Kim Waldron jenna dawn maclellan Women With Kitchen Appliances The Yellow Door Les Ateliers Nature Vivante: UnStill Life Workshops
j. dawn maclellan, 2013
Cultural Mediation
During the month of March 2013, the “chef d’équipe” and artist jenna dawn maclellan with her artist accomplice Chef Kim Waldron invite The Yellow Door’s 60+ Social Club to rediscover the banal through the “Nature Vivante” (UnStill Life) Workshops. In fact, there is nothing banal about the quotidian. The everyday comes to life where the ordinary becomes extraordinary as we undomesticate the domestic. Work becomes play as we infiltrate OBORO’s gallery, studios, office and kitchen. Cooking is reinvented through ludic actions and interactions while gaining exposure to performance and contemporary art practices. Over the course of the workshops “the socialites” will be exposed to both low and high-tech technologies as we reconstruct and question: reality or fiction? Our menu is forever changing. Along the way we will encounter special guests, The Women With Kitchen Appliances, as we celebrate life, the domestic arts and the everyday. As it turns out, a cookbook is not just a cookbook.
j. dawn maclellan, 2013
Kim Waldron’s art practice makes frequent use of self-portraiture as a means to engage with contemporary social situations. Through addressing the idea that reality is always a construction, over the years her work has questioned the role of images and the importance of context as discourse. The conceptual framework of her photographic series is based on the boundary that defines reality and fiction. Not only is self-representation an integral component of her work, the contexts that she uses to create these narratives is equally as important.
jenna dawn maclellan is a Montréal-based artist and cultural mediator, born in the prairies and raised in the community of Sioux Lookout. Location, accessibility and personal encounters have greatly influenced her socially-engaged practice, where she activates personal and social experiences through performative gestures in public and private spaces inspired by the everyday.
Women With Kitchen Appliances (WWKA) is a feminist performance art group. Ten women form the core group, but since its inception in 1999, more than fifty artists have participated in this collective project. The group creates theatrical improvisational sound performances through the amplification of manipulated kitchen apparatus. In the wake of the termination of its activities, WWKA participates in some workshops that will contribute to a critical reflection leading to the production of a retrospective publication, WWKA 1999-2012.
Situated in downtown Montreal, the Yellow Door has been an integral part of its community for over 100 years. Also known as the YMCA of McGill, the organization has always espoused precepts of social justice, freedom of expression, spirituality and personal growth.
