Coming up Soon
Messages from the Rocks - Stories of the Invisible
Artists Linda Duvall (SK) and Jillian McDonald (MB/NY) will animate a community-engaged artwork and residency in consultation with diverse members of the Regina community to share extraordinary encounters with unseen forces that animate the land.
DATES
Research residency: Summer 2021
Exhibition & public programs: June 2 - July 31, 2022
Art Gallery of Regina - 2420 Elphinstone Street, Regina SK.
Recent Projects
therewasandtherewasnot.art
Linda Duvall & Avi Ratnayake
There Was and There Was Not confronts and vanquishes the power of the omnipresent video conferencing platforms.
Linda Duvall & Avi Ratnayake’s www adventure sends users on a search through a network of connections by engaging with stories, sound and visual, and playing games.
The artists invite you to join them on the web as they traipse around informed failure / digital inertia.
Part of project - ‘Dear www’ presented by PAVED Arts & glór (Ireland)
October 29, 2021 to January 21, 2022
Curated by Moran Been-noon. Presented by PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, Canada) & glór (Co. Clare, Ireland)
Artists include: Martina Hynan & Monique Blom, Linda Duvall & Avi Ratnayake, & Martina Cleary & Janelle Pewapsconias.
We’re all tired of looking at each other through framed bunches of pixels. The years 2020 and 2021 made digital communication, and the internet, into our most “natural” way to see and hear each other. For Dear www. glór’s curator-in-residence Moran Been-noon invited six artists to respond to this reality. All the artwork offers a critical view, challenged by the technology, but at the same time acknowledges the road we’ve all walked and the value that can be found in digital channels.
This project brings together Irish artists based in the West, and Canadian artists based in Treaty 6 Territories – Saskatchewan, to pay tribute to digital art projects from the 20th century. Each Irish-Canadian pair created an artistic response to a historical digital art project, from a 2021 point of view.
PAVED Arts has joined forces with glór in Co. Clare, Ireland to co-present each digital project. glór is a multi-disciplinary arts centre located in the heart of Ennis. glór hosts local, national and international music, theatre, talks, dance, Film, comedy and visual arts events throughout the year.
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A Brief History of Nesting
in Arts Letters Press in instagram
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSCMhzYgxzY/
Join Linda Duvall as she explores diverse strategies and processes (avian and otherwise) for creating and reclaiming place in her project “A brief history of nesting”.
Linda Duvall is a visual artist, except when she isn’t. For much of 2020-2021, she stopped being an artist and just walked around a section of Treaty 6 prairie grassland in rural Saskatchewan for four seasons.
Linda started noticing many nests, particularly in the winter after the leaves had fallen.
The area where she walked was initially a treeless plot of land. Every year for the past 15 years, she has added a few thousand saplings and bare stick-roots. Slowly the sticks grew to the point of providing shelter for a few birds. And as more trees thrived, more nests were visible in the winter.
This is the resulting project.
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May 2021 - Norrnal Service will be Resumed as Soon as Possible, Artcore Gallery, Darby, UK (in person)
April 2021 -Tune in to Green”, Short Film Series, Exhibition Two, Austin, Texas (online)
February 2021 The (notso) Short Film Fest, Ely Center for the Arts, New Haven, Connecticut (online)
November 2020 Shed-1, Artcore Gallery, Darby, England (online)
2019 Saskatchewan Home Movies - Paved and VUCAVU, Saskatoon (online)
November 2019 - Books that Make Us Cry Residency and Exhibition with Alana Moore at BAM (Bridges Art Movement) 115 Third Avenue South, Saskatoon
August 2019 - POPLUCK Exhibition in the Pump House at River Landing, Saskatoon, SK
June 2019 - SPACEBODIES 111 Residency at Small Arms Inspection Building and Neilson Park Creative Center, Mississauga, ON
Nov 2018 - Hospitalfield Interdisciplinary Residency, Arbroath, Scotland
Nov 2018 - Social Art Summit, Sheffield, England
August 2018 - Exhibition Woven Together: The Influence of Sherri Smith at Crooked Tree Cultural Center, Petoskey, Michigan
August 2018 - EMMA International Collaboration at Big River, Saskatchewan
August 2018 - Murmur Land Studio Workshop, Saskatchewan
May 2018 - Biophony : Ayatana Artists' Research Program in Gatineau, PQ
May 2018 - The final Open Engagement Conference in New York, NY
Hospitalfield Residency
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In the Hole Residency
In the Hole was a short-term residency located in an earthen hole on Treaty 6 territory in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. Each resident spent 6 hours each day in this hole as a participant in this residency. Residents came for either one or two consecutive days.
