Since my initial post on art in vending machines, I’ve been looking into how the phenomena manifests itself in Canada. While there seems to be no overarching or nationally cohesive counterpart to the Art-O-Mat I encountered in Las Vegas, there are a myriad of interesting projects abound. Today, I’m going to share some of them with you (aren’t you lucky!).
My time as Writer-in-Residence is just over half way through, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I began this residency about a week after having given the oral defense of my master’s thesis, and only a couple of days after formally submitting the written component to the University. What drew me to the project initially was how I could potentially write about whatever interested me; how it enabled me to keep writing about visual arts and culture but with a different voice; and the opportunity to write about and engage with accessible community based arts initiatives.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is the writing. Not the actual putting words to paper, but choosing what to write about and then making decisions about how to write. After spending the past 10+ years writing academic papers where the topic is usually dictated by the course, the transition to writing about whatever I’d like is not so easy. I can write seventy-five words, five hundred words, a thousand words on just about any given topic, but the freedom of choice is something with which I find myself struggling. In addition, figuring out who I’m writing for is just as difficult. Of course I’m not writing for an academic audience, but I suspect most people who visit blogs via artist-run centres (and the like) know their way around the content of my posts.
Yet as per the position, I have the freedom to write about anything I want, in the style and length of my choosing. I can write brief, topical entries, or a through examination of something theoretical. I can use colloquialisms. No one from Latitude has ever asked me to write about a particular topic, or about an exhibition in one of their galleries, or to promote the programming they offer. Even this post, which extols the virtues of Latitude’s Writer-in-Residence program, was something that I chose and wrote without needing to consult anyone about. Though unfamiliar to me, I am learning to embrace this freedom. My own experiences, as well as those shared with me by others, speak to this uncommon feature of paid work and the unlikelihood of it happening again soon.
The recognition that this is my halfway point has me evaluating what I had set out to accomplish, what I have done, and what I would still like to do in my remaining residency. This process has led to some revelations, both expected and unexpected. I have some projects and collaborations in store for the near future, which will be revealed as they come to fruition. What I can say with certainty is that I’m grateful for the opportunities afforded to me by Latitude 53 and Todd Janes (the executive director), which couldn’t of have been better timed. The openness with which my ideas have been welcomed and encouraged is exciting.
Most importantly, the reading, reflecting and writing that I have been doing as part of this residency have led me to contemplate more broadly about what my next steps will be, both as a writer and beyond. I’m definitely in the period of reflection and transition that accompanies post graduate work. While I’m not looking for a destination, so far this residency has afforded me the luxury of time and play, which have helped me to discover more about what I want in life. And for that, I am sincere when I say Thank You, Todd Janes.
Today is the first day of the new year - a time that always seems to be ripe with possibility, the promise of new beginnings, and the chance to make changes. A time when someone will inevitably ask, “what are your New Year’s resolutions…?”
For many of the people with whom I spent New Year’s Eve (and from many of the facebook statuses I’ve read over the past few days), 2011 seems like a year that could have been better. For myself, I was fortunate to find 2011 rich with opportunities. Not only was it the year that I finished and defended my master’s thesis, but I also received my first teaching appointment, and became the most recent writer-in-residence at Latitude. Each has come with its own set of challenges which have helped me discover new things about myself and made visible those that were latent. The richness I found this past year came, in part, as the result of seizing opportunities as they came and taking the time to connect with what mattered most to me. Last year I didn’t bother to set any resolutions per se, instead I chose to think about the things I wanted to do rather than make changes I wasn’t really committed to.
The problem with resolutions is that typically they’re a series of self-imposed restrictions, and undefined in terms of how and when they are to be achieved. Beyond that, the self-improvements that fill resolutions could be done any time of year. If we honestly wanted to drink more water, eat healthier, quit smoking, save more, or whatever, then why would we wait for the first of January?
