Re-creation of a dream / Re-animation of an image
Zachery Longboy has always been attentive to the archive. He is an artist who uses his past work in an ongoing search for what it meant then, what it means now, and how he might create a bridge between those meanings. We have been irregularly in touch over the years about his documentation in the grunt archive and it's great to see this material come into the conversations as he engages with younger Indigenous artists and curators such as Justin Ducharme and Alanna Edwards.
Experiencing performance art via documentation at times feels like looking through a periscope: I am forever wondering who was in the room and what they experienced beyond the boundaries of the camera lens or the reach of the microphone. These details might emerge to enrich the record or they might persist as secrets, refusing to come to rest via description and holding their power. Both are cool. Not long ago, I emailed Longboy for some help identifying the collaborators in his work Re-creation of a Dream, performed at the old grunt space on East 6th Avenue. As usual he didn’t miss a beat, graciously offering me names and anecdotes about the folks in the images I sent him.
A few days later, I was delighted to see that he had taken one of the images, animated it, added sound, and shared the result on Instagram, ostensibly to folks who might be seeing it for the first time, decades after its creation and via a medium that might have seemed quite unlikely in 1992. To me it is a great honour to support contemporary creativity with archival material, it validates the often invisible labour of sustaining a community arts archive in a very pure way. I wanted to share the story behind this remediation more fully and Longboy again obliged, a testament to his generosity and that of his practice.
Dan Pon, 2024
You have my best wishes for a happy and prosperous future as you take advantage of modern material development without losing the best of your old traditions and culture. May God bless you all and may the days of peace and happiness be as sure as the course of the sun in the sky.
Queen Elizabeth II (addressing Indigenous Peoples in The Pas, Manitoba), 1970
I have faltered in my success to archive my performance works and have attempted to collect as much documentation that is out there on the web or from other sources. When approached by Dan Pon at THE GRUNT GALLERY to contribute to the archiving of performance festivals that I had participated in, I jumped at the opportunity. Since then I have had the good fortune to use the archive myself or direct curators/researchers to it.
Much of my performance and video works have either started off from a dream or a dream-like element. I’ve strived to re-create those dreams as truthful to the memory as possible. Re-creation of a dream was my first performance outside of art school, Emily Carr College of Art and Design as it was called at that time. So I had the luxury to create anything I wanted. I did some work with Full Circle: First Nations Performance, mainly exercises and training which gave me a small foundation to work from. Being a Sixties Scoop survivor I was stripped of traditions, language, and culture. I didn’t want to feel ashamed or to fault myself. I had to come to terms with it. The dream was to REcreate traditional rituals and ceremony through my damaged colonized eyes.
The performance began with Queen Elizabeth welcoming all who had gathered repeating herself like a broken record. Like a cyclone spinning uncontrollably the performance unravelled itself. When I was approached to assist with filling the missing information from the documentation of the performance, I was given several digitized photographs of the performance. I took the image of myself burning the words that I had spoken during the performance, the final cleansing, fire. I offered the fire to the four directions, north, east, south, west. Then literally swept away the Elements, and by doing so closing the performance. Because I didn’t have any video footage of the performance, I chose to animate the photographs that I had been given, making my own documentation of the event.
I am truly grateful for the documentation of this performance and other performances that I had done at the grunt. I have used the archive for other works where I’ve needed to look back. My personal archive at home has grown with the knowledge of how useful it is, not only for looking back, but for the future of my art practice.
Zachery Longboy, 2024
Experiencing performance art via documentation at times feels like looking through a periscope: I am forever wondering who was in the room and what they experienced beyond the boundaries of the camera lens or the reach of the microphone. These details might emerge to enrich the record or they might persist as secrets, refusing to come to rest via description and holding their power. Both are cool. Not long ago, I emailed Longboy for some help identifying the collaborators in his work Re-creation of a Dream, performed at the old grunt space on East 6th Avenue. As usual he didn’t miss a beat, graciously offering me names and anecdotes about the folks in the images I sent him.
A few days later, I was delighted to see that he had taken one of the images, animated it, added sound, and shared the result on Instagram, ostensibly to folks who might be seeing it for the first time, decades after its creation and via a medium that might have seemed quite unlikely in 1992. To me it is a great honour to support contemporary creativity with archival material, it validates the often invisible labour of sustaining a community arts archive in a very pure way. I wanted to share the story behind this remediation more fully and Longboy again obliged, a testament to his generosity and that of his practice.
Dan Pon, 2024
You have my best wishes for a happy and prosperous future as you take advantage of modern material development without losing the best of your old traditions and culture. May God bless you all and may the days of peace and happiness be as sure as the course of the sun in the sky.
Queen Elizabeth II (addressing Indigenous Peoples in The Pas, Manitoba), 1970
I have faltered in my success to archive my performance works and have attempted to collect as much documentation that is out there on the web or from other sources. When approached by Dan Pon at THE GRUNT GALLERY to contribute to the archiving of performance festivals that I had participated in, I jumped at the opportunity. Since then I have had the good fortune to use the archive myself or direct curators/researchers to it.
Much of my performance and video works have either started off from a dream or a dream-like element. I’ve strived to re-create those dreams as truthful to the memory as possible. Re-creation of a dream was my first performance outside of art school, Emily Carr College of Art and Design as it was called at that time. So I had the luxury to create anything I wanted. I did some work with Full Circle: First Nations Performance, mainly exercises and training which gave me a small foundation to work from. Being a Sixties Scoop survivor I was stripped of traditions, language, and culture. I didn’t want to feel ashamed or to fault myself. I had to come to terms with it. The dream was to REcreate traditional rituals and ceremony through my damaged colonized eyes.
The performance began with Queen Elizabeth welcoming all who had gathered repeating herself like a broken record. Like a cyclone spinning uncontrollably the performance unravelled itself. When I was approached to assist with filling the missing information from the documentation of the performance, I was given several digitized photographs of the performance. I took the image of myself burning the words that I had spoken during the performance, the final cleansing, fire. I offered the fire to the four directions, north, east, south, west. Then literally swept away the Elements, and by doing so closing the performance. Because I didn’t have any video footage of the performance, I chose to animate the photographs that I had been given, making my own documentation of the event.
I am truly grateful for the documentation of this performance and other performances that I had done at the grunt. I have used the archive for other works where I’ve needed to look back. My personal archive at home has grown with the knowledge of how useful it is, not only for looking back, but for the future of my art practice.
Zachery Longboy, 2024
