There’s a Velveteen Rabbit in My Pyjamas! A 12hr Art Marathon
START Gallery host an evening of communal art making that will last from 7:00pm to 7:00am nonstop! We welcome sculpture, painting, performance, photography, games, music, and anything else anyone feels inclined to do! People are encouraged to collaborate and trade their creations with other participants in the hope of creating an open and fun environment to exchange art and ideas. The Art Marathon is open to everyone, artist and dabbler alike!
The Game Show
Alongside the art marathon, Daniel Barrow will be presenting his online exhibition entitled The Game Show, showcasing the online drawing games involving 17 emerging and established Canadian artists. The games are ‘exuberant, impromptu and rebellious’ and some are ‘ambitious and profound process-based collaborations.” Afterwards, Daniel lead the audience in one of the games, entitled “Crazy Faces” by Shary Boyle (see below). For more info on The Game Show, see terminus1525.ca
Montréal musicians Cat Pontoon & Snailhouse will each give performances alongside the marathon following The Game Show.
Straight from Australia through a deep and cavernous under water passage filled with the decaying bodies of celebrity interviewers and the most remarkably beautiful phosphorescent butterflies comes the divine genius of Cat Pontoon.
Snailhouse is the project of Moncton’s lost child Mike Feuerstack who has collaborated with members of the Arcade Fire, Julie Doiron, Rich White, and the Acorn, and is also a member of the Wooden Stars.
The Help Project by Lance McLean
Help is an interactive performance which will encourage individuals to become active participants and explores the dynamics of forced intimacy as it questions who and what we care about. Help begins within the formal environment of the gallery, Struts Gallery, and will then move outside. After meeting with those who have gathered at the gallery at a predetermined hour and explaining Help to them, McLean – with their help – will venture out into the Sackville community to homes and businesses. Help depends on kindness, generosity and collaboration as its journey unfolds. (see right)
Enactments as performance: some more beginnings, an eternal return keynote address by Ihor Holubizky
The tautology of the working title is deliberate: it is my discomfort with the terms ‘performance’ and ‘video’ art, even though the terms – when defined – are openly and admittedly, un definable. The objective is not to propose a definition, but to open up questions and examine a (perhaps) hitherto overlooked connection between performance and video – before there was ‘performance art,’ before there was ‘video art.’ Which is to say, artists create and generate, and break the rules, and thereby establishing a new game. The art game, which artists must inevitably come to terms with, may not be predicated on how innovation is carved out for performance and video (as if a continuation of a formalist framework of art history), but within a ‘performative’ aspect for both. It may lead us to an ‘essential’ condition, as drawing now stands for itself and not only a stage to something else. This can be described as the necessity of a beginning, and an eternal return. Or to lean on Adolph Gottllieb’s response in 1950 to Robert Motherwell’s question, ‘how do you know when a work is finished,’ we should ask a more important question, why does ana artist start a work? It may be the solution to a problem, or the creation of a problem for which a solution can be expressed, again and again.
Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry by Daniel Barrow
The performance was developed during an Open Studio residency at Struts & faucet in 2005, and is Daniel’s fifth performance using an overhead projector to adopt comic book narrative into live forms of animation to present the vignettes which examine the relationships between beauty and sadness, and a romantic view of pain. Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry traces the interior dialogue of a sensitive garbage man as he wanders aimlessly through the city streets, collecting garbage in the early hours of the morning. Throughout the story, he encounters a number of disturbing tableaux and attempts to resolve the traumas internally through ‘crap-craft,’ the creative recycling of garbage into art.
Marc Bell’s Book Launch: Nog a Dod: Prehistoric Canadian Psychedooolia
Published by conundrum press in Canada and PictureBox in the United States, Nog A Dod documents in 288 pages nearly a decade of work by a loosely affiliated group of Canadian artists who draw with and about each other – Jason McLean, MArk Connery, Owen Plummer, Peter Thompson, Amy Lockhart, and Marc Bell. Like their contemporaries and friend in The Royal Art Lodge, they work on each other’s drawings, create small book runs and ephemera, and collaborate so closely that it is sometimes difficult to tell where one begins and another ends!
Risa Horowitz’s Trio at the Owens Art Gallery
Trio is a multi-channel video installation documenting the artist’s process of learning and performing a Franz Schubert Trio for piano, cello and violin. Risa Horowitz has limited musical training, and with this body of work questions ideals of competence, artistic genius, and specialization from a distinctly contemporary conceptual perspective. Risa explores interdisciplinarity and the questions that arise out of crossing media without the usual permissions that come with training and accredation. Trio is about making the opportunity for continual growth and learning; the possibility of exceeding one’s own potential; the successes that failure in and of itself implies.
Lemon Float Cabaret with MC Eryn Foster
The final event of the symposium, the Lemon Float cabaret is an eclectic evening of performances from visiting artists and members of the Sackville community. Anyone can sign up to do pretty much anything!