This year I challenge you to do something different. I challenge you to put aside the typical resolutions and make time to do the things you care about. Since you’re reading the Latitude 53 blog, perhaps this might mean visiting more of the great exhibitions that roll through here. Or maybe it means checking out a talk offered by a visiting artist and participating in the dialogue surrounding their practice (Latitude, the U of A, and the AGA are just three examples of places that run these kinds of initiatives). Or it could mean getting involved in any one of the arts related festivals that have earned Edmonton its reputation.
I offer you this challenge as I have taken it myself. Last year I wanted to connect more with what was happening in Edmonton’s diverse visual arts community, so I made the commitment to check out more exhibitions of all stripe. Those I attended included everything from the major exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta to the Garage Show (which, for those of you who missed it, was literally held in 2 garages), and everything else in between. I was part some interesting conversations about the history art in Edmonton (and on the prairies), the role of artist-run centres, and community engagement. In addition, I had the opportunity to attend an international conference, where I was able to share my own research about the visual culture of eugenics on the prairies - which has led to collaborative initiatives with some amazing people.
I will again resolve to spend time doing things that actually matter to me this year. And just maybe start that blog I’ve been contemplating for quite some time…
A couple of weeks ago I took a trip to Death Valley and Las Vegas, full of expectation. I’d been training for months in preparation to run what was to be my first big race: The Death Valley Marathon. Sadly, the race was cancelled at 3 am, only four hours before the start, due to dangerously high winds (50km/hr, gusting to 90km/hr!!). I had travelled all that way and like hell I wasn’t going to see Titus Canyon, so I ran part of the back half without support. It was amazing and I can only imagine how spectacular running the full course would have been. The rest of the day, and the one following, I spent time in and around Death Valley before heading to Las Vegas.
I’ll spare the details of the trip, since they’re not really the purpose of this blog, but will say that the two highlights of my trip were seeing Jubilee! – which was UNBELIEVEABLE (if you ever go to Vegas, this show is a MUST see!!!) – and the Art-O-Mat. On the second floor of our hotel, the Cosmopolitan, was about half a dozen boutiques and these unanticipated gems.
The Art-O-Mat
Tucked away, at the entrance to a pedway, two refurbished cigarette vending machines stood side-by-side. Instead of advertizing particular brands of cigarettes, backlit images professed the names of artists while the channels that had formerly held packs of cigarettes, now contained small boxes, whose contents could be yours for only $5.
Choices, choices…
Of course, I had to have one. I fed the machine my $5, pulled on the knob, and received a small white package, roughly 2”x3”. Wrapped around the outside was a glassine sleeve on which was printed little image and the text: Collage by Jordäo. Inside was some packaging material, an editioned collage, and a brief description of the artist and his practice.
The work I received!
As it turns out, this is the only Art-O-Mat in the state of Nevada, but there are 90 others like it across the United States (and one in Montreal). The first the Art-O-Mat appeared in 1997 when artist Clark Whittington was having a solo show at a local cafe in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Alongside 12 paintings, Whittington used a cigarette vending machine to sell some of his black and white photographs. Shortly thereafter, “Artists in Cellophane” was formed as an organization motivated by “taking art and ‘repackaging’ it to make it part of our daily lives…the AIC believes that art should be progressive, yet personal and approachable.”
In addition, for those people who don’t have access to buying individual works through a vending machine as I did, online orders can also be placed for Art-O-Carton. Playing off of the cigarette theme, AIC has made these individual works available in a “carton” format, containing 10 works by 10 different artists.
Just like smoking, these little works are highly addictive!
This whole project really appeals to me and reminds me of other, similar, art “vending” machine type initiatives. As a result, over the course of the next week, I’m going to be blogging about Canadian incarnations of these including The Teenie Weenie Zine Machine, distroboto, and trap/door’s Ashland Institute of Button Technology!
This past weekend the Royal Bison Craft and Art Fair celebrated its eleventh incarnation. Just shy of 2700 people attended the two day event that showcased the works of 72 local artists, designers and crafters of all stripe. I took in both days, each time bringing a different person with me and finding great things to spend my money on (which shall not be revealed, since I know the recipients read this blog!).
