Dana Claxton (Lakota, Canadian, b.1959) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and based in Vancouver. Drawing on Lakota cultural values, history and language, Claxton questions the multifaceted layers of identity inherent to indigenous ways of being. Issues surrounding indigenous labour and resistance, resource extraction and capital feature prominently in her latest research and work on the Service, Office and Retail Worker’s Union of Canada’s (SORWUC’s) 1978 protest action against the Muckamuck Restaurant.
Claxton’s work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre, Sundance Film Festival, Eiteljorg Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), and held in several major Canadian public collections. Her awards include the VIVA Award and the Eiteljorg Fellowship. Her work was selected for the Sydney Biennial (2010), Biennale de Montréal (2007), Biennale d’art contemporain du Havre, France (2006), Micro Wave, Hong Kong (2005) Art Star Biennale, Ottawa (2005), and Wro 03 Media Arts Biennale Wroclaw Poland (2003).
Althea Thauberger (Canadian, b. 1970) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and educator based in Vancouver. Rooted in sustained collaborative research and practice with groups or communities, Thauberger’s work investigates relationships between people and structures such as the state, economies, social codes, histories and traditions through aesthetic and institutional power relations. Born in Saskatoon, SK, she received a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Victoria. Her work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally including at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2005), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2006), Vancouver Art Gallery (2008, 2011) and the Musée d’Art Contemporain Montréal (2017), among others. She was shortlisted for the 2004 Sobey Art Award and the recipient of the 2011 VIVA Award. Alongside an active research and artistic practice, Thauberger has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Simon Fraser University, University of Victoria and Concordia University. She is currently Associate Professor of Visual Art at the University of British Columbia.
Peter Brook is right when he says, we find Shakespeare “excruciatingly boring.” But not in the writing, rather in production after production set in the same Shakespearian times in the same old Shakespearian places.
All the world is a stage is a world is an exhibition. Theatrical scenery was mere suggestion in Elizabethan theatre. Typical late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theatre and opera houses utilized painted stock scenic backdrops to set the stage for theatrical action. Typically, a single painter would produce a theatre’s collection of scenes. The same forest scene for one play would provide the forest scene for many other plays; a drawing room the same for another and another. Downstage set decoration or props were minimal. The play was the thing.
When Goethe served as Director of the Weimar Theatre, he commissioned scenic painter Friedrich Christian Beuther to produce a collection of scene paintings for the theatre. Upon witnessing the quality of the work, Goethe arranged a one-night event in 1816 for theatre patrons in which the only work presented on stage was the sequence of scene paintings. The curtain opened to a painting and closed to applause, opened again to another painted scene, then closed and so on throughout a performance in which a performer never set foot on stage.
Theatre folds and unfolds in and over time. Exhibitions fold and unfold in and over space. A Seat Next to the Ceiling is an exhibition on a stage. It folds and unfolds in and over space and time. It’s exhibition time. The audience is seated. The lights dim. The curtain opens onto a scenic tableau. The curtain closes to applause. It opens again onto another scene. Curtain closes. And again.
A Seat Next to the Ceiling features work by Dana Claxton, Mark Clintberg, Karen Kraven, Alvin Lucier, Arnaud Maggs, Althea Thauberger and John Watt and is curated by Gregory Elgstrand, a candidate to the Master’s Degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. The curator would like to thank his advisors Lorna Brown, Norman Armour, Patrick Rizotti, Marina Roy and Scott Watson, as well as the staff of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Borja Brown and the staff and crew of the Frederic Wood Theatre.
This project is made possible with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
Dana Claxton (Lakota, Canadian, b.1959) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and based in Vancouver. Drawing on Lakota cultural values, history and language, Claxton questions the multifaceted layers of identity inherent to indigenous ways of being. Issues surrounding indigenous labour and resistance, resource extraction and capital feature prominently in her latest research and work on the Service, Office and Retail Worker’s Union of Canada’s (SORWUC’s) 1978 protest action against the Muckamuck Restaurant.
Claxton’s work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre, Sundance Film Festival, Eiteljorg Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), and held in several major Canadian public collections. Her awards include the VIVA Award and the Eiteljorg Fellowship. Her work was selected for the Sydney Biennial (2010), Biennale de Montréal (2007), Biennale d’art contemporain du Havre, France (2006), Micro Wave, Hong Kong (2005) Art Star Biennale, Ottawa (2005), and Wro 03 Media Arts Biennale Wroclaw Poland (2003).
Althea Thauberger (Canadian, b. 1970) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and educator based in Vancouver. Rooted in sustained collaborative research and practice with groups or communities, Thauberger’s work investigates relationships between people and structures such as the state, economies, social codes, histories and traditions through aesthetic and institutional power relations. Born in Saskatoon, SK, she received a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Victoria. Her work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally including at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2005), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2006), Vancouver Art Gallery (2008, 2011) and the Musée d’Art Contemporain Montréal (2017), among others. She was shortlisted for the 2004 Sobey Art Award and the recipient of the 2011 VIVA Award. Alongside an active research and artistic practice, Thauberger has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Simon Fraser University, University of Victoria and Concordia University. She is currently Associate Professor of Visual Art at the University of British Columbia.
This project is made possible with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.