Performance

Power Play, January, 2005, (performance documentation) Blenheim, Ontario

Staged at a gas station in the heart an ethanol producing community in Southwestern Ontario, this performance began by making of hydrogen from a solar current. The hydrogen gas was used to power a small motor on-site. Unlike Robert Barry's Inert Gas Series - Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon the hydrogen gas is anything but inert. Though invisible the hydrogen becomes a catalyst, a driver to fuel  some other use. The process calls into question the need for fossil fuels when there are so many alternatives. It’s a small intervention that gets little attention as it is performed in a rural area. In this case the digital documentation serves as a catalyst for imaginative alternative possibilities. I was also questioning the notion of participation. In my view rural areas are almost completely excluded from contemporary art discussion. I am not positing a binary of city/countryside because this does not really exist - there are many transitional spaces, but it is something that still needs to be deconstructed. 

Urban Archivist, 2005, (performance documentation)  

This performance occurred on October 19, 2005 at 3PM on a .5 km stretch of Huron Church Road along side the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor Ontario. It consisted of collecting garbage for further study to determine its origin highlighting the damaging effects of commerce and trade. A list of 184, identifiable items, were catalogued with a devised nomenclature. The site was chosen because of its location as the apex of food trade between Canada and the United States with a truck passing, on average, every five seconds at North America’s busiest border crossing.