Imagine Better Futures - we already have what we need
Part III of a three-part conversation with Christina Battle and Rita McKeough, two artists that participated in the first iteration of Remediation Room, guided by Remediation Room curator Alana Bartol. Visit Remedy Toxic Energies: Summoning Circle (by Christina Battle) and Center for Interspecies Mutual Support in Troubled Times (by Rita McKeough) to learn more about their artworks. Visit the Artworks and Artists sections to view all of the artists and projects.
Image: Rita McKeough, H, 2014. Fourteen-day performance work with audio, video and kinetic objects, Mondo Monde New Media Festival, Faucet Media Arts Centre, Sackville, NB. Production assistance, Rachael Chiasson. Photo by Struts and Faucet Media Arts Centre.
Image description: A photograph of Rita in a squirrel suit. They are in room with small cots lining the walls. In the cots are cell phones with blankets on them. There are chords connecting the network of cell phones to small boxes with branches protruding from them. An image of a forest is projected on the back wall. The eye of the squirrel appears to look directly at the camera as it crouches down touching a blanket on one of the cell phone cots with a pinecone on it.
Alana:
I see both projects you each did for Remediation Room as calls to action, addressing the need for urgent change during an ecological, economic and social crisis. What is your relationship with change?
Christina:
Yeah. I think: bring it, we need it. <Laugh>
I'm super comfortable with change, but I think, because we talked a little bit about failure earlier, and this is the thing I love about being an artist, at least for me, being open and comfortable with failure and using that as a strategy to figure stuff out along the way and kind of roll with it. I think that goes hand in hand with thinking about change. Like it helps to make it really not such a daunting thing. It's something so full of potential, and if it doesn't quite work in the way that it's meant to, it could change again. And I think there's often this fear of change as being so final. But I see it as something much more active. And yeah, maybe there's something about – even though I hate using the term hope and hopefulness – I think that's where those things come together for me.
Rita:
For a long time, even since I was a young artist, with all of my heart, I believed that art can promote social change. I really believe that it has the power to make change. And I see that happening when we go into an exhibition or performance or we read something online or participate in something that allows us to see from a different perspective. And for me, immediately, when that happens, the change is happening, right? If you can see from someone else's perspective, from a different economic or cultural position, or even just physically from the air or from a different scale, everything changes. And your ability to be fully engaged and participate in the world, to me, just ramps up; it just amplifies.
Image: Christina Battle, Remedy Toxic Energies: Summoning Circle (postacrd), 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Image description: Light blue text in all caps on white reads: IMAGINE BETTER FUTURES. The text is surrounded by a circle of pink candles with yellow flames.
Alana:
Thank you. It's how we grow, too, right? Thank you both for those answers. And then I was thinking too, I'm curious, who are your teachers?
Christina:
That's a great question.
Rita:
I think for me, I grew up as a feminist, right? As a young artist learning, and I think it's all the artists and the feminists, the women, queer people, everybody who's fought and come before me, you know, I continually look at them and find encouragement and power from knowing everything that was done and even artists who made it possible for me to make the work I make. They teach me, reminding me all the time about how grateful I am and how much responsibility I have to stay motivated to stay committed. And so I have so much respect for all those that have come before, but also, the people who taught me. When I was a young artist, I had an instructor, John Will, who was really influential and believed in the relationship between art and life and was just really encouraging.
And also, whenever I get discouraged, an artist that I always think about and read about is Rebecca Belmore, who I find incredibly inspiring and is an inspiration and a teacher in the sense of how to continually engage critically with issues and concerns. And there are so many artists, like the two of you. I have great respect for you. And when I think of your work, I wanna get up, and I wanna keep going. And it's all the artists and the young artists around Calgary in the community, who are so brilliant. And so, so amazing. It's just like, yes, art is doing something. Art is important. Artists are still challenging this whole system.
Christina:
I love it. Yeah. I was thinking yesterday about just how much I really love being an artist. It's such a privilege. It's such a weird thing to do, I think, probably. But I get so much energy from it, and seeing others who also really love engaging with art and thinking about it and being weird with it. I really love working with artists at early stages of their careers who are taking a lot of risks and challenges and figuring things out as well. I learn so much from those experiences. And then I think as you were talking Rita, I was thinking so much about artists who have had such an impact on me of course, theoretically, and, and just by witnessing their work, but also those who I've been lucky to come to know and have conversations with and who I've become friends, and how those relationships just really keep me going as an artist.
