Artist Bloc - Part 2

Body Cartography by Agi Gutkowska on February 26th, 2010

Cara Spooner and Alicia Grant are on the move again with a new piece and residency at the Harbourfront Centre as part of the HATCH emerging performance series.

Body Cartography

Created in collaboration with visual artist Simon Rabyniuk, as well as urban theorist Alex Marques, Body Cartography emphasizes and distorts the idea of a city within a city. A performance that mixes disparate details of balancing on rooftops, walking home alone at night, raiding secret swimming pools and feeling too close to strangers – employing installation, dance and question and answer periods.

“Cara Spooner and Alicia Grant make films, installations, curated events, subtle interventions and performances. They come from a contemporary dance lineage and integrate the physicality of their dance backgrounds into their practice and conceptual performances. They collaboratively create art that amplifies, distorts and/or frames everyday experience, drawing attention to disparate details like personal space, contemporary mythology, architecture of food courts and how fast cars can actually move with dances, installations and question and answer periods. They merge inner and outer stimuli to create live art events that are a convergence of their own bodies and the world around them. Their interdisciplinary collaborations unpack the notion of artist as social being into a relational art practice.” from Harbourfront site.

February 25 & 27, 8 p.m at Harbourfront Centre. Studio Theatre. York Quay Centre, 235 Queens Quay West (Map)

Regular: $12 Student/Senior or Arts Worker: $10

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A SHORT LOVE STORY by Agi Gutkowska on February 23rd, 2010

APRICOT, short film by Ben Briand (sponsored by his incredible actors and crew) from Moonwalk Films on Vimeo.

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E P I C T R U T H ! ! ! by Aaron Kopff on February 19th, 2010

N E W B R O K E N S O C I A L S C E N E R E C O R D ! ! !

here is a link to the pitchfork article and a free download.

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Doris Salcedo by Aaron Kopff on February 16th, 2010

Bogotá, Colombia’s , Doris Salcedo is a part of the Guggenheim’s current show, Contemplating the Void. For the exhibit, which marks the building’s 50th anniversary, nearly two hundred artists, architects, and designers were invited to imagine their dream interventions in the rotunda of the space. Her mash- up art piece combines a downward view of the rotunda with a photograph of a New York tenement by the German-born artist Hans Haacke. The tenement photograph, part of his series documenting the holdings of a local real-estate baron, was scheduled to be featured in the 1971 Haacke show at the Guggenheim that was canceled for what were widely believed at the time to be political concerns by the museum’s director.

“What Hans was doing was amazing, and it was censored,” said Ms. Salcedo, a sculptor who is also politically inclined. She wrote to Mr. Haacke to obtain his image and then worked with four architects over several months to create the perfect alignment with the other picture. “It was a nightmare in Photoshop,” she said.

Her point is not so much an institutional critique as a take on the power of design, good or bad. “Architecture has a real effect on us,” she said. “The lack of architecture in the ghetto has a real effect on the people who live there.”

In another of her works Shibboleth sets out to intervene directly with the fabric of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.

In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.

Here is another one of her magnificent works she did for the Istanbul Biennial in 2003.

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[You who never arrived] by Agi Gutkowska on February 14th, 2010



You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

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Easy Evolution by Agi Gutkowska on February 14th, 2010

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FOR FLORENCE by Agi Gutkowska on February 12th, 2010

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Marching through your head by Agi Gutkowska on February 12th, 2010

The Making of “Marching Through Your Head” from Alan Poon.

This is the behind scene look at our good friend Alan Poon’s music video he co-directed with Adam Makarenko for Arts and Craft’s Zeus from their debut full-length album Say Us.

Zeus “Marching Through Your Head” from Alan Poon.

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$plit $creen by Aaron Kopff on February 12th, 2010

It is everywhere!

The year was 1967 and the Universal exhibition in Montreal, commonly referred to as Expo 67, was where multi-screen highlights like In the Labyrinth premiered. It was hailed by Time magazine as a “stunning visual display,” their review concluding: “such visual delights as Labyrinth … suggest that cinema—the most typical of 20th century arts—has just begun to explore its boundaries and possibilities.” Directors Norman Jewison and Richard Fleischer conceived their ambitious split-screen films of 1968 after visiting Expo ‘67.

Just look at the possibilities. I wanna explore this way more! (for some reason I could only find a clip of Brain DePalma’s Sisters in french)

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сломанные крылья by Aaron Kopff on February 12th, 2010

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