Image courtesy of Emily DiCarlo.

Shuttle Bus pickup/drop off time: Departing at 10:30 am to the VAC, returning to Toronto at 5:00 pm.
Shuttle Bus pickup/drop off location: Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St., Toronto, ON, M5V 2R2
Register for shuttle bus and workshops here

The Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (VAC) invites the public for a day of free workshops, film screenings and exhibition viewings on Saturday, August 27 from 12 – 5 pm. Mark Clintberg, Emily DiCarlo, and Miles Rufelds return to the VAC to culminate Sahar Te’s Incubator exhibition project with an in-person workshop series related to the fantastic potential of mushrooms. Visitors are welcome to view the VAC’s summer exhibition Sutures by Eve Tagny + Emii Alrai. A free shuttle bus will depart Toronto at 10:30 am to bring out-of-town visitors to the VAC for the day’s events. Free registration is required for the shuttle bus and Incubator workshops.

Incubator Workshop Series:
Sahar Te, Mark Clintberg, Emily DiCarlo, Miles Rufelds

In 2021, Sahar Te’s installation Incubator was part of an exhibition series, wholly titled Public Space. Founded on public and cultural collaboration, the series invited artists to lead participatory exhibition installations supported by community-focused programmes. Te, along with Clintberg, DiCarlo and Rufelds invites participants to engage in collective group happenings related to the fantastic potential of mycelium growth and collaboration. Included on August 27, is a participatory performance with Emily DiCarlo and Miles Rufelds’ short film screenings at the VAC. To conclude the Incubator Workshop Series, the VAC will host a virtual discussion with Mark Clintberg on September 9.

We need to speak in spores
Emily DiCarlo

What: Participatory performance
When: Saturday, August 27, 2022, 12 – 2 pm

We need to speak in spores is a collective exercise in attunement, empathy and collaboration where the public is invited to think like fungi. Participants will be presented with an “event score” — a set of simple instructions that will prompt a series of group actions, meditations, and thought experiments to explore the emergent effects of encounter.

In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discusses the mycelial potential of the “assemblage,” an open-ended gathering that holds the possibility of becoming a “happening,” where the collective’s power, ability and imagination become greater than the sum of their parts. She argues that this transformation can only occur through contamination and says, “we are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds —and new directions— may emerge.”

Taking cues from fungi’s integral role in a forest’s health, such as facilitating interspecies communication and resource distribution, the participatory event will repurpose a selection of research papers, essay selections, news stories, poems, mythologies and will “compost” previous artistic elements from Sahar Te’s curatorial program Incubator, originally installed in the VAC Loft Gallery in fall 2021. Through a process of exchanged “assembled contaminations,” participants will discover and co-produce their own collective, attuned language.

* To participate in this event, no previous performance experience is required.

Saprotrophs
Miles Rufelds

What: Screening and presentation
When: Saturday, August 27, 2022, 2 – 4 pm

Saprotrophs is a hybrid screening and lecture event to be presented at the VAC, focused on historicizing ideas of growth and decay, as they’ve evolved from the earth’s ancient ecologies to landscapes of industrialized capitalism. The event will open with a screening of artist Miles Rufelds’ 2019 essay film, Two or Three Saprophytes. Tonally pitched between Marxist ecological criticism and European Gothic horror, the film tells a hallucinatory narrative of mushrooms, chemicals, machines, and ghosts, contrasting a speculative history of the Industrial Revolution with a broader analysis of the earth’s patterns of growth, decomposition, and fossilization.

Following the screening, Rufelds will present a new piece of writing, expanding on themes brought up in the film, focusing specifically on contemporary questions surrounding the limits of capitalist growth, contested notions of “degrowth,” ecological activism, and labour agitation.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A and open discussion with the audience.

A Virtual Meeting
Mark Clintberg

What: Live virtual discussion
When: September 9, 6:30 PM
Where: Zoom, a live recording will be made available on YouTube.

Mark Clintberg leads a virtual discussion studying the phenomenon of artist-run restaurants—the subject of his Ph.D. thesis and a remaining area of ongoing research in his practice. Clintberg’s selected case studies use food and hospitality as leverage points to highlight commodity exchange, to enact activism, to question or claim forms of identity, and to spark conviviality.

Eve Tagny and Emii Alrai, Sutures (installation detail), 2022. Curated by Matthew Kyba and Megan Kammerer. Photo by LF Documentation

Summer Exhibition:
Sutures
Eve Tagny + Emii Alrai

July 3 – September 4, 2022

In their first collaborative exhibition, Eve Tagny and Emii Alrai bring together an accumulation of sculptural gestures which reference a two-year digital research process. These gestures are placed in the gallery as a visual essay, layering relationships between land, extraction, and the body.

After injury, a suture weaves broken pieces back into a whole. Its bands pull together, forcing two lacerations to meet as the body recovers from incision. The works in this exhibition take the form of stitches—physical and photographic assemblages which together create a scarred landscape. Traditional techniques of cob mortor, hand-dyed textile, and clay are blended with new experimentation in bio-plastics and construction materials to create a terrain that desires time to heal itself from the extractive binds which the non-white body undergoes in a landscape.

For any queries, please email: communications@vac.ca

The Incubator Workshop Series is proudly supported by

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

The VAC is proudly supported by