Community & Alumni Blog
Outtatown alumna wins $10,000 art prize
Erika Dueck fondly recalls her first week in South Africa with Canadian Mennonite University’s (CMU) Outtatown program in 2003. It included visiting a school in a Johannesburg township called Alexandra.
“That was maybe the best way to start off our experience there, because working with kids, they have so much excitement and so much joy. I remember them screaming because they were so excited... and we got to go in and play with them and teach them songs. It was really, really great.”
That Dueck (pictured at left with her husband, Gordon) easily recalls her Outtatown experience should come as no surprise. The 29-year-old has always been fascinated by memories. In fact, how the mind and memories function were the ideas Dueck chose to explore in The Ephemeral Mind, a mixed-media art piece that won her a $10,000 prize last year.
Dueck, a 2013 graduate of the University of Manitoba’s Fine Arts program, won the national prize through the BMO Financial Group’s 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition. The Ephemeral Mind is an eight-foot, cloud-like glowing paper shell that houses miniature rooms full of documents, drawers and boxes. The contents represent how we store and house memory.
The inspiration for the work came from Dueck’s childhood understandings of how memories functioned. She imagined that the mind resembled a large filing room that required visits in order to maintain information’s availability. If memories were placed in a room and not accessed often enough, an individual could potentially forget the existence of an entire room and its memories.
Through the piece, Dueck wants viewers to meditate and consider their minds and memories in relation to their understandings, their motivations, their fears, and their habits, as well as question what they have remembered and forgotten.
“We all have memory loss to a certain extent,” Dueck explains. “I think it is very scary for many people. When you do lose your memories you are almost losing yourself—or, that’s what you think.”
As a child, Dueck made it a habit to access certain memories so that she would not forget them.
When asked to access more of her Outtatown memories, Dueck recalls coming home from South Africa and being unsure of how the experience changed her.
“It was only after the program that you realize things you learned, or ways you’ve been challenged,” she says. “Some of the speakers we had both in the first term and the second term, those are talks and discussions that I still remember today.”
Dueck is thankful that during Outtatown, she was encouraged to confront issues she had never considered before, such as Apartheid in South Africa and prostitution in North America.
One activity Outtatown participants take part in each year that especially sticks with Dueck was giving roses to prostitutes in Vancouver’s Lower East Side.
“Giving roses to prostitutes helped us humanize these people and gain an understanding,” Dueck says.
“We need to understand that there’s a human being on the other end of these issues. I think that is one of the main reasons why every young person should do this sort of program.”
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