jamie griffiths
photography, film & performance - concept & innovation -
creative software for business & the arts - research, development & education
Announcements
Jamie is currently working on
WHITE LIES exhibition Electro Studio (Hastings) Sept-Oct 2013
WILD NEW TERRITORIES exhibition (Berlin) Sept 2013
DIRECTOR OF INTERACTIVE DESIGN Indigeneity Exhibition at London's South Bank BargeHouse Oct 2013.
Jamie is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council & the STEIM Foundation for the Arts (Amsterdam)
July 8-10 Nottingham Univ, UK
July 22-27 Jacksonville Univ, Florida
LA WEFAN MANIGUA is a collaborative interventionist sculpture with sound and video.
As part of the WILD NEW TERRITORIES Group Exhibition, the work is adapted to each location and continues to develop throughout the tri-city tour.
Jamie Griffiths (concept, isadora software, sound manipulations, sculpture)
Diego Samper (sound recordings)
Rob Scharein (fireflies, knotplot software)
LONDON, UK Sept 19 - Oct 28 2012
See video & more info below. Camley Street Natural Park Download a pdf file Info & photographs of WNT London 2012.
VANCOUVER, BC Jan 12- April 12th 2013
See video and more info below. Stanley Park/Xwayxway, Canada Place & SFU Gallery
SFU Gallery opening: January 12 at the Burnaby campus from 2-4pm.
Guided walk Sunday January 13 from 2-6pm starting at the Teck Gallery, walking via Canada Place to Stanley Park/XWayXway via the seawall. Wear confortable shoes, bring umbrella.
Download opening events invite .jpg
Download a pdf map of WNT in Vancouver, the walking trail along the seawall to Stanley Park/Xwayxway with list of installed artworks.
BERLIN, GERMANY Sept 2013
Berlin Botanical Gardens & Museum Watch this space for more info leading up to the Berlin installation in September 2013.
VANCOUVER - LA WEFAN MANIGUA
is a multi-part installation
Sound and video in Stanley Park by the disused Zoo Bear Pit.
Sound and video at the SFU gallery in Burnaby.
Video on the outdoor screen at Canada Place.
La Wefan Manigua brings the Colombian Amazon into Stanley Park, connecting it to BC’s old growth forest ecology. It compares the forced removal of the Squamish village at Xwayxway out of the park 120 years ago, with ongoing encroachments in the Amazon river basin.
Download a pdf file about the history of aboriginal communities in Stanley Park/Xwayxway
Park visitors hear the amplified sounds of Colombia’s Amazon ecology and the Makuna tribal nation alongside an old growth stump and the failed artificial salmon stream (a parks board ecological regeneration project).
In the gallery, artifical liana’s (hanging vines) are exhibited inside a museum exhibition case, swarmed by an artificial species of fireflies.
On the screen at Canada Place and in the Bear Pit television installation, the artist poses for the camera, in front of the buttress roots of a massive tree on a nature reserve in the Colombian Amazon.
LONDON - LA WEFAN MANIGUA
The work was installed as an outdoor interactive sculptural installation with sound and video projections. If a park visitor settled into the area quietly, the sounds of the Amazon at dusk become audible, gradually merging with the ambient sounds of the urban park. The soundscape was derived from field recordings of the Colombian Amazon forest, river ecology and indigenous peoples. If the visitor remained quiet, they experienced a 60 minute audio immersion into a rainforest ecology many thousands of miles away in the Colombian Amazon, interspersed with the sounds of a Makuna tribal village. Fireflies created from light, emerged at dusk to swarm in the trees around 'vines' made from felted wool with a jute core. The vines were loosely gathered together... 'woven'... to represent both the commodification of nature and the unity of natural ecosystems.
INFORMATION ABOUT THE DEVELOPMENT OF LA WEFAN MANIGUA
In January 2012, jamie joined Colombian/Canadian artist Diego Samper at Calanoa Amazonas Nature Reserve on the Amazon River in Colombia, to develop their concept for an experimental film project. Jamie spent several weeks immersed in the Amazon ecosystem alongside Diego and his wife, Marlene, being introduced to local Ticuna & Huitoto indigenous communities, artists and shamans, while also working as a volunteer researcher for a video/camera equipped library boat, the Yacaré, to serve the local indigenous communities. In the process of gathering of media during this trip, Jamie examined her outsider role in the complex sphere of contemporary Amazonian politics and ethics, while collaborating with Diego Samper, who has spent 40 years exploring, documenting and living-in-relationship with the ‘Big Forest’.
In Vancouver in the spring of 2012, Jamie invited longtime collaborator Rob Scharein (see Mystiq & Water to Bone) to work on the project with her, to develop a 'fake' species of insects for the video part of the installation.
The artists that have built LA WEFAN MANIGUA hope that the experience of a temporary simulated immersion in an Amazon ecosystem while visiting an urbanized parkland, will trigger thoughts about the history of both the Amazon, and of the lost natural ecosystems of the park spaces where the works are being installed. They hold up contemporary fine art practice against a backdrop of historical, colonial and contemporary ecosystem destructions, pulling a thread forward from the Anglo-Saxon/Roman past of Kings Cross's lost rivers and marshlands across to Canada's aboriginal genocides and contemporary issues of racism and broken treaties, through to the present day massive scale urban developments surrounding Camley Street Natural Park in London's Kings Cross. Finally, by exhibiting a video portrait of the artist in the Amazon, jamie turn the lens on herself, thereby questioning non-aboriginal excursions into the wild, for the sake of adventure, eco-tourism and art.
La Wefan Manigua asks visitors to ponder their own role in global urban/wild dynamics. It acknowledges the ongoing exploitation and destruction of indigenous people and their territories alongside ongoing harvesting of natural ecosystem 'resources' for commercial use across all regions.
WNT Home Page: www.wildnewterritories.com
WNT Transmedia Site: http://wildnewterritories.wordpress.com/
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WNT email: info@wildnewterritories.com