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A Set of Informal Questions about London, Ontario

We want to know about London, Ontario.

We’re doing an exhibition at Forest City Gallery, opening in September, and we’re looking into the wide range of narratives that go into constructing a place — the architecture, the headlines, the people, the memories, the relationships, the rumours — and we’re hoping you can help us out.

Whether you’re a longtime resident,  someone who just moved in, or even if you’ve only ever visited London, Ontario, we want to hear about it all.

So, just fill out the form below, tell us some stories, and we’ll work with all of this for our exhibition.

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Make It Work: Exhibition & Panel Discussion

I’m excited to note that in addition to the current exhibition, Make It Work, on at SoVA Projects Gallery (nee LeBel Gallery) featuring work by Michelle, a new poster installation that I did, and a ton of other incredible local Windsor-Detroit artists, there’s a panel discussion featuring guests from across the country.

If you’re remotely interested in some of the things we talk about here on the blog, you should really make a point of attending the reception and panel discussion on Thursday, February 3rd, starting at 5:30pm.

From the description of the panel discussion:

While the idea of creative economies has become commonplace in large cultural centres, there has been less consideration of the possibilities and challenges of working in economically distressed cities that are at a distance from cultural capitals and the art market.

Research into the trend of shrinking cities in recent years has drawn attention to the question of how to consider cities that are losing population and basic infrastructure. Possible answers to the problems raised by shrinking cities have not been coming from economists or politicians, but from artists, designers and architects.

Discussions will arise around questions such as:

What might locality and local production mean when two cities are located on an international border? What role do artists and grassroots organizations have in redefining local realities? How do ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural realities play out in negotiations of place and identity, and how can these negotiations posit new sorts of regional or global identities? And what might local mean in the Detroit-Windsor region, for example, where some creative practices are focused on audiences at the scale of the neighbourhood or even the block, while others seek audiences far beyond?

The Panel Discussion runs 6:30-9 pm SoVA Projects Gallery University of Windsor Huron Church Road @ College Avenue and features Anthony Kiendl (Director, Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, MB) Shauna McCabe (Director, Canadian Textile Museum, Toronto ON; Canada Research Chair, Mt. Alison University, NB) Andrew Herscher (Assistant Professor, Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, and co-founder of The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency) J. Monte Martinez (Creative Director, 555 Arts, Detroit, MI) Justin Langlois (Lecturer, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Windsor; Director Broken City Lab, Windsor, ON)

Moderator: Lee Rodney (Associate Professor, Art History and Visual Culture, University of Windsor; Curator of the Border Bookmobile, Windsor, ON)
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Interview with the Artist: Stephen Surlin

Stephen Surlin, a Windsor-based artist and musician (also known as DJ Furs), recently took some time aside from his busy life as a University of Windsor Fine Arts student to discuss his current exhibition Artist as Activist and how the works within it came to be. Surlin has worked with Broken City Lab on various projects and his solo work can be seen at the SoVA Projects Gallery at the University of Windsor this week until January 28. His closing reception is at 7pm on Friday, January 28 at the SoVA Projects Gallery.

The interview can be read after the page break.

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The Lot in Detroit: A Traveling Public Art Exhibition & Model for Temporary Use Spaces

Back in 2009, Kathy Leisen, an artist living in Corktown, Detroit, started using a vacant lot next to her house as a public art venue. She called it The Lot. And there are big letters to demarcate the space. The Lot is now less a particular vacant lot than an idea for using many vacant lots. From The Lot‘s website:

The Lot is an open space. A venue for art, creative thinking and performance, the lot is a curatorial project […] the lot is a transient artspace partnering with friends, strangers, and organizations.

The lot uses empty city lots. Typically, this means hard clay earth, crab grass and other weeds, and unexpected debris. Manipulating the land is ok. Landscaping is ok. Bringing in outside materials is ok. For example, proposals so far have included: creating a cemetery, hut sounds (sounds emitted from a hut), arranging an archeological dig (ancient cheetos wrappers), making a gallery of inflatables, and holding african dance classes.

There’s a range of projects detailed on The Lot‘s website, but maybe the best part of it is just the idea of coming together in a new place and doing something. Local artists are paired with out of town artists for each exhibition. Leisen prepared the original lot by picking up chunks of concrete in her downtime. She got to know her neighbours, brings together friends and strangers, and she frames this activity around the following idea: “We live here for a reason.”

As of late, The Lot has become a traveling public art exhibition, a pop-up exhibition of sorts, taking on an increasingly helpful and critical approach to using space temporarily. Often this temporary use by artists allows for the venue to be left in better condition than when it was found. We know — after SRSI, those storefronts were in a lot better shape than when we first moved in.

And that seems like a pretty fair trade-off. Temporary use of space for free, as long as we somehow improve the space before we leave.

Maybe we should draft some sort of agreement to arm folks in this city with something formal looking so they can start approaching landlords. Free space for a limited time, we’ll repaint, clean, landscape, etc. And, I’ve suggested it before, but the lot next to the AGW would be an amazing community space, why don’t we activate it?

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Talking to Walls: A Conversation About the Public Realm

Thursday night Cristina and I were up in Toronto at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, participating in the Christopher Hume curated exhibition, Public Realm.

