Resounding Peripheries: Sound Art Across Regional Ontario
Saturday August 26, 2023
Presented live in London Ontario and across various platforms online
LOMAA’s Resounding Peripheries: Sound Art Across Regional Ontario re-envisions London’s recent designation as a UNESCO city of music. Echoing this desire to look beyond conventional sites of cultural production, this series explores alternative sonic possibilities from our regional area as a well as others within the province. Serving as a celebration of practices hard-hit by the global pandemic, Resounding Peripheries provides an exciting opportunity for practitioners to reconnect with audiences and present new works that foreground the vitality of off-centre praxis.
Championing innovative and diverse approaches to contemporary sound art, LOMAA has invited five artists whose cutting-edge practices engage the nexus of sound art and performance, expanded sonic interactivity, sound aesthetics, and embodied listening. Through a series of live performances, in-person installations, and hybrid online presentations the works collectively underscore the significance of relationality. Overall, Resounding Peripheries resonates that the contributions of regional Ontario media practitioners are crucial in paving the future of sonic arts within Canada.
Sheri Osden Nault
Sharing relationships to Deshkan Ziibi (and others)
Museum London’s back lawns (Behind 421 Ridout St N)
In Partnership with Museum London Saturday August 26, 2023 11am EDT
River Walk
Recorded audio
Originally presented on Wednesday July 26, 2023
Download River Walk Here
Accessibility: While imagined and recorded as audio, this work is also available in transcript form as both a physical or digital zine. Physical copies available at Print Pop Vendor Market during the day. Online components are available for on-demand access.
Notes From The Artists
Recorded over several walks along the Deshkan Ziibing or Antler River (colonially referred to as the Thames in London, Ontario), Visiting Deshkan Ziibi invites listeners to walk alongside the river ‘with’ the artist. Crossing the temporalities and physical locations of multiple visits, Nault utilizes the current ease of access to streaming or downloading audio on personal devices to share stories, reflections, and observations, as though they were visiting the river alongside listeners. The artist’s relationship to other beings as relatives and teachers with enmeshed lives and futures, gently invites those visiting Deshkan Ziibi with them to reflect on the river, the land, and relationships to both human and non-human beings.
Sheri Osden Nault is a Two-Spirit Michif artist, community activist, and Assistant Professor at the Western University. They utilize sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes to consider embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous Futurist framework.
Sheri currently lives and creates near the Deshkan Ziibing, on the lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapéwak, and Chonnonton Nations, also known as ‘London, Ontario.’ They are colonially displaced Michif of the Charette, Bélanger, and Nault families. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, are a tattoo practitioner within the Indigenous Tattoo Revival movement in so-called Canada, and run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
Czarina Mendoza
Landmarks of Endurance
Museum London’s Lecture Theatre (421 Ridout St N)
In Partnership with Museum London
Saturday August 26, 2023 12:30pm EDT
Accessibility: Museum London is committed to accessibility for all visitors. There are two accessible parking spaces at the main entrance, a ground-level main entrance with automated doors, an elevator, accessible washrooms, and a complimentary transport chair.
Notes From The Artists
Czarina Mendoza performs a series of compositions that incorporate constructed tape-loops of found LINGUAPHONE language cassettes. Both rehearsed and improvised she explores the act of language acquisition and erasure - competing with sonic elements of droning, vocal response and field recordings that reinforce both a dominance and chase of untraceable sounds. She references modes of preservation and creates a sound collage of fragmented self-hood amongst the tension of domestic noise memories.
Czarina Mendoza (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Windsor, ON. Born and raised in central Alberta, the rural landscape alongside her family’s settlement from the UK and Philippines deepened her interest around the construction of identity, looking specifically into what it means to preserve and reciprocate cultural legacy. Her material-based practice repurposes found objects and mass consumer goods that investigate the mediation of transnational ties. As a collector she documents through audio recordings, objects, black and white film photography, and ephemera building a personal archive as both reference and material for her work. The results are hybridized artifacts that seem fractured, yet negotiate both a recalled and constructed time and space.
She is currently enrolled at Wayne State University (Detroit) studying her Masters in Information Sciences specializing in archiving and obsolescent formats. In 2022, as the TD Curatorial Fellow, Mendoza curated a solo show and film screening of Shelley Niro’s work titled Boundless at Art Windsor-Essex. She sits on the Regional Committee of Media City Film Festival. Mendoza currently hosts an experimental radio program called Soft Reduction on CJAM 99.1 broadcasting crossborder in Windsor-Detroit and she is ¼ of the synth-pop band Olinda.
