Hello. We're artists working through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city.
Ok, it’s an advertisement for a paint company, and it strikes me as being a pretty bad idea (in a long-term perspective, I kind of cringe when I see brick buildings painted here in Windsor). Inevitably, a bit history is being completely lost by painting over these walls.
However, the video is stunning and if for a moment we can forget the parts of it that make this a possibly poor long-term choice, it does get my imagination going thinking about how we could repaint blocks of concrete in this city.
In order to keep things moving with Eric Boucher’s Micro-Residency project, I invited Eric to interview my oldest (in terms of age) friend Terry Marentette yesterday afternoon. I met Terry two years ago in an Art History class at the School of Visual Arts and was immediately astonished by his immense knowledge of Windsor’s past. Eric’s interview sparked some great conversation about Windsor during the Depression, the Ambassador Bridge and its effects on Windsor, the history of Walkerville, the amount of people who leave Windsor after school, etc. Overall, Eric and I were both pleased with the amount of Windsor-related information Terry provided. I am excited to see the footage!
There’s an opening for two shows in which I’m participating on Friday, April 17, 2009, 7pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
On the first floor is the University of Windsor MFA Graduate Exhibition, Without, featuring documentation from various Broken City Lab projects alongside work by Steven Leyden Cochrane, and Henrjeta Mece, and on the second floor is the 2009 Windsor Biennial, with a large-scale graph outlining ideas and activities for re-imagining cross-border relations alongside too many other great area artists to name. As part of the Biennial, Broken City Lab will be working in Windsor and Detroit towards the realization of some of these activities throughout May and June (more details to follow).
The shows run from April 10 – June 5 and April 17 – July 5 respectively.
We got up early and headed down to the EC Row pedestrian overpass between the Dominion and Huron Church exits to install YOU ARE AMAZING! It’s hard to describe what it felt like to do this—taking on this project gave us all a genuine excitement about participating in changing a part of Windsor and the way we interact with it, even if it’s just for a moment. Windsor needs a lot of things, but I think maybe most importantly, it needs a little encouragement.
There was a lot of great documentation, with many photos after the jump, and a video on the way.