This residency coincided with an exhibition at PAVED Arts Saskatoon.
This 6 foot deep hole was dug in 2012 with a 5 foot walkway circling a central mound of earth. This hole has been hollowed out of thick prairie grassland with roots dangling overhead. Since then this space has been subject to ongoing weather events like rain, snow, hail and wind. Various transformations have occurred due to gopher and swallow incursions, and larger animals like deer, foxes, skunks and coyotes that discovered this sheltered space.
A space such as this hole can be approached from the perspective of the Anthropocene and ecology, spirituality and burials, secrecy or revelations, history and agriculture, and metaphor and symbol. This land is especially significant in terms of the history of Saskatchewan since there is no evidence that it has ever been tilled.
The premise of this residency was that new knowledge comes from the concentrated interaction of people with varying knowledge bases and perspectives.
This hole in the ground became a site for conversation, contemplation, reading out loud, making sounds, or being silent. This is also about duration, about spending extended blocks of time surrounded by earth and sky, and one other person
The Remai Modern presented
The Unacknowledged
Saskatoon Symphony 408 20th Street West, Saskatoon
The Unacknowledged is an ongoing, multi-faceted project by Linda Duvall that focuses on deceased individuals whose bodies have gone unclaimed. Due to the person’s situation at the time of death, there is no funeral, no obituary, and no celebration of life. While it can be easy to make assumptions about the circumstances and decisions that lead to this, the reasons are complex and each story is unique. The Unacknowledged allows for the recognition of the lives and deaths of these anonymous men and women, who are a vital part of our families and our communities.
For this presentation of The Unacknowledged, Duvall has been in dialog with different communities and faith groups about how they approach death. These ceremonies, rituals, music, and food customs will be incorporated into a commemoration event featuring diverse participants, each honoring an unclaimed person. While these gestures reflect the background and personal beliefs of the participants, together they reflect on our shared social bonds and the vulnerability and fragility of all lives. By naming the unclaimed in a shared public context, The Unacknowledged recognizes that there are people in our community without family supports, either through estrangement, geographical distance, containment in institutions, and other complicated situations.
For an earlier component of the project, Duvall worked with collaborators from across Canada—including theologians, poets, lawyers, inmates, filmmakers, health care workers, and street involved women—to produce commemorative banners for over 30 unclaimed individuals.
A selection of these were displayed from June 21 - July 3, 2016
http://remaimodern.org/pre-launch-programs/projects/linda-duvall-unacknowledged
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"Duvall’s work is as much about sociology and anthropology as it is about art. She takes, however, the role of ‘rebel sociologist’ … her interest is less in scientific methodology than in constructing work that fascinates in its final presentation."
Linda Jansma 'Sanctioned Deception' in catalogue Linda Duvall Enough White Lies 2005
"Linda Duvall engineers temporary relationships between strangers. Her social engagement art works bring people together to share stories across divides of culture, class and region. She uses artifice to encourage authenticity. These initially awkward meetings soon melt barriers to reveal a common humanity. The projects are fuelled by a faith in the healing properties of purposeless dialogue. Success is measured by feelings of quality engagement rather than the achievement of some end. The work is goalless but not guileless. The encounters are not ephemeral; Duvall records some of the sessions, others can be eavesdropped, so we can marvel at the richness of interpersonal discourse."
David Garneau 'Engaging Strangers' in catalogue Linda Duvall Where were the Mothers? 2009
