Sydney Hermant
Sydney Hermant is a Vancouver-based artist who has devoted time to organizing the work of other artists, making and recording music with her partner as Hello, Blue Roses, and is a co-director in the media collective Project Rainbow. Hermant is a graduate from the MFA program at the University of British Columbia (2010). Her online weekly drawing and newsletter service is available at www.yourdrawingweekly.com.
Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools
ERICA STOCKING
August 5–September 2, 2006
This project will be visible in Artspeak’s windows while the gallery is closed for August.
Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools will be installed in Artspeak’s front entrance and can be viewed from the street through the gallery windows. Every street level window has its own way of introducing its interior. Slick storefronts frame brief tableaux for their ideal visitor. In jumbled and dusty windows there is often an intentional sly nod to the passerby—a newspaper clipping or sequence of noteworthy objects. Windows of smaller shops and services tend to operate like portraits of the owners, mixing tools of the trade with more personal items. These window displays provide the beginnings of stories the pedestrian can choose to enter. In a commercial window the opening of the story being told suggests a clear plot to be followed. Erica Stocking, using a number of genres of display, balances disparate narratives to introduce a story without the linear engine of a plot. Released from serving a predetermined plot, objects in the display can be cast in many roles to become tools for imaginative play.
Playing is a serious matter. Like dreaming, play is a unique and vital form of consciousness, but unlike the simulation of a dream, playing occurs in the world. Play requires playmates and/or playthings. By imagining a chair as a throne or a house cat as a child, a player chooses to be in two places at once and balances them by a system of distance equivalences. This experience of unanchored, compound reality is echoed in Castaneda’s description of the assemblage point, the ambulatory point where human experience and reality is constructed. Erica Stocking has created tools to concentrate, direct energy, and make it easier to be in two places at once. Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools addresses the passerby with instruments of serious play.
Postscript 22: Sydney Hermant on Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools (PDF)
SEAN ALWARD, SYDNEY HERMANT
May 11, 2013
Speakeasy: Salon is a series of talks and presentations that interrogates Artspeak’s mandate to encourage a dialogue between visual art and writing. In this incarnation, speakers will present within the conversational salon format on wide-ranging subjects including art, music, literature, politics, popular culture, and science. Speakers select their own topics for discussion and are not expected to be experts in the subjects they present. Each session ends with a conversation between participants and speakers, creating an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and critical discourse, and a mutual scholarship of the topics explored. Speakeasy: Salon references both the demand for interdisciplinary learning in contemporary art and writing practices and an interest in the informal academic institution.
SEAN ALWARD
Figures in Landscapes: Lion-People and Hermaphrodites (an archeology travelogue and slide-show)
From the caves of Baden-Wurttemburg to the coast of British Columbia: the world’s oldest portable sculpture, the world’s oldest musical instrument, lion-people, mammoth slivers, live German cavemen, Einstein’s basement, sea-life turned to stone, compressed tropical substance, petroglyphs, and hermaphrodites.
SYDNEY HERMANT
Getting to Know You: What My 4 and 7/8 yr old Daughter Taught Me About Textiles