The Mashed Economies (ME) collective was formed in 2012 to further the previous spontaneous collaborations between Rebecca Garrett, Riaz Mehmood and Kim Jackson. Mashed Economies signals an effort on the part of the three artists to dig deep into issues of social relations and value within capitalism. Our work asks: what can art practices offer in moving our way through a social fabric that has been torn by colonial and capitalist histories. The 3 members of the ME Collective have, individually and together, worked extensively with artists, collectives and communities on dialogical and collaborative projects of exchange in social/political sites — in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the Northwest Territories, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Kenya and the United States of America. This includes work with youth, indigenous communities and women, as well as those who have experienced and/or resisted homelessness, imprisonment, colonialization, displacement and disenfranchisement. Riaz Mehmood’s projects have focused on the collaborative and participatory nature of art making. Rebecca Garrett and Kim Jackson developed a series of performative workshops involving video, food and performance.
In various ways within our projects we address the questions: Where are we standing? What are the social, cultural, phenomenological, legal, economic and political histories that have brought us here and that place us? How do various social and legislative laws decide and determine what or who will be incorporated into the political and social body, and who or what remains outside?
We ask: what are the ‘trade’ relations that we establish in our collaborative work as well as with the world? How do we recognize indigenous trade routes that have crisscrossed the land while creating new forms of trade, forms that maybe appear more as learning communities, a trade in knowledge rather than money? We are using materials to reactivate symbolic exchanges that were stamped out by colonial and capitalist economies.
These deep political and social structures mirror or echo conventions of looking, presenting, representing, eliding…The edges of these definitions cut to the bone of our belonging and understanding and making them visible opens up the possibility of a radical re-visioning.
As artist much of the labour we do is unpaid. The necessities of survival cause each of us to find paid labour outside of the projects that we do here. Occasionally we may receive government grants to fund small portions of the Mashed Economies project. It is also a reality that we will apply for many more grants than we will receive. We all live within a dialectic between the realities of surviving within capitalism and our desire to upset capitalism. Thinking about this contradiction, the M-ecos collective will strive towards transparent representation of the projects economics.
Rebecca Garrett
http://www.rebeccagarrett.ca/
Rebecca Garrett is a Toronto based artist whose use of media is situation specific. Since graduating from the Ontario College of Art in 1981, Garrett has been exhibiting single channel experimental videos; mixed media and performative interventions; site specific installations; photo-based wall pieces; and film and video installations, in numerous venues in Canada and abroad.
Garrett was Visiting Artist in Residence at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe for three years. (1989-92) During this period she continued to exhibit her work in galleries, produced single channel experimental works for screenings and broadcast, and at the same time developed a community based practice that involved working collectively and collaboratively with community groups. Her work has for many years embodied two parallel approaches to artistic practice. Her art works explore experimental formal concerns and are committed to the evolution of an alternative and innovative image language. The community based projects challenge documentary traditions by engaging performers in enacting alternative knowledges in various social and political contexts.
Garrett has taught at York University, the University of Toronto, and the Ontario College of Art and Design. From 2006 – 2009 she initiated and directed a community-based video production and training project with the Dehcho First Nations in the Northwest Territories, setting up a production facility and producing with trainees a broadcast quality video that documents the history of the Dehcho Dene and their struggle for control over their land. She has been involved in numerous artist, activist and solidarity communities, including the board of directors of YYZ for five years and President of the Board of Directors of Charles Street Video from 1998 – 2005.
In 2003 Garrett began search, an ongoing research and web based video database and archive project that explores the land of southwestern ontario and the interconnectedness of narratives, places, biopolitics, histories, people… a search for relations that have been elided or erased.
search has generated a number of works, including: search>echolocation>open sky, an interactive video and sound installation (2009); search>geography>erasure>affect (2010) a single channel video essay; search>scan>three sisters (2012), a performance/video/lecture; and search>earth>any body.
Kim Jackson
https://gatheringspace.wordpress.com/
http://watkinson.ourpark.ca/
My work arises out of anti-capitalist/colonial and activist engagements. My history includes work on an anarchist feminist zine, anti-poverty cultural and curatorial production and years of involvement in prison solidarity movement. More recently I am focused on community work in the neighbourhood in which I live, the Junction in west Toronto. I work specifically with the low-income neighbours who live in an array of situations including: social housing, a women’s shelter and an SRO Hotel and who face the onslaught of gentrification. I see gentrification as a continuation of colonial relations and as war on the poor. I refer to the method I work with as relational praxis art to indicate the importance of: diverse embodiments and particular/peculiar knowledge; relationality as a key dimension of the work; and the necessity to enact our inspiration and creative work through the material and lived realities of community members.
Riaz Mehmood
http://www.riazmehmood.com/
My artistic practice engages archival research along with performance and video. As an artist, I am interested in how history can shape the ways in which current knowledge is constructed and conveyed. In my work I use archival, found images to reconstruct and reinterpret stories, myths and religious texts.
I am also drawn towards issues around the colonial project and identity politics as these issues have greatly impacted my own identity and practice. In much of my current work, I rely on a collaborative process to filter and shift the narratives I find. This means that I work along with other artists to inform my research and aesthetic. I continue to use this method to strength the basis of my work and to shape the ways in which my archive of research grows. I see this process of reconstructing stories as a means to make sense of knowledge production and to create a sense of placement in history. Through my work, I hope to show how knowledge can be reedited and made to fit my own understanding of the world around me.
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