“Archeology, Theory, & Mischief: A Conversation with Kurtis Lesick” – curated by Kristina Marie Darling


Kurtis Lesick is an artist, curator, researcher, and award-winning creative content specialist. His installations, media works, digital performances, and cross-media collaborations explore the limits of materiality, knowledge, and themes of indeterminacy. lesick’s practice draws heavily on his experience in archaeology, anthropology and philosophy, as well as both his love and disdain for technology. 

His work has been presented and exhibited internationally in Canada, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.A. He is an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts where he teaches in Media Arts, has held an adjunct professorship at the Digital Futures Initiative in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (Canada), has been visiting faculty at the Banff Centre (Canada) and the University of California at Irvine (USA), and in 2020 was a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol (UK). In 2012, Lesick was awarded the inaugural People’s Choice Award for the Most Inspirational Digital Leader at the Digital Alberta Awards.

​Lesick has overseen the development of several large-scale online properties, written and creative directed the KidScreen award winning ‘Technosaurs’ project, and has consulted for such leading arts and media organizations as the Banff New Media Institute, the Calgary Arts Development Authority, Canadian Heritage, the National Film Board of Canada, the Union of BC Performers, Association of Alberta Colleges and Technical Institutes, and University of California-Irvine. His work was featured in Michael Petry’s (Curator, London MOCA) survey of text-based art: The Word is Art, Thames and Hudson. 

Kristina Marie Darling:  What questions drive your artistic practice? 

Kurtis Lesick: Thanks so much, Kristina. You’ve provided me here with a much-needed opportunity to think through some juicy questions that have really ‘located’ me in what is rather a whirlwind of a moment. I warn you: I’ve fully embraced your call for detail.

I come to art through the social sciences and humanities. So, my practice has always been driven by research-oriented questions—issues of materiality, how we shift, bend, and distort our material knowledge for political and economic ends, and the implications of this on identity, history, social thought, and ethics. I’m currently focussed on an inquiry on indeterminacy and ontological incompleteness. Indeterminacy thinks through the impossibility of fixed identity or form: all things—language, substance, individuality—break down when you zoom in close enough or zoom out far enough. 

Ontologically speaking (ontologies are theories of being), this suggests that things are always fundamentally incomplete. For instance, in particle and wave duality there is no totality in which light is both particle and wave in the exact same instance. The form of its existence is determined in relation to how it is experienced, or rather rendered through experience. Light is (as all things are) an ephemeral biproduct of a collision of contingent forces and agencies. It does not exist as a stable ontological entity rather it is in constant, iterative, and incomplete production, or what the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, would call ‘becoming.’

There is a famous aphorism of Heraclitus: “As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them.” We know this better as “One cannot step into the same river twice.” In his native Greek, Heraclitus’ writing often has an intentional ambiguity so there are not clear subjects and predicates, and it is not clear what is qualifying what. We cannot step into the same river twice because this river is always changing; we cannot step into the same river twice because we are always changing and are never the same entity twice. 

We may also think about this in terms of the self-negation of the act of contact. As a molecule of water activates the boundary of our skin we are physically placed in the world in a moment of sensation. This moment however also overwhelms the solitude of the self; we are part of something more that exceeds us and changes who we are. It is the moment of contact in a kiss when you feel the electricity of lip touching lip and you know you are present because you can feel the sensation of being drawn outside of yourself into a unity with another. It is a moment and an ontological truth for only as long as the intensity of the kiss and the connection persists.

Such forces are at play in everything around us. Art provides an opportunity to bracket or frame the world so that an artwork stops us, makes us focus on specific phenomena, and actually see these forces in action. I work a lot with performance for camera, video, photography and text in such a way as to draw attention to specific moments that challenge our assumptions of stable substance. It is important that I don’t ‘fabricate’ images, rather I capture actual scenarios; in a sense I am gathering a sort of thinking-in-action. This ‘thinking’ often isn’t just my own but captures the world as it works its way through things.

Wave Theory, for instance, is a 54-minute video installation developed at the Ionion Centre for the Arts and Culture in Kefalonia, Greece. Over a week I would place a camera and tripod in different locations along the beach and allowed the camera to capture durations of this “thinking in action.” I was reminded of the words of physicist and philosopher, Karen Barad, on the capacity of the world to theorise:

Theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world. The world theorises as well as experiments with itself. Figuring, reconfiguring. Animate and (so-called) inanimate creatures do not merely embody mathematical theories; they do mathematics. But life, whether organic or inorganic, animate or inanimate, is not an unfolding algorithm. Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes, and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being. 

