Karen Elaine Spencer - Sunday July 27, 2008

Karen Elaine Spencer, like many artists at Visualize this year, works in many media. Apparently she was even reluctant to come to Visualize, not wanting the pressures of a performance festival to hijack her process.

She was the first to arrive and will be the last to leave. Most of you won't see her perform, but you might run into her chalk texts on city sidewalks or find the odd tangerine. I did. They brought me up short as I wandered. What is this message writ large in chalk? I was so excited to stumble upon Karen's words that I began to watch for them and found, as a result, a hopscotch and "Darcy loves Anita", other artifacts by other urban writers.

Karen's pice is beautifully archived in her own blog,
likewritingwithwater.wordpress.com
(I'm sorry I'm not giving you a hyper-link. Your humble blogger is techno-doltish. Only through the graces of Amy Fung could I figure out how to attach pictures. Too bad there isn't an Amy Fung key command. Then I would have been able to give you weblinks and video.)



For over a week Karen has performed public writing that embodies the pain of colonization from the colonizer's perspective. Her texts have been written in English and Cree (which she has been studying while in Edmonton.) In this project she is attempting to acknowledge our history, not to lay blame or attempt undo what cannot be undone, but to own up.

She describes her work as "trying to sculpt social consciousness". She is concerned about the erosion of public space, and the politics regarding who is excluded by privatization. Ultimately, she wants her work to appear easy: for people to feel that they can make it too, and ideally, that they will.

Karen's Edmonton project, i dreamt i ran away from home, concluded on Sunday with a performance for invited guests. The litany of bad dreams ("I dreamt filled your mouth with stones. I dreamt I wrapped you in my skin. I dreamt I cut your children's hair...." was followed by a keening poem. Then Karen led us from the gallery to her final site, a slab of sidewalk near the gallery, upon which she wrote the final "dream": "I dreamt I awoke to hear your voice."

Watch for the next iteration of this performance action in Saskatoon in the summer of 2009.