We did a series of projections with short texts / fill-in-the-blanks that dealt with issues of public and private space, which were generated from the answers to the questionnaires we created, responses on Twitter, and conversations amongst ourselves.

Public Realm is up until January 31st, and there’s documentation of the projections up in the gallery along with a growing collection of our questionnaires with a ton of great answers. If you’re in the neighbourhood, stop by, there’s a lot of great work in the show!!!

After the jump, there’s a photo from all 100 fill-in-the-blanks that we projected.

Continue reading “Talking to Walls: A Conversation About the Public Realm”

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Love in a Cemetery: Art as Examination

If you haven’t already signed up for the Art&Education email list, do it now. Also, make sure you tick off at least the E-Flux list too. It’s nearly always a joy to get these in my inbox, always making me wish I had more time to read, to apply, to attend these exhibitions and schools and conferences that I see advertised on these lists.

Love in a Cemetery is just the most recent interesting thing to come from these lists, with the title taken from a quote by Allan Kaprow that goes like this, “Life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery.” With L.A.-based visual artist Andrea Bowers and curator Robert Sain, students from the Otis College of Art and Design and community organizations from throughout L.A. are participating in this exploration of aesthetics, pedagogy, and cultural politics.

Ok, sounds pretty good, definitely something that we’d generally be interested in, but here’s the really good part…

The project features a unique take on art as examination, as investigation into the future of cultural organizations, including art schools and community-based activist groups in the same learning circle as the better known museums of L.A.

And…

Sain considers the opportunity and obligation for arts organizations to be socially responsible and responsive in an age of diminished resources and uncertainty.

By the way, this is all part of the new residency model that 18th Street is attempting to generate, with this year’s cycle called Status Report: The Creative Economy.

18th Street itself has recently shifted from running a standard gallery program to an entirely different model for using the space — making it active by curating artists involved in process-based work continually. It’s still art, it’s still curated art, but it’s committing to thinking about what art can do or what art can be today.

It’s exciting to read this stuff. You should be excited. It’s exciting because this is part of what we try to do and it’s nice to know that other people like doing this as well.

[via Art&Education]

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Extended Field Trip Day 4: Everything is OK

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After four days at our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at Artspace, we installed our work and presented our research findings  in the main space at the gallery. After nearly 96 hours in the city, we came to realize that everything is ok in Peterborough.

Undoubtedly, we realized this by comparing our experiences in Windsor. Small things such as the fact that the parking meters in Peterborough accept change all the way down to nickels, or larger things such as the incredible number of people who either plan to stay in Peterborough or at least plan to come back eventually, make the city of Peterborough ok.

Though these four days have been only the very first opportunity we’ve had to spend a concentrated amount of time in another city in order to try to engage in some level of research, we felt like we learned a lot. There’s something about the entrepreneurial spirit in Peterborough, at all levels, that has seemed to encourage the right people to stay in the city, and it’s this sense at the very base of everything that we experienced that we need to begin to translate back to Windsor.

This translation, at the very least, will turn into more dialogue with more people back in Windsor. There’s so much to be done here and yet it seems like if more people can be convinced to try to stick it out here, just a little bit longer, that maybe we will be ok too, eventually.

Continue reading “Extended Field Trip Day 4: Everything is OK”

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Extended Field Trip #001: Artspace in Peterborough

peterborough map

Broken City Lab is heading up to Peterborough, Ontario for all of next week (October 12 – 17, 2009) for an extended field trip to collaborate with Artspace for a series of community and inter-city research initiatives, workshops, and interventions to understand the city of Peterborough, its infrastructures, and its communities.

We’ll be blogging extensively on our activities and experiences, running our research hub / studio out of Artspace‘s main gallery. We’ll be following this nightly schedule, while also exploring, documenting, creating, and planning each day:

October 13, 14, 15, 16: “Open Office Hours” Ongoing Open Office Hours / Public Meetings / Workshops daily at 4-5:30pm

October 13: “Extended Field Trip: An Introduction to Our Social Practice” Opening Artist Talk / Overview of Research Plans for Peterborough at 7pm

October 14: “Get Lost: An Algorithmic Adventure with Strangers” Exploring the City and Getting to Know Neighbourhoods on Foot at 5pm

October 15: “Open Forum: On the City of Peterborough” Townhall Meeting / Community Discussion on the city of Peterborough at 7pm

October 16: “Home Work from an Extended Field Trip: Comparing notes on what to do with the city in 96 hours” Closing Performance / Activity at 7pm

If you’re in Peterborough or the area, here’s the address for Artspace: 3/378 Aylmer St. N. Peterborough, Ontario.

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Exhibition Opening at AGW

Broken City Lab at the Art Gallery of Windsor

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.

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Making Things Happen (For A Week Straight)

From March 2 – 6, 2009, BROKEN CITY LAB be taking over the Lebel Gallery as a project site. Though we’re using the gallery, this isn’t going to be a normal exhibition; the space is going to function as a big collective office / studio for everyone, so we can work on a number of ongoing projects simultaneously and in a sustained way. Consider it week-long office hours.

And instead of an opening, we’re going to work in the Noiseborder space in the basement of Lambton Tower on Thursday, March 5th at 7pm, in a yet-to-be-announced activity (stay tuned). 

Mark the dates and leave some time to come by and participate. We’ll be posting more details on everything happening that week soon.