“muku & coro” takes place in Rauma, Finland, during a two months artist residency stay hosted by Raumars A-i-R. Rauma is a city of 40,000 people on the west coast of Finland; a 4 hour bus ride from the capital city Helsinki.
Pori newspaper covered the story behind "muku & coro" in Rauma.
Muku & Coro (11 Landscape Paintings with Dogs) is a site-specific installation project which explored the function of domestic spaces as friendly, alternate venues for art presentation. Eleven collaborators agreed to play roles as gallery owners, hosting a painting on their wall for 10 months. The first one took place in Montreal 2006. The second one, the Long Distance version is ongoing.
Commuters rarely pay attention to doors in the metro stations that lead to boiler rooms, storage spaces and offices. These doors, often painted grey or beige, tend to go unnoticed. Closed and locked, we never have the opportunity to find out what lies on the other side. The work calls attention to the otherwise nondescript doorway of a fake restaurant storefront by heightening people’s expectations and catching them by surprise. The artists hope to entice passersby to look for the restaurant and halt in front of the “temporarily closed” sign.
Les usagers du métro ne prêtent jamais attention aux portes qui pourraient mener à une chaufferie, un lieu de stockage ou un bureau. Ces entrées sont fermées et verrouillées, de couleur grise ou beige de façon à ce qu’elles passent généralement inaperçues. De ce fait, nous n’avons jamais la possibilité de savoir ce qui se cache vraiment derrière ces portes. «Maintenant ouvert/Temporai- rement fermé » attire donc l’attention sur une porte en créant un effet de surprise. Les artistes souhaitent que les passants cherchent et s’arrêtent devant ce restaurant «temporairement fermé».
The Survival Japanese Cooking project derives from my art practice in sculpture. Local food and kitchen equipment are used as material to explore the possibility of culinary cultural crossover. The project was executed while staying at RAUMARS A-i-R in Rauma, Finland. The Citymarket is a local store selling everything from groceries to hardwares. It is like Zellars or Wallmart. They publish monthly flyers for groceries on specials along with recipes in using those products in promotion. I happen to notice that in the October issue, two full pages were dedicated to Japanese cooking. I do not read any Finnish so I decided that I asked a Finnish person I got to become friends with to follow these recipes.
The Survival Japanese Cooking project derives from my art practice in sculpture. Local food and kitchen equipment are used as material to explore the possibility of culinary cultural crossover. The project was executed while staying for a week at This Neck of the Woods, a Canadian themed camp site, organized by Yvette Poorter in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Bolik was a soviet trained space dog who ran away a few days before her flight in 1951. A replacement, a street dog, was quickly found and made a successful flight. She was named ZIB, allegedly a Russian acronym meaning “Substitute for missing Bolik” .
This project examines the raw creative process by relating to people and their memory, by collaborating the creation of drawings of dogs that only live in their mind space.