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Urban Ecology Workshops at CIVIC SPACE with Sam Lefort

We’re really excited to announce our first Artist-in-Residence at CIVIC SPACE, Samantha Lefort with the Urban Ecology Project! Evolved from a love of design, urban environments, and creative projects – The Urban Ecology Project is the interjection of ecology and new life into an urban space. It kicks off on Tuesday, July 24 for a week of workshops.

Urban Apiaries, Tuesday July 24 @ 3pm 
BEES AND YOU, IN THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

Did you know 1 in every 3 bites of food are thanks to the pollination of bees? It’s true! Come and explore bee culture and honey culture in the urban landscape. Taste some honey and make a wild bee hive!

Urban Container, Tuesday July 24 @ 7pm  
Gardening 101 GET DIRTY.
Add some edibles to your landscape! One of the best and most efficient gardening methods, container gardening is great for any space!

Cycling Charette, Wednesday July 25 @ 7pm
A-ROUND ABOUT
In traditional design charette style, participants will be presented with an opportunity in the local community to see new possibilities and spark an invigoration of underutilized space – via bicycle. Exploring urban place by bicycle – acting as flaneur about the city, noticing, seeing, creating an urban narrative for NEW possibilities in the spaces we seldom see.

Moss Graffiti, Thursday July 26 @ 7pm
GET IT GROWIN’ ON
Learn how to make unique and intricate moss graffiti to add a little green to your City! All natural and chemical free, these beautiful living art pieces thrive on their own after application.All workshops are ALL AGES and FREE!! Any questions? Let us know.

SPACE IS LIMITED, please contact us to register in advance!

Here’s the entire set of lovely posters Samantha designed!

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Learning About the Emerging Emergencies of North Bay

We’re in North Bay on a residency as we prepare for an exhibition this fall at the White Water Gallery. After spending Monday getting acquainted with the downtown, we ventured further out. Of course, we had to stop at the North Bay arch. Getting a sense of these kinds of structural parts of the city that have, in a way, become shorthand for the entire geography has been helping us to shape the outlines of the exhibition.

Continue reading “Learning About the Emerging Emergencies of North Bay”

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IN STORE: NON-PLACE

Another incredible look back at SRSI from 2010, this time featuring Andrea Carvalho‘s work on non-places. Daragh Sankey continues to amaze us with these micro-documents … can’t wait to see what’s next!

Here’s the overview from In Store:

Chappas

We also saw this neighbourhood in The Border – the new-looking houses that Lee’s group explores, right on the edge of the wilderness, are right down the street from the Chappas houses that Simon (of DoUC fame) and Andrea find flowers in.

The area is vacant because the government bought up all the property. (Here is an example document given to landowners) The whole region lies in the path of the Detroit River International Crossing, the government’s new bridge to Detroit, just approved by PM Harper in June. Part of the project is to extend the 401 right to the bridge, so a huge swath of Windsor around Huron Church has been vacant for some time.

The first time I drove into Windsor I drove through this area and the visual impact was powerful. Only later did I hear about the DRIC, and the impact was dulled somewhat: just as on Indian Road (film coming soon!), the houses and stores were sold by the owners for good money, not abandoned due to economic hardship.

Upon further reflection though, there is a different kind of hardship at play. These giant transportation projects, cutting as they do through great swaths of the city, indicate that Windsor is valued more as a place to pass through than a place to live. “Canada’s busiest border crossing” is too powerful a thing; the gardens of Chappas, as they are in its way, cannot hope to stand.

Non-place

Andrea talked about this concept a lot. To quote:

Marc Augé coined the term non-lieux [non-places] to describe specific kinds of spaces, chiefly architectural and technological, designed to be passed through or consumed rather than appropriated, and retaining little or no trace of our engagement with them. These spaces, principally associated with transit and communication, are for Augé the defining characteristics of the contemporary period he calls ‘supermodernity,’ the product and agent of a contemporary crisis in social relations and consequently in the construction of individual identities through such relations.

The parking lot we see at the beginning of this film is a non-place. The vacant lot in which Andrea and Simon placed the flowers was a non-place, but by their action, dropped the non-. Maybe many more actions like that could cumulatively do the same for Windsor as a whole.

Here’s the original Andrea video from SRSI, for what it’s worth: SRSI – Andrea Carvalho.

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Exploring North Bay (prep for Surviving North Bay)

We’re in North Bay for a residency in preparation of an upcoming exhibition. White Water Gallery is our gracious host (and for the first half of the day, our introduction to North Bay).

Much of the day is on foot, with cameras.

