Summer Institute

"I walked past the self-consciousness that crippled me in the past because there was an actual person I was talking to. I think the great problem that people have starting out is this feeling that you’re writing into a void. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t know who you are. Writing and identity are so relational." Luther Konadu: What does it feel like to be the writer Chris Kraus today, right now, Thursday 29th June 2017? Chris Kraus : Oh gosh. [Laughs]. I try and separate myself because of the TV show! Since the character shares my name, there's this “Chris Kraus” persona bouncing around the internet – I try and distance myself as much as possible from that. The teaching that I’m doing here is close to my real work as a writer. Working with a small group of people, reading texts and talking about them, and intensely focusing on other each other’s writing. To me, that’s at the heart of what I do as a writer. It’s so close to writing itself. I try to fo...

When I met up with Kegan McFadden, he had been working on a short essay describing a murder site at the foot of the Osborne bridge. In 1991 a man was murdered there on gay pride day and found in the river. This essay is just a small piece of the research he’s taking on for a longer book project. He led a tour with participants of the summer institute to this site as an opportunity to share first hand insight into this space of history that many might not know of. McFadden has been curating independently and publishing writing about other artists for quite sometime now and I was curious about what its like to do that line of work, I imagine their must be an annoying maybe frustrating part to that role most wouldn’t think about. So I put the question to him. He laughs and tells me that it can be frustrating if you are the sort of curator who wants to work with an artist because of a specific art but then have a completely different idea for it that might not be how the artist sees their ...

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode we speak with writer/musician Daniel Colussi. He shares some of his experiences of being in the institute and how it has been somewhat of an appropriate crossover coming from his MA in Cultural studies at the University of Winnipeg. "It been a collaborative type of environment which is very useful", he describes how "people bring in and share their own interests, readings, and practices. It definitely helped me think in a different way from school and bridge out of academic concerns into different ways of writing. It got me thinking about how I can apply some of the workshops with Chris towards the music that I make as opposed to writing essays. She talked about trying to write specifically about something that’s ephemeral, or vague, or undefined, ...

Ralph Prichard has been working on a script for a film that follows a character who works for an app start up called Shouldr. This app seeks to offer support and help to alleviate some of the emotional stress and load its users face living through contemporary urban life. The way this speculative app works is once you pay for it, download it, and login, you are connected with a live person on the other side who works as a sort of casual contractor or freelancer to the app, like an Uber driver would. One of these self-appointed workers is Pritchard’s protagonist who is also a student living in the city of London, over-working to the point of exhaustion, as an emotional labourer. With the feedback of peers and Chris Kraus throughout the institute, Pritchard has taken the time to rigorously work on the particulars of the characters in this fictionalized world and raised the stakes of the situations they find themselves in. Pritchard’s potent take on ideas of emotional labour as it plays o...

"When she finally recognized this, she had a joyous attack from the waves of new ideas. Her mouth became free of sand." Soyoung Kwon describes, in poetic fashion, what once felt like a mouth full of sand unable of swallow: "The small particles encroach into the softest part her body, near the throat, gets in between unreachable parts of teeth gaps, takes away the pleasure of thinking about delicious food and inhibits [the ability] to speak out." She is referring to feeling obligated in some way - which then became a fixation - to write and make work that discusses her identity as a Korean female immigrant artist. She describes writing her masters thesis and searching for frameworks that were tangible, meaningful, and troubling to unfold. This joyous attack of new ideas Kwon describes is when she realized her fixation on identity was limiting her curiosity and she could express her experiences regardless of identifying herself as a Korean female immigrant. The Retire...

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode, we speak with the Vancouver based artist Maegan Hill-Carroll who just earlier this year, had a solo show, Green Puce at Winnipeg's Platform Centre for Digital and Photographic Art. Hill-Carroll’s association to photography as a photographer is at a point of constructive progression. The way she has seen and worked through the medium has evolved and is evolving from her formative image making processes to what now incorporates narratives and pure colour. In my short conversation with Hill-Carroll, informs me of this reassessing as a way of looking at what it means especially for her to take pictures particularly in our present day inundation of images. And more than anything else, she is after what is more satisfying out her practice. This, she recognizes is ...

