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We’re Featured in Artcite’s 30th Anniversary Exhibition, Opening Tomorrow Night at 7:30

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“30X30 – Artcite 30th ANNIVERSARY SHOW pt. 2”

An Invitational Group Show featuring Works by Emerging Artists Nominated by Artcite Alumni and Members

Opening Reception – Friday, September 13, 7:30 PM at Artcite (109 University Ave. W, Windsor)

We’ve just recently been selected to take part in Artcite‘s 30th Anniversary / 30×30 exhibition, which opens tomorrow at 7:30pm. We contributed a series of posters which deal with issues we confront and negotiate with on a nearly daily basis (collaboration, creativity, time, resources, direction, etc.)

I know it’s short notice, but if you’re in the area, please stop by. There’s a ton of interesting work from 15 Canadian and American emerging artists. We hope to see you there!

The exhibition runs September 13 to November 16, 2013 – Wed-Sat 12-5 or by appointment

Featuring works by:

Daniel Bernyk (Windsor, ON)
Broken City Lab (Windsor, ON)
Michael Paul Britto (Bronx, NY, USA)
Katyuska Doleatto (Toronto, ON)
Hans Gindlesberger (Blacksburg, VA, USA)
Arturo Herrera (Windsor, ON)
Adriane Little (Kalamazoo, MI, USA)
Ella Dawn McGeough (Toronto, ON)
Susy Oliveira (Toronto, ON)
David Poolman (Toronto, ON)
Maayke Schurer (Ottawa, ON)
Andrea Slavik / Alicia Chester (Windsor ON, Rochester, NY, USA)
Owen Eric Wood (Windsor ON)
Nicole June Wurstner (Buffalo NY, USA)
Jade Yumang (Vancouver BC, Brooklyn, NY, USA)

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Learn More About… Jeanne van Heeswijk Homework II: Long Forms / Short Utopias Keynote Panelist

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Jeanne van Heeswijk – Rotterdam, The Netherlands

We’re less than two months away from Homework II: Long Forms / Short Utopias and things are really coming together. If you’ve been browsing our site lately, you’ve probably seen that we have announced a tentative schedule for the weekend and a list of people who will be curating and sitting on panels. While things might change slightly in the next two months, the schedule is an accurate representation of how the weekend will go, more or less. We’re very excited and we hope you can attend Homework II this fall. For more information and to register to attend, please click here.

Jeanne van Heeswijk is one of three featured keynote speakers who will be presenting at Homework II. Currently living in Rotterdam, she is a visual artist who, since 1993, has created contexts for interaction in public spaces. Her projects distinguish themselves through a strong social involvement. She creates new public (meeting-)spaces or remodels existing ones with her work.

She regularly lectures on topics such as urban renewal, participation and cultural production and sees herself as a mediator, an intermediary between a situation, a space, a neighbourhood and the people connected to these. She has coined the term “urban curating” for her interventions and “in the sedate Dutch art world in which all taboos appear to have been broken, her work – uniquely – arouses fierce controversy.” Jeanne will be speaking with these ideas in mind and, along with Steve Lambert and Darren O’Donnell, will be presenting on the first evening of Homework II (Friday, November 8th).

Jeanne van Heeswijk – Public Faculty (2008-2012)

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Public Faculty No. 1 – Skopje City Park (2008)

“Public Faculty, which has previously taken place in Macedonia, the Netherlands, Serbia and England, refers to Joseph Beuys’s epochmaking work ’Richtkräfte’, an installation with 100 blackboards created for public discussion. The idea is to engage in learning by means of exchanging knowledge in a certain locality. By visualizing the discourses, the signs set a rethinking of the public arena in motion through collective cultural action. Driven by a belief in the connection between art, life and space, she engages herself in local communities and involves the public in social projects with communication and change as the objective.”

Homework II will run November 8-10, 2013 in Windsor, Ontario at Art Gallery of Windsor and CIVIC Space.

Our featured keynote speakers this year will be Jeanne van Heeswijk (Rotterdam), Darren O’Donnell (Toronto), and Steve Lambert (New York). In addition to our keynotes, we’ve also invited a series of curatorial partners, who we’ll be announcing soon, to develop panels that tackle the conference themes. And, to top it all off, everyone who attends will be co-authors of a book that captures the ideas and conversations from this year’s conference through a series of interviews with presenters, attendees, and organizers alongside collected materials from our 2011 conference.

For more information, please email homework@brokencitylab.org

Homework II: Long Forms / Short Utopias is made possible with generous support from the Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Trillium Foundation, Art Gallery of Windsor, and IN/TERMINUS.

HomeworkIISponsors

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Scapegoat Journal 05 – Excess!!! (art is excess, artists are not excessive, art is not enough)

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SCAPEGOAT: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy is an independent, not-for-profit, bi-annual journal designed to create a context for research and development regarding design practice, historical investigation, and theoretical inquiry. Edited by friends like Adrian Blackwell, Adam Bobbette, Nasrin Himada, Jane Hutton, Marcin Kedzior, Chris Lee, Christie Pearson, and Etienne Turpin, SCAPEGOAT should be considered required reading.

