Alberta Whittle has a new post up on her blog about how her residency at FRESH MILK has been progressing:

In the neighbourhood where I grew up, I always used to see shoes suspended from telephone wires. I was always drawn to these shoes and instinctively wanted to retrieve them and take them home with me. Mainly sneakers, but of varying hues, sizes, brands and stages of deterioration. They never seemed to truly age, but marked territory and memory for the community in some way. I don’t remember what I hoped to do with them, but there was value or symbolism these shoes were imbued with that called to me. When I mentioned them to my sister, she said shoes dangling from the wire signified that drugs were peddled in this area. Hence, these shoes adopted a different meaning for me and became an image of demarcation of space, as much as of gang culture.

Bronzing the shoes refers to their symbolism as a signifier of a specific rite of passage, where shoes are appropriated by members of a community to represent a commodity and a zone. I intend to situate these newly-bronzed shoes in a similar frame to create an urban shrine to the invented realities suggested by the fete posters. – Alberta Whittle

Follow her blog at http://albertawhittlenavigation.blogspot.com/, and remember to come out to FRESH MILK IX next week Thursday, November 29th at 7pm to see her performance and more!