ARTISTS STRIKE OUT FOR ‘TERRA INCOGNITA’
Be3Dimensional grant recipients on the anticipated challenges and rewards of using 3D printing in their work
3D printing is already a vital tool in a breadth of disciplines, from film production to medical technology to furniture making, but its use in the art world is still nascent, to say the least.
Two big-time players in the Canadian museum scene are looking to hurry it along. The Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) and the National Gallery of Canada announced Thursday that they had chosen two prominent Canadian artists, Geoffrey Farmer and Duane Linklater, as the inaugural recipients of Be3Dimensional Innovation Fund grants, which gives each artist $50,000 to develop a project using the technology over the next year.
Linklater and Farmer will work with Think2Thing, a Toronto 3D imaging lab fronted by renowned photo artist Ed Burtynsky, to explore the medium with a mind to pushing it into new terrain.
As Ryerson Imaging Centre director Paul Roth recently put it, 3D printing is the “terra incognita” in the disciplines of art and photography, and both Linklater and Farmer are able explorers. Linklater, chosen by the RIC, is a First Nations artist living in North Bay, Ont. He won the Sobey Art Award in 2013, perhaps the most prestigious prize in Canadian art. Farmer, who is based in Vancouver, is the National Gallery’s pick. He’ll represent Canada at the Venice Biennale next year. We spoke with both of them about their ideas and what they hoped to accomplish.
Duane Linklater
Recent exhibitions: Art Gallery of Ontario, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Linklater, who is an Omaskeko Cree from the Moose Creek First Nation, used 3D printing for a project at the Utah Museum of Fine Art earlier this year, so when Roth called to offer the opportunity to develop those ideas further, it was a no-brainer. We caught up with the artist at home in North Bay. It sounds like you’re not a complete rookie when it comes to this technology.
No, it was just by chance that I had just finished a project at the Utah Museum of Fine Art, working with their native American collection, when I got the call. Working with Whitney Tassie, the curator there, we devised a way to scan the native American objects in the museum in place, without handling them or touching them.
What was your intent?
Well, the objects I selected were all unattributed. That’s a really key bit of information. This sort of erasure or forgetting of the artist name is akin to the process of scanning and losing the information. Going through that process, it loses the colour, it loses the detail. For some reason, the institution couldn’t keep the artist name alongside those objects. I wanted to use the technology to speak to that.
So, really, you’re looking at using the process as a way to be critical of historical museum practice when it comes to these objects; the idea of First Nations objects acquired by dubious means or that standard colonial practice of simply taking without asking, whether it’s objects or lands or even people.
That’s exactly right. Relationships between museum collections and indigenous people everywhere — really, all over the globe — is hugely contentious and fraught with problems. There is a lot of potential for discussion and engagement. This is one way to provoke that. But it’s not totally oppositional.
No, I think technology itself is offering a potential way to mend some of those relationships or at least address them. We could use this technology to take objects home and leave something behind, as a copy. I don’t know if that’s what I plan to do, but it’s really important to start thinking about and reframing and engaging these relationships. It’s the responsibility of the artist to interrogate things like museum collections,
but also the technology that’s emerging to benefit the museum. There’s another benefit there that indigenous people might be able to have as well. So what kind of shift will take place for you, from there to here?
With the Utah project I had permission to do this. Right now, I’m interested in this idea of permission and what happens if I don’t get it. So you’re planning some kind of guerrilla scanning interventions? With iPhone scanners, that’s possible. (Laughs) Maybe. We’ll see. Geoffrey Farmer
Recent exhibitions: Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Vancouver Art Gallery (career survey), National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario
Farmer is one of Canada’s most widely lauded artists, showing at
such prominent international venues as (d)OCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany, and the Louvre. Busily preparing for next May’s opening in Venice, Farmer talked about his interest in the new technology and how he’ll use it in his project for the Canada pavilion at Venice. The first question is, with Venice on the horizon, how will you find time to do this?
I actually proposed that I make it a part of my Venice project. My project in Venice is to take a leap in my methodology. And I’ve always wanted to work in conjunction with Ryerson on something — their LIFE magazine collection, the Blackstar collection — so I just thought, this makes a lot of sense. I don’t know how it makes sense just yet (laughs). That’s what’s enticing for me as an artist. You mentioned LIFE magazine, which immediately brings to mind
perhapsLeaves of your Grass, best which known was work:a hit at (d)OCUMENTA in 2013. In that, you used thousands of images clipped from LIFE to produce a monumental sculptural work: images, manifested as a physical object, with presence.
Well, yes. It did interest me to think of that connection I already have, with photography as being a thing, of images having a physical dimension. I’ve been exploring that in a very low-tech way: with a pair of scissors, standing images up and looking at them as objects.
I thought this would be a natural extension or development in my work. There’s a tendency with any new technology, I think, to put the cart before the horse, to let the technology drive the idea instead of the other way around. How can you address that?
The technology might be new, but reproductions of all kinds have been made for a long time. That’s always been an aspect of contemporary art, but also classical works, too. It’s true that this is somehow different, though, and I think we’re still grappling to understand what that difference is. Is it a bit of a statement to be using this technology for the first time in Venice, which is probably the highest profile art event in the world?
The way I’ll be using it, people might not necessarily know I used 3D technology to create the work. But the methodology to get there, for me, is the shift: I’m thinking a lot about how I have used collage and my work, so I’m interested in how this technology can capture dimension, but also still use the methodology of collage. How these things will collide — and what will happen in that collision — is what’s exciting for me.