Artist Xstine Cook invites you to view the results of her month-long residency and contemplate the creative potential of plastic.
Reception at 7 pm on September 28
The packaging materials for this residency were generated by Cook’s family’s normal consumption over the course of a year, and were prepared on site in the Hub, where the art was imagined, designed, and created.
By touching, manipulating, and re-purposing plastic that was intended for a single use before being thrown to Earth to process over unknown millennia, “This is Not My Culture” invites you to view this miraculous material not as waste, but as an extraordinary resource. This is Not My Culture contemplates the globe’s frantic pace of plastic generation that is at the crux of the fraught relationship between humans’ minds and hearts; our addiction to convenience, vs the interconnectedness of all life.
ABOUT XSTINE COOK
A cultural activist who uses the power of storytelling to bring unconventional stories and art forms to light, Xstine Cook operates on the core belief that all humans are art makers, and acts of radical creativity are necessary to evolve our understanding of ourselves, each other and our world.
Xstine is a visitor to the Treaty 7 area, who was raised in Calgary and in the foothills of Alberta along Dog Pound Creek. Cook is a mask maker and multi-disciplinarian. She trained at Dell’Arte theatre school in Humboldt County California, and with various masters in Indonesia, Italy, France, and the West Coast of Canada.
Xstine co-founded Green Fools Theatre where she wrote, directed, and designed many of the company’s boundary-stretching original works until she left in 2003 to start the Festival of Animated Objects, and CAOS, an interdisciplinary arts company.
Xstine is the recipient of the 2022 City of Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts, the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal, the Rozsa Foundation’s Innovation Award, and countless awards for her filmmaking.
Cook recently co-wrote and produced MONSTR, an animated short by Tank Standing Buffalo for HBO Max Warner Brothers Discovery Access Animated Shorts Program.
cSPACE is situated on Treaty 7 territory, home of the Siksika, Kainai and Piikani Nations, as well as the Tsuut’ina Nation, the Îyârhe Nakoda Bearspaw, Chiniki and Goodstoney First Nations, and Otipemisiwak Métis Government Districts 5 and 6.