Get there early, before the crowds!
But the Royal Bison offers more than the wonderful opportunity to pick-up unique gifts; it’s a showcase and a breeding ground for new ideas, which makes it a lot like an informal artist run centre.
Let me explain. Artist run centres began as alternative spaces to mainstream or commercial galleries, offering artists an opportunity to present new and experimental art as well as the chance to network with other artists. Initiated and maintained by artists, as the name suggests, artist run centres bridge different forms of practice, two and three dimensional work co-exist and enter into dialogue with performance and critical writing. In addition, artist run centres routinely hold artists talks as a way for the community to speak first hand with artists about their work and process. Artists apply to show their work in these spaces and the process of selection is typically juried by their peers - other artists. Because the goal of artist run centres is to offer artists a venue to show work that’s in progress, rooted in conceptualism, innovative, unconventional, performance-based, or otherwise intangible, they differ greatly from a commercial gallery where the goal is to sell art.
Many of these aspects related directly to the aims of the Royal Bison. Run by local artists and designers, it is a space that exists beyond the realm of any traditional galleries where artists are able to engage directly with the community and with each other. Vikki Wiercinski, one of the three organizers behind the most recent Royal Bison, also highlights how one of their goals is to foster an environment for experimentation for their vendors aimed “to show off the top notch creativity in Edmonton and support groups that create art around the city.” To achieve this goal, the Royal Bison is a juried affair, in that once the applications have come in, a team of artists and designers collectively decide which submissions to include, which motivates potential applicants to keep their work interesting and of a higher caliber.
Design work of Gabe Wong
Once accepted there is a small fee to participate, which helps organizers cover the costs of things like the venue, promotions and maintaining the website. The fee is low enough so that it “encourage[s] aspiring and budding makers to put themselves out there with very little financial risk.” Wiercinski uses herself as an example. Formally trained as a graphic designer, she hadn’t really thought that much else was possible with her degree until she began participating in the Royal Bison where she was able to develop her own line of goods she hand prints in small editions.
This is also the first year that the Royal Bison made regular contributions to a blog, featuring a diverse range of artists and works slotted to participate, as a way to increase interest in the show long before the doors ever opened. Designed more to entice people to attend the show, the writing on the blog is supplemented with loads of great images and is descriptive more than anything else. Still, I recommend checking it out – embedded in the profile of each artist is a link to their own website, thereby increasing exposure to those features.
Artist Books by Uppercase
The Royal Bison evolved out of a pre-existing art and craft fair, cleverly named Arts Versus Crafts, held a few times in 2004-05 at the former Red Strap Market. Like the Royal Bison, the purpose was to bring well made arts and crafts to the people in way that was accessible to both potential vendors and visitors. The torch was taken up by Raymond Biesinger in 2007 when it was apparent that Arts Versus Crafts wasn’t going to take place again, but used the former fair as a model - $2 admission, cheap tables for vendors, great independent work.
Biesinger led the Bison for 10 great fairs and really helped it attain its reputation for fun, quirky goods before moving to Montreal and passing the torch again. I asked him if he’d begun anything like the beloved Royal Bison in Montreal and Biesinger told me that he didn’t have to, “others have been doing a fantastic job of organizing similar fairs (Puces Pop, Smart Design Mart, etc.) [and] it’s an absolute pleasure to roll in to any fair, these days, with a portfolio full of prints and nothing to do but table them!”
Rings by Jeanie Andronyk
Of course the biggest difference between the Royal Bison and an artist run centre is that despite offering an alternative venue to display original works and a place to engage different members of the community, vendors are there to (hopefully) sell some of the works they make. Yet the spirit is the same. The response from the arts community has been overwhelming (double the applicants than ever before) as it has been from the public at large. More people came through the doors on Saturday alone than at any previous Royal Bison. Wiercinski says the feedback has been unbelievable, people “are absolutely impressed with what quality and range Edmonton’s art and craft scene has to offer and they haven’t seen another fair like our Royal Bison.”
