Pam Hall and Margaret Dragu - Vancouver/St. John's, Canada

atlantic basin project - volume one

Pam Hall is an interdisciplinary artist working across, and sometimes in between, the boundaries of medium and discipline. She makes visual art, constructs installations, works with language, and is engaged in film, video, and most recently, performance. She works alone (inside and outside of her studios), and collaborates with others (sometimes individuals, sometimes communities). Based in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, she travels extensively to pursue the creation and presentation of her work, and to teach graduate students in the U.S. Her work has been shown throughout Canada and internationally.

Margaret Dragu is a warm-hearted, fearless and indomitable spirit who has left her mark across disciplines and across the country. Dragu's astonishing output of work spans back to 1969 and includes forays into theatre, film, video, writing, choreography and above all, performance art. She is perhaps best known for her work in the 1980s, including her long-running X's and O's series, which began with a solstice mega-spectacle in Hamilton in 1983 (X's and O's on the Longest Day of the Year) and continues with her recent "Improvisation for X's and O's". Her 1988 film project I VANT TO BE ALONE reads as a who's who of the Toronto art scene of the 1980s, while her smaller, more intimate 1990s work has been produced and seen mainly on the west coast.

See Lady Justice website.

Coming soon: Marginalia - Out of the House will be presented at the Richmond Art Gallery in BC in July of 2008.

From www.pamhall.ca

Marginalia

Marginalia is a collaboration, a correspondence, a conversation - between two artists on opposite coasts of Canada. It began through the 'matchmaking' efforts of Glenn Alteen, the Director of grunt Gallery in Vancouver, and Richard Simas, the Director of Theatre LaChapelle in Montreal. They wondered what might happen if they enabled a collaboration between two senior women artists from radically different traditions of practice, and sponsored their meeting at joint residency in Montreal in 2004.

Since that time, Hall and Dragu have been exchanging emails, video clips and 'memory cloths'- small fabric squares approximately 12" x 12", which they construct as 'postcards/journal pages/poems/snapshots' of their daily lives and precoccupations. The squares/carres are exchanged digitally several times a week and have come to represent a 'soft book of days' through which each artist maps, then shares their history.

In a recent Artist Statement, Hall and Dragu 'explained' the project this way:

"MARGINALIA is about creating discourse: both between the two artists who have undertaken this committed correspondence, and between audiences who experience the work both virtually and in real-time. Our process engages new technologies and old manual practices to explore the ground between art and life, between one coast and another, between two strangers deciding to 'make a relationship'. We are, like most Canadians, exploring how it might be possible to forge deep connection, mutual understanding, and complicity across great distance."

MARGINALIA was presented to the public for the first time during the LIVE Bienalle of Performance Art, in Vancouver, 2005. To view in-depth documentation from this project and its evolution click on any of the images or this link to

Pam Hall 's Website

December, 2007
by lizsolo

This first edition of the Atlantic Basin Project has been made possible by the efforts of members of the Independent Artists Cooperative and its in house collective Rock Can Roll Independent and through the generous support of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council.