Amy Ball 2021 Finalist

In her performance practice, Amy Ball explores the feminization of architectural space. She plays the part of the performer and delivers her writing in a variety of situational choreographies that respond directly to the architecture in which she is performing. Her written, installation, film, sculptural and graphic work engage with fictional and non-fictional niche communities; she is particularly interested in communities that pose alternative ways of living to those widely accepted as the norm. Amy works across a variety of media as she perpetually develops her own language of engagement. Most of the work she has produced since relocating back to Dawson City in 2018 has been community oriented. After living overseas for nearly a decade, returning to the Yukon and returning to her community has allowed her to fulfill a desire to work more collaboratively and socially.

Photo documentation: Mark Dickenson, Neu Alte Brücke

Energy was first as foremost an exploration of capitalist infrastructure. Our culture’s obsession with energy; with a lack of if, with a constant striving for more of it both internally: human, and externally: environmental, is at the centre of the project. The need for that energy is then commodified in a classic neo-liberal way of selling back to us what we think we need, and Red Bull is the perfect example of that as it not only sold us energy but created as entire industry that made selling energy to our bodies possible in the first place. The exhibition consisted of a large scale window painting that you could see from the street, 5 framed monoprints each of a single sleeping character that was taken from the original ad campaigns for Red Bull in Europe – the moment before they tasted Red Bull and miraculously awoke, the original essay that viewers could take home with them, and a short looped animation of a similar character looped on the subway and unable to wake up.

Sample from the essay:
“What is so remarkable about Red Bull’s© history, is that in 4 the years that proceed 1982 when Dietrich and Chaleo first shook hands and threw their heads back in simultaneously anticipatory gay bouts of laughter at their then forthcoming and invariably successful collaboration, and the first partially rebranded aluminum can hitting the shelves in Austria in 1987, is that Red Bull© created both the supply and the demand: it was the golden egg, a perfect union, all three sections of the evenly distributed Venn diagram. Red Bull© was pure potential. Before it, there was coffee and there was tea and there was coca-cola, and before that there was cocaine; before it all there may have been some abstract rural rituals of testing out different consumables picked out of the ground to see how they’d make you feel, some of which may have been energy boosting, but soon Red Bull© would burst through the glass ceiling, paving the way for an endless stream of competitors, none of which to this day, have surpassed the ground breaking hard rock base jumping skydiving reality that is Red Bull©. It was not only such a success because it dominated a market, but because it invented it, initiating an entire product category, and founding a market which to this day continues along on a path of healthy and consistent growth, filling Red Bull©’s neighbouring shelves with your Monsters©, your Rock Stars©, your Full Throttles©, your Amps©’ and your os’©; and, arguably soon after your healthier branded alternatives, your Club Mates’© and your Matchas’.

But where did this demand come from? Humans have experimented and relied on an incomprehensible variety of consumable assistants at keeping them awake or making them more alert or altering their outlook in someway, but why now, has there been an energy deficit for 31 years that took 75+ billion cans to fill? The Red Bull© can soon became synonymous with pubs, clubs, and bars of all kind; with late night driving, with long haul transport, with epic study benders in university libraries, with meeting deadlines in cramped cubicles, with high school gym classes, with family barbecues, with smokers, with non smokers, with mountain bike rides, with beach vacations, with chess tournaments, with online poker, with getting ready to go out, with deciding to stay in; it is 355mL that goes hand in hand with nearly every cultural event from skydiving to fashion shows, from music festivals to art exhibitions. Since it his the ground running in 1982, Red Bull©, true to form, has been like an energetic kid, hungry for airtime and not old enough to feel shame about it. Red Bull© was willing to associate itself with any need for energy, even when no energy was needed at all.”

Photo documentation: Viviana Abelson

The overall exhibition “powers” consisted the above mentioned works as well as two large scale video projections, a light installation, and a window installation, but I’ve chosen to focus on the ceramic benches and the sound installation for the purposed of this application. This exhibition was born out of research into pre-apocalyptic prepper communities, and the benches are the most representational of that. Their stability, almost architectural feeling, is meant to exist in stark contrast with the instability their contents represent. After extensive research one thing all of the prepper communities I was following had in common was their almost excitement at the potential for the world to end in whatever way, the want to embrace the instability of the future, and of course in a very predictable way to be the men that help form the new society that will most certainly serve them best. In contrast to the benches was the sound installation entitled “Without Rule of Law” that is my voice reciting a sort of mantra that repeats “I am an man, I’m a strong man, I’m a very strong man” and so on, in a sort of defeated attempt to convince the audience or herself that she is ready for anything.

See full documentation here: https://vimeo.com/255547854

Photo documentation: Viviana Abelson
Performance documentation: Viviana Abelson

This performance took place on the opening evening of the exhibition “powers” (represented in Artwork 3 of this application). Viewers are invited out of the exhibition space and into the cellar in the historic building, where they are confronted with this person on a dirt bike, fully clad, who is back lit and pushing themselves around the cramped space by foot. There is a microphone jammed into their helmet and as they begin to pant at the effort of navigating this small space, they begin to recite a similar mantra to the one playing upstairs “I am a man, I am a strong man, I am a very strong man.” The motivation (as with the sound installation mentioned in Artwork 3) is to depict the absurdity of this male protagonist pumping himself up for the end of the world. By having this performer push themselves around in a tight space on a bike that isn’t on, I hoped to highlight that tension: the inaction of now due to the anticipation of action in the future.

Performance documentation: Camillo Brau

Don’t be a Stranger was a series of performances collaboratively done with the artist Filippa Petersson between 2016-2017. We developed a methodology to create these performances that would end up looking and sounding different completely dependant upon the spaces each was performed in. We were interested in feminizing architecture space by adding narratives of space that tend to go unheard (just as feminine experience of space tends to go unheard). Filippa and I developed a method where we would arrange site visits to the proposed locations and ask for tours of the entire building, everywhere from exhibition rooms to storage facilities to offices. These tours were usually offered to us from characters who really knew the place, often more akin to janitors as opposed to curators; therefore, giving us access to a less public knowledge of the buildings. The spoken content of our performances was both directly and indirectly derived from these tours. This gesture shone a light on minor histories and experiences of space that have remained hidden; this is directly related for me to the gesture of feminizing space, as the female role in architecture (both in industry, but also in use-of-space) is generally a hidden one.

Filippa was a visual centre point for the performances – she would be the focal point of the audience, and she would be performing the task of playing and intervening with audio that was coming from me, as I physically navigated the entire building. At times Filippa would be running mic cables out widows, or covering speakers with ceramic to turn the volume down if it was too loud as son on, while I recited the stories from around the building within the spaces we heard them.