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. OK, in this episode we speak with Letch Klinhoch who is a writer, artist and arts administrator. She also started the free access artist book library, Also As Well Too. Maybe its probably a good thing to appear and present yourself as being confident. And sure, if you happen to be the person overseeing a team or maybe the same is true if you are a parent just so your kids feel a kind of confidence, security, and ease. But as Kinloch mentioned during our conversation, it is always scary to be vulnerable and it sucks to live that alone. Maybe, it would be nice to talk and share that and know that other people feel vulnerable. Perhaps, a balance of faking it to you make it and leaping in with your eyes closed and being vulnerable when you need to as Kinloch describes is a way to do ...

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. OK, in this episode we speak with Jacquelyn Ross. Ross is a writer and art critic currently based out of Toronto. She is a Creative Writing MFA candidate at the University of Guelph and some of her work has been featured in Mousse, Bomb and C Magazine. For the last two or so years she’s been running the very-good-idea publishing project Blank Cheque—publishing books by artists and writers who are peripherally related to the art world somehow. She's currently working on a collection of essays and short stories, having recently tossed out an early draft of a novel. Many of the new stories salvage pieces from the initial draft (recurring characters include a cynical young critic who's lost faith in art, an over-confident painter, and a private-detective-cum-art- historian re...

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode, we speak with the Toronto-based reader, writer, Ph.D. candidate, and all around creative thinker Esmé Hogeveen. Gathering from speaking with Hogeveen, her interests lie in what the art world can show about certain topics as it relates to culture, society, and politics more broadly. Thinking about tactics for looking seems to be an overarching approach for Hogeveen than looking at art through aesthetics. She describes further when asked about her focus on gendered ways of scrutiny: "I didn’t think about scrutiny as way to bring those topics together because it is a visual practice as well as cognitive one but it's been an interesting space into looking at the idea of who can and can’t scrutinize and who has the capacity to show descent in an optical way....

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode, we speak with Winnipeg based artist Kristina Banera. Banera seems to be preoccupied with the thought of preservation. Keeping in place fleeting histories, memories, and remnants that cease to exist with time. When asked what she thinks the world needs more of, she answered saying: "I think I have a fear of the past disappearing. It feels like its always fleeting. I fear that all that information will disappear and the next generation won't have access to it." She brings this up in talking to her about her mother and Lockport, MB a town she grew up in which in many ways remains a mystery to her. A lot of what she knows about the place is through stories others have described to her and in search of past histories. She recently discovered a museum tha...

Participants take some pictures with Kraus

So, the final day of the Chris Kraus led Summer Institute Session I came to a close yesterday with a night of performance, readings, screenings, and a couple of art objects. Apart from the on-and-off rain showers, it was a pretty great end to the first session. Below are some shots from the night. Assemblage by Maegan Hill-Carroll Video Ad by Ralph Pritchard Video and text by Kristina Banera It, 1927 (2017) video by Fabiola Carranza Screening of Chris Kraus' film ' Gravity and Grace ' Chloe Lum read from her poem ' What do stones smell like? ' Jasmine Reimer reads from ' Lap-uh-roh-SKOP-ic ' Soyoung Kwon in her lecture performance, ' The Retirement House of the Roomba ' Erica Eyres' Video Tutorial Readings continues indoors after rain showers disrupts initial programming. Maegan Hill-Carroll reads from ' Lucretia: Standing on stones, golden ratio toes .' Roewan Crowe reads from ' The Poetics of Here ' with light source assistance...

Chris Kraus and Summer Institute participants engage in discussions on poetry and prose writings. Kraus led writing workshops whereby the Summer Institute participants share their individual works and receive feedback from peers as well as Kraus. Below are some images from the final days of their group workshops.

Plug In ICA's Summer Institute and Also As Well Too co-presented "News from Afar" by the delightful Jeanne Randolph as the next engagement in the response series There's Something I Want to Tell You . Below are some photos from the presentation.