Karen Spencer
dream listener/porteur de rêves/portador de sueños
(interventions)
November 25, 2006 to November 25, 2007
in the city
with the collaboration of Centre de recherche urbaine de Montréal, homelessnation.org and the St-James Drop-In Centre
www.dreamlistener.wordpress.com
LANCEMENT / LAUNCH
dream listener : An audiobook in three movements/un livre audio en trois parties
Friday October 19, 2007
from 6 to 11 PM
at the park with no name
All proceeds from the launch will go to the Saint James Drop-In Centre
dream listener: an audiobook in three movements is the compelling story of dream listener, a public art project by artist Karen Spencer in collaboration with the Centre de recherche urbaine de Montréal (CRUM), Homeless Nation, and the St-James Drop-In Centre. The dream listener project is a mobile intervention in the street that takes place from 25 November 2006 to 25 November 2007. For one year Karen Spencer has written her dreams on cardboard, gone out into the street, and held the cardboard dream in front of her. Made visible and displayed in this manner, the dream elicits a response. A dialogue begins with people in the street, opening the possibility of entering into the dream world of others. She asks the public, did you dream last night? Tell me your dream...
Nous sommes tous de beaux rêveurs.
Occurring in the street and using found cardboard to communicate her dreams, Karen's interventions imply a direct relationship with people who live their lives on the street. The artist has also spent the year building relationships with members of the St-James Drop-In Centre in Montréal, a day centre for people who are at risk because of one or a combination of the following factors: homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse, personality disorder, or intellectual handicap. Karen's interventions have taken place in Montréal, Chicoutimi, and North Bay, Ontario, where she has shared, collected, and listened to dreams.
The Centre de recherche urbaine de Montréal was commissioned by Karen Spencer to create an original audio piece as part of the dream listener project.
dream listener: an audiobook in three movements combines excerpts of dreams told to Karen with narration of her own experiences and encounters with people on the street and at the St-James Drop-In Centre. By turns poignant, surreal, comic and revelatory, the audiobook is both a document of Karen's experience and an original composition in itself. The CD will be available at the launch for a suggested donation of $10, all proceeds going to the St-James Drop-In Centre.
The CRUM is an artists' collective that seeks to explore and develop links between art and urban space. Current members of the CRUM are Chris Carrière, Matt Killen, Alexandra McIntosh, Doug Scholes, and Felicity Tayler.
Montréal artist Karen Spencer has a masters degree in arts from UQAM and has presented her work on numerous occasions in Québec, Canada, Finland, Yugoslavia, Italia and France. She is a wanderer, a loiterer, a rider of trains, a circulator of dreams. She takes the mundane events of ordinary life and mines these for their poetic underpinnings. Although Karen's work has been presented in exhibition centres across Canada and Europe (recent exhibitions include votre rêve dans mon oreille at Lobe in Chicoutimi, lit de pain at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and metro rider at La Centrale in Montréal), her favorite place of presentation is the street.
More information :
Karen Spencer's blog for the project (includes many pictures). dreamlistener.wordpress.com
St-James Drop-In Centre www.stjamescentre.ca
The Homeless Nation is Canada's only website created by and for Homeless Canadians. They work to close the digital divide between the general public and Canada's homeless population. homelessnation.org
Visit the 18e Nuit des sans-abri with activities through-out Québec
Thanks to ATSA - États d'urgence November 21-25
***
open house: Wednesday April 4 from 1PM to 4:30PM at St-James Drop-In Centre
(studio: 1440 St-Alexandre, corner of Sainte-Catherine 3rd floor)
Listening: Karen Spencer's project is to listen to dreams. And to listen again. And again. She will immerse herself into this land of dreams, and this immersion is the content of the work. Listening works with transience, the disappearance of things: To tell the dream, to listen to the dream, to allow it to disappear.
As a way of placing the work within a global artistic practice, we might draw a parallel to a performance project of the Beijing conceptual/performance artist Song Dong: Writing diary with water, 1995/present. Dong uses a calligraphy brush to write daily diary entries in water on a block of stone. As the artist explains "After a while this stone slowly became a part of me. That means I could say anything to it and be unscrupulous. This act became a part of life and it made me more relaxed." In a certain way, listening to dreams is also about an act becoming part of life, a traceless act that is engaged in over and over. The telling of the dream is captured by the ear and will disappear as the writing with water disappears on the stone.
