Scott McGovern on Working Outside of Space and Time (The Secret Ingredient – 07/01/15)

The Secret Ingredient

Scott McGovern, Program Director of artist-run centre Ed Video, has just returned to Guelph after spending the fall in Paris, France with his partner Jenn E Norton and their daughter Edie McGovern Norton for Jenn’s Canada Council Residency. Hear his take on what it means to be a Canadian artist abroad and getting cred back home, his upcoming partnership with Parallel Oaxaca, travelling with Toronto’s Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, SOMA in Mexico City, and Art-Athina in Athens, Greece. Reflect on Kelly Richardson’s work The Great Destroyer, a work he recently curated at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. The project partially takes place on Ed Video’s portable exhibition space, the 20 stackable units of Christie Digital MicroTiles, on which play forest scenes from Algonquin Park interspersed with paintings from the Group of Seven accompanied by the Australian mynah bird, imitating the sounds of its forest being destroyed. Ed Video recently lost their downtown exhibition space. What new opportunities for collaboration and branching out internationally present themselves with this change? “From 2006 onwards, I stopped using humour as the entry point and started to using beauty, to seduce the viewer into the work. Humour was too specific and some viewers were not getting beyond the joke. With beauty it was easier to create a psychological space where the viewer is invited into luscious looking imagery and allow themselves to experience the other sensations too. And this tends to make longer works too, that seems to go on forever, like moving paintings. They’re larger, so that the viewer feels like they could simply step into the work.” - Kelly Richardson