The Art Collective's new show opens Monday Nov. 7, 2005, at the VAV Gallery, at 1395 Rene-Levesque Blvd. in downtown Montreal. The show, which runs from Nov. 7 to 18, is part of the gallery's special Interactive show. The official opening party, not to be missed, is at 7 p.m. Tuesday Nov. 8. You are invited to come and see our exhibition and participate in two special interactive projects: our Interactive Wall No. 6, where you can put up your own work; and a special project on the theme of Taking Apart Pop Culture, involving collage, painting and drawing. The Pop Culture pieces produced Tuesday evening will be shown in the VA building lobby for the two weeks the Interactive show is on.
Finally, the Interactive Wall will be operating on week days from noon until 230. And for a special treat, come on Friday Nov. 11 and Friday Nov. 18 to see members of the collective doing collaborative drawing in the gallery. You can even join in.
You can see the best examples of the collective's collaborative art making in this special exhibition which presents many exciting pieces of recent work combined with several of the top pieces created by the collective since it began in September 2004. Several pieces were selected by Montreal artists Francois Morelli and Holly King in a special curatorial session. The final curatorial selection was made by VAV Gallery co-directors Michelle Lacombe and Evita Karasek. Check out our Photos section to see Michelle and Evita with a dog image that was featured in a recent show.
Here is the newsletter sent to Collective members and friends this week:
Our show is up in the VAV Gallery and it looks great! We have one wall for the Interactive Wall and one wall for our work. We also have a window for putting up acetates, like last year in the Greater than One show. Interactive pieces from the UQAM and mezzanine show/events have been placed on this wall to start Interactive Wall No. 6.
At last Friday’s session, we went through our work this fall and picked out a selection of the best pieces. This material was brought to the gallery along with work done last year that went through a curatorial process, either with artists Holly King and Françoir Morelli or in our own curating sessions. The final curatorial selection of pieces for this show was made by Michelle Lacombe and Evita Kurasek, the VAV’s co-directors. Collective members Shawn Kuruneru and Robert Winters added a couple of pieces as well that scored strongly at the group’s curating session last Friday and represented key elements of our current work.
All members and friends of the collective are invited to come Tuesday night at 7 p.m. for the opening at the VAV Gallery to help out with the interactive wall and the interactive pop culture project, which is co-sponsored by the Painting and Drawing Association. If you have any pop culture images you can bring in, that would be great, or some materials, maybe some leftover paint or a brush (which would be returned).
The show lasts two weeks and we will try to operate the interactive wall as many days as we can, between noon and 230. If you can stop by in this period to help out, that would be great; please let me know if you can take care of the wall for one of these days. Nov. 16 is a day I won’t be able to be there, if somebody is free that day, that would help.
For Nov. 11 and Nov. 18, during the two week show, we’ll have our regular Friday sessions in the gallery, 10 to 130. These are “performances” in which visitors can become involved, as with the interactive wall, which visitors can curate or work on, thus becoming part of the performance/process themselves.
Also of note: The Art Collective has been notified that it has received $500 in funding from the Fine Arts Student Alliance for materials. We thank FASA for all its help. The project also received $500 for materials last year, which helped us enormously in our start-up phase.
2) The three large pieces done during the Interactive Day on March 27, 2003, the last day of the Trans-species Collective show at the Belgo building, are being shown for the first time in the VA lobby starting Monday. These remarkable pieces were done by about 20 artists working for a full day in the gallery to mark the close of the show, which presented work by Rodrigo Marti, Simone Rochon, Emily Stoddart and Robert Winters. It was curated by Juliana Espana Keller. These pieces are being show to inspire work on large pieces related to the theme of Taking Apart Pop Culture being done Tuesday evening. We are co-ordinating this project, which is co-sponsored by the Painting and Drawing Association.
In the wider art world:
3) Visiting professor Eric Simon has provided excellent information about a new show coming to the Drawing Centre in New York involving collaboration. It’s worth looking at to see whether we might be able to propose something similar to the Drawing Centre or a museum/gallery a bit closer to us.
http://www.drawingcenter.org/upcoming.htm
In the Drawing Room
Acute Zonal Occult Outer: Selections Winter 2006 January 7 – February 11, 2006 Opening Reception: Friday, January 6, 6–8 pm
Fritz Welch with Elena Beelaerts and Jovi Schnell will invite Rudolf Eb.Er, Kim Jones, Alastair MacLennan, Ryoga Katsuma, Andre Stitt and Crank Sturgeon to create the installation Acute Zonal Occult Outer. This collaborative of emerging artists will take over the Drawing Room with large-scale drawings that will grow and creep throughout the space, changing with performance and natural decay as the artists playfully explore the process of structures that become established and then deteriorate over time. Acute Zonal Occult Outer was selected through the Viewing Program.
