Annie Canto and Jasmina Majcenic | My Beautiful Laundry

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Annie Canto and Jasmina Majcenic, "My Beautiful Laundry"

Courtesy of the Gallery.

Exhibition Reception: Thursday, June 1 @ 7 - 10PM (part of Yukon Riverside Arts Festival Art Crawl)

The ODD Gallery will transform into a community laundromat for this collaborative, interactive installation by Annie Canto and Jasmina Majcenic. The public is invited to do their washing and drying within the gallery for the duration of the exhibit and to participate in a series of community events and programming.

Wash Party & Soft Opening: Friday, May 19th @ 5:00PM

Air Dry Disco: Thursday, June 1 @ 10PM (part of Yukon Riverside Arts Festival)

DIY Drop in Laundry: May 19 – June 24, during gallery hours

No it’s not a prank. Well perhaps it is, but it’s the kind of hijinks that has a heart full of love and a head full of critical theory, and it does what all good jokes do; points us towards something that is true. Annie Canto’s mischievous installation of a fictionalized laundromat in ODD Gallery, makes us think about the socio-historical factors shaping and influencing the relationship between ourselves, others and the places we inhabit together. This space, activated in collaboration with community-based artist, Jasmina Majcenic, combines function and fun to open up the possibilities of laundry as a site of unexpected connection. Yes, it is a nostalgic re-staging of a fictitious laundromat that’s untouched by the winds of time, but it’s also a functioning event space with food, music, and making; where you can actually go and wash your clothes.

Like with many of Canto’s other projects, this installation foregrounds the adjacent specificities of a particular place, and takes as its cues from the Dawson City community who has long been creative about how to use and inhabit multipurpose spaces. Combined with Majcenic’s reflections on laundry as a place for dreaming, the two come together to activate the collective imagination of their communities using laundry as a transformative and everyday site for meaningful exchange.

Their laundromat, then, is not only replicating the cheerfully mismatched signage and beautifully unintentional furniture of classic laundromats but also taking up the idiosyncratically Dawson attitude of competent DIY-ness that is used to fill particular and functional needs within the city.

By jamming a laundromat into an artist-run centre, expectations are defamiliarized around the nature and function of both places. This irreverent blending of two disparate-seeming spaces takes away our ability to rely on the assumptions we have for how public spaces are meant to be used, and by whom.

The way we locate ourselves, or are located, in physical spaces is indivisible from the larger political and historical conversations widening or constricting the ideological space there is for us in public, social and civic life.

No space is ever neutral and neither is our socially constructed understanding of what activities can be deemed to have, or lack, artistic status. Having a working laundromat in the gallery reframes the function of the gallery away from being restricted to the singular task of art, with a capital A, and instead, opens it up to becoming a site for fractaling out a new range of possibilities for how we can be together, in-situ.    

ANNIE CANTO is a visual artist and educator living on the unceded homelands of the hənqəminəm and Skwxwú7mesh speaking peoples in Burnaby, British Columbia. The underpinnings of her socially engaged art practice use critical race theory and women of colour feminist theories to network and question the complex systems that govern our relationships. Despite the rigorous critical and theoretical framework lurking beneath her work, Canto comes at these weighty issues from the side, with an irreverently serious playfulness. In her performance and material practices, Canto shepherds us away from the more attention grabbing instances of othering and alienation; towards the quiet moments, those slippery experiences of social rupture and its flipside of kinship and belonging. With a surgeon’s precision and a surrealist’s cheeky flippancy, she turns our gaze towards the moments that normally slip under our radar; the misconnections, the halting attempts, the fault lines, the absurd, all those unintentionally telling moments that expose the things we simultaneously fear and long for. Canto has shown work with No. 3 Gallery and Access Gallery’s PLOT in Vancouver, BC, and is very excited to be showing work at The ODD Gallery in Dawson City, YT. She currently works as a humanities instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and works with young artists through the Artist in Residence Studio Program with the Vancouver School Board.

anniecanto.com

JASMINA MAJCENIC

My eyes follow the lines, there are many

many clothes lines, held up by trees, singing their own kind of song. I watch them in the elements and I am reminded of nature’s beauty, the simple joys and the pure satisfaction of hard work done. Bed sheets move in the wind, the sunlight speaks through them and I, I am awash in this beauty.

Jasmina Majcenic is a community artist living in the taiga region of Turtle Islands subarctic. She is an uninvited settler on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, home of the Hän people, also known as Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

Much of Majcenic’s work is rooted in her maternal Balkan ancestry and cultural heritage.  Her multidisciplinary arts practice often acts as a soothing balm to the liminal experience of diaspora, while also creating a direct line of communication to her ancestry.

Majcenic invites people in through collaborative interaction and playfulness. Although deeply kind, she is not afraid to be sassy. Her socially engaged art practice aims to create low-barrier access to art, as a tool of empowerment, harm reduction and wellness. She credits SKETCH Working Arts for Street Involved and Homeless Youth in Toronto Ontario, for supporting her and many other vulnerable youth. SKETCH provided access to art supplies, basic needs and a diverse arts community rooted in anti-poverty and advocacy.

Truly an interdisciplinary artist, she blends community based and therapeutic approaches with written, visual and performing arts in her programming, workshops and personal practice. You may find Majcenic leading a kolo (Balkan circle dance) through the street, DJing on local community radio, feeding loved ones, gardening or speaking to her forebears through feeding her wood stove and other auspicious domestic rituals.