The Mixer: The Ultimate Sk8 Activity Centre

In my teens, throughout my twenties and well into my thirties, being a skateboarder was a key part of my identity. It was freedom and pleasure, a way of traversing the concrete and asphalt landscape of strip malls and parking lots in my hometown.

 

It was as a teenage skateboarder in my hometown of Kamloops, BC that I first encountered sexism. I both insulated myself within a community of skateboarding friends who didn’t find my interest and gender remarkable and worked to erase many of my external gender markers.

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Whenever I went to the skate park, which was rare because I preferred to cultivate the Overwaitea parking lot closer to my home, I inevitably became a spectacle. All the boys would stop and stare at me as I performed my few tricks – slides and grinds – on the fun box, rails or coping of the 1/4 pipes that encircled our tiny skate park. One boy, who saw himself as a sort of envoy for male skater kind would approach me, “You’re pretty good for a girl,” he would utter without a trace of irony or awareness of the innate sexism of the statement.

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This was among the many stories that I shared with viewers in the installation The Mixer. I created an avatar to represent myself to players of the game, who could access stories from my history as a marginalized girl skater through playing the game. My character, L’il Sandee, is a boy. The game only allows for the creation of male characters, which mirrored my experience of the homosocial skateboarding world.

This marked my first foray into incorporating video games and interactive electronics into my work. I took advantage of the edibility built-into the commercially produced game - the number one video game of the day - to recreate the skatepark from my hometown and to embed bits of text that would flash upon the screen, implicating the player in my experiences as a girl skater. It also proved to be incredibly social - large groups of teenagers would gather in the gallery to play the game together. A powerful counter to the notion that video games are antisocial. 

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The Mixer installation presents opportunities for viewers to be active and creative within the exhibition space. Several photo resistor sensors were embedded in the surface of the model of a 1/4 pipe. By moving over the surface of the ramp, the participant triggers a unique mix of audio samples from the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.

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This process of DJing by moving over the ramp, also proved to be incredibly social. I would often witness a young person directing their friend to don the headphones while they played something from them by moving over the ramp. I really saw this as a way to make creativity accessible to anyone entering the gallery and also to make skateboarding accessible to non-skateboarders.

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I modeled a new level for the fan-maintained Tony Hawk's Underground for an exhibition in 2022 at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie. I imagined, "what is Claes Oldenburg made a skate park of cis-female identified objects?" Underwire bras, menstrual cups, tampons, pink razor blades and bar graphs communicating gender representation statistic about characters in the game series all become skateable objects in my level.