And I think one thing that's really common across all of these artists who I also consider friends is this sort of lifelong love of being an artist. And being hungry to learn more, seek new knowledge, try new things, and experiment with stuff. And just constantly learning as a part of [an art] practice. Maybe that describes a certain kind of artist, too; I don't know, but yeah, I feel like I'm constantly learning so much from so many. I feel really lucky.
Alana:
And maybe you already answered this question then, but what gives you energy? I'm just thinking about the weight of these topics we've been talking about, and there are different strategies that you're employing. What feeds or grounds your art practice, and do we already have what we need to imagine better futures?
Christina:
Yeah. I feel like, yeah, we do absolutely have what we need to imagine better futures. It's just sort of been trained out of us a little bit. I just get so much energy from conversations like this, from connecting with folks who are concerned, angry, and excited about similar things. And these sort of frank, honest conversations about it. I really appreciated how over the last few months, folks have been pretty honest about how exhausted they are. It's important to me that we are sharing what's really going on with one another. I get a lot of energy out of that and feeling that alliance. And also, quite honestly, humour. I think everything is just so absurd! <laugh> And I find it really powerful to be able to see things that way, right? This question of how do we imagine better futures, I think part of it is just seeing how fucked up and stupid things are right now actually, and how much things just aren’t really working. And there's something about laughter and humour within that that I get a lot of energy out of.
Rita:
No, I agree with a lot of what you were just saying, Christina. Totally. And I think that it's true. For me, it's going to see other people's work. It's ways of thinking that I've never thought of, and it just blows my mind, and it's really inspiring, and it gives me energy, it's exciting. And I'll use the word hopeful because there are so many people who are so willing to give their life over to art, you know, and commit their life. It's their passion. And just working alongside other artists gives me energy and keeps me motivated. It's just so extraordinary. And I think that I agree with you that humor is so important because that's where complex thinking comes from, I think.
And it's also approachable. Like we talked about earlier, I struggle with the same thing about being too God damn serious sometimes. And I have to make myself laugh at myself. Right? Because nobody can listen when it's like that, right? Nobody. So it's really important to find other ways to speak and other kinds of languages almost, whether they're visual or audio or performative, and use those other languages to try to almost translate what we have in our hands right now. And it's something that's totally funny and stupid, but also really complex and important and meaningful in the desire to kind of understand it and then change it.
What kind of shifts are required, and what do we have to imagine a better future? Do we have everything in place? And I think we do. And I keep coming back to the idea that just turning my head upside down is really what has to happen. You know, it's letting go of ways of thinking, letting go of expectations that you know of, and continuing to be critical of everything.
Rita McKeough, tender, 2015, Installation and video projection. Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America, Esker Foundation Project Space, Mohkinstsis/Calgary, AB. Photo: John Dean/courtesy of Esker Foundation. Courtesy of the artist.
Image description: A photograph of three rows of small metal frame hospital beds with white pillows and sheets with hot dogs tucked into them. There is a large projection of brown cows in a field on the wall that the hot dogs are facing. Between the rows of beds, about every two beds, are cell phones turned horizontally to face the hot dogs with images of cows and fields on them. The floor is checkered white and blue. There are white curtains on the right and left sides of the image, as if you are peering into the space.
Alana:
I feel like you already have an answer to my other question, which was more about stamina to continue to create work. And it sounds like you both get a lot of, like me <laugh>, energy from these kinds of conversations, engaging with other artists, engaging in research and learning, and then experimenting and learning from failures and art.
Christina:
Also, remembering to rest.
There's something really nice that I learned from artistic practice of being forced to slow down sometimes, you know when it takes time to work through ideas, but also to work with materials. And I love those moments of embedded rest in art-making as a reminder that we also need to do that.
Alana:
Yeah. And also so necessary because we are living within a capitalist system, and obviously, the art world is embedded in that. There’s this idea of constant productivity, whatever that looks like, and it can look like a lot of things, and there's so much work put on artists all the time to do so much. And also to keep creating new things, which is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. And it's so unsustainable and so just that it almost seems unethical.
Do you think about your work as a kind of continuous learning? Rita, you've incorporated pieces you've made from different installations into artworks. Christina, I see you working on long-term projects, shifting them over time, figuring out what strategies work with them, and evolving them in all these ways. And I take an interdisciplinary approach to a lot of my quote-unquote projects that are more directed around a specific idea or topic, but then they kind of can unfurl in lots of ways.
