Tonight is our last Rooftop Patio party of the year, and it’s going to be a good one, guaranteed. It’s hosted by Gravitypope and Blackbyrd Myoozik, with DJs and the usual cocktails and delicious snacks. We’ve got a brand new one-week installation by Elaine Wannechko in the Community Gallery, and a big gallery space full of beautiful photography that you can hang out in if it’s raining on the actual roof. And we’re going to keep the party going until 11!
Please join us tonight—we’ll finish the summer with a blast!
Want to see behind the bedsheets?
Elaine Wannechko has a new installation in the Latitude 53 Community Gallery! Come by & check it out. Thursday August 12th 5pm-11pm!
In this week’s Vue Weekly, Amy Fung writes about our Summer Members’ Series and the experience of seeing works-in-progress:
The more opportunities for visual artists to show their works-in-progress, the better, as communication in and around the art world can only approve. Studio critiques appear to be a regular exercise when in art school, forcing students to verbally enunciate a word or two about their work, or God forbid, defend their work to questions. One translation of that has surfaced as of late: Latitude 53 recently began showing a members’ series that lasts for a few days at a time, and the one I’ve caught so far, by Marc Seigner, appears to be quite different from his known body of work in printmaking, and it was positive to see a space for experiments and works in progress.
Tonight on the patio—as well as our regular Thursday-night party hosted by the board of directors—we have the opening party for the third entry in the series, Gerry Dotto’s Crooked Numbers, and next week we’ll be finishing the series with an installation by Elaine Wannechko. We hope to see you!
Our Rooftop Patio Series continues with another exciting installment tomorrow night - Thursday, July 29! This week’s party will be hosted by CJSR FM 88.5, which means fun DJs spinning all night. If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll play that Steely Dan song you wanted to hear all summer long.
We are also delighted to bring you another installment of our Members’ Series, featuring new works by Marc Siegner this week.
Join us on Thursday from 5 - 9 PM for sunshine, great company, fine drinks and delicious snacks from Boston Pizza on Jasper Ave. See you on the patio!
It’s Thursday again! Tonight our rooftop patio is hosted by our generous supporter ATB Financial, and should be twice as good, since it’s also the launch party for our Summer Members’ Series featuring Scott Smallwood. We hope to see you in the sunshine!
Scott Smallwood took this video of his installation “Rainforest Arcade”, which is up right now in our Community Gallery. It gives you just an idea of the way it works—we’ve been listening to it burble away in the gallery for some time now and observing the way that it changes over the course of the day.
Smallwood has more videos of his unique music machines on youtube.
This week at the gallery we’re starting something new: over the next month we’re opening up our Community Gallery space for the Summer Members’ Series. We’ve invited four of Edmonton’s most interesting artists who also happen to be Latitude 53 members to bring their latest work into the gallery, one each week, and to come celebrate with us at the Rooftop Patio on Thursday.
This week, Scott Smallwood is starting things off with his unique solar-powered noisemakers. Smallwood currently teaches music composition at the University of Alberta, but as well as writing music in more traditional ways, he creates these small works which create sounds electronically or mechanically and are powered by ambient light. In his own words:
“Rainforest Arcade” is a sound installation based on a series of solar-powered sonic mobiles, critters, and musical automatons. Throughout the day as the sun’s luminosity waxes and wanes, this listening space moves through lively, insect-like chattering to soft clickings and silences.
He’s installed them next to the windows facing out to the Patio, so their sounds will change over the course of the day, and even from viewers and visitors casting shadows across them. If you lean in close to listen to them, you may find the sounds they produce changing or falling silent entirely in your shadow.
In the coming weeks, look forward to Marc Siegner, Gerry Dotto and Elaine Wannechko giving you even more reasons to make it out to the Rooftop Patio, or stop by the gallery during the day. Meanwhile, our main galleries will be hosting Draw and, come July 30, two new shows of photography.