Here, I consider myself in the role of creative director rather than author. Aside from the choice of location and final selection of clips, I left it to my ‘collaborators’, the beach and camera, to decide what the audience should see. The work was installed on two 6-foot-high screens that juxtaposed two different moments. The audience could place themselves inside both moments concurrently or focus on one or the other. The footage rarely produced a vantage point that I, myself, had experienced. The camera could ‘see’ under the water, where I could not. It could determine boundaries and capture interactions. Most wonderfully it could capture the dematerialization of boundaries—the essence of what Democritus would call den, the spectral nothing-appearing-as­something, or the kiss that produces and overwhelms at the same time.

KMD:  You come to visual art with an impressive background in archaeology and socio-cultural theory. Can you say more about the importance of cross-disciplinary inquiry in the arts?  

KL: My formal education was in archaeology and anthropology and I worked as a practicing archaeologist for about 10 years. During my post-graduate work at the University of Sheffield I set up a diverse and multidisciplinary ‘cultural research collective’ that would meet a couple of times a month to try and make sense of the explosion of social theory at the time. I would present a reading and then we would go around the room and everyone would have to reinterpret the content in terms of their own research. Inevitably I would learn more about the ideas and theories through these more applied discussions than I did from the readings. What was once jargon and abstraction was now operationalised through a variety of real-world examples. We weren’t just regurgitating theory we were observing it in practice in different scenarios and could identify overlaps and common processes that suddenly made sense when words didn’t. 

When I moved back to Canada, I incorporated the collective and ran it as a research business doing work for clients like Canadian Heritage, Parks Canada, as well as private research and consulting firms. In many instances I was doing research for the “posterity of the Canadian people” but the work would end up in a report in a handful of filing cabinets in a few people’s offices. The work had little meaning if it wasn’t in circulation. In fact, as was evident in those theory meetings back in Sheffield, it was the actual circulation that was producing the meaning in the first place. I needed to find a way back to those generative explorations—and that was art.

In 2004 the collective launched its first work, a digital documentary, “Ghosts of Industry” [https://www.kurtislesick.com/ghosts-of-industry] about the proving ground of the oil sands industry in Canada. Through a combination of photography, video, animation, soundscapes, and graphic design, the website situated its audience in the northern Canadian settlement of Bitumount creating an intimate sense of space and place. The audience was carried through the experience by seven poems that introduce spatial themes and encouraged Socratic curiosity and imagination. The content of the story

 was told through (digital) artefacts and archival materials which formed narrative puzzle pieces as the audience moved through the documentary. 

In this way the story was built through the interaction of the reader, rather than being communicated didactically. Even for me, every time I would go through the site the encounter would be distinctive; I would approach the content from different perspectives often bringing with me the contexts of my particular day. It was a generative experience where the viewer was given the right to question the content (it was archival information, after all, not a strict narrative). Hence the project made me think in new and different ways, it provoked novel ideas relevant far beyond my original intentions and interests. The project ‘thought’ on my behalf.

At the time of this project the web was still a bit like the wild west: it was exciting, experimental, few or no rules and even fewer conventions as to how things should be done. What really set this project apart were the idiosyncrasies of the content and its experiential and phenomenological approach. When I had first visited the real site of the settlement it was such a bizarre setting: swollen and distorted by years of freeze and thaw. It was an adventure to move through; questions opened up before you based on your discoveries, and you had to search for your answers in the artefactual evidence at hand. It was a distinctively “archaeological” experience that I wanted to transpose into a digital milieu. The cross-disciplinary lens kept us grounded, focused on content and experience, and opened us up to non-traditional audiences and venues. Most of all, it kept us out of the pit of self-indulgence in which early work with emergent technologies often finds itself.

KMD:  I’m as intrigued as ever by your text-based video works. How does time shape our experience of language?  

KL: Time-based works like video or performance are much more of a negotiation with an audience than the traditional visual arts. In painting or sculpture, for instance, the audience can approach the work on their terms and explore it on their own time. We see this when we visit a gallery or museum and there are visitors that spend time considering each and every piece in turn. A work is able to unfold in this way. An element will draw our attention and then the eye has time to move across the work noticing synergies or discordances. You can spend time with a painting or a sculpture; you have as much time as you want to take it all in. 

With a time-based work, like a video, each second of time is essentially a new piece which is reconstituted with every moment of change (perhaps the epitome of Heraclitus’ becoming). The audience is bombarded with images and sound which require some sort of visual or aural continuity or thematic directive in order to stabilise the experience and give the audience the opportunity to engage, reflect, and extricate the immediate stimuli into meaningful signification. The instantaneous moment needs to be elongated, and elements of the visuals need to be entangled or connected across time. 

