top of page

CCC

CCC is a collection of artists, writers, and audio producers. We like to be described as a nebulous assortment of curious individuals who work together to create temporary installations and uncanny experiences that exist in the world for a few moments until they don't anymore. 

- Below are a few samples of our work

L'ESPRIT DE L'ESCALIER

During a social dinner, a remark was made to the French philosopher Denis Diderot which left him speechless at the time. As he explains, "l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier" or, in English, "a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument leveled against him, loses his head and can only think clearly
again once he has reached the bottom of the stairs" The term L'esprit de l'escalier was coined for this situation. Thinking of the perfect reply, only too late.
The work uses the premise of a stairwell moment
to examine the relationship between ideas of death, sleep, loss and preservation—all the words you wish you’d said and all the thoughts you wish you’d documented. Based on six short essays written, recorded and produced by CCC and voiced by Abigail Whitney and Stella Isaac, the audio piece reworks these texts into a ​discordant array of thoughts that roam from one topic to the next, attempting to
regain their focus.

L’esprit de l’escalier was commissioned by Koffler.Digital and developed in conjunction with Nicole Collins: Furthest Boundless. 

THE SUBLIME IN QUOTATIONS

 

 

"A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: Did you come by photograph or by train? All photographs are a form of transportation and an expression of absence."

 

(I think I remember reading that) most painted Egyptian figures are in eternal profile; something about the continuity of life after death. Eternity now exists online. Profiles of deceased relatives and friends keep lingering on our screens, and computer algorithms keep asking us if we'd like to invite them to art openings or fancy dress parties.

Nobody used to mean no body, but bodies matter less and less. Matter matters less and less. Expressions of absence. The Sublime in Quotations is an attempt to reconcile this new reality where figure, object, image, and data are all collapsing into one eternal presence. The exhibition was created as a work in five chapters, each explore a theme central to this ongoing collapse.

I.Myth making

II.The cyclops, and the vanishing point

III.Floating or falling through the water

IV.Absence and profile

V.Collection as preservation

- The video from the exhibition can be seen here - a short essay about the work can be seen here. 

Narrative

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

"A pink paper. A green kitchen. An unremarkable view. I’m not sure I will go back. The cabin was fine but I felt you could put your hands through me the last time I was there. Every morning was the same until it happened. I would sit in the green kitchen after coming back from church and try to make Rowan talk to me about the sermon. She would read a large ratty paper (yesterday’s) that she had found on the way back. The combination of these ‘sources of information’ gave us some odd ideas so we had a lot to talk about."

 

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE is a small skeletal fishing hut with brass trumpet-like tubes protruding from its core. Installed outside the Duntara Hall, it invites the viewer to lean in and hear a story, or more accurately, five stories from five trumpet speakers.  Toronto based art collective CCC (Braden Labonte and Angela Shackel) commissioned five writers to each create a different fiction (romance, horror, sci-fi, etc.) using common characters and a common location. The recorded stories are played simultaneously through the five trumpets attached to the sculpture/ hut. As viewers approach the whispering structure, they hear the story of Rowan and Quinn in a fishing hut as told by five different authors in five different genres. Standing by the sculpture/ hut the listener hears one story at a time which slowly begins to morph and evolve as they navigate around the structure. One narrative rolls into another creating a new and different story for each listener.

Commissioned Writers: Howard Akler, Edwina Attlee, Tony Burgess, Miranda Hill

HOLD ON HOLD ON SOME THINGS LAST FOREVER

“In Babylon once stood the Ishtar Gate, a fortified ingress of brilliant blue. How did such a wonder ever spring up, perhaps 2,600 years ago? Built by Nebuchadnezzar II is history’s shorthand, iterated in every encyclopedia and guidebook, including our own. This reductive phrase reminded us of Hampton Court and Henry VIII, of Versailles and Louis Quatorze too, and of other monarchs besides who snatched glory with un-callused hands: power and gold their only graft. Remembering them we forgot the workers who baked the bricks and piled them high, who sawed the cedar wood and hauled it along. That unremembered rabble fell nameless by the wayside giving memory the slip. And what of the divine dedicatee in all this – that goddess of love, war, fertility and sex, of whom we read? Surely it was she who drove them all, labourers and king alike?”

HOLD ON HOLD ON SOME THINGS LAST FOREVER is a site specific installation made of loose sand that is presented in a state of flux and deterioration for the duration of the exhibition.

30

THIRTY SOMETHING SUNSETS

"Be very careful, Forgetting is not so much the antithesis of memory. This is less about excavating the past, about recapturing a vanished substance, or about returning to the achievements of a previous time. And it has nothing to do with nostalgia. It is rather about returning to a time before possibilities were eroded, to a moment before opportunities were squandered. Time past and time future. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present."

Thirty Something Sunsets are  a series of 32 hand-cut monotype records were pressed onto phonograph discs. Poets and essayists were invited to create original works reacting and reflecting on idea and existence of the city of babylon. We invited the writers record their written responses to the themes of the exhibition --Babylon, labour, art and artefact, collections, time, place, individuality and social structures.

The recorded writings have been, cut up, and re-ordered into a layered dream-like structure and printed onto phonographic disks with a zoetrope animated surface. 

Scondi

HOLD ON HOLD ON SOME THINGS LAST FOREVER

"Modernity is our antiquity. We live with its ruins, and play in its ashes.

This is the pulse, this is the sound

This is the beat of a new generation.

Great words to cover ugly actions - good frames to save bad paintings.

We incorporate modernity into our present, 

leaving deliberate scars or disguising 

our age marks with the uplifting cream 

of oblivion.

Culture becomes a paradoxical commodity,

stuck by the deadly rhythm of the production line.

So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Contemporary modernism, then, is not 

anti-modern; it is closer, in fact, to the 

critical and experimental spirit of 

modernity than to the existing forms 

of industrial and postindustrial 

modernization.

It's a naive young secret for the new romantics,

We express ourselves in old & fashionable ways."

THE SCONDI COLLECTION

"Born in Montefollonico, Italy, Annabella Scondi immigrated to Canada in 1923 at the age of two. She won fame at a young age for the breadth and equanimity of her observations, which she diligently transcribed in her childhood diaries that her mother published after the Second World War. Meticulously chronicling the activities of her family and neighbours during her father’s incarceration at the Petawawa internment camp, Ms. Scondi astonished readers with her intuitive grasp of the vast social forces that influenced the day-to-day life of those closest to her.

The period of Ms. Scondi’s formal employment passed without comment, as she suspended her usual practice of keeping detailed journals, and neglected to revisit any of her memories in her subsequent diaries. Consequently, almost nothing is known of her way of life for more than 30 years, although private records indicate that she subscribed to several art periodicals and was an avid reader of criticism. There is some indication that she began developing her unique collections during this time of prolonged quietude.

Ultimately, it was not until she retired from her post at the station and retreated to her cabin in the woods that she was able to embark upon the many artistic investigations that would occupy her remaining days and years.

The works displayed here formed the constituent parts of a totalizing environment that was both intricately personal and essentially human."

bottom of page