by admin | Jun 19, 2016 | blog, News
Local artists’ project creates images and poetry of abandoned objects
Jennifer Thuncher | Squamish Chief
April 7, 2016 06:00 AM
Bren Simmers (left) and Laurel Terlesky at Nexen Beach. The women are launching an image and poetry project, Narratives of the Lost. Photo: Bren Simmers and Laurel Terlesky
Laurel Terlesky sees a single black glove along the trail at Nexen Beach. Instead of passing it by as other walkers do, Terlesky takes out her camera and snaps a photo, it is for her Narratives of the Lost project.
Terlesky takes pictures of left items she finds in her travels and poet Bren Simmers puts words to the images.
Terlesky explains the project: “To be able to develop a narrative about our community and try to get a lens back to the owners who might have had these objects, and also objects have been left in certain places, so really finding a sense of identity through the land and the people that are here…
“I feel like our community is transitioning a lot, there’s a lot of new people moving here and even with Nexen and the Oceanfront starting to get developed too.”
A lost pair of socks along a Squamish trail.
“That was a pretty good one,” she said of the trophy, which didn’t have a nameplate.
A collared dress shirt left on a bench out in the rain was another curious item Terlesky found – a “deflated shirt, like someone had just walked out of it.”
The items point to a unique character of Squamish, Terlesky said.
“It is not that they were just left on the side of the path or something. They are carefully hung up on a tree or put somewhere,” she said.
An abandoned trophy at Nexen Beach near the log sort. – See more at: http://www.squamishchief.com/community/lost-and-found-objects-in-squamish-1.2225225#sthash.vTDprG92.dpuf
Rather than just images, Terlesky wanted a narrative added to enhance the project, so she contacted the poet Simmers to develop it more, and along with the photos, “start to create the conversation.”
Simmers, who has lived in Squamish for about two years, says penning poems for each item is an entry point for her into the stories and history of the district.
“I look through the different pictures she puts up and inevitably there will be one that will grab my attention,” Simmers said, adding the discarded trophy was definitely one that got her thinking. “How did it get there? And why didn’t the person put it in the garbage can? They couldn’t actually let go of it and just the whole scene suggested this sort of identity in transition, so I sort of went with it as a larger portrait of Squamish and it changing in terms of its identity in the world.”
The women want to make the project interactive, according to Simmers.
They are asking Squamish residents to send in images of lost objects they have seen, along with the location. Eventually, the plan is to print postcards with an image on one side and a poem on the back, Simmers said. The cards would be distributed around Squamish.
The Squamish Arts Council recently granted the project $2,000 from its 2016 Arts and Culture Enhancement Grant. The funds will help build toward a public show planned for the fall.
To send images or for more information, email Terlesky at lost@laurelterlesky.ca.
@ Copyright 2016 Squamish Chief – See more at: http://www.squamishchief.com/community/lost-and-found-objects-in-squamish-1.2225225#sthash.vTDprG92.dpuf
by admin | Mar 9, 2016 | blog, News
Inspiring Creativity
Mike Chouinard / Squamish Chief
March 3, 2016
A dozen or so students line up in twos and begin to walk a slow lap around a classroom inside Quest University.
At one point, they interlock pinkies, with the aim of becoming aware of how their bodies are moving around the space. At first glance, it might not seem what one would expect inside an art class, but there is a method.
“Different movements require different support systems,” said current artist in residence Amara Hark-Weber. “A shoe is basically a tool.”
In this case, the students are taking a class in making shoes from Hark-Weber, a cobbler whose own creations are sometimes conceptual or unusual and sometimes more familiar.
Over the three and a half weeks of the block at Quest, the students, who represent a range of academic pursuits, are looking at shoes from all angles, with the aim of making a pair of their own as the project for the class.
“It’s interesting. You never really think about how to make shoes,” said student Bayle James, who is focusing her regular course of studies on the social sciences. “It’s a different way of thinking.”
