Call for Submissions: Repair Centre

New project alert!  Check out the following call for submissions and throw something my way if you're interested!

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Repair Centre
at the Peter McKendrick Community Gallery
Artscape Wychwood Barns, 601 Christie Street, Toronto
Curated by Tara Bursey and sponsored by the Wychwood Barns Community Association

Repair Centre invites artists to submit art and project proposals that explore the politics, pragmatics, poetics and aesthetics of repair. This exhibition will take place at the Peter McKendrick Community Gallery in July of 2015.

Drawing on the past function of the Wychwood Barns TTC streetcar repair barns, Repair Centre will examine the function and principles of repair to restore, renew, maintain and heal. This call for submissions invites artists to consider artistic acts of repair as a means of engaging issues related to (but not limited to) architecture, ecology, the material world, DIY, labour, skilling and deskilling, the aesthetics of repair, human relationships, performativity and the borderlands between art and life. This exhibition proposes repair as an opportunity for re-invention, re-incarnation and an experience beyond a simple means to an end.

Please send the following materials for consideration:
-- A project proposal of new work, or a statement about previous work you are submitting for consideration (one page maximum, pdf format)
-- 3-5 jpgs of previous work (72dpi; 1024 x 768 pixels) or web links to video or audio
-- A corresponding image list (pdf format)
-- An updated CV and Bio (pdf format)
-- Contact information

Please send proposals to tara@tarabursey.com by July 15th, 2014. Please label all email submissions as REPAIR CENTRE SUB in the subject line.

The Hamilton Sign Register

New project alert!  I've started a new blog called The Hamilton Sign Register-- the product of many recent aimless, unemployed person wanderings around my new city.  It is an outlet for my love of old signs and typefaces as well as a way educate myself more about them and get to know Hamilton a little better.

http://thehamiltonsignregister.blogspot.ca/

Artscape Youngplace

 Heather Nicol

 Debbie Adams in Stairmasters

 Hanging tapestry in the SKETCH Admin Hub

 UnArchive exhibition title wall

 David Adam Brown at the Koffler Gallery

Vacant studio on the 2nd floor

Gorgeous visuals abound at the grand opening of Artscape Youngplace on Tuesday night.

UnArchive and Stairmasters at Artscape Youngplace

I have nearly reached the end of two consecutive contracts with Artscape and these amazing exhibitions are the culmination of them!  UnArchive and Stairmasters, curated by the amazing Heather Nicol (with research and curatorial assistance from yours truly), are important parts of the official opening of Artscape Youngplace at 180 Shaw that happens tomorrow. Come and see the first phase of Unarchive (more work will be added to the exhibition until the official exhibition opening on Jan 7th), amazing artwork and artifacts, and an astounding update to a beautiful example of Toronto's built heritage. Register to attend tomorrow's public opening here. Lots more info about the Artscape Youngplace project can be found on their website.

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Unarchive

Phase One: November 19, 2013

Exhibition opens January 7 - March 30, 2014
Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street

www.artscapeyoungplace.ca

Featuring new works by: Ian Carr-Harris and Yvonne Lammerich, Dave Dyment, Lee Henderson, Nina Levitt and Jessica Vallentin with selected items from the Givins/Shaw Junior Public School historic archives, and artwork by students at Givins/Shaw Junior Public School.

Curated by Heather Nicol

Curator’s Talk & Tour: January 7, 2014, 7:00 to 9:00 pm

Opening Vernissage: January 9, 2014, 7:00 to 9:00 pm

Unarchive features new works by artists Ian Carr-Harris and Yvonne Lammerich, Dave Dyment, Lee Henderson, Nina Levitt and Jessica Vallentin, who have been granted access to the rich Givins/Shaw Junior Public School archival collection comprised of records and data, photographs of classes and teams, trophies and plaques, scrap books, press clippings, snapshots and more, packed into locked closets and an over-stuffed vitrine. This remarkable treasure trove has inspired and provoked creative responses in sculpture, installation, assemblage, text and photo based works. The exhibition also features historic and pedagogic displays, along with artworks by current Grade Four, Five and Six students from the Givins/Shaw J.P.S.

As this elegant school building’s transformation into the innovative Artscape Youngplace draws to a close and the dust finally settles, Unarchive will unfold in synch with the architectural completion. November 19 marks the first phase of the project; the fully realized exhibition will be on view from January 9 - March 30, 2014, with an opening vernissage taking place on January 9 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm and a curator’s talk and tour on January 7 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.
Unarchive and Stairmasters inaugurate the Artscape Youngplace Hallway Galleries, an impressive new public exhibition space at Artscape Youngplace, soon to be the largest cultural institution in the West Queen West area. The galleries span more than 9,000 square feet of spectacular corridor and stairwell space across three floors and are open seven days a week with free admission.

Image: Lee Henderson



Stairmasters


Debbie Adams, Melissa Fisher and Seth Scriver

Curated by Heather Nicol
November 19, 2013 – March 30, 2014

Artscape Youngplace,
180 Shaw Street

Announcing a new era of creative intervention at 180 Shaw Street, the North, South and West stairwells at Artscape Youngplace have been transformed into site-specific installations. Often-overlooked architectural zones, the liminal, in-between and connective qualities of these spaces are expanded upon by artists with wide-ranging practices spanning animation, design, sculpture, book and film making. Using vinyl as their medium, these “stairmasters” playfully explore the material’s associations with signage, temporality and mutability, inviting viewers on an experiential ascent or descent as they explore Artscape Youngplace in its inaugural season.

This project kicks off the new Artscape Youngplace Hallway Galleries, which span more than 9,000 square feet of spectacular corridor and stairwell space across three floors, and are open seven days a week with free admission.
Heather Nicol, a Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist with a studio at Artscape Youngplace, is the curator of the two inaugural exhibitions, UnArchive and Stairmasters. Nicol previously curated and produced Art School (Dismissed) on this site in 2010, an intervention which responded to the decommissioned Toronto District School Board property prior to its renewal by Artscape.

