Ronnie Montreal

UNTITLED EMERGENCY, 2024

In this piece I explore ideas of public/private space and free speech. The object is a “speaker”, a vehicle for sound but doesn’t look like a typical speaker. The main audio comes from an app called Radio Unit and is a pair of 911 operators giving direction to EMT’s, fire people and police in real time. I perform/manipulate the audio on an iPad also adding beats and samples. The audio is sent via Bluetooth to the speaker.  Everytime this piece is performed the emergencies will be different due to the live aspect. This raises questions of privacy lost to corporate requirements and free speech, are the operator's voices meant to be available for consumption or used as found objects.

Through the form I “colonize” renaissance art and use draperies to highlight the form of the “speaker” but also defuse the form and it’s meaningful presence. All of the materials were purchased at hardware stores to create a democracy of elements, ideally an experience available to all viewers.

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I graduated from University of Victoria with a BFA in 1990. I completed the work for my MFA at Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1993.

I am a Mik’maq person with European ancestry. In the 50’s my grandmother took my mother and her other children out of residential school and moved to Toronto, where my mother hid her identity. In the 60’s my mother had her native identity stripped away and then reinstated in the 80’s by the Canadian Government. Her experiences have left a hole in me and many questions about identity. 

It was my exposure to the work of Roland Brener and Mowry Baden at UVIC and then later Andrea Blum and Robert Morris at Hunter College that further defined notions of identity, space (public, private and institutional) and how an object (art) asserts or is co opted by these environs and has it’s meaning or identity adjusted. It was especially in New York that my work started incorporating ideas of popular and (un)popular culture, low and high. I started DJing at clubs and wanted to incorporate this more visceral experience into my own work. The dance club is a place where the goal can be to lose one’s identity and the vehicle to this goal is the music. Bringing these ideas to my work is still a driving force for me.

Towards the end of my time in New York I suffered a mental health crisis and though I was producing, showing and selling work I could not remain. This closed a chapter for the production and showing of art objects but my concerns were the same and my focus became personal sound design, writing and drawing. 

COVID changed everything for me. Losing my job and being unemployed for the first time as an adult gave me time to think about how I wanted my life to look. I feel that humanity had a group look at its mortality and that this left a layer of fear on everything. This fear is now another idea that I am examining in my art.

@ronniemontreal