In just a few weeks, Hark-Weber’s cobbling course has managed to cover a lot of ground. Early on, the students were making patterns in paper as models for shoes. One assignment required them to research different types of shoes from different eras, such as moccasins, turn shoes, prehistoric shoes and medieval era shoes. From there, they had to put together a short visual presentation.
They also had to research other aspects of making shoes. For example, in one class, Renée Hall delivered a presentation on an overhead projector about different types of stitching, or at least those she had been able to pick up so far – running, back, whip and saddle stitching. “This is the extent of my sewing knowledge,” she said. “I don’t know anything fancier.”
Unlike full-semester programs during which students take several courses simultaneously spread over a fall or spring, Quest offers block programs. The students take one class full-time for three and a half weeks, which allows them to study something more deeply and with fewer distractions.
Quest tutor of music and humanities Jeff Warren, who oversees the artist in residence program, says this approach is especially suited for arts studies because artists tend to take this approach with their own work.
“Artists are quite often project-based,” he said.
Laurel Terlesky, a Squamish artist who served as artist in residence last year, finds the approach allows classes to explore many new ideas. “The students come from a lot of different angles,” she said.
Her course focused on art, technology and the body, examining how technology extends the body.
“We’re able to connect and communicate in ways we haven’t before,” she said.
The class involved photography, collage pieces and electronics, as students worked on projects such as soft sculptures that included interactive sensors attuned to touch, light and sound.
She had one student, with a focus in neuroscience, working on a project that looked at the “aha!” moment in the brain by taking art theory and mixing it with the technical side to literally show the moment when the thought occurs.
Regardless of what endeavours the students choose, Terlesky thinks the course can only help in their chosen field.
“It makes for creative thinkers,” she said. “That’s the reason I like to teach…. I like to work with people and tease out their personal skill or aptitude.”
Over the first two years, the program has offered a wide variety of opportunities and artists with whom the students can study, such as Whistler-based James Stewart, who was the first artist in residence.
A sculptor who also has worked in the film industry with a background in computer graphics, Stewart’s body of work includes films such as Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and District 9. Over the timeframe of the class, he wanted to get students into the workspace quickly for work ranging from painting nudes to using a scientific approach to abstraction and colour theory, all of
which ultimately led them to a better understanding of art quality.
“You can take something like Picasso or Matisse and really appreciate it,” he said
Stewart agrees the intense period of study allows the class to deeply delve into the work.
“You actually have, in my mind, three chunks of time per day, seven days a week you can use, and that’s kind of the way art works.”
For Stewart, the Quest method offered him a different way to teach in another sense.
“It’s not just the block system at Quest. It’s also the way that the school runs itself,” he said.
Stewart says the university is structured differently from other institutions, which are more hierarchical or centralized. Although he ran his course syllabus by Warren, he basically had the freedom to set up the class how he wanted.
He had the class tackle the question of asking where the line between subjectivity and objectivity in art is.“Instead of me telling the students where that line is, the point was to try and find it as a class,” he said.
Another element of the residency is that it allots the artists time for their own work. Terlesky was able to continue working on her installation piece with the help of Canada Council funding and is adapting her piece for exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand.
Current artist in residence Hark-Weber has taken on a new challenge, working with corsets and printing plates, to explore connections between the body, language and narratives. “I did something that is totally new and outside my comfort zone,” she said.
Her current students have had to quickly pick up new practical skills, as many had not sewn before. For students like James, this meant having to make patterns on paper three times, adding adjustments along the way, before starting to cut into the shoe leather.
As the class approached its completion, the conceptual side of the class took a back seat, as the students busily worked away on their projects, cutting leather, punching eyelets, sewing or hand-dyeing exteriors, with the aim of finishing in time for a show of their work on Tuesday night.
It also offered a chance for the students to discuss with Hark-Weber the obstacles they discovered along their path, whether this was breaking a needle or learning how to punch holes in leather or having to re-measure soles. “There are challenges every step of the way,” Hark-Weber said. “It really has been like a survey course. There’s a lot of different elements.”