Curator’s Talk & Tour: January 7, 2014, 7:00 to 9:00 pm

Reception: January 9, 2014, 7:00 to 9:00 pm
www.artscapeyoungplace.ca

Image: Debbie Adams

Hamilton Supercrawl 2013

Hooked Ontario coat of arms chair pad.  Really nice!

Dancing shoes.

Last year, I gushed about Supercrawl after taking in the full event from the comfort of the tent where I was helping as part of the Toronto Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef.  Supercrawl this year was a whirlwind-- we had guests from Toronto who came to take in the event with us.  By the time we had a leisurely chat and a few drinks on our front porch, Saturday afternoon had turned into Saturday night and we were tossed into the shark tank that is the grand finale of the mammoth annual event that includes art installations, food trucks galore and several A-list musical acts.

We made a big mistake taking our time, because Supercrawl is not something you can really take in in two hours on the final night.  We found ourselves wandering in to Christ's Church Anglican Cathedral on James Street to catch our breaths.  Being from Toronto, huge street fairs with food and cheap vendors (Supercrawl certainly had its share of these this year) are a dime a dozen.  Rarer experiences are those you get in a historic building where you can share in a sense of quiet wonder with a large group of similarly awestruck folks amid the chaos of the outside world.

"The Ward"

Read a great article in the Toronto Star yesterday highlighting the (largely forgotten) history of the downtown Toronto neighbourhood once called "The Ward"-- home to thousands of immigrants who arrived in the city between the 1890s and 1920s.  This neighbourhood, which my work happens to be right in the heart of, was home to Toronto's first Chinatown and was even earlier a bustling-- if utterly impoverished-- multicultural community.  John Lorinc of the Star asks: "How should the present-day city excavate and commemorate the heritage of this ghost neighbourhood and its critical role in the shaping of modern Toronto?" An important and timely question as heritage buildings are jeopardized by the unprecedented amount of development happening in the downtown core right now.  FYI: "The Ward" was demolished in the 1950s to make way for Nathan Phillips Square, New City Hall and hospital row on University Avenue.

The Encampment

I was lucky to catch The Encampment-- a massive temporary public art piece by artist collaborators (as well as a huge number of contributing artists) Thomas+Guinevere a couple of weeks ago at Fort York.  200 tents were placed on the grounds of Fort York-- site of The War of 1812-- which served as individual sites for artistic interventions.  The project's handout explained that each tent installation was inspired by real individuals living in the Canadas during the war.  As compelling as some of the tent installations were, for me the real power in the installation was the sight of the 200 tents together on a historic site against the backdrop of the changing city.

Though the tents were (for me) a thoroughly engaging evocation of Canada's history, I can't help but also see them a bittersweet metaphor for my own vague alienation and feelings of displacement in the city I was born in as it changes more everyday.

Rochester Trip

Took a quick trip across the pond to Rochester, New York last week.  The weather was sort of craptastic (mostly cold and damp), but it was a really cool trip nonetheless.  Rochester is a tiny city, with lots of neat art deco/art moderne architecture.  The Kodak Building, the firehall on Chestnut Avenue and this old Chevrolet dealership (?) turned coffee shop in downtown Rochester's east end were highlights, for sure.

While I was there, I managed to take in a lot of art in both expected and unexpected places.  I went to the George Eastman House (Eastman was founder of Kodak, which is based in Rochester) which is a museum of photography and film situated in an old ivy-covered mansion.  There was an exhibition up which featured a number of photographic medallions from the early 20th Century such as the one above (scooped from the George Eastman House Flickr page).  There was another small exhibition called Ballyhoo, which focused on promotional materials and signage from the golden age of film and was particularly neat.  The one thing that irked me about Eastman House was it's lack of wayfinding information-- after leaving, we realized that we had missed two of the museum's exhibitions entirely.  Rats!

One of our other stops was the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, which had a great show up called Work It: Artists Address Labour and Unemployment.  It was nice to see pieces from Kathryn Clark's Foreclosure Quilt series up in this show, which I had only previously seen through images online.  Also got to meet the gallery's plucky Director, who introduced himself and chatted for a while.  Nice dude!  Don't think that's ever happened to me in Toronto...!

Our first night there, we ventured into the amazing abandoned Rochester Subway tunnel with the friend we were staying with armed with only a single flashlight and about $10 (goes a long way in the U.S.) worth of alcohol . Apparently people go down into the tunnel all the time to explore-- there was a ton of graffiti down there.  The above patch was particularly unusual.

This trip to Rochester made me miss Baltimore quite a bit, and reminded me how much smaller American cities have to offer.  Canadians generally want to go to places like New York City and San Francisco on vacation-- understandably so, but smaller American cities seem to really have their own unique identity and a slew of neat things to check out that can be found pretty easily.  I'm looking forward to going on more quick and dirty trips like this just south of the border in the future-- next up is Detroit, hopefully.

Columns and Swoops

Somewhere along the line-- during my time in the States, most likely-- I turned into an architecture gawker. In the States, I went to museums and felt that I could admire the architecture without having my enjoyment of it be tainted by a certain degree of bitterness about the politics and astounding prices that are par for the course among (many, but not all) Toronto institutions.

Looking at these photos, it dawned on me how cool it would be to make a big series of pictures like this. I'm hoping to make it out to the DIA in Detroit later this month, so we'll see if I can add a new photo to the pile that soon.

Fox Court, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Looking up at the Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC
Central Court, The Walters, Baltimore, MD

16 Museums

For a zine that I'm working on which should be done later on today, hopefully!  More on this later...