Blackwood Gallery
presents
the fourth edition
of
DOOR
TO
DOOR

April 23 to April 29, 2012

Curated by Christof Migone
With Gina Badger and Tazeen Qayyum

Door to Door is an exhibition home delivery service. A cumulation of instant sites. An exhibition of moments. We are dislocating the gallery through a spatial and temporal splintering process. It is here and there, and there, and there, ... The starting premise for this itinerant series is to present work that delivers itself to you. In other words, if you cannot come to the gallery, the gallery will come to you.

For more information on the project, please click here.

About the projects

Gina Badger - Temagami Crescent (2012)

Where are we? Centered on one residential suburban street in Mississauga, Ontario, this postcard series presents five possible answers to this question. Temagami Crescent's name, like that of so many other streets around it, maps one Indigenous reality—in this case, Temagami First Nation on Bear Island, Ontario—onto another—Mississauga First Nation—managing to obscure the Indigenous character of both in the process. Working against this naturalizing tendency, this project maps a series of five overlapping regions, defined by characteristics such as present-day First Nations communities, watersheds, treaties, correctional facilities, plant species and etymology. The maps are delivered as postcards, one a day for a week, to each household on Temagami Crescent, and are posted simultaneously on the artist's website, ginabadger.ca. An illustrated practice of learning the land, this project has been developed for a largely non-Indigenous audience by an artist who is the descendent of settlers in Treaty 6 territory, in present-day Alberta.

Tazeen Qayyum – Threading Encounters (2012)
An interactive performance project that delves into the significance of a simple act of shaping eyebrows, and the impact it has on the daily routine of Mississauga households. The women who participate in the project will take some time out from their regular chores, and I will observe how they experience the meaningful and productive results of such an encounter.

In Threading Encounters I offer randomly selected women to invite me to their house for the purpose of getting their eyebrows shaped and threaded by me. Upon meeting a complete stranger in the privacy of their home, I intend to examine the dynamics of 'engagement' and the quality of a spontaneous conversation between unknown individuals during an intimate and intrusive act.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), the founding co-director of Quality of Life Research Institute, called the concept of engagement 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience', which he defined as a state in which a subject becomes totally absorbed in an activity; a state of focused attention characterized by decreased self-consciousness and time awareness.

The Threading Encounter begins at the very moment when a willing participant receives my project flyer and makes a call to set an appointment, inviting me to their home. Once there, together we establish a suitable space, select a chair, improvise available lighting, and get to know each other. During the threading activity, which has its own set of distinct gestural and physical dynamics, I initiate a conversation that evokes curiosity, stimulates memory, and provides opportunities to hear personal stories and make friends, all the while both of us are completely engaged in the activity.

Since threading in the Greater Toronto Area is the preferred method of removing facial hair by the women of South Asian origin, the project also examines the relevance of minority identity politics, the multi-layered collective memories and expressions of communities within the diversity of Canada. Finding a salon offering this service is amongst the first things an immigrant South Asian woman looks for in any new land. I see this act as a subtle yet strong cultural expression of adhering to previous conditioning and the small pleasures found in familiarity.

Threading Encounters is documented through photographs taken at participating households as well as a log journal, documenting the flyer distribution, phone calls, appointments made, and the visit itself.

About the artists

Gina Badger is an artist and writer working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation. Her favoured research methods include listening, walking, eating and drinking. She has presented work internationally at venues including The Kitchen (NYC); LACMA (Los Angeles); Issue Project Room (NYC); and the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), and has recently published in the journals No More Potlucks, Scapegoat and Public, and in the books Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research (Walther Konig) and Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices (YYZ). Currently living and working in Toronto, Badger holds an M.S. in Visual Studies from MIT. A collaborator at heart, Gina is a member of the Montreal-based Artivistic Collective, and is currently the editorial director of FUSE Magazine.

Tazeen Qayyum is a contemporary miniature painter who received her BFA in Visual Arts from the National College of Arts Lahore, Pakistan in 1996. Her work has been shown internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, some of which include ' The Veiled' at the Textile Museum of Canada, 'The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan 1990 -2010', Mohatta Palace Museum, Pakistan, 'Urban Myths & Modern Fables', University of Sydney, Australia and UTSC, Toronto, 'A Thousand and One Days: The Art of Pakistani Women Miniaturists' at the Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii, 'JAALA Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Japan, 'Homecoming', at the National Gallery of Pakistan and 'CodeLive Metro' at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Her work has received several critical reviews including in The New York Times (2009) and The Globe and Mail (2011).

Generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Blackwood Gallery
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd. N.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
www.blackwoodgallery.ca
blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca
905.828.3789