“With busy hands” is a collaborative exhibition of Chris Dufour and Alexis Hogan with contributions from 10 youth connected with Artemis Place Secondary that occurred in summer of 2022 in Victoria, BC. The show’s name centers the creative intent of the artists’ collaboration: to keep our hands busy (and mind open) while exploring material practices that connect to ecology, place, identity, and belonging. For Dufour and Hogan, alienation marks both experiences of climate crisis and queerness. This project’s roots are in the evolution of friendship, where making art and engaging in material practices that connects to place (e.g. making charcoal out of blackberry and scotch broom, sharing mushroom foraging, working through apocalypse survival strategies) has been integral for being seen in their queer identities and finding a sense of belonging, which works against a pervasive culture of alienation.
The duo pushed their shared practice further and through Dufour and their student’s creation of the Artemis Place Garden, Artemisia, and Hogan’s access to the ‘lichen’ mobile programming space, the opportunity to intentionally work with a cohort of Artemis youth emerged. Working together over 4 weeks, the cohort utilized film photography (film donated through PHOTONews flash and Beau Photo), natural dyeing from a cultivated dye garden, and paper making from invasive species. The exhibition shows pieces Hogan and Dufour made in collaboration with the Artemis youth cohort. Additionally, the works in this exhibition are informed by the project’s guest artists, Sarah Jim and Caitlin Ffrench, who mentored the youth and shared skills with the group from their respective creative practices.”
“Here are some shots from our collaborative program that lead to the exhibition ‘with busy hands’ in Victoria, BC in the lichen mobile programming space and Artemis Place Secondary garden. Working with 10 incredible youth connected to Artemis Place Secondary, this project creates space, offers tools & resources, and intergenerational mentorship, in order to think about where connections between art and ecology occur. Keeping our hands busy in order to grapple with our collective uncertain future has been challenging and inspiring.
With support from Camera Traders, Beau Photo, and PHOTONews Flash, we integrated film photography as a way for us to collectively document and index explorations with representation, material practice, place, and the social and more-than-human relationships that have been transpiring throughout the duration of the project. In the project, youth were shown how to shoot on SLR cameras, the interactions with light and black and white film, and, subsequently, how to develop it themselves. We collectively came up with prompts to guide us and used the cameras to document the relationships we were building with ecology, community, and the critical relationships to materials we were working with. See here a couple of photos shot by our students Lyla Ferris and Caro MacGregor”
About the Author – Chris Dufour is an emerging social practicing artist working at the intersections of ecology, permaculture, photography, and textiles.
