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The Best of Awards

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We know that a city is more than just buildings, roads, political decisions, pools, telephone poles, and parks. We know that it’s all of the little things that make this city great, or better yet, it’s all the little things that so many people we know do for us, knowingly or not, every day that make this city great. We think it’s long overdue that we help celebrate those people and we hope you’ll help us.

We want to have a big awards ceremony…really big actually. So, we’ll make the awards and host the party, all you have to do is find someone to nominate and show up to help us celebrate.

Here’s how it will work: You make a nomination below, we’ll mail you two invitations (one for you and one for the person you nominate), and then you both show up for our awards party on Thursday, May 8th, 2014 at 6:00PM.

**Don’t forget: The nominator is responsible for bringing the nominee to collect their award.

Submissions are now closed. Thank you to everyone who made a nomination for The Best of Awards! We’ll be in touch soon and see you on Thursday, May 8th at 6pm (CIVIC Space – 411 Pelissier Street, Windsor)

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Rodrigo Marti on his Artistic Practice and Working at CIVIC Space

Just last month our friend Rodrigo Marti put together a project here at CIVIC Space, the substantially titled, “THANKSGIVING * DIA DE ACCION DE GRACIA * FOR THE LOVE OF GOD * POR EL AMOR DE DIOS * CLOTHING SWAP * MERCADO TRUEQUE DE ROPA“. Near the end of Rodrigo’s stay in Windsor, he sat down with Dennis Hunkler of ArtWindsor, which is a fairly new web-only Windsor arts resource put together by Arturo Herrera. It features, among other things, interviews with Windsor artists, most of whom are just starting their careers in the arts and are speculating as to what will happen. It’s an interesting twist on conventional artist interviews and in the best cases, helps to capture a time of unlimited possibility.

After chatting with Dennis earlier in the setup of his show, Rodrigo sat down again and discussed the issues surrounding the kind of work he does, the misconceptions that often arise, and how he intended the work to function.

To learn more about Rodrigo’s work, please visit here.

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Opt0ut Man: A Department of Unusual Certainties Project

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Opt0ut Man: A Department of Unusual Certainties Project

November 8th to 30th – CIVIC Space (411 Pelissier Street, Windsor, Ontario)

Join us November 23rd, between noon to 5pm, to talk taxes!

We’re thrilled to announce that our good friends Chris & Simon of Department of Unusual Certainties (they have worked with us here and here and will be part of Neighbourhood Spaces 2014) are back in Windsor putting together Opt0ut Man, the first stage of a project exploring issues around taxation.

Opt0ut Man is everyone – the belief that we give, but do not receive. Our society has been built on the ideal that we are all in this together. Increasingly we stand witness to changing ideas of what building a society means – a strong individual, means a strong country. The old adage that there are only two certain things in life, taxes and death, begs the question of what life do we want?

Opt0ut Man is an exploration of thoughts, opinions, opportunities, facts and consequences responding to the premise “What would happen if an individual had the option of opting out of the tax system?” expressed as a story. Seen for the first time in CIVIC Space, it is the first stage of longer term project.

Department of Unusual Certainties // www.DoUC.ca

Founded in 2010, Department of Unusual Certainties integrates the partial perspectives gleaned from its members committed explorations of a range of disciplines towards the creation of a truly Public Art. Over the last 24 months, DoUC has published work in magazines in North American and European. They have also exhibited projects across Canada, as well as at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture and at the Prado Media Lab. They were strategic partner to Migrating Landscapes Organizers, curators of the Canadian Pavilion 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture; and were the 2011 Innovators in Residence at the Design Exchange, Canada’s design museum.

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Archival Tendencies (Lossy Practices) Opens October 19th at Modern Fuel

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Exhibition Runs from October 19th to November 30th at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston, Ontario

In case you were wondering what all the cement boxes, wooden flags, and the humidifier filing cabinet were for, we have an exhibition called Archival Tendencies (Lossy Practices) coming up at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston, Ontario. The exhibition opens October 19th, with an opening reception for Archival Tendencies and All You Ever Wanted by Christine Dewancker at 7pm. It features all new installation work based on concepts surrounding archival practices. If you’re nearby or are looking for something to do in the Kingston area, please come out and check out the exhibition.

Through a series of installations, sculptural works, and participatory projects, Archival Tendencies (Lossy Practices) will demonstrate the ways in which we might reconsider our approach to the spaces, infrastructures, and bureaucracies around us. The exhibition examines the ways in which we document, share, and collectively remember these spaces within the frame of the archival practices, and use of follies as creative intervention. The works aim to explore the expressions of power through official and unofficial archival practices, and play with a range of archival tendencies and lossy practices. The exhibition will argue for a renewed effort and set of tactics to both earnestly “keep track of” and intentionally “lose sight of” a range of artifacts and ideas that are normally discarded, pushed aside, or otherwise forgotten.

