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Canadian Time 2

Canadian Time 2 builds upon a 2006 performance Kirouac underwent at the Rijksakademie (Netherlands) where she painted time signatures on the wall in the hours awaiting the results of her program eligibility. In 2011 she translates a similar, yet more pronounced set of circumstances in a performance executed at the Receiver Festival in Charleston, SC. Alluding to the twelve-hour drive from her home in North Carolina to the Canadian border, she marries painting and tragi-comic theater in a performance of equal duration. Simultaneously abstract and visceral, Canadian Time 2 bring life to the physical and psychological anxieties of statehood as Kirouac wrestles with the tenuous status of living as an ”alien” in the U.S. under strict and at times nonsensical immigration rules.
 
Enclosed in a white cube, Kirouac painted the real time hours and minutes of her home city (Winnipeg, Canada) in red paint across a 22’ wall. After twelve hours of relentlessly painting (and painting over), her recording’s legibility yielded to an ominously dripping red mass. Once every hour she stopped to box with an adjacent wall for an intense three-minute round, in the end senselessly fighting a twelve-round match with an unmovable opponent. Leaving an equally violent, if cryptic recording of time on the wall, Canadian Time 2 translates intangible fears and measures from a loud, urgent presence, back to an abstraction.