Displaying: For one year Karen Spencer will write dreams on cardboard, go to the street, hold the cardboard dream in front of her. The dream made visible, displayed in this way, elicits a response. A dialogue is begun which opens the possibility of entering into the dream world of others. The private world of the dream is displaced into the social, rubbing against prescriptions of the appropriate. It is about the softening of boundaries between inside and outside (on the street).
Taking garbage like found cardboard, investing it with words, and then abandoning it again. Believing in the potential of the oblique, the invisible, the chance encounter with a spectator, non spectator--the glimpse, the turn of the head, the stare, the smile, the averting eyes, the moving away, the coming towards.
Each cardboard dream as well as the location where the cardboard dream is abandoned is documented with a digital image. Some of the encounters are reported in the blog.
Recording: The third component of the project conflates homelessness and dreams--both which are considered to be without economic value, and both which are tolerated as long as they remain invisible and do not strain the marketplace economy. Dreaming dreams is generally considered to be a waste of time, it does not produce an exchange value. Homeless people are generally considered to be a drain on society, requiring a "welfare" state to intervene on their behalf.
With the involvement of Homeless Nation and the Centre de recherche urbaine de Montréal, a compact disc of recorded dreams will be produced and launched in October of 2007 to mark the 18th Nuit des sans-abris in Quebec. This audio dream project will in turn be available for downloading from the HomelessNation.org web site.
"My artistic research seeks to deepen my understanding of the ephemeral nature of daily experience and to re-situate this experience in place and time. Specifically I am interested in subverting activities and spaces that are assigned a low or no exchange value. I have consistently worked within spaces that speak of a disenfranchisement from a secure position within society. In expect nothing (2000), the rooming house existed in a precarious relationship to homelessness, the ramblin' man (2001) claimed no space, and loitererin' (2003) occupied a fragile relationship to territory... while the metro rider (2004) was always moving. dream listener is a continuation of this exploration. "
Karen Spencer (Montréal) has a masters degree in arts at UQAM and has presented her work in numerous occasions in Québec, Canada, Finland, Yougoslavia, Italia and France. She is a wanderer, a loiterer, a rider of trains, a circulator of dreams. She takes the mundane events of ordinary life and mines these for their poetic underpinnings. Although Karen's work has been presented in exhibition centres across Canada and Europe (recent exhibitions being: "votre rêve dans mon oreille" at le Lobe in Chicoutimi, "lit de pain" at la Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and "metro rider" at la Centrale in Montreal) her favorite place of presentation is the street.
***
Karen Spencer will be doing a performance/dream reading at the Festival Voix d'Amérique
February 5, 2007 between 5 and 7 PM
at the Casa del Popolo
4873 boul. Saint-Laurent
during the Text-Perplexed series animated by Victoria Stanton
***
artist’s talk at Souffles Gallery
Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 7PM
Souffles
7044 St-Urbain (between Mozart and Jean-Talon)
Montréal Québec H2S 3H5
(514) 271-4691
de Castelnau métro
souffles@bellnet.ca
Please join us on Friday, December 8th at Souffles, where Karen Spencer will discuss her ongoing project dream listener/porteur de rêves currently presented by DARE-DARE. She will talk about how this work came to be and reflect on questions such as, What happens when a performance merges with one’s self-identity in an uncomfortable way? See you there!
Souffles is a collaborative project by Vida Simon and Jack Stanley. In its present form, it is an exhibition-event space located in a former sewing factory in Montréal. This empty sky lit room holds visual art, poetry readings, performances, artists’ talks, discussions, as well as activities difficult to name.
dream listener/porteur de rêves
dream listener goes to the street
she stands on the sidewalk
holds words in front of her
words written on found cardboard
words that recount a dream
others look at the words, read the words,
approach her, talk to her
she asks,
Did you dream last night?
Tell me your dream.
she listens.
When she leaves the street
she leaves the cardboard with the dream behind.
The artist wishes to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres for its support. She also wishes to thank Émilie Laforce, Priscilla Kauffmann, Christine Brault, Valérie Perron, Jean-Pierre Caissie and Anne-Marie Beaulieu, coordinator of the arts workshop of the St-James drop-in Centre.