As a teacher, she is not expecting to be turning out a dozen new cobblers, but that is not what the course is about for her or the students. Rather, it is about the process.
Hark-Weber likes to minimize the differences that academia can sometimes place on disciplines like the arts and sciences. Instead, for her, the challenge comes down to problem-solving, and as to the work the students have produced, she has been more than impressed with the fresh perspectives she has witnessed and the growth she has seen in just a few short weeks. “In terms of the designs that people have come up, they’re so awesome,” she said.
by admin | Nov 8, 2015 | blog, News
Squamish Chief
October 28, 2015 09:52 AM
by, Rebecca Aldous
http://www.squamishchief.com/lifestyles/the-memory-of-touch-1.2097806
Squamish artist Laurel Terlesky sits at her dining room table with the sketches of her bed sheets from her Hallowed Winds project. Photo: Rebecca Aldous
It’s that spring morning when you awake to feel the strengthening sun tingling on your skin. It’s the first time the weight of your newborn child is placed on your chest or the way your mother’s fingernails twirled across your scalp as she shampooed your hair.
Laurel Terlesky is interested in all of these moments. The Squamish artist is exploring the notion of the memory of touch; how it lingers in our bodies, in the very fabric of our cells.
“I’m looking at how experience links in our bodies, not just our minds,” she says during an interview with The Squamish Chief in her downtown apartment. “These kinds of memories are deep. They travel with you for a long time.”
The Calgary native’s journey with art took her to Berlin and New York while studying for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree with the International Creative Practice from Transart Institute, accredited by Plymouth University in the United Kingdom. She always knew art was what she wanted to do. Working with your hands is a big part of communication, Terlesky says.
“For me, that is my language.”
In the beginning, art poured out of her in the form of paintings, but her interest in how people communicate led Terlesky to explore installation pieces – mixing drawings and sculptures with the modern world in the form of audio recordings and electronic light pieces. As a program advisor for Emily Carr University of Art and Design’s continuing studies Design and Transition course, Terlesky is constantly delving into the relationship behind new technology, like smartphones and social media, and how people interact with the pieces through touch.
This year, Quest University Canada hosted Terlesky as an artist in residence. She created a piece she called Hallowed Winds. The installation featured a mound of snow white, knotted bed sheets in the centre of the room. Behind them were two white walls covered with pencil drawings of Terlesky’s bed sheet which she photographed and sketched every morning for a year. Terlesky wanted to see how the body leaves its trace in the world around it.
“I wanted to understand the language in the sheets,” Terlesky says, noting sleeping patterns can reflect what is going on in our lives.
Hallowed Winds included audio narratives that participants had recorded about other individuals’ memories of touch. Terlesky left a book for viewers to share their stories. Her latest project, Surface Rupture, has spawned out of those tales.
“I took the book and I read through all the stories,” Terlesky says. “I feel so gifted that people have shared these things.”
With a grant from the British Columbia Arts Council, Terlesky has already started work on the new piece. She wants to incorporate porcelain sculpture, wool and felt on a wall structure, that will feature audio capsules of the stories collected in the journal at Hallowed Winds.
Starting such a multi-media project is an overwhelming feeling, Terlesky admits. Art can build a safe place for people to share intimate details of their lives. But with that comes a sense of responsibility, Terlesky says, as she juggles the different components and fits them together. “I am finding my way with all of those pieces. Art is where we can have these kinds of conversations,” Terlesky says, adding she hopes the work will encourage people to reflect and live in the moment.
– See more at: http://www.squamishchief.com/lifestyles/the-memory-of-touch-1.2097806#sthash.iIqnC5aI.dpuf
by admin | Apr 5, 2015 | blog, News
Original Post: http://www.questu.ca/news-and-events/apr-2-2015-laurel-terlesky-hallowed-winds
Quest is pleased to showcase Artist-In-Residence, Laurel Terlesky’s exhibition ‘Hallowed Winds’ this week in the
MPR.
