Part performance, part playing with lego, part engineered life-cycle of a monument, and part poem, the brick in question (2021) is a work which is and is not about right now, and is and is not about the Paris Commune. It was conceived by a good and diligent student but executed by a tardy truant. It is a series of questions about our political futures presents pasts, and simultaneously a sad sack breakup poem. The original idea came from long COVID walks spent imagining familiar objects being used to make barricades—easily moved, stacked and piled by two people, perhaps neighbours, into defensive structures—a vision of the streets and alleyways of this place congested with renoviction debris, sewage project signs, and greenest city dumpsters. If we all hold the line.
Bio:
Born shortly before the tumult of the Romanian revolution, and currently living as a guest on unceded and occupied xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ lands, Ada Dragomir works across media feeling most at home somewhere between spoofed youtube videos and serious sculptural objects. By harnessing the power of absurdity and irony to point to uncomfortable political realities, her practice primarily addresses questions of productivity, value, and labour. A recent graduate of Emily Carr University (BFA 2020), Dragomir has participated in several exhibitions and curatorial projects including curating Ritual Union at the RBC Media Commons Gallery, addressing the political implications of technology on the body. Most recently, she exhibited a solo show titled Against Working as part of the 2020 Capture Photography Festival. Dragomir has been published in Femme Art Review and Woo Magazine, and finds immense pleasure in reading and writing as avenues for creative expression.
