Given the now-innumerable international exhibitions and festivals taking place all year round and all across the globe, actors of the contemporary art scene are constantly on the move from one event to the next, traveling the world yet rarely having the opportunity to actually exit the art world. With air travel and the virtual realm of cyberspace, borders and geography are collapsed, disappearing from our collective art world memory. Seeking to create an alternate experience, artists (and cyclists) Petra Chevrier and Cheryl Rondeau will realize an intervention that crosses and intersects both the art world and the everyday, at a rare moment (once every ten years), under a tight timeline (within approximately ten days), covering roughly 1,600 km, by human-powered transportation, the bicycle. The tour will start 8 June 2007 in Venice with the duo crossing the finish-line 19 June 2007 in Münster < stopping in Basel and Kassel, among many other towns, along the way. While seeing the art will be a component of the tour, the central proposition is to explore the effect of physically ricocheting off of art events and the surrounding landscape and exploring the manner this alters body, perception and interpretation of the events.
Loaded with maps, cameras, phones and notebooks, and outfitted in limited edition, artist-designed cycling jerseys, Chevrier and Rondeau will endeavour to meticulously log their trouvailles and map out their parcours. The Situationists were known to use walkie-talkies on their dérives. Similarly, the artists will exploit today's technology. Daily activities will involve collecting media fragments from the expositions and tour, using digital video and time-lapse imagery to map the geography of the experience and record the multiplicity of interstitial spaces between these four mega art happenings. Maintaining a record of the borders crossed and the landscapes traversed; while dealing with the elements Ð the Alps and other mountain ranges that happen to be in the way Ð and the punishing fatigue that is at the core of long-distance cycling. Physical endurance will form a central theme of the exploration. The use of the body in the duo's displacement is central to the project - the body is a deeply integrated and necessary part of the physical experience of the landscape and art events - literally bringing the project to life.
A virtual component will be hosted by Women's Art Resource Centre (WARC). This project will be a feature of their redeveloped World Wide WARC interactive web site. WARC will host daily presentations and screenings of newly uploaded material, and audience members will have access online where they can interact, respond while reviewing detailed maps of the planned routes, along with other preparatory material.
Detailed route coordinates and our daily activities will be widely advertised and promoted in Europe and Canada, thus encouraging cycling and art enthusiasts, and the general public, to join the peloton whether physically or virtually.
A multi-media exhibition is scheduled for 2008 at WARC and will explore several intersecting themes that emerge from the intervention, including the nature of evolution in individual/virtual cartographies and the interplay of liminal spaces in contemporary culture and art.
Petra Chevrier is a designer and multi-media artist specializing in the application of old and new technologies in installations and other site-specific media works. In the past, she has worked as the Executive Director of the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, as Senior Project Manager at Bruce Mau Design, and as graphic designer for the launch of Prefix Photo magazine, as well as for many other book and magazine projects. Her roots are in the physical sciences, having completed a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Toronto in 1988, and worked as exhibit scientist and developer for the Ontario Science Centre until 1990. She has been an avid long-distance cyclist since 1997.
Cheryl Rondeau studied photography and video at the Ontario College of Art (Toronto) and has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social/Cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto. Her work has been included in exhibitions and festivals internationally including Mediawave International Festival of Visual Arts (Gyor, Hungary), Scope Art Fair (New York City) and Museum of Modern Art (Bogota, Colombia). Rondeau is co-founder (with Mercedes Cueto and Darlene Naponse) of the Elements Collective. Rondeau has been an avid cyclist since 1990 and has participated in races both in Canada and the United States.
|