Music, Painting, Event, Poetry, Object, Film and Dance: A Panel Discussion on Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964).
Moderator: Dave Dyment
Panelists: Suzette Mayr, Ayumi Goto & Billy-Ray Belcourt
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
4pm MST, 6pm EST
The Panel Conversation on Grapefruit is hosted as a Public Program of the ongoing exhibition, Yoko Ono: GROWING FREEDOM.
Contemporary Calgary invites you to an interdisciplinary discussion on Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, exploring where it sits in relation to other artists’ books and multiples, its relevance as an object of material culture, and its contribution to the genre of conceptual art. Following the format of a round table conversation, we attempt to unravel this unconventional work and the unique creative process of a pioneering artist.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Dave Dyment
Based in Sackville, NB, Dave Dyment’s practice includes audio, video, photography, performance, writing and curating, and the production of artists’ books and multiples. His research-based practice employs found materials to investigate tropes and memes from popular culture. Dyment's work has been included in exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery (Los Angeles), The Power Plant (Toronto), the Montreal Biennale, and other national and international venues. Recent exhibitions include Pop Quiz at The Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, NB and Watching Night of the Living Dead at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge. Examples of his work can be seen at dave-dyment.com or heard on the YYZ Anthology Aural Cultures or the Art Metropole disk New Life After Fire, a collaboration with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. He is represented by MKG127.
Dyment curated Yoko Ono’s work in Nuit Blanche exhibitions in both Toronto (2008) and Edmonton (2015). In 2018, he was commissioned by the CBC to write about Ono’s activities in Canada. The text can be read on the CBC website, here.
Ayumi Goto
Ayumi Goto is a performance artist, currently based in Toronto, traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Missisaugas of the Credit First Nations. Born in Canada, she often draws upon her Japanese heritage and language to creatively challenge nation-building, cultural belonging, and activism. Often working in collaboration, she also explores land-human interrelationality, impermanence, gender fluidities, and spatial-temporal play. Ayumi has performed in London, Berlin, Naha, Kyoto, Nuuk and across this land currently called Canada. She has a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Simon Fraser University, where she investigated and presented a practice-based sense of collective responsibility and third-space shadow relations through the development of a performance art practice in response to the art works and lives of: Cree Métis multi-media artist, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Siksika interdisciplinary artist, Adrian Stimson, and Tahltan performance artist, object maker and best friend, Peter Morin. Ayumi is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow for Dr. Andrea Fatona's Centre, The State of Blackness Platform at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.
Suzette Mayr
Suzette Mayr is the author of five novels including her most recent book Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall. Her fourth novel Monoceros won the ReLit Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, was long-listed for the 2011 Giller Prize, and nominated for a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Monoceros was also included on The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of 2011. Her novels have also been nominated for the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. She has done interdisciplinary work with Calgary theatre company Theatre Junction, visual artists Lisa Brawn and Geoff Hunter, and she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary and at Widener University, Pennsylvania. She is a former President of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
Photo by Tenille Campbell.
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He lives in Vancouver, where he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at UBC. His books are THIS WOUND IS A WORLD, NDN COPING MECHANISMS, and A HISTORY OF MY BRIEF BODY.