Both sound and text are ways of doing this by creating duration and narrative rather than just a stream of images. In most of my work sound provides a core sense of immersion often through ambiences and drone, punctuated by audio transitions which create reference points across the full interval of the piece. The audience is “contained” within the consistency of sound which is temporarily broken with disjunctures in the audio. This prompts them to make connections with previous visual segments in the work where the same audio was present. The sound of an airplane propeller connects us to previous times we’ve experienced it (both inside and outside of the artwork); it meaningfully entangles elements across time and space by linking them experientially; it changes a simple stimulus into a signifier. This linking creates reference points and actually locates events in relation to one another. So, we are taking empty, meaningless linear time—a set of immediate and ephemeral stimuli which are overridden by the next immediate experience—and we weave them together by creating links between hitherto disconnected experiences. We are in a sense, then, creating time—what philosopher Martin Heidegger calls “temporalizing temporality.” This is also the exact same functionality as language. Essentially, by using audio prompts to create both continuity and disjuncture throughout a duration of visual stimuli, I am working with the audience to create our own shared language for the work.

Time and language are thus inextricably linked, one might say they are even part of the same thing. This only works, however, if we see language as a relational process, a process that puts one thing or one experience in connection with another. Words make relational links by virtualising or generalising an experience into an abstraction. It’s like a bucket that holds a stand-in for an experience so we can transpose it on the past or into the future. As virtual experience, words are about possibility rather than actuality, where things could go or could have gone. 

Even history contains this sort of contingency. We approach history as if it is an objective and unchanging fact but being that it is contained in words it is always one provisional perspective on an event. One thing that has come out of my work is the observation of different simultaneous times and different simultaneous, even contradictory events.

I made the work “Inner Waters Flowing Faster” just after one of my closest friends had died of cancer. It was a collaboration with glass artist, Kai Scholefield, and sound artist, Greg Debicki (@woulg), aka woulg made for the Exposure Photography Festival. At the outset it was meant to be a fun experiment looking at projection on glass, but I was so gutted by the loss of my friend that I was completely incapacitated for making work—so the work became about her. 

The piece consists of several poetic cycles which seem to take the listener through the same experience, but which slowly develop a rationalisation that unravels the fixity of time and space in relation to our loved ones. Fragments of memories are projected on, through, around, and off of three glass sculptures each perforated in the centre with a hole. During crescendos in the ambient soundscape of the work radiances of light erupt from the glass and fill the room with a presence of something not really there. 

Somehow the combination of all these elements work together to disrupt the assumed logic of time. One spectator had told me that the work had reconnected them to a loved one and had made them completely rethink the nature of time. Somehow it was like time and space had holes in them that sets of relations would slip through and back again. The work became deeply affective (much more than I had anticipated); it was the first piece I had worked on that made audience members weep. 

In another example, the piece “The Limits of Things” is a 13-minute and 45-second, animated poem produced in the presentation software, “Keynote,” comprised of 246 individual slides and projected onto a 6 foot surface. The visuals are text in “courier new” font on a vertically oriented (portrait) page. It has been shown both as white text on black background and black text on white background. The poem reads from top to bottom and left to right as per English convention but is distributed across the page in a way that disrupts simple reading, generates creative mis-readings, and prompts the reader to “chase” the text in a more engaged fashion. Verbs are always right-justified creating a zone of action on the right hand side of the screen and a zone of ‘objectness’ on the left. It is significant enough to note the disparity in language between words of action and words that ascribe determinate values. The left and centre zones of each page are much more readily used than the right side. This is suggestive that language is thus in itself a determinizing machine that fabricates a guise of stable substance. 

The content of the poem focuses on the act of archaeological excavation, the trowel penetrating the soil, the stimulation and mediation of body sensation in the excavator through both the trowel and the landscape, the manufacture and conflation of time(s)—both the time of the excavation and the times signified in the engagement with the soil—and finally the abstraction of this action of excavation into the stable “truth” of material knowledge and history.

The text situates the reader in multiple times and places taking them from the body of the earth, to that of the trowel, then to that of the excavator and back again. It asks palpable and fully unresolved questions about the nature of materiality, the nuances of language, and the constancy of substance, and operationalises the viability of a world of Heraclitean flux.

KMD:  Given that we met at an art center in Greece, and you are frequently on the island of Crete, I’d love to hear more about how your work is shaped by travel and a sense of place.  What has travel made possible within your body of work?

