Yesterday was the second day of our Making Things Happen (For a Week Straight) show—where we worked in the gallery and travelled to Vincent Massey secondary school to start working with some physics students on another large-scale project we’re planning. We also worked a bit more on the hanging baskets and planned for Thursday’s event.
I can’t remember where I stumbled across Eltono’s work, but this project in particular seemed worth noting. Using double-sided tape and confetti, the gallery space starts off with the walls looking essentially blank (except for the double-sided tape designs) and a big pile of confetti in the middle. Fun if nothing else, I guess, right? There are some more photos of this project executed on the street at Eltono’s website.
This Thursday, March 5th we’ll be in the basement of Lambton Tower: Studio A to remix / rewrite Windsor’s history. We’ll be remixing visuals and sounds from Windsor’s history, but also looking to collaboratively and collectively write a personal / fictional / “what you can remember” history of Windsor, which we’ll later publish as a book with everyone in attendance as a co-author.
The event is free and starts at 7:30pm sharp. Presented as part of NoiseBorder.
Today was a great start to the Making Things Happen (For a Week Straight) show. We got the gallery basically put together, showing some of our existing projects and making it into a big studio of sorts. The major projects of the day were painting the title wall, getting a new adapter for our LED sign, and starting on some wire + newspaper baskets for what’s casually been dubbed as hanging seed bombs.
Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, March 3rd, at 7pm, LeBel, in the gallery. We have a lot of projects underway, and since we’re in the gallery all week, we’re doing even more. If you haven’t come out for Office Hours yet, this could be a great first time.
This will be updated every few minutes automatically… might eventually move this to the sidebar… I’ll also put up the archives from the folder and the code to do this soon.
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This week’s Office Hours were busy, hectic, and (I think) productive. There we some new faces around the table, which is always great, and lots to do in terms of planning and organizing. Breaking into groups made sense and we pushed forward on a bunch of things in parallel, but I’m looking forward to the show next week when we can all be around one table working together collaboratively.
Though I’m not sure that “decorating” is the correct term (my vocabulary is failing me right now), I know that this idea has come up a number of times in various discussions on what to do with the houses on Indian Road, and other abandoned properties throughout the city. Doing something like painting the boards over the windows on abandoned buildings highlights them in a way that helps to keep them from fading into the periphery, while also arguably helping to raise the aesthetic of the surrounding area.
A similar project involving literally highlighting urban blight that’s probably more well-known was the Detroit Demolition Disneyland series of interventions where buildings marked for demolition by the city of Detroit were painted bright orange by an anonymous group. I think it worked for what is was, though the issue is entirely different than what’s going on here in Windsor.
So, do we need to consider tackling the vacant property throughout the city? I would be curious to figure out just how many vacancies we face, but beyond that, does a project like the one above, which is in Liverpool, do anything else other than decorate the neighbourhood, and is that enough?
[via Wooster Collective]
As if you needed another reason to switch over to Gmail … I present the BCL-v1 Gmail theme.
Danielle and I went over to Detroit yesterday to meet with Aaron Timlin (from the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit) at the LadyBug Gallery to discuss some potential collaborative projects over the summer. After getting a quick tour of the gallery and some of the other studios and workspaces in the building (which we unfortunately didn’t get any photos of, though next time), we headed out into the neighbourhood for a guided tour with Aaron to start brainstorming some future projects and project sites.