Margaret Dragu
Margaret Dragu works in video, installation, digital and analogue publication, and performance. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist, and community-based practices, she has shown in Canada, the US and Europe. Dragu is celebrating her 50th year as a working artist. Her favourite art-making material is still the body despite, or because of, her bionic status as a grateful owner of two recent hip replacements. She was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012, Éminence Grise (2012) for 7a*11d, and the first artist in FADO’s publication series Canadian Performance Art Legends (2000).
Artist Website: margaretdragu.com
Artist Instagram: instagram.com/ladragu
Justine A. Chambers
Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation and the body as a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there — the social choreographies present in the everyday. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Artist Website: justineachambers.com
Artist Instagram: instagram.com/justine.a.chambers
Artist Statement
I am mapping my experience of moving through the public sphere as a person with a mobility issue. I utilize collaboration, humour, sound and movement to look critically at ableism, the process of aging; while also envisioning the city as a location for spatial justice.
For over three years, I have been working with artist Justine A. Chambers on a project called NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel. It is an immersive installation that explores the social architecture of ability through video, performance, music and text. It also asks the question “can performance be a form of publishing?”
While working on this “13 chapter novel” we also made some “extra chapters” for performances, exhibitions and publishing that are all called chapter 4. We have made 3 chapter fours so far. This is one of them.