KL: A million years ago, when I was working as an archaeologist in remote (and thoroughly spectacular) locations I was really struck by how much better I could process ideas than if I was stuck in my office or home. We not only tend to take our habituated environments for granted, but we move into a sort of day-to-day malaise of navigating responsibilities and performing maintenance routines that cut us off from the world. Our spaces kind of grow around us like an extension of our bodies, and like our bodies we tend not to notice them unless there is a problem. 

Travel re-introduces some alterity to the environment: the weather is hotter or more humid; foods are different; packaging is larger or smaller, with different design and linguistic conventions; heating and cooling systems create an invisible distinctiveness to interiors; people, customs, and languages take on a ‘foreignness’, our bodies function differently, and most of all we exist differently in our bodies. We may be less comfortable and confident and fall back and listen or observe more. Perhaps the opposite is at play, and we are released from our traditional, social baggage and can be more outgoing and engaging. Whatever the case, the world is fundamentally different and hence we become something new.

For me, travel therefore becomes an essential way to put myself back in the world. I try to schedule residencies or retreats every year when I’m not teaching so I can re-engage with my practice.  The Koumaria Residency, for example, is a short, intensive, and collaborative (and highly recommended!) media arts research residency in Sellasia, Greece. 10 artists from around the world are taken to an organic olive farm overlooking Sparta in the Peloponnese for 10 days and are fed, watered, and let loose to rapidly create and collaborate. The only reason you are there is to make work, so it makes you engage with the place in a very different and activated way; everyone and everything around you are a potential collaborator. 

In 2019, I produced 4 projects in 10 days all of which involved some sort of very physical endurance performance for camera. In “I know” I balance a large stone across the nape of my neck and navigate over a kilometre, up hills and through olive groves back to our residency accommodation. While nothing changes in the material composition of the situation (the stone is the same stone I gingerly picked up at the beginning of the performance and there is material continuity in my body), throughout the performance the bodies in play (mine and the stone) are actually reconstituted. We exist in juxtaposition as one and an ‘other.’ Each becomes an extension of the other, and both together become something new. My body is transformed: neck forced downward, shoulders forced forward, organs forced outward—the body crumpled over into this new hybrid creature. I am stone and body and something always in excess of myself and this other. Touch between two objects always makes us more. Touch always exceeds all that it produces. Place therefore literally insinuates itself not just in my work, but in the expression of my body.

As such a sense of place is critical to my practice. This is not just from the perspective of where it is created, or its content is derived but also in that my work thinks through if and how space and place are created and sustained. I think that my work is much cleverer than I am on this front, hopefully I am catching up the more I pay attention to it. Because I work largely in installation and performance, I think I am very intentional about my approach to space and my desire to locate the audience. But (and this is where I think I am starting to learn more from my work) any time you’re talking about materiality and exploring issues of being or reality, as much as we are implicitly talking about (and manufacturing) time, we are doing the same with space and place.

As problematic a figure as artist Carl Andre was, I think his most significant contribution was in rethinking “the cut”. He realised that as a sculptor the “cuts” he was making in materials, the interventions and modifications brought on by the artist were unnecessary for meaning-making. The object, in its own materiality, is itself the cut. The presence of the object in relation to the viewer is its own intervention that locates both the object and the viewer as phenomenological participants in the art experience. The art object is a cut in the reality of the audience. It actively positions the audience in the foreground, bisects the space, and drops the rest of the room in the background. As a subject of attention, the audience is firmly situated in the world through the act of attending. The presence of an object in relation to a viewer (or any other object for that matter) necessitates a differentiation of space, and the imposition of boundaries and limits that delineate materiality. 

When I walk into a room it is a different room if it is empty, or if it has a piano in it, or a person, or a person playing a piano. I am also a different person if I enter this space under these conditions. In a space with a piano I may be drawn across the otherwise empty space to the gravity of the instrument. If it is a person my reaction may be the opposite wanting to respect their mutual claim to the space. If it is a person playing a piano, I may feel conspicuous and self-conscious for disturbing them, or I may enthusiastically carve out some space in the periphery from which I can watch them. The presencing brought on by ‘the cut” puts this all into play and determines the sets of circumstances through which all objects, us included, come to be defined: the cut is always about creating conditions of otherness.

KMD:  In addition to your achievements as an artist, you’re an accomplished and beloved educator. What has teaching and mentoring others opened up within your creative practice?  

KL: Teaching is a weird thing. On one hand it takes you away from your practice. I often end up compressing my year’s studio work into a few weeks during the summer break. Teaching, curriculum development, grad student supervision, committee work, and navigating the often intensely painful structure of university bureaucracy (as any university employee will attest) barely leaves time for a cocktail at the end of the day let alone settling into studio work. On the other hand, teaching allows you an opportunity to think deeply and critically and engage vicariously with your topics through the work and research of your students. 