We record what we can about the city’s history and get a read of the direction the city moves towards — though this movement, or lack thereof, already feels central to the things we want to take up here.

We break at the edge of Lake Nipissing.

Throughout our roaming, we documented a lot of the signage around the (very tidy) downtown core — trying to get a read of how residents, business owners, and the municipality itself negotiates communication strategies — and certainly, what they’re trying to communicate.

And on that note, the night winds down with some very preliminary sketching around ideas of emergencies (or, again, lack thereof) in North Bay. Tomorrow, more exploring as we prepare for the evening’s psychogeographic walk, starting at 8pm. It’s feeling late, but it’s early in the project — much more tomorrow.

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Cardstock Handwriting Stencils from our Vinyl Cutter (test phase)

We’ll be picking up on this again today as we continue to experiment with cutting stencils of our handwriting on cardstock from our vinyl cutter, the Graphtec ce5000-60. These are very early tests, but will hopefully lay the groundwork for some processes and projects later on in the summer or fall.

No big surprise, trying to convert writing on a chalkboard to a stencil produces a really challenging job for the cutter. The grain of the chalk was interesting to work into an outline / live trace in Illustrator. Also, Sara has nice handwriting.

Hiba’s handwriting worked a lot better on paper. We’ll almost certainly work from this as a starting point as we continue researching this.

But beyond handwriting, we’re also looking at a kind of automated process to turn photos into stencils — so the tests in cutting these kinds of very delicate edges have been worthwhile.

Above the cutting interface through Illustrator.

The adjusted image that we built the stencil file from — after live tracing in Illustrator.

You can see the cutter did a pretty insanely great job at retaining the detail.

But, the blade didn’t quite make it through the paper entirely. So, we’ll have to make some adjustments on the down-force (I think that’s what it’s called) and try again. We used a similar process to cut the templates for our Letter Library from cardstock, but it’s entirely possible that the complexity of these cuts makes it more difficult for the blade to cut all the way through and maintain that depth of cut.

More later today and likely throughout the week …

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Laser Cut Acrylic Extraction Process & Lunch Time French Lesson

Hiba started working with the laser cut acrylic, pulling apart the excess that we won’t need when we make the cast.

We’ll be creating a rubber mould from the positive of the acrylic.

The excess, the negative.

Hiba carefully placing some letters pulled off their base.

Careful work.

Then, Kiki came by to give us a French lesson, or maybe a lesson in Quebec politics.

This might be my most favourite way to learn French ever.

Kiki showed us some really interesting examples of the play on words that have shaped some of the discussions around the Red Square movement in Quebec.

Some of the vocabulary we learned today. We’re going to do this again later this week, and hopefully convince Kiki to offer a short course here at CIVIC SPACE by the end of it.

Currently, Josh and Hiba sit across from me, we’re going to go play now.

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Walk-by Theatre: Bike Safety, the Psychology of Selling, and Leadership in the 1940s

Last night we hosted our first Walk-by Theatre screening. Featuring films pulled from the Prelinger archives, Danielle and I curated a program that touched on the aesthetics, values, and practices of 1940s/50s/60s American culture.

The built-in benches on Pelissier along with some chairs from our collection were perfect seating for the hour-long program. A number of other passersby stopped for a couple of minutes, while others stayed for the rest of the screening. A large sheet, our new projector, and some borrowed speakers made this a really simple process and I think it looked really great!

And, in case you missed it, here are the links to the films:

One Got Fat – Bicycle Safety (1963)

Man to Man – Salesmanship and psychology instruction for gun dealers (1947)

Hired! – Quirky Chevrolet sales film (1940)

We’ll be doing this nearly every Monday at 9pm for an hour-or-so. It’s free, and we have plenty of seating. There’s a parking garage right above the seating, and plenty of bike racks.

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Research Trip: Residency at White Water Gallery for A Northern Locality

photo: http://www.merlex.ca/

We’re heading up to White Water Gallery next week for a weeklong residency exploring a northern locality — this work will inform an exhibition coming up in the fall!

Over the course of a weeklong residency, we will engage in a series of exploratory public interventions, micro-gestures, and tactical DIY responses to North Bay.

Join us on Tuesday night at 8pm for a psycho-geographic walk around the downtown starting at White Water Gallery, an “afternoon intervention task force” on Wednesday at 7pm, and an outdoor participatory public projection event on Thursday night at 9pm.

Each event will call on public participation to engage with North Bay, its infrastructures and its communities. Throughout the residency, we’ll be collecting research on North Bay in support of an exhibition in the fall that will aim to not only examine the practice and production of a northern locality, but also present a range of resistive tactics that can help the community survive, or help one survive the community.