Exhibition Statement Map Outdoor Events Indoor Exhibition Gallery 1313

Parkette endeavors to explore the psychology and sociology of both urban planning and the urbanite. What do these small spaces reveal about the activities, needs and coping strategies of the city dweller? While parks are recreational spaces where an individual or group can take a break from the urban environment, the parkette’s natural environmental features are often negligible. There is rarely enough room to throw a Frisbee without it flying into oncoming traffic, and there is nothing essentially restful about a bench on seven square feet of grass along side a major city artery. The parkette is a marginal island of green in the midst of a sea of asphalt and concrete.

Has the big city dweller adapted in such a way that the conceptual space established by the line of the curb is sufficient to provide a sanctuary from urban traffic, or is a parkette simply an ideal location to witness the vital currents of social activity, which characterize an urban center and feed the psyche of the urbanite?

Parkette will engage both solicited viewers and unsuspecting passersby. It aims to allow the participating artists to voice their interpretation of the phenomenon of the parkette, but also to draw the attention of the public in the context of their own neighbourhoods and, in doing so, to learn more about these inhabitants perceptions of urban spaces.

Michel Foucault states that space in the contemporary era is defined by the relationship between sites. The problem of site, or placement, arises from demography. “How do home, work and other sites relate to each other?” Foucault asserts that the anxiety of our era is fundamentally related to space. While contemporary space is not entirely desanctified, this is not officially recognized in our secular world. Postmodern space is still defined by certain oppositions, such as private and public, leisure and work, nature and culture. These oppositions may yet be nurtured by a hidden belief in the sacred.

Victor Turner described sacred spaces as liminal, a place and moment ‘in and out of time.’ The pilgrim of a liminal space hoped to have direct experience of an invisible or supernatural order and a subsequent transformation of spirit or personality. The modern desacralized, individualized variant of the liminal is described as the liminoid.  Leisure spaces such as parks, spas and resorts are liminoid. While a parkette is in no way removed from the sites and sounds of the frantic urban populace, when one enters its limited space, he or she steps into a designated rest area, theoretically liminoid.

Foucault’s sociology characterizes phenomenon in terms of dramatic differentiation rather than mutability and gradual change.  He states that we live inside a set of relations that delineate sites that are irreducible to one another and absolutely not super-imposable. Sites are not void spaces inside of which we can place individuals and things. Parkette questions the accuracy of this assertion. Do the participating artists not transform the nature of their spaces? What part will the social and physical reality of the chosen parkettes play in their projects?

Paul Grajauskas’s art examines the subjectivity of space and time by posing questions to his audiences posted on large strategically placed signs. Karina Bergmans’s Can You Spare a Moment? invites pedestrians to lie down in the rest space of the artist’s tiny patch of green grass. The nature of her parkette, be it a sanctuary space or simply another landmark, will be determined by her audience’s reaction. Miriam Jordan and Julian Haladyn’s participatory performance-installation calls on the spiritual tradition of the tea ceremony. The Tea Garden is a movable, sacred site complete with table, chairs and specially designed cups.  An event, which is customarily hosted in a carefully cultivated religious or domestic space, will be held in a very different environment.

Most of the pieces in Parkette combine installation and performance art. These modes of expression might be called postmodern art’s answer to the space and time previously furnished by places of worship and ritual. Installation establishes or transforms an environment, creating a space for discussion, exchange or rumination. Whereas ritual generally aims to balance tensions in society by reweaving dramatic changes into the fabric of culture, performance art thrives on imbalance, evoking or pointing out the disturbing, often without the offer of a resolution. The performance artist plays the part of the satirist or the joker, setting up his or her own modular environment like a traveling player. She upsets the normal balance of things with mirth, psycho-socio criticism and unsettling wit.

Many of the artists use the setting of the garden in their prospective parkettes. As Shannon Cochrane mentions in her artist statement, gardens have been accused of being culture masquerading as nature. Cochrane’s A-Z Garden will host a mysterious alchemical process that will allow articles of culture to take root and blossom like living organisms. A ragged, private yard will become a public garden. In Jillian Mcdonald’s Ivy League, the virtual social space of a hypertext website will, for the first time, take the form of a physical ivy garden in which a web-based dialectic will be voiced by the public conflict of two performance artists. The issues of xenophobia and environmental activism intertwine in a manner akin to gorilla gardening only with more dangerous artillery. Richard Preston too uses nature as a metaphor for culture. In contrast to the political conflict of Ivy League,the portrayal of immigration and urban settlement in Shorelines is quiet and meditative. Preston’s movement of small coloured boxes across the topography of his chosen parkette seems to suggest the presence of the same certainty in ethnic migration and integration as is inherent in geological change.

Contemporary artists often pose open-ended questions. Parkette is my open-ended question, as I do not have one particular hypothesis, or one answer I expect to get. The character of the parkette is determined by, the surroundings, the inhabitants and the activities that occur within it.

Jenny McMaster, 2005

Focault, Michel. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec. “Des Espace Autres,” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite. France: October, 1984.

Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.
 

Some of her published works include, Urban Skins a catalogue, for CUAG. “Curator’s Notes: Territories of Mind and Spirit: Land and Space in Inuit Art”, Inuit Art Quarterly, “Curator’s Notes: Private Myths and Public Dreams: Inuit Art and Surrealism,” Inuit Art Quarterly (Ottawa). “Tanja Perskaja,” Glencairn Museum Newsletter, “Balzac, Serusier and Gauguin,”Glencairn Museum Newsletter (Philadelphia).

McMaster has a Masters in Modern Religious Thought and Culture, and a Bachelors in Art History from Carleton University.