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.
Erica Stocking (b.1981, Toronto) lives in Vancouver with her husband and two young children. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute in 2004. Group exhibitions include an upcoming installment at the Museum of Longing and Failure in Bergen, Norway, Properties, Western Front (2013), The Triumphant Carrot, Contemporary Art Gallery (2010), How Soon is Now, Vancouver Art Gallery (2009), and a solo exhibition at Richmond Art Gallery (2007). She was the recipient of the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award: Emerging Artist (2009), and has completed two permanent public artworks: Yellow Fence (2009), Burnaby, BC, and Geyser for Hillcrest Park (2012), created in collaboration with Vanessa Kwan for the City of Vancouver. She is a founding member of the artist collective Norma (est. 2003) whose final collaboration was performed in 2014 at the PuSH Festival in Vancouver. She recently attended The Universe and Other Systems Summer Thematic Residency at The Banff Centre led by Shary Boyle. Materials and the unseen forces that shape them inspire her.
Director/Curator of Artspeak 2004–2010.
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)