Megan Morman
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Cooler
Follow Cooler online at http://www.artgossip.ca
Performance Summary
Cooler explores the roles that storytelling and gossip play in building spaces for community. Stationed in the gallery near the ubiquitous site of workplace gossip - the water cooler – Megan will develop a series of timely, potentially embellished stories about her experiences at Visualeyez. Artists, organizers and festivalgoers will be treated like celebrities; their stories, both titillating and mundane, made an object of fascination. She’ll leave reviews to the critics, emphasizing happenings outside/after/in the bushes behind the performance. Cooler quenches public thirst for gossip and makes both audience and artists feel like one of the ‘it’ crowd. Visit Cooler on the web at artgossip.ca.
Biography:
Megan grew up in a small town in rural Minnesota and moved to Canada in 1997 to study at the University of Saskatchewan. Her early art experiences were largely with “activist” art outside the organized contemporary art community: artcars, and costumes for drag queens and radical cheerleaders. In 2003 she graduated with degrees in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, focusing on critical theory and community development. Since then she has worked as a freelance designer, writer and thing-doer, as well as a “professional volunteer” with organizations like the Saskatoon Pride Festival. She is currently the Volunteer Coordinator at AIDS Saskatoon.
Megan has performed with AKA Gallery (Saskatoon) and SAVAC (Toronto), and shown at Neutral Ground (Regina), Godfrey Dean Gallery (Yorkton, SK) and Calgary’s Artcity Festival. She received a grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Board in 2007, and in 2008 was awarded the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts’ Jane Turnbull Evans Endowment Fund for emerging women artists.
Artist Statement:
Much of my art practice wrestles with questions of belonging and “recognition by one’s peers”: How does a person become an artist, and how do we best perform our roles as art community members? I’m particularly interested in cultural communities and the ways that identity and group membership are established through storytelling and gossip.
I’m interested in practically everything, and my art reflects (and focuses and magnifies) this nerdy, awkward enthusiasm. Even when it deals with art/disciplinary issues, it’s important to me that my work also be accessible to and engaging of people outside the art community. My work frequently incorporates bathos, irony, and feelings of naughtiness, as well as a pervasive sense of humour.
A background in critical studies informs my fascination with labour and production as they relate to conceptual art. In ongoing performance/intervention LadyLady Helping Services I offers my good intentions and “help” to other artists (whether they ask for it or not). Other art interests include social history, queerness, and mass culture fandom. I love crafts that work with pixels, and am especially fond of art I can make while watching late-night reruns of Star Trek: Voyager.
Website:
http://www.populust.ca/ladylady
Performance Date / Time / Location
September 16th&ndash21st, at Latitude 53 and online at http://www.artgossip.ca