Wild Card | Justine A. Chambers and SaraH Wong | August 2021
Shifting attention away from the screen, Wild Card is a participatory game devised by Justine A. Chambers and Sarah Wong that consists of 52 playing-style cards, each of which reveals a set of instructions for a score to be performed. Not unlike dance choreography, the scores that make up the project enable sequences of movements to be learned, passed on and elaborated. The artist’s interest in cards stems from the nature of play they represent, and how they have the capacity to function as a tool for decision making and collaboration. The movements being prompted are distilled from habitual gestures, and invite performers to fixate on moments that are otherwise overlooked.
Each piece in the Wild Card deck provides a set of instructions that can be seen as an invitation to participate in and shift a continually unfolding “dance.” While the instructions on each card varies, prompts such as “Glance behind you” make room for each one, in its turn, to be further interpreted by its performer. When enacted, the scores have the potential to manifest as an interruption of the everyday. The artists have strategically chosen initial hiding spots throughout the city of “Vancouver” for each of the 52 cards, and can be happened upon by chance or sought out using the provided map accompanying this email. Adding another familiar element of play to the project, the artists are encouraging participants to perform sequences alone or with others, trade the cards or give them new hiding spots once they’ve been enacted.
Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances “that are already there”–the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her choreographic projects have been presented at Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Helen and Morris Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Sophiensaele (Berlin), Nanaimo Art Gallery, Artspeak (Vancouver), Hong Kong Arts Festival, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Agora de la Danse (Montréal), Festival of New Dance (St. John’s), Mile Zero Dance Society (Edmonton), Dancing on the Edge (Vancouver), Canada Dance Festival (Ottawa), Dance in Vancouver, The Western Front, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Sarah Wong is an emerging dance artist, choreographer and writer based in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her practice explores queer and racialized identity through the lens of ancestry. Using embodied experiences and archival materials, she creates within the realms of performance, installation, and creative writing. Her work has been presented in Vancouver at IGNITE! Youth Arts Festival, Vines Art Festival, and Boombox, and internationally at Mosaico Danza Interplay Festival (Turin, IT). She has worked with artists including Dumb Instrument Dance, Kinesis Dance somatheatro, plastic orchid factory, and Mardon & Mitsuhashi. She is currently engaged in an artistic mentorship with Justine A. Chambers through the support of the BC Arts Council Early Career Development Program.
Wild Card is supported by the Responsive Small Neighbourhood Grants initiative and the BC Arts Council.
SPAM (Special Presentation Art Mail) is an email-based art series where artists work collaboratively to create a digital artwork. Through the link below, viewers can sign up to partake in the project by volunteering to receive upcoming interactive Number 3 Gallery emails.
For the most part, the only art we encounter these days arrives via digital means. You may receive emails announcing exhibitions—both online and in person (often by appointment)—and documentation of process work on your feed in lieu of studio visits or art crawls. When we consider how this changes our perception and relationship to artworks we might also reflect on how many folks have been exclusively viewing artwork this way long before our current infectious disease concerns. This said, online art can just as easily connect us as it can be ignored entirely. If we start to question whether the work we see is losing something to these platforms we might also note how art and technology are almost irreducibly connected—be it the tools we use of the visual influence it can catalyze.
This is not a new dynamic; mail artists have long used postal technology as a way to share snippets of their progress or work, which often intentionally took the place of formal in-person exhibitions. Not unlike our current email subscriptions, mail art (an inherently collaborative medium) would enclose participatory or interactive project and publication opportunities. Given that technology is presently the lifeline to connectivity for many of us, what better time to reconnect with the spirit of the early mail and e-mail artists who used their choice method of distribution as a transfer of aesthetic information to surmount geographical and cultural boundaries.
To view the project please contact number3gallery@gmail.com