S F Ho, jaye simpson, and Helena Krobath
curated by co-director, Whitney Brennan
Arts Assembly is pleased to present the commute, a new digital initiative that explores the concept of commuting and its relationships to safety, accessibility and public transportation. For the first iteration of the commute, artists S F Ho, jaye simpson, and Helena Krobath produced new audio-based works relating to their daily commute or a route between places of their choosing. The works are available for free download accompanied by online maps (when required) to follow while you listen to the artists’ audio works.
Due to the current pandemic that requires us to shelter in place with limited travel, we are adapting the public engagement of the commute as necessary while restrictions are in place.
For our inaugural release of the commute, we ask you to join us for a different kind of ‘commute’ with S. F. Ho’s new work, Guts: A Guided Meditation (2020). Please listen to this piece wherever you are, and we recommend using headphones for an optimal listening experience.
In Guts, Ho invites listeners on a guided experience as a body and mind in a state of illness during a time of quarantined isolation. Parodying the framework of a guided meditation, Ho narrates our journey through corporeal sensations and psychological reflections, easing us into “the elemental conditions of the body.” Their narrative contracts and bends, turning from descriptions of our immediate, imaginary surroundings to the functions of a body living with illness. Our disembodiment is twofold; we are removed from our own current state of isolation into the narrative space of the piece, and simultaneously, we are displaced from a sense of bodily normalcy. The narrator takes us on a journey with no destination, exploring the meditative movements that are still possible when physical mobility is rendered either unsanctioned or impossible. Coalesced with the current circumstances of a global pandemic, Ho’s work touches on the forces, external or internal, which often dictate one’s sense of bodily autonomy, and our ability to move ‘freely’ through or within the world.
S F Ho is a 90% chill 10% not artist living on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. They are into community building, books, and being sort of boring. They just finished writing a short novella about aliens, love, and boundaries called George the Parasite.
Content warning: ‘Fake’ and deliberately intense guided meditation grounded in the perspective of a sick body. Some strong language.
Helena Krobath lives and works in unceded territories around the Lower Mainland, where she practices field recording, electroacoustic composition, multimedia art, and soundwalking.
Helena holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia, and she takes keen interest in how information is created and communicated through built places. Her fieldwork investigates how infrastructures, sensory tuning, and narrative frames co-construct imagination.
Helena has exhibited radio art with New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA, South River) and Community Radio Education Society Media Arts Committee (CRES MAC, Vancouver), among others. She has contributed to learning and mentorship programs with VIVO Media Arts Centre, and has led several public soundwalks with Vancouver New Music and Vancouver Soundwalk Collective. She co-hosts the Soundscape Show on Vancouver Coop Radio and volunteers with the Vancouver Tenants Union.
In Helena Krobath’s Ghost Story Commute (2020) we ride the West Coast Express, a commuter train that typically brings workers into Vancouver in the morning, and back to the Fraser Valley, to the suburbs, in the evening. The WCE is not for inner-city travellers, and its schedule very clearly dictates that those who use it are not ‘from’ Vancouver, but travel into it only to work, before leaving again. It is neither welcoming nor accommodating outside of a nine-to-five schedule, and it does not encourage Vancouver residents to use the train to journey outside the city. Krobath articulates this from-elsewhere suburban experience and introduces the train’s migratory characters through the view of a travelling ghost who observes the passengers, their idiosyncrasies, their commuter habits. How are we when we travel? What ghosts do we ride with on these commutes? Do we know their histories as we ride the rails across the valley?
Listening instructions: Can be accessed anywhere, but imagined on the train itself or from vantage points along that route where the train can be observed. The West Coast Express departs at Waterfront and follows the CPR tracks along the inlet/river. Headphones recommended.
Credits: Sample from “Strange Consolation”, courtesy of Neck of the Woods Samples from "Stanley Cup Riots in Vancouver 2011, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," courtesy of Tetsuro Shigematsu
jaye simpson is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer writer, artist, performer and activist from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation, while their settler ancestry is Scottish and French. Their poems and essays are published in Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international, SAD Magazine, GUTS Magazine, Room, Today’s Parent, Grain, and SubTerrain. simpson is also published in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Worker Poetry, as well as Love After The End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. simpson is currently resisting, ruminating and residing on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations territories, colonially known as Vancouver. it was never going to be okay is their first book.
jaye simpson has ridden the #20 bus in Vancouver often. Enough to know that its route along Commercial Drive and down Hastings Street into what’s known as the Downtown Eastside, is a route that carries folks not only on their commutes from work to home, but also as a sort of east side migratory route; the bus’ path charts the points of intersecting lives who make their way into the downtown core. simpson’s piece, Migrational Memories, follows the #20 bus as they narrate a series of what they initially thought were disconnected experiences, but later realized all occurred around Commercial Drive. They only notice now, years later, how they would return to the same place in a frequent but fractured migration.
We, the listener, are guided through their experiences; love, family history, the systemic racism and discrimination of the country’s social welfare and educational systems. We are somewhere familiar on this route, passing the storefronts and cafes along “The Drive,” and yet our narrator’s reality is one many of us have never experienced, one we have glided past, or even been guided away from. There is intimacy here, sadness too, but also growth, and metamorphosis. If simpson is not a monarch butterfly we can only think that there is still a deeply coded relationship to place; One that precedes birth, and lives in bones and cells.
Listening instructions: Get on the #20 Downtown North bus at Broadway and Commercial Drive. Ride the bus until Hastings Street.
For a longer route, continue on the #20 until Hastings St. and Main St. Transfer on Main St and Pender St. to the #19 Metrotown Station. Get off at Broadway and Clark Dr.
The commute is made possible with support from the Province of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver.
