Saturday May 20th La Dragu The Scribe BLOG

photo: Opening Gala at Latitude 53 with Edmonton band AUDIO SQUADRON

Saturday May 20th:
Two blocks from Latitude 53 is the Grant MacEwan Community College.
It has a FABULOUS Fitness & Wellness Centre with large gyms, pool,
aerobic classes, squash/rcketball courts, steam rooms.
I buy a 10 visit pass. My first visit:
1 hr. alternate 10 min. cardio/strength
15 min. abs/back on physioball
15 min. stretch/yoga/fascial release
20 min. shower/steam

I arrived at Latitude 53 only 8 min. late (breathless & guilty).
Only one artist was twitchy to get a move on and
stay on schedule -- fellow Virgo Sarada Rauch.
We made a date to do colour-coded filing, dusting & desk-neat-ening later.

Sharp and quick-witted Todd Janes through us in the gallery's Soccer Mom Van
and took us to a "smaller" Edmonton mall for Suzanne Caines' wireless microphone,
Sarada's wallpaper, Naufus's firecrackers, and Zoe & my gym locker locks.
Todd dropped us at Stoney Plain Road -- full of FABULOUS 2nd hand stores,
pawn shops, and a brisk street trade in HOT bikes/small electrical equipment.
We agreed to meet at Opening Gala at 8:00 pm featuring local band Audio Squadron.



A LITTLE CHAT WITH ZOE KREYE

Zoe Kreye is my roommate at Dayz Inn. She scored a fridge for us.
We shopped at Save On Foods and stocked up on salad, fruit, yoghurt,
and "real" milk. While eating, showering, lounging
and watching Madonna on MuchTV, I asked her about her art practice.

Zoe does Relational Performance Art.
This kind of performance has a strong presence in Montreal
(ie. Sylvie Coton, Karen Spencer, Rachel Echenburg, Jessica MacCormick etc.)
which is where she has been living the last few years.
Zoe comes to performance from sculpture and other 3-dimensional work
but chose performance as a way to answer her own questions
about her place/relationship with her art and the audience.
Zoe describes showing sculpture in a gallery but finally
the audience presence in the exchange feeling too limited
(ie. comment book at the gallery entrance).
When she first did performance aktions in more presentational performance,
she felt like the only change in art/artist/audience interaction
was that SHE had become the sculputre.
Asking herself how she could get past this feeling, she turned
to a kind of performance that is very intimate and usually executed
one-on-one.

For more than a year, Zoe has done a series of performances
asking people to come to her studio and map their life by drawing it on paper.
Some people ask Zoe to draw what they describe to her,
some draw with her, some prefer to draw by themselves.
All choices ask the bigger questions of what does collaboration mean
and how does an artist place her/his self IN RELATION to the audience
(one or many) ESPECIALLY if the audience is doing something WITH the artist.

[The performative maps have included:
a professional gardner's 10 year memory map of a favourite neighbourhood of gardens
a Norwegian summerhouse from someone's childhood
a mother's 1 yr. map-diary tracing locations during her pregnancy, birth of her child,
and first few months of raising her new baby.]

Zoe felt the maps were quite wonderful in their own way
but as objects they could only hold a fraction of the intimacy
of what occured during the one-one-one LIVE exchange
during the performance.
She is bringing these concerns and questions to her new work
"DEDICATED TO YOU" . Zoe is accepting appointments for a
rendezvous on the rooftop of Latitude 53 through out the festival.
Contact her at: ZOEKREYE@YAHOO.CA
or call 423-5353 to make an appointment.

Love,
La Dragu