Megan Dyck and Tia Halliday: The Sense Economy

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The Laboratory of Spatial Bemusement, Tia Halliday + Megan Dyck, "An Operational Gaze," 2020

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THE LABORATORY OF SPATIAL BEMUSEMENT

The Sense Economy

Artists' Talk: May 29 - 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Join Kamloops Art Gallery Assistant Curator Craig Willms for a virtual conversation with artists Tia Halliday and Megan Dyck, to learn more about their collaborative art practice and The Laboratory of Spatial Bemusement. 

Through their collaborative practice, The Laboratory of Spatial Bemusement, Megan Dyck and Tia Halliday have focused on presenting a series of kinetic sculptures and dance-based performances that incorporate design and accoutrement reminiscent of 18th-century French furniture and textiles. The Sense Economy invites viewers to engage in a tactile and movement-based consideration of luxury and hybridized domestic objects while being encouraged to think about our own relationship to these objects.

The sculptures are liminal structures that transform the gallery space into an arena for experiential dance. They initiate a desire to be held, dwelled within, stood upon, shaken, or worn on one’s head. Pictorial space is navigated in both two and three dimensions allowing for spatial and embodied images to be created through the object’s entrances and exits, physical follies, and material oppressions.

For this project, the artists created a video reminiscent of 1960s performance art, while taking cues from contemporary dance. Enacted by amateur performers, the stark repetition of simple movements is juxtaposed by a curious engagement with hybridized objects that are both utilitarian and functional in nature. Amidst the subject’s multimodal engagement with highly fetishized material phenomena, subtle themes of gender play emerge. Traditional archetypes of masculinity and femininity are transformed to elicit new ways of thinking about the body’s relationship to objects and the visual cultures that inform these engagements.

The Laboratory of Spatial Bemusement sets up conditions for thinking about our cultural associations with objects in relation to gender and capital conditions as a way of reflecting on how we relate to the world around us.