September 8 – November 6, 2015
Lisa Myers is a Port Severn/Toronto-based artist whose artistic practice considers the relationship between geography, food, and memory. Throughout the residency, Myers created a stop-motion animation entitled, Each Portion which had its premiere at the AGO for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, on October 3, 2015.
Each Portion engages the associations and memories triggered by food. Starting from berry picking from various sites around Ontario, this project invited people into the Community Gallery through the early part of September to contribute to the animation by experimenting with the absorption of blueberry pigment on wooden spoons.
The spoons were photographed for the creation of the video and then displayed in the Community Gallery alongside other work by Myers in the exhibition, where a heart started. As part of this work, Myers also hosted a special gathering on September 20th together with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, a national arts service organization that supports, promotes and advocates on behalf of Indigenous curators and artists, who held their annual meeting in Ontario on September 18 - 20.
As a complimentary project, Myers researched images from the Prints and Drawings archive of the railway and landscape in order to create an intervention in the galleries with her own blueberry prints. The prints act as Myers own articulations of finding home, place and story based on a journey her grandfather took in 1919/1920 from Sault Ste. Marie to Espanola which Myers herself retraced in 2012.
Inspired by the questions raised in the exhibition Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, Myers also engaged in conversations with curators and academics around land, identity and representation.
