New Vancouver art book reminds of the importance of support networks

The new art book What Are Our Supports? co-edited by Joni Low and art historian Jeff O’Brien sets out to remind readers of the importance of support networks and how human care and simple gestures can transform art and the world beyond.

The anthology will have an official launch event at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts on Jan. 21, 2 p.m. The event will include presentations and Q&As with contributors.

Low and O’Brien took the time to answer a few questions from Postmedia.

Q: This book grew out of the 2018 public space series What Are Our Supports? (WAOS) What was the brief/request made to the five artist groups chosen to be a part of this?

Low: The original What Are Our Supports? projects in 2018 began with a brief to five artists, asking: how do we make visible the invisible support structures, webs, relations, and sensibilities crucial to art and artist communities — mediation that creates relationships to context? What are the afterlives of structures that have outgrown their intended uses? What can we bring from the old — ideas, technologies, paradigms — to create a new? How might we do this alone and in conversation with one another? It was inspired by these artists’ practices — who consciously sustain space for art outside of institutional and gallery contexts — and by U.K. artist Céline Condorelli’s project, Support Structures (2003/2009), excerpts of which are reprinted in this book. The five artists then invited additional artists to collaborate with them on their projects.

Low: HMH Boothy was commissioned specifically for the project. Modelled after a public telephone booth — with the cultural associations of The Matrix, Superman, and Dr. Who in mind — Germaine designed it as a framework/threshold that opens onto possibilities and situations. Boothy is also part of Koh’s larger Home Made Home series, which responds to urban space restrictions and affordability crises with structures that advocate modest, sustainable livelihoods. As an obsolete structure in our smartphone era, Boothy is now free to become something else. All projects were situated in Boothy for these reasons, and specifically to test the malleability of its identity and use: as a lightbox, garden, service kiosk, time-space portal, and nexus for transformation. I see Boothy as a microcosm of our world and an emblem of this moment, in its world-making potential.

Low: Cathedral Square Park embodies the metaphor of the project as a support structure: its fountain functions as a cooling system for the masked underground substation beneath, which powers parts of the downtown core. It is a park that time forgot, slightly outdated and decaying, designed during Expo 86. It sits between neighbourhoods that were on the crest of gentrification at that time; it is also inhabited by many different publics throughout the day, which made it an interesting site to test art in public space.

Q: What needs to be and is being done to help create/reinvigorate support networks for artists and art communities during these pandemic times?

Q: How do you describe the book and what is the overriding message contained on its pages?

O’Brien: The book is (hopefully) a beginning, a first step, a seed, in thinking about how artistic practices can help us reimagine the world beyond our current difficult, precarious, pandemic times. WAOS is a living book, a living object, that acts as both an archive of a past curatorial project, and a building block for thinking about future possibilities. In a sense, it marks the end of a curatorial project (the exhibition) and the creation of a support structure that tries to assist us in moving beyond the crisis.

Low: We hope that readers will attune themselves to the under recognized supports that are crucial for the survival of communities and connection, and realize how important the act of support is in shaping our present and future worlds. We hope they will be inspired by the artists’ emphases on self-organization, mutual aid, pleasure activism and sensorial agency to themselves support and align with causes they believe in — to follow their intuitions. These intangible, relational and incorporeal supports are so often the sparks for action moving forward.