Edmonton needs more points of engagement between art and the public at large and alternative venues like the Royal Bison aim to fill that need. It’s not just the arts community that is asking, it’s also the people like those that attended in droves this past weekend.
In a mere three days, I’ll be headed down south to run my first marathon on quite the scenic trails through Titus Canyon in Death Valley, California. Since the race is on a Saturday morning, I’ll be staying overnight to give my legs the proper recovery they’ll need (the course gains 1,700 feet in the first 20K and then looses 5000 on the back half…!), before heading to Las Vegas on Sunday.
The view into Titus Canyon
I’ve never been to Vegas, but I’m looking forward to it. High on my hit-list is seeing showgirls strut across a stage wearing excessively ornamented headdresses, feathers, and so many rhinestones that there’s a chance their shimmer may cause blindness.
Vegas Showgirls!
I’ve been trying to hunt down some great galleries to see, but for all the entertainment offering that Vegas has (and there is a tremendous amount), galleries seem to be harder to come by… so I’m hoping that readers might be able to offer some suggestions about exhibitions, galleries, or spaces worth seeing while I’m there. What are your suggestions for things not to miss in the city that never sleeps?
Our current Writer in Residence, Megan Bertagnolli, is featured today on Akimbo’s Hit List—talking about five of her favourite things: Running, Camembert, The Royal Bison Craft & Art Fair, Gothic Cathedrals, and local artist Alexa Mietz, who she wrote about this week and who will also be featured in the Schmoozy silent auction next week. Go take a look!
This week I had the pleasure of seeing Alexa Mietz’s exhibition “TASTY” at the University of Alberta’s FAB Gallery.
Drawing inspiration from an eclectic array of sources including the rich foliage patterns of William Morris, the enigmatic shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell, and the decorative wall niches she encountered while visiting the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Alexa creates visual experiences that elicit wonder. It also helps that the works contain a healthy amount of glitter, rhinestones and iridescent ceramic figurines (craft materials to fall in love with). Through her inclusion of kitsch, found objects and fingernails, this current body of work is at once magnetic and abject, while raising questions about class and taste. (The photos of these works simply don’t do them justice. They shimmer and are far more intricate in person…)
Easy Breezy, 2011
Back up a second….fingernails? Take a closer look at Easy Breezy…
Mid-terms are over for another semester and I just finished a round of grading essays (something that I actually enjoy doing). As usual, they run the gamut from outstanding and humorous to the lackluster….
I teach the history of art and visual culture, which I often describe as learning about history and ideas in pictures. At the beginning of the semester, I passed out a series of 10 short questions to gauge the existing knowledge level of my students whom I knew had never taken any kind of art history before. The most important question for me was the last: ‘This class is an elective. Why did you choose it over the other options available to you?’ My primary goal in asking this was to uncover the reasoning behind their choice so that I could develop strategies for delivering the content of the course in ways that would potentially be more meaningful to this group of students.
As I suspected, many selected this class because it fit into their schedule, or they thought the content sounded somewhat interesting. However, I also received a response that made me excited – “I’m taking this class because when I go into museums or galleries I always see people spending lots of time looking at things and I always wonder what it is they’re looking at.” In essence, this student’s motivation for enrolling in the course was to increase his visual literacy by learning how to decode and read images.
The kinds of survey courses I teach have traditionally been structured upon rote memorization and the subsequent regurgitation of specific pieces of information. Yes, there are fundamental learning objectives that need to be achieved; however, I also want my students to develop their own visually critical toolboxes, which to me entails having them apply the knowledge that they’ve learned to new and unfamiliar situations (or in this particular case – works of art or visual culture). What this ability to apply knowledge demonstrates is a grasping of the broad, underlying concepts that influence or shape the way an object appears. The idea is that the skills they develop will (hopefully) transfer to real-life encounters beyond the pages of a textbook and the walls of the classroom.
