Summer 2017
A research residency on the work of Jayce Salloum as alternative media.
Jayce Salloum has made a career out of interrogating the complicated nature of representation and the power of images and text. His career has also intersected in an extraordinary way with the history of artist-run centres and arts collectives. Salloum has continuously and ingeniously addressed the public through various channels, including performances, photographs, installations, postcards, stencils, mail art, bookworks, magazine projects, and videos. Considering Salloum’s work as a form of alternative media, researcher Michael Davidge is particularly interested in Salloum’s publishing activities in artist’s books and magazines, which offer a unique lens through which to bring the history of artist-run centres and artists’ publishing into focus. One goal of this residency is to underscore the manner in which Salloum’s work presents an alternative to the mainstream media’s representation of war, the nation state, and the nature of conflict, while highlighting the importance of artist-run centres as platforms for alternative views.
Michael Davidge is an artist, writer and independent curator who lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He holds an M.A. in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Western University in London, Ontario. Citation is an activity that bridges his varied practices that are intertextual and interdisciplinary in nature. He was the founding editor of Syphon, an arts and culture publication produced by Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston, Ontario that acts as a record and communiqué for regional arts communities. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash and C Magazine, among other publications. Currently, he is the coordinator for SAW Video’s Cultural Engineering project, a quarterly on-line video magazine that addresses the impact of a major arts infrastructure development in Ottawa from the perspective of local artists: the project will culminate in an exhibition in fall 2017.