moving box project by quiteourselves



Moving Box is an alternative itinerary derived from Quite Ourselves’ annual project called Moving Trailer. The 2020 global pandemic halted QO from continuing the Moving Trailer Project, at which emerging artists would gather and share their creations in a small, four-walled rented moving van. Since its inauguration in 2017, Moving Trailer has accommodated more than twenty artists who felt unsettled in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada, and still shifting between geographical locations and emotional geographies. Instead of gathering together at a parc in town, Moving Box ignited its journey by physically visiting QO’s artist friends who have spread worldwide in light of keeping the friendship and alliance-ship together nonetheless. A participant member puts their personal items in a generic cardboard box and mails it to the next participant no matter where the person lives. The box has now journeyed over four countries, six cities across the globe. The more the surface of the box has gotten worn off, ripped off, the more items that wish to reach out to each other have been accumulated. Nonetheless, the shared moment well preserved in the box has gone through the delivery system upon costs at different currencies as well as numerous delays due to the pandemic. How the Box has evolved along with how the life with the pandemic has dissolved into our everyday life might be the exact representation of how we have kept ourselves strong by friendly attachments and sharing personal moments online or by mails during several lockdowns. Thereby, Quite Ourselves acknowledges that friendship is privileged yet enriched by any means.
The box has now settled back in Montreal, where the first mail began in October 2020.
-Ivetta Sunyoung Kang

Land Acknowledgment

I/We would like to begin by acknowledging that the artist collective Quite Ourselves was mainly founded and carried forward with the artists who gathered and developed the friendship at Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather today. Tiohtiá:ke commonly known as Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. We respect the continued connections with the past, present, and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.

Credits
Concept by Quite Ourselves
Editor and Design team: Ahreum Lee, Breanna Shanahan and Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Project Coordinator, Accountant and Editor: Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Webpage Entrance and Background Designer: Ji Ryang Cha
Writers: Breanna Shanahan, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Sophia Flo Dacy-cole
Essay editor and proofreader: Sophia Flo Dacy-cole
Roundtable Moderator: Esther Bourdages
Roundtable Participants: Ahreum Lee, Breanna Shanahan, Heewoong Jin, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Sophia Flo Dacy-cole
Roundtable video/audio editor: ijo
Designer and Web developer: Ahreum Lee, Boyong Kim and Heewoong Jin
Technical advice: Donghun Lee

This project is generously supported by the DIGITAL NOW grant by the Canada Arts Council.

Jin Heewoong

Jin heewoong(born in 1985 in Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Seoul and Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Graduated from Cheongju University with a Bachelor’s in Painting. He received a graduate degree in Painting from the same university and currently pursuing his MFA program in Concordia in the sculpture department. He has been presented/will be presented at Centre Mai (2023), Maison de la culture Janine-Sutto (2022), Ignition at Leonard & Bina Art Gallery (2022), Peripheral Hours, Tiohtià:ke/Montreal (2019) and Cheongju International Craft biennale 2017. He is a co-founding member of Quite Ourselves, a group of artists seeking sustainable mobility for their present. He experiments with processes of juxtaposition, combination and arrangement with objects that can be found in our surroundings. By producing variations in the arrangement of his objects, Jin’s work generates meanings, order and chaos within his object combinations. These artworks often reveal and frame aesthetic and conceptual elements inherent to the used objects. He recently started expanding his practice with video by combining the internal voice in his text and footage that explores the subtle nuances of his experience of displacement.

Cha Ji-Ryang

Cha Ji Ryang (he/him) has led numerous media-based participative projects and initiated theme-based sites that focus on systems and individuals. Since 2008 with The expressions to move as a start, he has created an online community with emerging young generations to temporarily occupy spaces through such projects, Midnight Parade, Temporary Enterprise, and New Home. He has continued to meet with the public in various places while leading projects like the K-Refugees series that shares the future that is out of balance and the BATS project with people who have experienced emigration.

Eugene Park

Eugene Park (she/her) was born in Seoul. Now, she is living and working in Vancouver/K’emk’emláý, BC, Canada

Breanna Shanahan

Breanna Shanahan (she/her) is a sculpture and two-dimensional based artist whose work focuses on post-humanism, and collective subconscious output. Her daily art practice which engages with the community attempts to bookmark time and place along with influence of others who are part of a network. Shanahan is an instructor teaching sculpture and drawing at universities across Canada. She received her MFA at Concordia University june 2019. Her work has been exhibited in Italy, China, Austria, The United States of America and in Canada. Shanahan has represented Canada in Pengzhou at their international artist centre and at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg Austria as the first Canadian recipient of the Jorisch Family Artist Residency. She is the recipient of many prestigious awards, scholarships, grants and residency and currently has a public artwork up at Marcus Restaurant in the four seasons, Montreal.

