Event Info
Megan Quigley : Of Inheritance and Intent:
The participatory installation will involve the creation of a camera obscura wit...
Fri. January 22nd 2016 - Fri. February 5th 2016 + Add to Calendar
1056A North Park St.
Opening: Friday 22nd January 2016
Opening 7 - 10pm
Event Description
The participatory installation will involve the creation of a camera obscura within the Ministry of Casual Living Northpark space. The camera obscura will effectively fill and “paint” the space with a reflected image of the surrounding neighborhood – North Park, on unceded Lekwungen homelands. Visitors will be provided with photographic paper and invited to “record” a piece of the landscape – selecting their portion of space with whatever affection and logic they desire. With an exposure time of approximately ten minutes this will necessitate a stillness and intentionality in the space, as well as an implication in the bodily and geographical experience of art making as well as archiving. These images will then be processed and the silver gelatin prints will be displayed within the gallery, in relative proximity. Over time, the landscape of the gallery will grow, and shift, and become historicized, reflecting the affections of those who engage with it. After the allotted installation time, the camera obsucra will be removed and leaving the prints, therefore revealing the curated and archived landscape of the North Park Neighborhood. This new landscape will hopefully provoke considerations of erasure, narrative, and memory in the context of unceded and contested landscapes.
unceded (ʌnˈsiːdɪd) adjective
1. not ceded or handed over; unyielded; (ceded to yield or formally surrender to another)
Of Inheritance and Intent aims to create an opportunity to engage with the selectivity of memory, history, and the practice of archiving as they relate to colonial geographies. Not only does the Ministry of Casual Living continue to exist and work on unceded Indigenous Territories but furthermore the North Park space exists within its own contested history of having been evicted and then re-leased. My intention is to engage with the physicality and selectivity of archiving and memory, as well as the intentionality of relating to space within a colonized and contested context. Moreover, through the conversion of the gallery space into a living, reflective, and potentially photographic arena, I hope to engage with capacities of creative practices to challenge hegemonic understandings of histories and place, and to implicate community and engagement.
Megan K. Quigley is an emerging artist and aspiring curator learning and practicing in Lekwungen Territories (Victoria B.C.) Megan has lived and worked on Lekwungen homelands for seven years, having come from Istanbul, Turkey. Megan’s art practice engages with multidisciplinary approaches to form and meaning, working with craft practices in textile, ceramics, and photography, as well as performance art and new media. She is particularly interested in the tensions between the sacred and the archive, as a means of interrogating realities of inheritance in the contexts of neocolonialism. Situated within an immigrant settler context Megan is interested in investigating transnational and diasporic practices of reclamation and sovereignty, especially through the terms of marginalization. As such, her work also situates queer and multiracial methodologies and aesthetics. Through investigations into diasporic spaces she works towards discursive interventions in neocolonialism, and aspires to considerations of fickle spaces of resurgence and reclamation. Megan is also a member at the Ministry of Casual Living, and enjoys a culture of collaboration.
In-Person Event
