Hannah & I did an artist project for the Spring issue of C Magazine.

Accompanied by text “Summerhill, Revised: Learning in/as Marginalia” by Stephanie Springgay.

Ariana Jacob and I are organizing an event tomorrow called the Conference of Conferences.

Conference of Conferences is a day long symposium of curated selections from recent art & theory conferences around the world. Recordings of lectures, podcasts & panels will be re-presented to conference participants, and will be followed by local respondents and group discussions. Conference of Conferences is a focused site for generating local dialogue about events & issues in recent global public art discourse.

Conference of Conferences will take place from 10am – 6:00pm Saturday February 26th at Fieldwork, at the corner of SW Jefferson St & SW 11th Ave in Portland, OR.

Hannah and I just donated this limited edition keychain to the access gallery art auction:

It could be yours, and it comes with a 1976 Chevy Malibu Classic.

Bidding starts at $600.

If you happen to be in Vancouver, BC, Hannah and I have a show up at Access Gallery (437 West Hastings St) until January 28.

Summerhill, Revised is the culmination of work completed by Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed in collaboration with art teacher education candidates* and the A/r/tography** research collective during a three-week residency in the Teacher Education Program at the University of British Columbia.

The project employed 26 copies of A.S. Neill’s controversial text Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, which chronicles the unorthodox opinions of Scottish educator Alexander Sutherland Neill on topics ranging from needlework to nudity. Reed and Jickling took this book as a guide for various modes of learning; it became a conversation starter, a scholarly manual, a readymade sculpture and a fieldtrip guide.

A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School (founded in 1921, and still running) operates similarly to many art education programs today, where self-directed and intrinsically-motivated pupils choose their own research topics and modes of expression. Summerhill’s doctrine of individualism, free will and self-regulation is in many ways analogous to perceptions of the contemporary artist figure and emerging ideals of self-directed art education.

Each teacher candidate was given a copy of Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing and encouraged to write in the margins, draw on the pages and create any kind of handmade revision to the text. It is the assembly of these modified pages and the recollection of the conversations and experiences of the experiment that form Summerhill, Revised.

This exhibition was produced through support from the Becoming Pedagogical SSHRC funded research project, whose aim is to study how A/r/tography might be uniquely situated to enact, develop and problematize becoming pedagogical in a teacher education program.

*Anna Ryoo, Stanna Cermakova, Claire Williams, Esther Shoop, Gillian Smith, Heather Toomer, Jamie Smith, Jessica Millikan, Joanna Jedrzejcyk, Jonathan Lorne, Judy Leung, Julia Lim, Kay Pham, Kt Zydek, Landon Shantz, Linda Chen, Linna Song, Lyndsey Gantert, Mark Mitchell, Mehran Modarres, Peter Shin, Roxanne Ganon, Safi Arnold, Shanaaz Mackay, Shirley Chan and Zac Pinette.

**Rita Irwin, Donal O Donoghue, Stephanie Springgay, Adrienne Boulton-Funke, Natalie LeBlanc, Heidi May and Valerie Triggs.

For more information, please visit www.accessgallery.ca, or contact access@vaarc.ca

I have a short essay included in this publication, produced by Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen:

From the editors:

These essays are adapted from four lectures delivered inside Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s exhibition, “The Classroom,” at PDX Contemporary Art gallery, in Portland, Ore., during July of 2010. The exhibition featured a collection of pedagogical props which the lecturers — Anne Marie Oliver, Sean Regan, Helen Reed, and Barry Sanders — used, or not, in their talks. A Classroom Reader is the physical trace of those public events: a meditation on education through the subjects of mediology, metaphor, gift-giving, transmission, tradition, death, and the imagination. It features an introduction by the artists and a dozen B/W images of instructional illustrations drawn by each of the four speakers.

Get a copy here.

For the last three weeks my partner Hannah and I have been artists-in-residence with the A/R/Tography Research Collective in the teacher education program at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver.

We were invited to work with a group of teacher candidates on a number of projects.

One of the projects was a revised Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing by A.S. Neil, annotated by the teacher candidates.

The revised book will launch in January at Access Gallery in Vancouver, BC. Date TBA.

I’m participating in a group exhibition in Toronto this fall, curated by Rose Bouthillier and featuring work by myself, Althea Thauberger and Lars Laumann.

From Prefix:

“To Be Real,” a group exhibition featuring three internationally emerging artists who investigate collaborative, pseudo-ethnographic image making in contemporary photography and video. The subjects of the works are removed from the “real world” in formal, psychological, and physical ways. This isolation encourages a tentative, autonomous selfhood, constructed through narrative, gestures, and symbolism. Working between collaboration and direction, each artist takes on the role of participant–observer: achieving closeness with subjects, while at the same time distancing them through the structural conventions of language and images.”

A review of the show by David Balzar can be found here.

In the latest issue of Front Magazine I interview artist Keith Langergraber about his recent show at The Western Front, his interest in science fiction and the intersections of fan culture & contemporary art.

The fall 2010 issue of Front Magazine explores semi-fame, niche popularity, local heroes, fan culture, obsession and adoration.

Front Magazine is published quarterly by the Western Front Society in Vancouver, British Columbia.

- Margaret Atwood

“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
— Woody Allen