Posted on

Open Studio – Civic Boredom: Street Remedies

Mark your calendars for Friday, October 26th at 7pm for an open studio of our artist-in-residence, Sam Lefort. You’ll remember Sam from earlier in the summer when she hosted a rapid fire series of workshops on urban ecology at CIVIC SPACE. She’ll be presenting a new project realized over the course of her residency in collaboration with students from J.L. Forster Secondary School. You’ll have a chance to meet Sam and the students!

The project, CIVIC BOREDOM: STREET REMEDIES,  features a series of temporary street art stencils installed around the city. Working through a series of workshops with Sam, the students created powerful text-based visual statements that will get residents and visitors starting to think about issues impacting youth.

Using custom card stock stencils and environmentally friendly, hand-made chalk paint (corn starch and water), students made their marks (temporarily) around downtown Windsor to try to bring some attention to their hopes and concerns for their futures and the future of the city.

Here are just a few of the installations around the city. LESS TALKING MORE DOING.

I WISH YOU COULD SEE THE POTENTIAL.

OUR FUTURE.

THEY JUST KEEP FIGHTNIG (sic).

See you Friday!

Posted on

Exploring Urban Ecology with Sam Lefort (a look back at our week of workshops)

It was a quick week, but such an excellent start to our Artist-in-Residence program at CIVIC SPACE. Sam Lefort, bee lover, excellent designer, and most generous workshop host spent the week teaching members of the Windsor-Essex (and beyond) community about a range of sustainably minded practices and interventions, hopefully many of which will be carried on in numerous locations around the region.

We’re already looking forward to bringing Sam back, but in the meantime, here’s a look at the week (and possibly what you missed!)…

Continue reading “Exploring Urban Ecology with Sam Lefort (a look back at our week of workshops)”

Posted on

Evan Roth’s Art & Hacking Class

http://vimeo.com/37927700

Danielle, Michelle and I were over in Detroit at the recent INITIATE panel discussion and Evan Roth made a presentation on the early stages of some of this work. It’s awesome to see where it went — hopefully we’ll have a chance to head over and check out the show. Here’s the details from Roths’ site…

Welcome To Detroit
Works by Evan Roth
Curated by Gregory Tom

Eastern Michigan University’s University Gallery
900 Oakwood Street, 2nd Floor
Ypsilanti, MI 48197

Reception @ EMU’s University Gallery October 14, 4:30pm – 7:00pm

March 8, 2012: It is no secret that Detroit’s creative community has been attracting media attention of late. What started as photos of “Ruin Porn” and “$100 Dollar Houses” led to a flood of additional articles on creative activity in Detroit.

Evan Roth’s exhibition, Welcome to Detroit, will feature nearly all-new work, much of it made during his residency. The work follows his core conceptual framework of appropriating popular culture and combining it with a hacker’s philosophy to highlight how small shifts in visualization can allow us to see our environment with new eyes, whether online, at home, in the city or at the airport. His work acts as both a mirror and vault to contemporary society, creating work that reflects and withstands a world of rapid advancements in computing power, changing screen resolution and repainted city walls.

For Welcome to Detroit, Evan mines everything from the spray paint can, to hip-hop music, to airplane shopping magazines and flight safety cards, resulting in a show that moves freely across media, but always with a sense of pop cultural pranksterism. From individual art objects to video pieces to documentation, the work is designed to simultaneously serve as a record of activity and creative output, while also underscoring important issues concerning copyright, public space, and our offline and online identities.

Additional information on Evan Roth can be found at http://evan-roth.com/about/.

Posted on

Here Comes the Neighborhood

 

HCTN EPISODE 1 : INTRODUCING THE WALLS from Here Comes the Neighborhood on Vimeo.

I dream daily about a colourful, messy, city as this one.

For the amount of dead space that lies between places, there should be something to pull people in and make them walk by and engage in something, even if it’s only momentarily. It reminds me about something I had thought up a while ago in re-imagining Maiden Lane as a more interactive space…. (more on that at a later time.)

HERE COMES THE NEIGHBORHOOD explores a unique juncture in history as a new community emerges and evolves. A progressive urban revitalization campaign is examined in the first person, using this year’s new Artists and their commissions as a lens to explore a neighborhood in transition. The Series is framed by colorful overview and concluding episodes, providing the scope of past, present and future.

An outdoor museum. Why can’t some form of this project be done here?

Thanks Tom.

Posted on

Urban Camouflage And The Potentials of Commissioned ‘Street Art’

Ceyetano Ferrer, City of Chicago (Iowa #2), 2006

Street artist Ceyetano Ferrer specializes in blending urban objects into their environments by painting layers over them in a way that makes them seem transparent. Ferrer uses photo stickers on public objects like street signs, boxes and billboards and camouflages them to create an illusion of the objects fading into the landscape. -via PSFK.com

The public art works of Ceyetano Ferrer are quite stunning on first glance. The optical illusion he creates seems at first impossible and mysterious, though the process is as “simple” as placing a well-planned sticker on to a surface. As far as “street art” goes, this very much falls in line with the guerilla style shock and awe that makes the genre so exciting and valuable in a certain sense of subversiveness.

Continue reading “Urban Camouflage And The Potentials of Commissioned ‘Street Art’”

Posted on

Roadsworth: Painting the City

Life Support System by Roadsworth

Reading about a show up at Atelier Punkt, featuring work by Roadsworth, I was interested in the gestures that transform an infrastructure that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.

Working with road paint, the street artist, Roadsworth, plays with the existing roadway communication to transform straight lines into heartbeats, street crossings into candles and fire crackers, and pedestrian crosswalks into gifts.

Continue reading “Roadsworth: Painting the City”

Posted on

A Love Letter to Syracuse

COLAB and Syracuse University brought Steven Powers to Syracuse to work on a project similar to his efforts in Philadelphia, A Love Letter For You, aimed at transforming some railway overpasses that literally divide the community.

After having a number of discussions with the community, Powers selected from a series of things that residents loved and hated about their city to paint some phrases that span six lanes of traffic. The work was created on an overpass that doesn’t look all that different from overpasses that we have, particularly on Dougall, north of EC Row, and in Syrcause, which is a rustbelt city in its own right.

We’re written about Powers in the past, and his work continues to be a huge point of inspiration. Trained as a sign painter, I’m continually amazed at the ways in which Powers’ work can uplift an entire community and yet be such a personal message.

The video is directed by Samuel J Macon and Faythe Levine and was shot in collaboration with the University of Syracuse, Steven Powers and his crew. Parts of this short film will make its way to a larger documentary they’re working on called, “SIGN PAINTERS. STORIES FROM AN AMERICAN CRAFT.”

[via This Big City]

Posted on

Reverse Graffiti in South Africa

We’ve tossed around the idea of engaging in some form of reverse graffiti in Windsor for quite a while now. I assume there must be a few Windsor buildings dirty enough for a nice contrast-heavy design. Any suggestions? I think the Hiram Walker storage facilities near Russel Woods are covered with a black residue, but the premises are private and probably inaccessible. Apparently there are no laws prohibiting reverse graffiti in this part of South Africa. I wonder if we have any? I’d like to find out!

Via: The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts