HEaD
NINA VROEMEN & KRISTA DAVIS
PROJECT STATEMENT
HEaD (Hypercosmic Earth and Dirt) is the collaboration between Yukon-based artist Krista Davis and Montreal-based artist Nina Vroemen. Davis and Vroemen bring their work in video, performance, animation, dance and sonic experimentation together to build works principled on an ethics of both wonder and care.
Nina Vroemen seeks projects that quicken the heart. She is an interdisciplinary artist living and working between Dawson City, Yukon and Montreal, Quebec. Her work is informed by the intimacies and discord in traveling between these two very different homes. She writes, creates, performs and directs a collection of multidisciplinary works. Working primarily with video, performance and sonic experimentation, she aims to engage audiences in realizing voiceless narratives, unmarked history and the silhouettes of memory.
Krista Davis is an artist working primarily in video, animation and performance. Living between the Canadian far-north and the American desert Southwest, Davis takes on her physical and social surroundings as locations of immersive research. The queer body—with all its ascribed meanings, its limitations, its desires and emotional responses— becomes a tool for unpacking and understanding these surroundings. Her art offerings take the form of single-channel videos, video-sculptures, installations and collaborative cabaret-style mash-up live shows.
The collaboration began in Dawson City, Yukon in 2016, with Vroemen creating audio for Davis' image, and song from Davis' words. They completed four image-sound collaborations which have shown in 13 galleries and festivals across North America, including the Dawson City International Film Festival, in Dawson City, Yukon, the Arizona Biennial (Museum of Fine Art in Tucson, AZ), and the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This video work has received support from the Yukon Film Fund and the Yukon Advanced Artist Award.
As points on a map their coordinates mark a triangle across the North American continent: Queer. Female. Elemental. From Quebec to Arizona to Yukon, the two work across distances to mix sound, image, performance and ideas about our networked connections to the land and each other.
Nina Vroemen | Engagements with Failure
Nina Vroemen | Lines and Holes
AUDIO/VISUAL COLLABORATIONS
PRISCILLA-LEIGH
Priscilla-Leigh is an on-going desert-drag project, where characters emerge as hyperdesert beings who act as gate keepers to the visitors who attempt to understand this seemingly barren land. Priscilla, an obvious outsider, is found wandering past creosote and cacti, collecting clues from these ostentatious mythical beings and their javelina choir.
This project takes form as a series of interrelated video vignettes combining video, animation, text and song.
DEAR HUMAN
Video | 6:23
Breaking down the master/pet binary, Dear Human observes the canine practice of living life like a series of love affairs and proposes strategies for navigating pesky human complexities that muck up our ability to just feel good.
Video: Krista Davis
Music: Nina Vroemen