domestic labour (Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintainance Art comes to mind), a compelling aspect of Deliver is the artistic treatment Cann gives the unfairly prescribed yet necessary. Cann’s labour-come-art is both hyper-visible and invisible. Her dress and loafers are a legible caricature of the mid-century American housewife, transplanted into a 2019 public. More telling, however, is how easily Cann and her aestheticized labour blend into her environment. The tidying, clearing and washing enacted by Cann are absurdly ordinary, and subsumed by the action of the Downtown festival. Besides the adjacent display of a handwritten chore chart and a tongue-in-cheek sign reading ‘men at work,’ the gestures associated with Deliver are easily naturalized as “just someone cleaning up”⁠—a terrifying appraisal that wherever you are, a woman in uniform is likely tidying up after those around her.

Please pay Stacey Cann and the labouring women around you diligence for what they deliver. And make sure your Food Street refuse ends up in a trash can.

___________________

About the author: Brittany Gergel is currently completing a BA Honours in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta. She participated in the Faculty of Art & Design’s 2018 collaboration project “Anthropocities,” publishing art interpretation in the project’s peer-reviewed catalogue and for display at the IPCC’s Cities and Climate Change Conference. She received the Faculty’s Margret Andrekson Scholarship in Art History in 2018 for superior academic achievement. In 2019, she completed an honours thesis, “Obstetrical Authority in an Atlas with Flaps.” Her areas of focus are Anthropocene ethics and the history of medicine as they intersect with visual and material culture.

By: Haylee Fortin, Curatorial Assistant.

Image: Drawing by the author Haylee Fortin

Without access to a car, I do a lot of walking. In this process of moving, a physical connection is created between body and place. Walking can be meditative, energizing, challenging and rewarding. As the act of walking translates distance into time, sights seen, sounds heard and energy spent, it imparts an appreciation for what exists between point A and point B. However, with the advent of digitizing maps at the street level, walking is affected more and more by the technology we use.

Bekk Wells’ The Walking Stitch, is an ongoing project which invites participants to explore and re-think wayfinding in urban spaces through walking and craft. Maps of the participant’s city are printed onto fabric and then made into pillows. Wells encourages small groups to set out on an exploratory route, to seek out unfamiliar places or re-experience the familiar in a new way. Each person is given a printed pillow, as well as a needle and thread to stitch the progress of their path. With every iteration of The Walking Stitch a new physical record of a walk taken is generated.

There is a commitment to meandering in The Walking Stitch that contrasts the increasingly common practice of using an app to deliver the most efficient and direct course to a destination. Wells’ work responds to the Situationists’ practice of dérive, an unplanned journey guided by the landscape and whatever encounters take place en route. Movement without purpose is at odds with the new trend towards monetizing where people go, when they go and how they get there. In a society of smart phone users, we are often unknowingly supplying the data of our day to day movements to interested parties through “geolocation” data. Phone applications like the popular Pokémon Go have the ability through their terms and conditions to track user’s location in real time, allowing marketers the possibility of predicting a user’s buying habits or digitally customizing advertising to each individual. Habits that may be imperceptible to you are useful to companies that see your potential as a consumer. To deviate from your daily routine is disruptive to this form of data collection.

Without a labeled map or destination, The Walking Stitch requires you to take notice of the space around you and operate, albeit temporarily, outside of your usual routine. By isolating map reading and embroidery as experiences without an express goal, Wells draws your attention to their changing roles in a society inundated with technology. What future do these skills have?  As we move towards an increasingly digitized world, it’s worth contemplating how the loss of analog knowledge impacts our relationship with digital systems.  

Image: Bekk Wells’ The Walking Stitch, 2019 

____________

About the author: Creative both in practice and thought, Haylee Fortin is an Edmonton based painter, new media artist and printmaker. Haylee’s practice often addresses themes of isolation and femininity through collage and imagery sourced from online hunting forums. Graduating with distinction from the University of Alberta’s Fine Art program in 2015, Haylee has since pursued an interest in art as a means of community engagement with local artist run centers. Through her position as studio assistant, Haylee supports programming for artists with developmental disabilities at the Nina Haggerty Center as well as courses in print-making at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists (SNAP). As the installation artist for the 2016 and 2017 URB PRK concert series, Haylee developed an appreciation for public art through creating weekly public art installations. An appreciation which continues to grow through her position as curatorial assistant with The Works.