The Public Swoon
We work between pleasure and critique to coax unexpected relationships between land, people, ideas and practices. We’re imagining and talking to you, the active public. We meet through sprawling music theatre projects, experimental performance and fake holidays. Our process is large-scale and long-term, centring human and non-human labour to research deep co-creation and the hustle economy.
We borrow from the familiar to stretch the borders of what you can fall in love with. We produce events that call forth moments of utopian possibility through public displays of thought and feeling. We’re permanently enrolled in Friendship 101.
Past collaborations include: Pathetic Fallacy (2014), Klasika (2015), Short History of a Small Town (2016), Signals from the Mountain (2016).
In development: Mermaid Spring.
We Are
Kyla Gardiner
Kyla Gardiner is a designer and performance creator based in Vancouver, BC. Her artistic research investigates non-human agency, design-based approaches to devised creation, and the ways deep collaboration might challenge ideas of artistic authorship. Kyla holds a BA in Theatre and Philosophy from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She is an Assistant Professor in Production and Design at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts.
Barbara Adler
Barbara Adler is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects brings together writing, composition, event making and design. Her work frequently addresses artifice within the natural world, nostalgia, and commodity culture. Though her heroes tend to be marginally successful side-hustlers with excellent fake eyelashes, Barbara is emphatically anti-whimsy. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies and a BA in Art and Cultural Studies, both from Simon Fraser University.
