Wednesday October 29th, 3-5pm, SBSG 3323
In the last 50 years, the circumpolar world has moved from the periphery to the center of international policy and public culture. This presentation explores how art and anthropology can work in parallel to create visual and textual representations that ‘picture the north’ as heterogeneous, complex, and unfolding rather than reproducing polarising views of the arctic as a place of extreme fragility or boundless opportunity. It describes a multimodal installation, Mackenzie Place, that is the outcome of a decade-long engagement between an artist (Jackson) and an anthropologist (Bell). Mackenzie Place is a series of still and moving images that provide an in-depth study of a lone high-rise residential tower in Hay River, Northwest Territories – a multi-ethnic town north of the 60th parallel in Canada. We use the term “parallel play” to describe our method of working alongside each other in generative, but not necessarily collaborative, ways. Rather than attempting to have our disciplinary, personal, and aesthetic commitments converge into a coherent singular effort, we maintained proximity around a shared visual/ethnographic anchor to explore what different forms of media may ‘say’, or make say-able, about northern life worlds.
The event will begin at 3:00pm with a visit with Jackson to the Mackenzie Place multi-channel film installation on view in the SBSG 3rd floor lobby (3100) October 29 – November 5. At 3:30pm we proceed to SBSG 3323 for Jackson and Bell’s colloquium presentation.
INSTALLATION
Mackenzie Place
Mackenzie Place is a multi-channel time-lapse film shot from the roof of the seventeen-story tower that presides over the center of Hay River (Xátł’odehchee) in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Derived from nearly one million still images captured over five years, the film brings to life a panorama of inexorably evolving environments and activities across all four seasons, sometimes beautiful, sometimes banal. Anthropologist Lindsay Bell, a former resident of Hay River, introduced artist Jesse Colin Jackson to the town’s “High Rise,” a lone concrete tower built in 1975 far from its typical urban home. In 2013, they began a research-creation collaboration focused on this town and its tower. Mackenzie Place engages the viewer in what the building sees, how it is seen, and the lives lived within its walls. Voices reading aloud from Lindsay’s book Under Pressure: Diamond Mining and Everyday Life in Northern Canada tell the building’s story and the stories of those who have made it their home. Mackenzie Place explores the legacies of colonialism through an unlikely lens, by holding the viewer’s attention on the structures of development and how people live within them.
Contact: Kim Fortun, kfortun@uci.edu