Epistemological Conundrum

I am in the middle of a two year graduate program at ECUAD, the programs includes a 12 credit summer internship. For my summer internship, I am teaching a directed studies class in the aboriginal gathering place (AGP).

The AGP is attached the the north campus of ECUAD and is a place for Aboriginal students find a sense of community on campus. This project was my idea, though it could not have happened without the work of the aboriginal coordinator Brenda Crabtree. I have three students on this project;

William,

Mark

and James.

The only parameters I had for this project was that it had to fit it the AGP and it had to have something to do with education. Fitting it into the AGP was easy enough, I just made the pole 9'.

It took me a while to come up with an idea, mostly because I have mixed feelings about the history of aboriginal peoples education in Canada. Never the less I have an idea that satisfies both my scepticism and enthusiasm, its called Epistemological Conundrum and its an interior house post.

Under One Beat

In april I was approached by the Vancouver childrens Festival to create an interactive sculpture/installation. I had no idea what I would do but I accepted anyway.

At the time I was busy finishing the first year of the Masters of applied arts program at ECUAD. Because of that I didn't even think about the project righht away. A few weeks later on a trip to the Freida Diesing school of Northwest Coast art (I helped fascilitate a drummaking workshop and did a talk about my practice), I came up with an idea.

in my moleskine journal I drew a rough sketch.

Three wooden box drums on a metal base, the drums would face in towards each other and on the outside of each drum would be an archived image of an aboriginal in Vancouver over the last 125 years(the projects funding came from the Vancouver 125 fund).

My plan was to build the box drums myself and commission out the base to a metal worker. Unfortunately I had issues with the metal base and decided a wooden base would be more than sufficiant.

I had another project starting in the middle of May, so I needed a helper who was able to do some light labour work and have some scanning/photo skills. Perfectly suited to the task was my classmate and Newcastle supporter Adam Stenhouse. I managed to get the artwork done 2 days before my deadline (not bad).

Under One Beat, is based on the idea of one drum, in a traditional Nisga'a dance group the idea is to get all the drums to sound like one drum, its about unity. The archived images add another element, I think of the installation as honouring the past.