Juliana España Keller

 

VIdeo Stills from the video work: Mother Nature and The Tuning of the World - Juliana España Keller 2011

  PERFORMANCE OPENING NIGHT:  Bird Song: An Ode to Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist art movements,
challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions such as dubbing a urinal or ‘ready-made’ and naming it ‘Fountain’. Therefore, he insisted that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

The performance work, ‘Bird Song: An Ode to Marcel Duchamp’ is a conceptual strategy to remove the artist from a high-art practice and distance herself from commodity culture to concentrate on creating an intervention in the landscape. It is arguable that the art market always finds ways to incorporate the activities of those dematerializing the art object within existing institutions and structures but Juliana hopes that by creating an outdoor exhibition in solidarity with the natural environment, greatly extends an allied interest in ecology and green politics.

To add to this discourse, ‘Bird Song: An Ode to Marcel Duchamp’ is a subversive act to attract the colony of birds and wild life that live in the wetlands to the staging of an outdoor art exhibition of Icelandic Art of a cross-disciplinary nature….

Laminated images taken from the internet and constructed as sign posts will be staked around the wetlands area surrounding the Nordic House.  They symbolically represent a small selection of well-established Icelandic Artists who have left their historic stamp in the Icelandic art world and at large, whether it be through Painting, Music, Theatre, Sculpture, Photography or Film and Television, etc. 

Juliana’s performance incorporates the installation of this outdoor intervention as an art exhibition for the wildlife of the wetlands. She  invites the viewer to the ‘vernissage’  alongside with the wetlands wildlife who will be served trails of bird seed distributed along the path so as to observe each artist posted along the trail.

BIO

Juliana is a British visual artist who was born in London, England of Spanish and English descent and emigrated to Jersey City, NJ, US as a teenager. She spent her formative years in and around New York attitude, her thirties living in the jungle of Ciudad Guyana, Venezuela and is now a passionate 'Mile Ender' living in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

Juliana has presented her installations, photography and performance work in many international venues abroad in Europe, South America and the USA and she is currently a Part-Time Faculty member of the Painting and Drawing Department of the Studio Arts Program of Concordia University. 

Her obsession with the people and landscape of Iceland is profound and occupies her mind and artistic practice..  She has been to Iceland several times as part of The International Residency program through the support of the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (SÍM) in Reykjavik
 
Juliana is also a part of two performance collectives:
WWKA [Women with Kitchen Appliances] and B.E. Canada.