In the latest issue of  SCAPEGOAT, focused on EXCESS,  BCL Research Fellows, Justin Langlois and Hiba Abdallah tackle the language of excess around valuations of design, art, and civic life. This work comes alongside along work from approximately 60 other contributors (including upcoming Homework II panel organizer, Tom Provost)… and here’s the full epic list:

Contributors to EXCESS include: Ariella AZOULAY, Georges BATAILLE, Jean BAUDRILLARD, Alex BERCEANU, Diana BERESFORD-KROEGER, James BRIDLE, Melissa CATE CHRIST, Tings CHAK, Steven CHODORIWSKY, Vicki DASILVA, Heather DAVIS, Sara DEAN, Amanda DE LISIO, Seth DENIZEN, EMIL, ÉPOPÉE, FALA ATELIER, Valeria FEDERIGHI, Natasha GINWALA, HEBBEL AM UFER, Lisa HIRMER, Gary HUSTWIT, David HUTAMA, Kate HUTCHENS, Jennifer JACQUET, Martti KALLIALA, Prachi KAMDAR, Stuart KENDALL, Chris KRAUS, Abidin KUSNO, Emily KUTIL, Clint LANGEVIN, Justin LANGLOIS, Sam LEACH, Stanisław LEM, Sylvère LOTRINGER, Filipe MAGALHAES, Danielle MCDONNOUGH, Meredith MILLER, Srimoyee MITRA, Jeffrey MONAGHAN, Jon PACK, Keith PEIFFER, Rich PELL, pHgH, Rick PRELINGER, Thomas PROVOST, raumlaborberlin, John Paul RICCO, Erin SCHNEIDER, Ana Luisa SOARES, Scott SØRLI, Raphael SPERRY, Anna-Sophie SPRINGER, Antonio STOPPANI, Maria TAYLOR, Eugene THACKER, Kika THORNE, Emily VANDERPOL, Kevin WALBY, Eyal WEIZMAN, Jason YOUNG, Vivian ZIHERL, and Joanna ZYLINSKA.

The issue is now available online for purchase today. Please share with your friends and colleagues. SCAPEGOAT is an awesome independent Toronto-based journal that’s worth supporting.

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Desire and the City Day 1: The Results

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This past Saturday, CIVIC Space saw the first session of Desire and the City, the first of a two-part design workshop created by our friend Kiki Athanassiadis. Kiki is interested in the potential that abandoned lots suggest, and since Windsor has many of them, there was an abundance of source material to pull from. She put together a kit for everyone to use; it consisted of survey forms to use at the abandoned lots, large black and white images of lots in Windsor, and images of objects printed on vellum that could be taped and overlapped. These materials allowed us to visualize our ideas in a very gratifying way (as you’ll see below).

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Kiki also posted some colour shots of general areas and a “master map” of where the sites are located in the city.

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Here Kiki explains her survey forms and what we might want to note once we head out to our desired lots.

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After Kiki describes the project and the instructions for how the session will work, we start to think about which lots we might visit. Sara and I decided to go East and visit a lot near Caesar’s Windsor.

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Here’s a closer shot of the survey forms. They are about half the size of a regular sheet of paper and bound with a think glue. They’re nice.

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Kiki shows us where the lots she’s photographed are located in relation to the downtown core.

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…and we’re on our way. Most of the pack decided to head West, but we went East.

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Embarrassingly enough, I forgot to get a shot of the property we chose. It looked like it was for sale, but the real estate signs and wooden posts were left in a heap in the middle of the lot. When we returned, we briefly shared our ideas. The ideas ranged from community garden proposals to a manmade volcano. We used the pages Kiki laid out to mock up our ideas in space. Obviously, there wasn’t a volcano printout, but most people found what they needed in the stack.

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Everyone got really invested in his/her creation and, consequently, we didn’t realize how quickly time was going by.

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Here’s a little covered garden / naturalized area tucked into the corner of this lot.

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Here is a celebratory lot between two commercial spaces, complete with bunting and all.

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I didn’t know a pallet pathway was a possibility until I saw this idea. The pallets could also be filled with something, or be used as planters.

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Here’s something you don’t see enough of: public tree houses. There really isn’t a compelling reason why something like this couldn’t exist, besides the issue of accessibility. It also looks like the main treehouse is a garden…interesting.

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Here is a pretty serious community garden proposal that covers a whole abandoned lot with greenery. It looks like it might also house a massive compost bin. Impressive!

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This proposal looks like a fairly substantial gazebo structure or performance stage. I like the way it works with the shape of the railroad ties pictured beneath it.

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There’s more to come, so please join us for the second day of Desire and the City on Saturday, September 14th from 1-4pm at CIVIC Space. Don’t forget to register here. Hope to see you!

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Neighbourhood Spaces Interview with Artist-in-Residence Ariana Jacob

Next in the Neighbourhood Spaces (NS) mini-doc series is an interview with artist-in-residence Ariana Jacob. She has been staying with us at CIVIC Space for the past month, and we’ve been lucky enough to catch occasional glimpses into the work she’s been doing. As a Neighbourhood Spaces artist-in-residence, Ariana has been based in Windsor’s Unemployed Help Centre and Tecumseh Mall. She has also been having conversations with the people she encounters on the streets, sidewalks and in transit as she travels from downtown Windsor to her community sites by bus. She has also made a series of great silkscreened posters that you may have seen on our blog or around town.

Currently living in Portland, OR, Ariana makes artwork that uses conversation as medium and as a subjective research method. WORKING / NOT WORKING explores the basic realities of what people do for work these days, the place work has in their lives, and how contemporary work and economic realities are affecting how we understand ourselves.

Drawing on Studs Terkel’s classic book, “Working” this project revisits his approach to the role work has in our lives considering how much more precarious work conditions have become since Stud’s 1970s.

You can view more of her work at: www.publicwondering.com

Also, please visit the NS Blog for more updates: www.acwr.net/ns-blog

NS is a collaborative partnership between the Arts Council – Windsor & Region, Broken City Lab and The City of Windsor (“the Collaborative”). This program is made possible through the generous financial support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.