4) Juliana Espana Keller, an affiliated artist with the collective, urges members to please click on the websites below:
(Juliana has been involved in a Toronto trip to the Art Fair with Art Mur.)
http.//www.kyledraws.com
http://www.ashleymacomber.com
http.//www.welikehim.com
5) Also of interest is a coming General Idea show at the Andy Warhol museum.
http://www.warhol.org/calendar/index.html
General Idea Editions: 1967-1995
Expanded, exclusively at The Warhol, with a selection of the group’s major installations and unique works
Through December 31, 2005
Organized and circulated by the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga and curated by Barbara Fischer.
Additional works curated by The Warhol’s John Smith.
The Andy Warhol Museum
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
http://www.warhol.org
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Below is a summary of the General Idea show.
Robert Winters
co-ordinator of the collective
The Warhol presents the retrospective exhibition, General Idea Editions: 1967-1995 now through December 31, 2005. The internationally-touring exhibition features more than 200 mass produced objects — including prints, postcards, posters, photo-based projects, multiples, serial publications, flags, and crests — produced from 1967 to 1995 by Canadian-based art collective General Idea.
Exclusively at The Warhol, the exhibition has been doubled in size to include several of the group’s major installations and many unique works, in order to illuminate the group's use of mass-produced and multiple elements.
General Idea was formed by Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson in 1969 in Toronto and came to international attention for their incisive interventions into the media environment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Says Bronson in the exhibition catalogue, the collective “emerged in the aftermath of the Paris riots, from the detritus of hippie communes, underground newspapers, radical education, Happenings, love-ins, Marshall McLuhan, and the International Situationists. We believed in free economy, in the abolition of copyright, and in a grassroots horizontal structure that prefigured the Internet.”
Pioneers of media-based practices, General Idea’s work involved everyday promotional culture and evolved into high gloss advertising. General Idea editions form a discourse that established the group’s broader themes: the role of the media, the dissemination of marginalized identities, and the devaluation of originality and artistic genius. Masters of appropriation, General Idea bent popular icons to their own needs, transforming bastions of Americana such as LIFE Magazine and beauty pageants into vehicles for subverting the culture’s reigning values.
In addition to the works in General Idea Edition: 1967-1995, The Warhol is presenting three major installation works by General Idea. One Day of AZT (1991) and One Year of AZT (1991.) were based on the daily dose of AZT taken by people living with AIDS at the time. Five gigantic pills, each large enough to hold a body, and 1,825 oversized pills, assembled like a calendar, describe life in an era of pharmaceuticals, not only for those suffering from AIDS, but for the elderly and the chronically ill in this consumer culture.
Pla©ebo (Helium) was first exhibited in Vienna in 1992. Over 5000 red/green/blue pill-shaped mylar balloons were exhibited in a public atrium in the city center. As the balloons lost their helium and descended, the public took them home and the piece was thus dismantled and spread into the city. Similarly at the Warhol, as the balloons descend they are available to be taken by visitors.
Mondo Cane Kama Sutra is a series of 10 oversized canvases, day-glo geometric self-portraits that describe the life of the artists as a metaphorical coupling of poodle triplets. This major installation has not been exhibited since 1985, when it was featured at the Kunsthalle Basel, the van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
In connection with the exhibition, The Warhol is presenting a series of education programs and workshops that focus on collaborations with local artists and organizations and explore contemporary notions of social activism. On November 30, The Warhol will present SILENT|LISTEN, a special World AIDS Day performance/dialogue with Los Angeles-based art/activist group Ultra-red.
General Idea Editions: 1967-1995 has received generous financial assistance from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the support of Foreign Affairs Canada. Additional support was provided by the Canadian Consulate General. This exhibition and related programs at The Warhol are presented in remembrance of the late Dr. Samuel W. Golden.
