Exhibition: March 14 – May 9, 2014
Reception : March 14th, 5:30 to 7:30
See information on tours below.
The City of Saint John Art Gallery at the Saint John Arts Centre
This spring, Third Space is bringing back Montreal-based artist Victoria Stanton, in a continuation of her interactive project, This City, My Love (mapping the unspectacular in Saint John). A year ago Victoria travelled to Saint John and New Brunswick for the first time. During a month long residency here, Victoria met with Saint Johners and visited sites that held meaning to them. This series of one on one meetings and ‘site seeing’ was an intensely rich and complex experience. “I encountered this city through the eyes of the locals, stepping into another world while discovering the myriad stories that make up the multiple invisible histories of Saint John and those that live here,” says Victoria.
In the second stage – for Third Space’s upcoming exhibition –Victoria is returning to Saint John to construct an unconventional map of human encounters. Through photography, field notes, drawings, collected artefacts and film, the exhibition recalls her visits, and reconstitutes this city out of the memories that were recounted to her. In a sense these have now become her memories as the stories she heard in conjunction with each site, and person, now become part of an album that uncovers the varied histories and identities that contribute to the rich tapestry that is Saint John.
Victoria’s exhibit will be located at the City of Saint John Gallery, in the SJ Arts Centre and runs from March 14th to May 9th.
Tours of Invisible Saint John with Peter Josselyn and Victoria Stanton will be held:
Saturday March 15
1:00 – 2:15pm
2:30 – 3:45pm
7:30 – 8:45pm
Sunday March 16
2:30 – 3:45pm
4:00 – 5:15pm
Space is limited – for more information and to reserve your spot please contact Third Space Gallery: tiersespace (at) gmail.com
About Victoria Stanton:
Victoria Stanton (Montreal, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist working with live action, human interaction, video, film, photo, drawing, and writing. Continually exploring within such diverse media, while the outward results of her practice manifest in a multiplicity of forms, performance is the unifying central focus and invariable core of her research. Her time-based work includes performance for stage, performance for the camera, actions in public spaces, and one-on-one encounters in intimate contexts. Whether participatory, durational, task-based or audio-visual, her work is an investigation into the ability (and the desire) to hold a space, to appropriate and disrupt the quotidian, to create spontaneous intimacy, to tread vulnerability. Investing a performative presence and consciousness within multiple spaces / times, she continuously underscores the complex aspects of “transaction” and the possibility for transformation.
Stanton has presented exhibitions, performances, interventions, and films/videos in Canada, the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Australia, Japan and Mexico. Her creative and critical writings have been published in Canadian and American anthologies and art/literary/lifestyle magazines, with one of her articles garnering a finalist position for the Prix de la SODEP in March 2013. She is the co-author with Vincent Tinguely of Impure: Reinventing the Word (conundrum press, 2001) and is currently working on a new book with the TouVA Collective (comprised of Anne Bérubé, Sylvie Tourangeau and Stanton) developing salient notions on how performance is practiced and on the question of “the performative”.
Featured Image: Victoria Stanton, This City, My Love, 2014