At Alberta University of the Arts, I’m lucky enough to work within a curriculum structure that privileges the students’ independent thinking and artistic research rather than rote or didactic learning. So, I create situations where students can engage with my questions on their own terms and develop their own trajectories. In some ways it is very much like those days back in Sheffield where everyone thinks through and articulates a shared subject through their own experience and priorities. There have been some real surprises that have introduced me to thoughts and directions that I otherwise wouldn’t have encountered. One undergraduate student, for instance in a class on ‘aesthetics and mattering’ focussed on the ‘sublime.’ As I pulled a few readings for him and opened these up in discussion the sublime revealed itself as an instance where reality conflates object and subject. Our subjectivity is overwhelmed and sublated into something new, something indescribable yet fully experienceable. 

  My work with graduate students is likewise incredibly generative. I’d say the most important thing is discovering that most everything that you teach and advise to them are completely relevant to yourself. There are so many things you realize are essential to your practice only when you hear them coming out of your mouth when you’re trying to support and mentor a student. An example is discussing the importance of pairing creative writing with a studio practice and academic reading as a means of accessing and bridging a full depth of embodied experience. Three of my MFA students, in particular, embraced this practice changing completely the efficacy and understanding of their work. 

Patrick Moskwa (@Patrick.Moskwa) wrote intimate letters to different parts of his domestic environment as a way to think through architecture as an experiential membrane that forms between physical space and lived action. He used latex casts to capture these in-between spaces: here a limp latex brick sits below the marks it has made being repeatedly thrown at a wall, lavender scented soap remediates the dimensions of his body, its height and weight, into copies of the same brick that was hurled at his window with an anti-queer slogan, a dustpan and hand-broom made of healing lavender from his garden, and a welcome mat with the greeting “I can host” written in Vaseline carries traces of the footsteps of his visitors across the gallery floor.

Tomo Ingalls composed elaborate phenomenological explorations of her attempts to access a singular existence of her own dissociated from the sets of relations that define her from outside: her status as a daughter, a mother, a lover, a Japanese national, an immigrant to Canada. These texts, reminiscent of Clarice Lispector in their forthright accessibility of the deeply abstract, take us behind the intensity of both her gruelling endurance performances and her sculptural ceramic objects and truly capture the precarity of identity.

 Anahita Mosayebi [https://www.hitadesignstudio.com] (@hita_design_studio) used concrete poetry to help sort through the fundamental ambiguity of emotional experience. The poems, complex in both their form and nuance, encapsulate for her the essence of specific emotional affects. These were then re-materialised in ceramic and used to create labyrinthian corridors which when activated by the audience become experiential and ‘emotional’ environments. The logic of the installation is rationalised through the language of traditional Persian music: “Experiencing emotions in our body is always an abstract and slippery moment, like an improvised music piece which is played through the audience’s presence, it cannot be shown visually but must be experienced in the way it can change the body’s improvised responses and interactions with the environment.”

These three works sit beside my practice, informing it, extending its conversation, and re-materialising essential elements, like the use of creative writing, that I take for granted and underappreciate. When you teach and mentor you have to bring everything that is inside out into the fore to articulate to your students. Teaching is therefore an incredible opportunity to see and understand your own practice inside-out.

KMD:  What are you working on?  What else can we look forward to?  

KL: I’m just coming off of a year’s sabbatical which has been an incredible opportunity to circle back and take stock of some research that has long been percolating. I’ve been able to dive deep into thinking along with a variety of philosophers, thinkers, and artists and bounce them off of my studio and exhibition practice. Never before have I been able to say: “This year I had 7 shows just to see how some ideas could and would play themselves out.” 

Two somewhat massive projects have come out of this: firstly, I need to finish compiling this research into a publication on indeterminability and ontological incompleteness (I am discovering that writing on the fragmentation of reality is surprisingly hard); secondly, I have a decade’s worth of studio research that I want to build into a thematic, solo, touring show (any curators and gallery directors out there, I will be looking for great venues!). I have to walk the walk and put these ideas into proper circulation. The goal is to work on the writing this year, and next summer to have a gallery-based residency where I can work out the configuration of an exhibition that would tour in 2026-27. 

In the meantime, the big thing I’ll be working on is trying to maintain, as best I can, the momentum of the sabbatical. I’ve got to thank you, Kristina, for your provocations here and the incredible chance to think further about my work. In the panic of the start of the university term this exercised has connected all the dots so that I can stay somewhat true to the trajectory of the sabbatical.