A hauntingly beautiful visual and sensory experience. Hallowed Winds explores the memory of touch and the felt experience of the body.
VISITING HOURS:
Today, Tuesday March 31, 4 – 8pm
Wednesday, April 1, 10am – 2pm
Thursday, April 2, 10am – 2pm, 4 – 8pm
Friday, April 3, 10am – 4pm
HALLOWED WINDS
How does our flesh hold a memory of someone? To touch and be touched momentarily ruptures the boundary between our internal and external sense of space. Hallowed Winds offers stories that ride on breath and wind, evoking the deeply felt nature of relationships.
BIOGRAPHY:
Laurel Terlesky is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist and educator. She holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in International Creative Practice from Transart Institute (New York / Berlin), accredited by Plymouth University (UK) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Victoria (Canada). Her works have been experienced across North America on screen — television, large-scale projection, and the internet — and in exhibitions. In 2008, she was awarded a stipend for a five week residency in Barcelona, Spain. Currently, she is Artist-In-Residence at Quest University in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada, where she is building a large installation project entitled, Hallowed Winds, and leading the course, Art, Technology and the Body.
Terlesky’s creative practice explores tacit knowledge through the generation of objects made by and for touch. Her works are further marked by time capsules of audio that pull on one’s fabric of perception. These material transformations delivered through the imprint of touch, call for a momentary pause in a reflective space. She provides tactile encounters to assert what we know by way of our flesh. Codified in her objects are the results of explorations in vulnerable communication and empathic response. Her process aims to bridge gaps, lessen disconnections, grey out false dualisms and repair places of missed communication.
Installations that include projection and sound are also home in Terlesky’s body of work. She breathes life into a space for her participants to feel her empathic sensibilities and evoke a deep sense of being. Visitors to her spaces are called to participate by locating their body as shadow, wind, and vibration. View more of Laurel’s work at
www.laurelterlesky.ca.
by admin | Feb 23, 2015 | blog, News
Post available : http://www.transart.org/quest-university-canada-invites-transart-alumna-as-artist-in-residence-for-hallowed-winds/
Quest University Canada
Laurel Terlesky: Artist-In-Residence
Quest University’s Artist-in-Residence program is pleased to welcome Laurel Terlesky MFA, Transart alumna, as artist-in-residence this March. Together with students, faculty and staff, Terlesky will be creating an installation, Hallowed Winds. The exhibition will be open to the public March 31 – April 3, 2015.
Hallowed Winds is an installation that explores the imprint of touch in our memory and how the body leaves its trace in materiality. This installation will create a shared experience between participants activated by the ephemeral audio narratives evoking an awareness of the felt body.
As part of her residency, Laurel Terlesky will teach a course at Quest University titled “Art, the Body and Technology”. The course will provoke a dialogue amongst students to reveal the spaces and intersections of physical perceptual and sensory driven awareness, cyberspace, the networked nodes of our social community and reflect upon how technology shifts the ways we inhabit our physical landscapes and interior environments.
About Quest’s Artist-in-Residence
Quest University Canada’s artist-in-residence program is open to artists in any discipline, including, but not limited to, visual art, dramatic art, creative writing, dance and music. The artists in residence offer courses in their craft and in the creative process, and provide students with opportunities to develop creative and artistic skills. Additionally, the artists share their own work with the University and surrounding community through installations, exhibitions, or events. Resident artists normally come to Quest for either 6 weeks or 12 weeks between September and April, teaching one or two courses respectively. The remainder of the time is dedicated to the support and practice of both the artists’ and students’ work, which may include open studio sessions, performance/exhibition of artist’s work, and other activities. We offer visiting tutor status, accommodation, and compensation for the entire residence period. We will attempt to accommodate the specific needs of your artistic genre within the constraints of our limited resources.
Quest University Canada
3200 University Boulevard
Squamish, Canada
www.questu.ca
https://laurelterlesky.ca
http://www.transart.org/people/laurel-terlesky/
