Has the Artist Been Paid?ARTIFACTS (Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee)

Oct 10- 20, 2019

Opening Oct. 10, 7-9PM

For Has the Artist Been Paid? ARTIFACTS explores the seemingly financial futility of working as a contemporary artist in Canada. Examining themselves as minimally paid cultural workers, Patterson & Raudvee build and re-work using a variety of media: video, objects, and photo-based images. The exhibition addresses this notion of the artist at work by re-purposing mass-produced objects within the context of de/re-production. These mass-produced objects are altered and acquire an elevated status as art object.

ARTIFACTS (Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee) have for over 30 years made performances, videos and visual exhibitions. Each exhibition has resonated within time and place and has evolved from the shifting lives and relationship of these two women. One might think of artefacts in this instance as the detritus that remains from work which is stored – perhaps deliciously hidden – clouded in dust in some obscure location. All it takes is to dust off the scripts, objects, drawings and photographs and reshow them. But as reflection is so key to ARTIFACTS’ process, the “objects” become reworked from memories, traces and images. They are reread, reclaimed, and re-contextualized and given a new life as the unique and the quirky.

Exhibit of Artists@Work objects and images by ARTIFACTS. Performance-to-video: ARTIFACTS with Hri Neil (Videographer & Video Editor), and photo-images with Miklos Legrady (Performance Photo-documentation). Special thank you to Natalie Piper (Inkfly Design) for Logo Design Assistance.