As those who have taken any course of any kind can attest, one of the biggest drawbacks to a survey class is its breadth that comes at the sacrifice of depth. Most works are only covered in a superficial manner, which can make developing that critical toolbox tricky. In addition, keeping students engaged for a three hour long night class (as I have been charged with doing) is its own special kind of challenge.
Yet the in-class discussions and the compare and contrasts we’ve been doing appear to be paying off in terms of increasing visual literacy. So much so, that the “never seen before” sculpture included in the mid-term was one of the best answered questions on the exam. Just like all the other slide identifications, they had to name the work, sculptor and producing culture. The difference was that they had to provide evidence that supported their answer.
“Man Watering High Flower Pots” – Praxiteles
To me, reading their answers was exhilarating. (Yes, I realize how much that might make it sound like I need more excitement in my life – which is not true – I think it just makes me a hard-core educator at heart!) I suspect that part of the reason for the success on this question has to do with what the students had to do when presented with an unfamiliar image. They had to look. Instead of briefly glancing at the image to see what it was before turning back to the page, heads down, while trying to recall all the minutiae of whatever work was on the screen, they actually had to look at the work they were writing about and think about it in an active way. Fueled by the mini chocolate bars passed out before the exams, they had to think about what other works had they seen before which were similar or different, and how? Which aspects of the work offered clues as to which culture produced it, and why?
Across the board, their analyses of the work illustrated that they have begun internalizing the grand narratives set out in the course. As someone passionate about the ways viewers create meaning when engaging with visual culture, especially those inexperienced in the language of visual culture, this is a major coup. My next hope is that since their exams are non-cumulative, they retain at least some of the content they learned in the first half of the semester…
Wow. I can’t believe how fast October is flying by. Fall has been just perfect this year and there are so many great things happening that are worth doing and sharing. But first I’m going to follow in the footsteps of my predecessor and introduce both myself as well as my good intentions for the next six months….
My name is Megan Bertagnolli and the short biography about me on the Writer in Residence page states that I am a writer, but I consider myself to be much more of an educator. What I enjoy is connecting people to new ideas in ways that are both engaging and meaningful to them. I strive to do this by creating a space for dialogue in the talks I give, the programming develop, and the curatorial projects in which I am involved. Having recently graduated with a Masters in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, my approach to these different roles is informed by my art historical background, rather than being rooted in art education or practice. As such, one of my principal endeavours during this residency is to engage with readings about critical museum pedagogy and practice, and to investigate how different people use and make sense of visual culture. I’m also curious about the perceptions or beliefs that circulate about what art is or what art has the capacity to be or do.
One of the reasons I’ve been so busy this month comes as a result of Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week and my participation in the Collective Memory Project: Responses to Eugenics in Alberta. Spearheaded by former Writer in Residence Anne Pasek, the entire project consisted of a series of public discussions about the history of eugenics in Canada and open studio where people had the opportunity to make art work responding to that history. This project will be punctuated by an exhibition of both historical documents and artworks that attempts to make eugenic “histories and ideologies visible.” Furthermore, it gives agency to communities and voices not often seen or heard.
The term “eugenics” comes from the Greek for “well-born.” Broadly speaking, however, eugenics encompasses the policies, practices and attitudes that both promote and discourage certain characteristics or socio-cultural groups. Examples include everything from the classification, segregation and sterilization of the “unfit” (those with disabilities, mental health issues, labeled sexually deviant, or from particular racial groups) as well as modern genetic testing, prenatal screening and the rise of designer babies. Often associated with the extreme example of Nazi Germany, Canada’s own involvement includes Residential Schools and Provincial Training Schools which sought to address “the Indian problem” and “the feeble-minded threat” respectively.
This week (October 15-23) is Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week talks, films and performances relating to this history of eugenics in Alberta. Opening on the 23rd in the Extension Gallery at Enterprise Square (10230 Jasper Ave) will be the exhibition component of the Collective Memory Project, which includes an interactive component that invites visitors to actively engage with the themes and ideas being presented by contributing their own stories and reflections to the eugenics tree. While the reception will be this Sunday from 2-4 pm, the exhibition runs until the 23rd of November.