This year we’re changing it up a little bit at the Rooftop Patio Series. We’ve still got all the things you loved over the last three years though: delicious weekly featured cocktails (and they’re good—we had a little tasting party meeting with some of our Special Events Committee last week), snacks courtesy of Boston Pizza on Jasper, Blue Plate Diner, Mongolie Grill, Café Select and Haweli. And of course we have a roster of great guest hosts from the community—you can see the list on our website, but it includes organizations like Sled Island Music Festival, M.A.D.E. in Edmonton, Exposure: Edmonton’s Queer Arts & Culture Festival and a very special Canada Day party hosted by the National Portrait Gallery. But there’s more.
Patio Series Sponsors
The Rooftop Patio is a big part of our fundraising season, and part of its appeal is the knowledge that every drink helps Latitude 53 with our not-for-profit activities in programming, publications, and more. This year ATB Financial, Capital Power, JCI Edmonton and FSC Consulting Engineers are helping us out as our Rooftop Patio Series sponsors.
Summer Member’s Series
You already know about this if you’ve been following the blog here, but in July and August we’ll have four local artists who just happen to be Latitude 53 members showing in the community gallery, one each week. Here’s some details to whet your appetite; there’s much more to come.
Scott Smallwood is an assistant professor of music at the University of Alberta. You might previously have seen a few of his solar-powered noisemaking works installed as part of Maria Whiteman’s De Anima at FAB Gallery in March.
Marc Siegner is a printmaker and co-founder of SNAP. His Star Hotel series comes out of a recent residency at Red Gate in Beijing, and deals with homeless people displaced during the pre-Olympic clean-up.
Gerry Dotto is a conceptual artist who works most often in printmaking, artist’s books and digital media. He’s been active in the Edmonton art scene since 1982.
Elaine Wannechko is a multi-disciplinary artist who you might have seen in our podcast—she’s a regular at Latitude 53 as a volunteer, visitor and artist, appearing alongside T.L. Cowan in the Twisted She Project at Visualeyez 2009.
Restaurant Gift Vouchers
Not only have our generous food sponsors at Boston Pizza, Blue Plate Diner, Café Select, Mongolie Grill and Haweli provided us with food for the patio season, but they’ve been kind enough to offer deals to our guests. Come to Latitude 53 cocktails and stay downtown for dinner!
Follow Patio on the blog
Right here on this blog we plan to offer all kinds of content during the summer patio season. Interviews and updates from members and friends, the latest gossip and photos of every Thursday night on our patio. Stay in touch!
This week we’ll be sending invitations and newsletters to all of our members about our upcoming summer programming, but you can already see a few details on National Portrait Gallery, the Summer Members’ Series, the Rooftop Patio and Not Another Fucking Landscape over on our website.
Summertime is approaching, and we’re really excited about the programming we’ll be bringing. We’ve got a new newsletter at the printers this week that we’ll be sending out to all of our members, and of course we’ll be updating the website and this blog with info. In fact, there’s so much that we actually couldn’t fit it all into the newsletter. Look for:
The National Portrait Gallery June 11–July 17
In response to the cancellation of the “official” National Portrait Gallery, a group of
Edmonton artists has put together this collection of exciting contemporary portraiture
from across the country. This big show will spill into all three of our gallery spaces.
(Image: Jonathan Kaiser)
Rooftop Patio Series, Thursdays June–August
Our ever-popular rooftop patio returns with a new roster of special guest hosts and
one-off cocktails.
Summer Members’ Series
We’ve selected four Latitude 53 Members to show their stuff in the
Community Gallery for one-week installments, giving us even more to celebrate on the
rooftop patio.
Not Another Fucking Landscape & Gore, Quebec
In August, we’ve got two shows of contemporary landscape photography. Gore, Quebec comes to us from Montreal artist Jonas St. Michael, and Not Another Fucking Landscape includes work by Edmonton’s own Zachary Ayotte, Ted Kerr, Amie Rangel and Marshall Watson, curated by Anthony Easton.
We’ll have more information and previews of these in the next few weeks—stay tuned. It’s going to be an exciting summer!
