Leigh Tennant and Cease Wyss

January - March, 2017

Griffin Art Projects is pleased to welcome our new artist in residence, Cease Wyss, and announce an extension of Leigh Tennant’s studio research, which began this fall, into the 2017 Winter Residency.

T'uy'tanat - Cease Wyss is Coast Salish from the Skwxwu7mesh and Sto:Lo First Nations communities. She has moved into the studio and will be there through the end of March. Over the past 25 years, Wyss has worked in media arts, performance, and installation including public art, exhibitions and community engagement.

Cease has recently returned to textiles after nearly 30 years and has been awarded a grant to hire a master weaver from her community to mentor weaving cedar and wool in Coast Salish styles. This important element of her culture has driven her research of looms, materials and weaving patterns. Wyss will be using the studio space to create a Coast Salish Noble Blanket which will be a part of an upcoming exhibition curated by Adrian Stimson.

Leigh Tennant will be continuing through the end of February their work begun in the residency this fall, an investigation of Maria Gough’s superb look at Russian Constructivism The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. Gough’s work reflects that, when the constructivist project was conceived, they didn’t entirely know how they would use it, that is, how they and we would use it. Tennant takes on this challenge.

This process marks Tennant’s total rejection of the social form of art in parliamentary-capitalism; or what Alain Badiou names the finitude of democratic materialism. Tennant’s negotiation of liberalism rejects the place that queer politics and notions of free sexuality reify as a form of politics, which has become synonymous with the distribution and policing of rights. In doing so, Tennant takes on the challenge of thinking about a cosmology suitable to a society that has undergone industrialization, the scientific revolution and the advent of communism.