Weird Woods is an installation and 16mm eco-processed film.

Spirale En Bois is a 20’ x 20’ installation of an ascending spiral wood-pile. This sculpture was built as a durational performance and interactive artwork for the International Symposium of Contemporary Art Baie-Saint-Paul in 2019. Visitors to the open studio were engaged in conversations around personal history with firewood as a survival source, extraction industry, forestry practices, and feminism.

All wood was sourced locally, and donated back to local community as firewood to heat their homes.

I imagined John Graves Simcoe and Henry Dundas’ personal relationship through a series of correspondence I generated based on historical research at the University of Toronto Thomas Fischer Rare Books Library. This work culminated in a performance at the library, dialoguing my generated letters and watercolors (attributed to Elizabeth Simcoe) with historical artifacts such as books, dog hair, and hand-drawn maps. Highlighting the ongoing mechanics of colonial violence in southern Ontario, the work drew into question the practice of honoring a known bigot and opportunist by portraying him as such through the constructed narrative of personal correspondence.

Revolution Revolution

Revolution Revolution is performance and video work by Gillian Dykeman that activates the latent radical potential of the human energy amassed through engaging fitness. Operating as a home stationary bike workout, Revolution Revolution delivers fitness instruction in tandem with revolutionary rhetoric. Utopia is latent within the everyday, so how do we move from sliding over its radical possibilities and instead find a way to activate it? What is the energy of revolution? How do we better engineer our energetic outputs to formulate collective ways of being out of a culture that glorifies individualism …to radically reimagine what it is we’re doing with our lives?  Our life-force? Our love? See more on Vimeo and HERE

Revolution Revolution has been presented over dozen times as either a exercise-bike or aerobics based performance both live and as video installations. The performances include fitness instruction and revolutionary rhetoric, usually tailored to a given location or exhibition theme. Below is the documentation from the development and presentation of this work at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

I did an independent residency in November and December of 2017 at the Banff Centre, where I developed Revolution Revolution work substantially. I made a large backdrop painting 7′ x 12′ for the video version of this work.  It’s a watercolour on canvas. At this time, the major focus of my revolutionary rhetoric was on the needs of contemporary workers; the Precariat in particular.

Thanks again to artsnb.

I read The Dharma Bums almost every year; perhaps every two. The first time I read it, it opened me up. The next time, I still enjoyed it, but my feminist critique started coming in. It remains compelling, but I can’t help thinking about the circumstances surrounding the text, and the spaces/left out parts within it. My favourite part is the mountain climb; my favourite part is the solo ranger station work; my favourite part is thinking about what it felt like.

I’ve re-read a few of my other heroic authors, thinking about their stories – do we have any non-male protagonists enjoying this kind of agency and fluidity in the world? On The Road, similarly. Marylou and Camille – I think about them. All my favourite early and mid 20th century auto-fictions are haunted by interesting women. Sidelined as supporting actors; diminished as such, but clearly fascinating humans. Could we tell their stories? Is there the possibility of a femme/non-binary/trans-man drifting across America on the knife edge of poverty, getting by on their good looks, enmeshing themselves with the landscape and spirituality of America for all time? At least Jack was queer; I don’t know how much was self-censored and how much was obscured by publishers. When I drive around America, I think about Jack; especially moving across in either direction. In Boulder I wonder about Ginsberg. Was the Trident open while he made this place? I went there, had a coffee, and felt at home; it’s so similar to its sister in Halifax. I imagined a golden thread running down into the Earth below Boulder and then back up again under Halifax. The children of the American Buddhists who moved to Nova Scotia en masse call themselves the Dharma Brats; I term I learned long before reading Dharma Bums.

What would those adventures look like if I had them? Again, I’ve got enormous amounts of privilege; no right to claim “Bum”, no right to romanticise poverty when it is purely optional. I can get a job anywhere, I’ve always been able to. I couldn’t get a lease on an apartment when I was 18; nobody in Kelowna wanted to rent to a girl and her boyfriend and their two dude friends. I never thought to ask my 20 year old boyfriend to make those calls. I filled three months with rapid consumption of important life lessons, and then took the train home to live with my parents again.

I’m safe most of the time; but not as much as Jack enjoyed in the 1950s. That ease. We need to live in a world where that ease which is really a birthright is something enjoyed by all.

Kids have such an innate sense of Justice. They know instinctively when things aren’t exactly fair, and they will call out the wielder of power / judgement (teacher, parent, older kid) to try and set things back into balance. I still have that; as strong as a little kid I have it. I want things to be fair; I feel strongly that they are out of balance when they are not fair; “that’s just the way it is – roll with it”; isn’t a good enough answer for me. I’ve become more pragmatic, but deploying pragmatism is superficial; I know it’s not how I really feel. I want maximum fairness. Agency; I am an artist because it’s my fastest and best access point to agency. Everyone should be an artist; everyone should feel they have the creative tools to rub up against the edges that might otherwise hem them in – rules of propriety, civic bylaws, economic rules, citizenship, rules of gender. Wherever boundaries are most rigid they are most vulnerable to cracks; artists are trained to get their fingers in there; I want to talk to artists who pry those boundaries back a little; artists who conflate things, bother containment, artists who are double agents. Artists who point out contradictions and sway on a trapeze between them, making space, making room for fairness; (sometimes on the nose, sometimes subversively). Jack made a little room for me; I’d say it’s about 10’ x 10’. The woman-shaped space in his literature is small, but could be radically inhabited, filled until it’s forced to expand. Stretched to accommodate the largesse of experience that isn’t strictly white and male. Re-reading The Dharma Bums has helped me to find it; to see that light coming through. Repetition gives us insight into the variations, the cracks, the missing parts of the story.

I’m calling for that life to be lived. I’m calling for that book to be written and celebrated. We need and hunger for it to define a generation; this generation.

x posted on affinities blog

*Number subject to depending on friends willingness to participate / actually check their facebook messages.

REVOLUTION REVOLUTION harnesses the amazing energies generated by a roomful of people focusing together on a demanding task. This performance activates the latent radical potential of the human energy amassed through engaging fitness. Operating as a stationary bike workout and fitness movement (complete with its own posters, costumes, and YouTube home fitness videos), Revolution Revolution delivers fitness instruction in tandem with revolutionary rhetoric. Utopia is latent within the everyday, so how do we move from sliding over its radical possibilities and instead find a way to activate it? What is the energy of revolution? How do we better engineer our energetic outputs to formulate collective ways of being out of a culture that glorifies individualism …to radically reimagine what it is we’re doing with our lives?  Our life-force? Our love? 

 Thanks so much to artsnb for supporting this new project.

I had an exhibition of this work at Saint Mary’s University Gallery in the summer of 2017. It was shown in tandem with AgitProp: Soviet Propaganda 1905-1945; an exhibition of Soviet Poster Art.

Dispatches from the Future Feminist Utopia is a work revisiting major earthworks and recasting them as abandoned alien technology. Feminists in the future have appropriated these devices (the earthworks) to bring forth the feminist utopia.The narrative voice (spoken as the moon) is polyvocal and decentred through multiple genders and accents. This work – an installation of sculptures and watercolour schematic drawings, and videos – describe how to activate the earthwork devices to bring on the feminist utopia now. The works compel the dispatch recipients to find their own iteration of this possibility.

Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future from Gillian Dykeman on Vimeo.