Debbie Ebanks Schlums
Dead and Wake
Installation at Satellite Project Space (121 Dundas St)
In Partnership with Satellite Project Space
Saturday August 26, 2023 12 to 5pm EDT
Accessibility: The physical location is at street-level with no stairs or barriers for entry. Vibratactile transmitters will be available to translate sound into feeling for d/Deaf and hard of hearing individuals thanks to VibraFusionLab.
Notes From The Artists
Consenting not to be a single being, I explore the intersections of Black/Caribbean diasporic consciousness, a state of being in and across several locations at once; time periods, cultures and generations in the same moment. In this context, the construction of my own identity is necessarily an ongoing investigation. Dead and Wake catalyzes field recordings to compose sounds and memories from the places where I live on Turtle Island and where my ancestors are from in Jamaica: waves, birds, insects, music. Alongside these sounds, is the sound of my great uncle, Mas Guy, teaching me about his practice of making shelter from the land; a knowledge derived during the time of enslavement and passed on through generations.
Belonging is
Not Static
A riddim
Impossible to possess.
Somewhere Sometime
Between dreaming and consciousness
Drifting on the edge of
Dead and Wake
Debbie Ebanks Schlums is multidisciplinary artist, Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. She has worked nationally and internationally on social practice projects addressing migration, materiality, and her Black/Chinese Caribbean identity. Exhibitions include the Mitchell Gallery, MacEwan University; the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery and the Museum of Dufferin; and collectively with the Odeimin Runners art collective, at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Nuit Blanche and Images Festival. Debbie is a recipient of numerous arts awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Art Council, Dufferin Arts Council, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, California College of the Arts Impact Award, and the Susan and John Hunkin Award in Fine Arts.
Eeva Siivonen
We are not lost from us
Installation at 140 Dundas St
Saturday August 26, 2023 12 to 5pm EDT
Accessibility: The physical location is at street-level with no stairs or barriers for entry.
Notes From The Artists
We are not lost from us is a multi-channel sound and moving image installation that activates a dormant commercial space at 140 Dundas St in downtown London. It reimagines the empty space as a theatrical panorama scene; a lush uncanny landscape inhabited by the various occupants that thrive in the overlooked nooks of the city’s urban environment. Its large-scale video projections and scattered sources of sound intersect with the architectural features of the space, blurring the boundaries between the imaginary landscape and the urban space it is situated within.
Eeva Siivonen’s moving image practice engages with strategies of documentary, essay, and found footage film practices and employs these strategies to construct immersive moving image installations and single-channel works. Her practice describes subjective experience in ways that resist separation between self and other, interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, and living and nonliving. The ethos of her practice is to create space for empathy by embracing the impossibility of gaining knowledge of ourselves and others, and our place in the world.
Her work has been shown internationally at various film festivals and gallery exhibitions. Recent screenings include San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Festival, DOBRA International Festival of Experimental Cinema in Rio de Janeiro, and Transient Visions Festival of Moving Image in Johnson City, NY. She has also received multiple international artist residency fellowships, including Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, Goetemann Artist Residency in Gloucester Massachusetts, Terra Foundation in Giverny, France, and Munson Arts Institute in Utica, NY. She currently resides in London, Ontario.
Anahí González
from here to there; from there to here
Postcards found throughout London and at the Print Pop Vendor Market for Online viewing
Saturday August 26, 2023
Accessibility: Available online and on postcards throughout London and at LOMAA’s Print Pop Vendor Market table
Notes From The Artists
from here to there; from there to here (2019-2023), engages with themes around movement between Mexico and Canada through the train. Thinking about the train carts as containers of labour, the piece critiques practices of commerce favouring products over people: free product flow, restricted immigration. Using visual and sound railway cues, González connects both countries to emphasize the inadvertent power of Canadian imperialism over Mexico concerning human labour.
Anahí González (she/her) is a Mexican photographer based in London, ON. Her practice explores visual narratives about Mexican labour for/within Canada to decenter the United States narrative concerning Mexican migration. She is a Research Associate of The Creative Food Research Collaboratory, contributor editor of The Embassy Cultural House, and an Art and Visual Culture Ph.D. candidate at Western University. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings in Mexico, Canada, Norway, Spain, and France.