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Triage: A Propagation Project and Exhibition by Patricia Coates at CIVIC Space

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Triage: A Propagation Project by Patricia Coates

Exhibition Runs September 16th – 26th / Closing Reception Wednesday, September 25th at 7pm

CIVIC Space – 411 Pelissier Street, Windsor, Ontario

Triage: A Propagation Project by Patricia Coates is an ecological intervention and a commitment to acquiring a personal knowledge of the land where she lives. Essex County is a microcosm for global environmental and social concerns. A place of globally significant bio-diverse prairie and wetland, heavy industry, agriculture, and nuclear technology on the Detroit River, the area reveals a shaping of rural and urban landscapes where human disturbance is ongoing. The interface of natural and man-made environments further suggests a complex and conflicted human nature playing out in our relationship with the land: we want to save, own, and exploit it all at the same time. From this entangled, self-driven motive to protect and ‘save nature’ surfaces contradiction and, at times, a wilful, and absurd relationship with the ecology, revealing a significant human psychological dimension that defines us irreconcilably as both creative and destructive beings. During Triage, a search to acquire a personal knowledge of how the land, trees, soil, and the ecosystem as a whole function has revealed her own complicated relationship, in which good intentions and ‘saving nature’ are questioned.

The seedlings are grown from acorns gathered from Pin and Chinquapin Oaks, two Carolinian species indigenous to Essex County. The ‘pots’ were gleaned from city streets, rural roads, dumpsters and contributed to by family, friends and her own consumption. The trees will be planted on the restoration site and the Essex County landfill: enthalpy and entropy–growth and decay–playing out simultaneously.

Please join us on Wednesday, September 25th at 7pm for a closing reception at CIVIC Space. 

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Flint Public Art Project – Call for Proposals

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Flint Public Art Project – Flint, Michigan

Call for Proposals for Temporary Installations at Spring Grove Silos – Deadline: Wednesday, June 26th

Our friends over at Flint Public Art Project, an initiative which helps to organize engaging public events, workshops and temporary installations in the city of Flint, Michigan, are preparing to fund new site-based installations at the end of this summer. Flint Public Art Project aims to inspire Flint residents to reimagine their city, reclaim vacant and under-utilized areas, and use innovative methods to help influence Flint’s long-term city planning. It’s a very cool project and all the better that they’re continuing to open up opportunities to participate and collaborate. Here’s the latest:

Flint Public Art Project is currently seeking proposals for temporary installations incorporating two, 65-feet-tall concrete silos at Spring Grove, a restored wetlands and open space near downtown Flint. Two artists will receive up to $3,500 each for their projects, which will be installed August 1 and September 5. These installations will be part of Spring Grove Nights, a new summer program featuring music, dance, and theater performances as well the silo projects. These events will help residents and visitors re-imagine the site, establishing a public space unlike any other in the city and informing a long-range community plan to re-use the silos.
 
Submit a proposal by Wednesday, June 26. More information can be found here.
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Laser Cut Acrylic Extraction Process & Lunch Time French Lesson

Hiba started working with the laser cut acrylic, pulling apart the excess that we won’t need when we make the cast.

We’ll be creating a rubber mould from the positive of the acrylic.

The excess, the negative.

Hiba carefully placing some letters pulled off their base.

Careful work.

Then, Kiki came by to give us a French lesson, or maybe a lesson in Quebec politics.

This might be my most favourite way to learn French ever.

Kiki showed us some really interesting examples of the play on words that have shaped some of the discussions around the Red Square movement in Quebec.

Some of the vocabulary we learned today. We’re going to do this again later this week, and hopefully convince Kiki to offer a short course here at CIVIC SPACE by the end of it.

Currently, Josh and Hiba sit across from me, we’re going to go play now.

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Announcing CIVIC SPACE (Community Innovation through Vital Interactions & Collaborations)

For more information on CIVIC SPACE and its programming: please visit civicspace.info.

We’re incredibly excited to announce a new initiative that will become the centre of our focus for the next two years.

CIVIC SPACE (Community Innovation through Vital Interaction & Collaboration Space) will launch on Thursday, June 21st at 411 Pelissier Street in downtown Windsor. Supported by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, CIVIC SPACE will serve as a hub for our events, public activities, and research around locality, infrastructure, education, and creative practice as a driver for civic change.

This storefront space (once a textile store and before that a jeweller) will soon host new community projects, artist residencies, DIY workshops, public lectures and a range of other new initiatives for the next 24-months. CIVIC SPACE will aim to engage the public in addressing community challenges through new programming and activities that initiate collaborative creative problem solving.

On June 21st at 7pm, we’ll be kicking things off with the Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). This open community project invites anyone and everyone to come borrow from our letterset to caption the city around them. With Windsor at the edge of so many transitions, how might we collectively reclaim and create our own public narratives about the future of our city through this playful intervention? Anyone participating will be issued a Letter Library Card and will able to sign out 12″ 3D letters from our collection to create their own temporary installation, document it with one of our single-use cameras, and ultimately help to build an archive of new captions for the city’s build environment.

We’ll also be announcing the rest of our summer programming very soon … stay close.

CIVIC SPACE would not be possible without the incredibly generous support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

P.S. If you’re interested in applying for a residency, looking to connect for a new collaborative project, or just interested in (finally) making the trip to Windsor, be in touch.

Continue reading “Announcing CIVIC SPACE (Community Innovation through Vital Interactions & Collaborations)”

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Hamilton: Two Tales of a City Fill-in-the-blanks (English)

Two Tales of a City (March 9th – May 4th, 2012 at Hamilton Artists Inc.) aims to examine a range of social, economic, cultural, and political dualities tracked throughout Hamilton’s past, present, and future. Gathered from archival research, interviews, and pop-up surveys and timelines, Two Tales of a City will present competing, intertwining, and parallel narratives of Hamilton through a large-scale fabric banner, oversized bunting, a workshop, and forthcoming publication.

Please contribute to the exhibition by filling in the form below and telling us your story about Hamilton!

Or, do it in French!

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