Abstract

Considering its role in the development of Canada, its iconic landscapes and the extensive art production at the Banff Centre, Banff is a significant site of Canadian visual culture requiring further analysis. Technological innovations, grappled with by artists during the latter half of the twentieth century (Michael Century), featured in exhibitions, residencies and on-site DIY radio stations at the Banff Centre in the Eighties and Nineties, culminating in the exhibition, Radio Rethink (1992) at the Walter Phillips Gallery. This thesis challenges how art history incorporates, remembers and contends with ephemeral performance artworks involving live radio transmissions and public interventions. The analysis focuses on an interview between Daina Augaitis, the curator of Radio Rethink (1992), and participating artist, Colette Urban, as regards Urban’s multi-day, performance art walk, It’s on Your Head, It’s in Your Head (1992). Archives of Banff Centre exhibitions, such as, Between Views and Points of View (1991) and As Public As Race (1992), and performance artworks by Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Rebecca Belmore, Margo Kane, Camille Turner and Diana Burgoyne, contextualize Urban’s work within the milieu of art production at the Banff Centre and public performance art in Canada around the turn of the twentieth century. By attempting to intercept, collaborate and respond to the archival interview through site-writing (Jane Rendell) and an interdisciplinary methodology (Katherine McKittrick), this thesis enacts the archive to reconceptualize the way we write about ephemeral works in Canada, and the parameters of artistic and spatial agency in commercially constructed and federally implicated public spaces.