Amanda Trager and Erik Moskowitz

Amanda Trager and Erik Moskowitz’s work is expressed in a range of forms, including single-channel film, video installation, as well as two- and three-dimensional artworks. Their work situates research, interviews, and oral history practices within destabilizing narratives by way of an aesthetic based in songwriting and voice amplification, offbeat tempos, and depictions of the natural environment at odds with the hand made. As such, their work is indebted to the culture of their hometown, New York City, particularly its 1970s and 1980s-era performative avant-garde (Joan Jonas, The Wooster Group), as well as to the emerging discipline of sensory ethnography, and polyvocal/multivocal research techniques.

While in residency in Montreal, the artists will be developing two projects based in Canadian history. The first is research-creation with bearing on Marie-Joseph Angelique, an enslaved Black woman living in Montreal in the early 18th century, and Claude Thibault, the white indentured servant who was her lover and co-conspirator.

The second, a long-term work called The Cape Breton Song-Portrait Project, is derived from research on the diverse communities of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Beginning with their own communities of people “come from away” (dedicated Buddhist practitioners, artists from the New York City’s “Downtown scene”, Vietnam War draft evaders, and Back-to-the-Landers, all arriving between the 1960s and 1980s), this oral history project extends to people of the African Nova Scotian community, and the area’s settler-colonial descendants. The project entails overlaying interview excerpts with song to create multiplicitous identities built on deep listening. 

 

Biography

Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager’s collaborative partnership began in 2008. Their work has been exhibited and screened internationally at venues that include Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume (Paris); IFFR (Rotterdam); The Showroom (London); Reina Sofia, (Madrid); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); The Mexicali Biennial (Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena and Cine Tonala, Mexicali, Mexico); Microscope Gallery, 303 Gallery and Participant Inc. (NYC). Art residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts and Montalvo Arts Center (both California). 

They are recipients of numerous awards including IndieLisboa’s Short Film Grand Prize (Portugal) and many grants from New York State. Amanda Trager is currently a graduate student at NSCAD University (Halifax) pursuing a Master’s Degree in Art Education under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson and artist Joscelyn Gardner. Her Master’s research, supported by the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, focuses on the history of slavery in colonial-era Montreal.

 

Recent exhibitions

2023	Song-Portrait X, Eltuek Centre, Sydney, Nova Scotia, CA.
2022	The Work of Love, group exhibition, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New-York City, USA.
2021	Migration, transcription and Song of freedom, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), USA.
2020	Two Russians in the Free World (webisode launch), Microscope Gallery/Plateforme, Brooklyn, USA. Mexicali Biennial: Manifesting the Terrestrial Paradise, Ciné Tonala, Mexicali, MX.