Nancy Davenport Awarded DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant

This photograph made me immediately think of this email I found in my Inbox:

Les maçons désoeuvrés venaient par habitude tourner chaque jour autour des
chantiers. Les mains dans les poches, chaussés de lourds sabots, ils arrivaient
piane-piane…

[The unemployed masons had the habit of coming, each day, to hang around the
work yards. Hands in the pockets, wearing heavy wooden clogs, they slowly
arrived...]

–from "Mémoires de la Société d’agriculture, commerce, sciences et arts" by
Société d’agriculture, commerce, sciences et arts de la Marne

And big congrats to Nancy for getting this:

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art is delighted to announce its very first production grant to New York based Canadian artist Nancy Davenport. The grant helps Nancy to complete a project titled Workers for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial. DHC/ART is committed to initiating and supporting the production of new work by Canadian artists in a variety of media through an annual commission or grant.

Workers is an ambitious media installation which laterally tackles the representation of labour and issues arising from globalisation by connecting Norwegian workers to their out-sourced Chinese counterparts in a seamless, multi-screen DVD environment. At the centre of this merged, moving frieze of animated portraits of both sets of workers is an image of a factory — itself subjected to digital enhancements where workers gather at the gates or rocket into outer space referencing film pioneers the Lumière brothers and
Georges Méliès.

via French Word of the Day and NancyDavenport.com