Rita:
I think that like sometimes, I don't know if you agree with this, but there's a kind of an expectation that you're making new work all the time, but sometimes when you’ve got something really important to say you call your friends, and your friends might be a piece from an older work, or they might be a material, and you call them, “I need your help, come forward, lend your voice.” So it seems like an interesting kind of alternative strategy.
Christina:
I think it also is really helpful for thinking about sustainability just in life in general. All the things you're pointing toward, Alana, how difficult it is to be expected to make new things all the time. I feel like that doesn't necessarily map onto artistic practice well, at least in the way that I practice. So for me, a real strategy I lean on a lot is working through just one giant idea in a variety of ways over time, over and over and over again, so that I don't feel like I'm constantly reinventing the wheel at each opportunity. Also, I work a lot with plants and seeds, and they have their own timeline and sense of time, and I really value being able to centre that as a way to help sustain myself as well 'cause it really doesn't align well with administrative deadlines and timelines. But there's just no way around it. So being able to have that reminder that, you know, working with seeds and plants means that I have to follow a different timeline than maybe what an institution would rather I follow.
I think a lot about how often practice is really not considered from the perspective of those who are exhibiting our artistic work. And how it actually is really difficult for artists (especially early career artists) to sort of vocalize the agency that they need around how much time they need or how their practice goes. And I think one of the things that’s been so wonderful working with you curating this project is a real keen sense of understanding how it is that artists make work. You know, we all make work differently, but you really value practice. And that offers an opportunity for all of us to think about how to make something in a way that is right for each of us. And that is very much not typical, sadly, when working with curators, to be honest. So I appreciate how open you are to thinking about all of these concerns.
Images: Christina Battle, "seeds are meant to disperse", Untitled Art Society (Calgary), curated by Ellyn Walker, 2018. Photos: Katy Whitt Photography. [previously titled: seeds for the end of the world].
Image description (left): A photograph of four zines on a white plinth. The front cover has a design with four connected hexagons, one is solid black with text that reads: "seeds for the end of the world". One zine stands vertical on the right, showing the back cover which has a yellow and green image of a plant. Image description (right): A photograph of a clear bowl filled with a mixture of seeds on a white plinth. A person's hand holds a spoon with a scoop of the seeds. Their other hand holds a small plastic bag open. There is another white plinth in the background.
Alana:
Thank you. Yeah, it comes from my own experience, right? <Laugh> Working with not only other curators but other artists as well. It's different every time, and time is such an essential element. And I think, how would the art world shift if everyone valued people's time and different approaches and support systems needed? These aren't necessarily things that can even be standardized, it changes with personal parts of our lives as well. And also the pandemic. So yeah, that's something I feel really strongly about is just really trying to be well attuned to any artist I'm working with in terms of what supports [they need] and to trust them. I think trust is such a huge thing that I'm thinking a lot about, too, in terms of how artists are supported or not supported. Trust is a key value I hold when trying to make something in any role.
Well, maybe I'll wrap it up here, but I'd love to ask you one more question. It's just a very easy one. What are you currently reading? I'm always reading many books at the same time, and I'm always interested in discovering what other people are reading.
Rita:
Well, the main book I'm reading right now it's called No Time to Spare by Ursula Le Guin. She wrote it when she was eighty-something, and the subtitle of it is “thinking about what matters.” It's talking about feminism, anger and age, and utopia, and yeah, it's fascinating. And I'm also reading Sara Ahmed's book Living a Feminist Life.
Christina:
Yeah. I feel like I’m reading so many books at the same time and not really reading any of them. <Laugh>.
I'm hoping to be better over the summer. But I just started James Bridle’s new book Ways of Being on planetary intelligence, which is really great. I like his writing a lot. He writes a lot about technology and our relationship to it. And so this one is all about thinking through intelligence, ultimately.
Alana:
Nice. Thank you for that. Yeah. I tend to kind of have a lot of books around that I <laugh> some I'm immersed in and others I'm just like reading bits of pieces.
Christina:
I also started a book you recommended, Alana. I forget the title. It's something to do with America. It's fiction.
Alana:
Oh, American War [by Omar El Akkad]?
Christina:
American War. Yeah. I'm like a third of the way through. It's really great. That was a great suggestion.