Flo-Sophia Dacy-Cole

Sophia Dacy-Cole (she/her) is a Ph.D. Student at the Australian National University. Her research is about plant and soil communication, and staying with the trouble of living on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri lands. She makes performance sculptures. Sophia comes alive in touch and texture.

Ivetta sun young Kang

Ivetta Sunyoung Kang (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Montreal on the land now called Canada. She obtained a BFA from Sang Myung University in South Korea and an MFA from Concordia University. Her work has been presented/will be presented at Sound Scene in partnership with the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2022), ArtScience Museum (2022), Dazibao (2022), The Korean Cultural Center Washington DC (2021), Xpace Cultural Center (2020), Arlington Arts Center (2020), among others. She has participated/is participating in artist residency programs at the AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence (2022), ZK/U (2022) and DAÏMÔN (2019), among others. She has been awarded the RBC Newcomer Arts Award (2021) and was shortlisted for the Simon Blais Award (2016). She has co-founded Quite Ourselves, an artist collective, seeking sustainable mobility in life and art creation. Ivetta’s practice is concerned with archive, video installation, text, performative work and participation

Joni Cheung

Snack Witch aka Joni Cheung (she/they) is a grateful, uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh, and Kanien’kehá:ka peoples. They get paid to make art most of the time, sometimes to teach and communicate digitally/IRL, but generally to drive friends and their things around #fulllicenselyfe. Her time is currently occupied by their candidacy as a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University, where she is investigating the interdependent relationship between objects, place and identity, while navigating discourses of transnationalism, migration, and diasporas. Joni likes to collect and reference still and moving images, texts, audio and soundscapes, objects, places and spaces, popular culture, and digital media in their interdisciplinary research-based practice. Their research presents itself as installations, sculptures, performances, texts, photography and video, as well as accumulations of ephemera that bring attention to things often overlooked. Her favourite materials are banal, everyday objects that hold significant cultural weight and through their sheer existence, they are documents of the shared lived-experiences and memories between individuals within and outside of their communities. Aside from researching and writing, she likes doing snack and beverage reviews, medium length walks at the beach, being wrapped into a blanket burrito & cinnamon bun , and her perfect first date involves a thorough walkthrough at multiple grocery stores + Costco, getting bubble tea, and breads + pastries from all the bakeries. She has exhibited and curated shows at the CRES Media Arts Committee, Vancouver; the FOFA Gallery, Montréal, Centre A: the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver; the Audain Gallery, Vancouver; and has been featured in CBC Arts; and the Canada Line Transit BC Public Art Program, among other spaces and platforms. They are a recipient of numerous awards, including the British Columbia Arts Council Scholarship (2020) and the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Studio Arts Fellowship (2019). She was waitlisted for the SSHRC - Joseph-Armand Bombardier: Canada Graduate Master’s Scholarship (2020).

Matt Ng

Matthew Ng (he/him) is a Canadian artist currently working in Hong Kong. He works in a multidisciplinary way usually in drawing installation and sculpture. His current practice explores questions surrounding devotion and spirituality through the lens of sculpture and drawing reference to religious artistic iconography and practices, geometric patterning and primitive cave paintings. He has been a core member of Quite Ourselves since its founding in 2017 and has played a role in all of their projects and his solo exhibitions include shows in Canada and the United States.

Sara Faridamin

Sara Faridamin (she/her) is a visual artist, concentrating on the medium of photography. She has her academic and practical background in photography, visual communication, urban sociology and fine arts. She was born in Tehran, Iran and is based in Vancouver, Canada. She is interested in psychogeography, memory of place and exploring the concept of rhythm in the everyday life of cities. Her photographs reflect ideas about time and temporality. She focuses on a particular location over a long period of time, in order to get a thorough understanding of space as a container of time and place.

Ah-reum Lee

Ahreum Lee (she/her) is a musician and interdisciplinary media artist from Seoul, South Korea and is currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Lee began her career as the co-founder and frontwoman of experimental art-rock band Juck Juck Grunzie. After spending nearly a decade producing records and touring internationally, she extended her practice into video and multimedia installation work. She was a finalist for the Emerging Digital Artist Award held by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video (Toronto) in 2019. She has exhibited and performed in Montreal at Fonderie Darling, Studio XX, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, as well as Third Shift Festival (Saint John), and Axis Lab (Chicago). Additionally, she has participated in the Intersections | Cross-sections (Toronto) and In Motion: Performance and Unsettled Borders (Chicago) conferences.