The Art Collective

Last week’s session was a very strong one, with several excellent pieces in a variety of styles. I’ve posted about a dozen new images of our work and lots of new photos, including our homage to the Perm Show, an exhibition of work from the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. The show, which runs until March 26 at MOCCA in Toronto, includes work by Montreal artist Holly King. These images can be viewed in our gallery, under: Our Work and Photos.

Holly has agreed to curate part of our next show, and is coming to our session on Friday at about 1230 to do a selection and arrangement of work she likes. We can look at work before she arrives to see what is our strongest material, and see if any strong pieces need touching up, as we did before our November show in the VAV Gallery. Holly has work in several museum collections and had a solo show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Last week was the first time we’ve used a date stamp on a label on the back of each piece, and each piece is initialed by each artist after they’ve worked on it. It went very smoothly and now each piece is dated and we know who worked on it.

Final details are being tied up, but it looks like The Art Collective is going on a television show to do a collaborative piece on live tv to help kick off the Art Matters festival. It will be a morning show, probably on Friday March 3, and we will be joined by artists from the Art Matters executive in our work; they’ll be interviewed during the show about what’s happening in the festival. We’ll also show some of our collaborative work and talk about what we do. Theme of television seems natural as we’ll be in a tv studio, we can draw in the on air people etc. if it seems to work, they’ll be checking in on us as we work.

The Art Matters festival is planning to hold several special events involving collaborative art making that will be co-ordinated by The Art Collective.

Tuesday March 7, 6 to 11 p.m., VAV Gallery: interactive session we’ll be leading in the VAV Gallery the evening of March 7 as the interactive part of the French Kiss UQAM-Concordia show. This will be a large-scale collaborative event with artists from UQAM and Concordia and could turn out to be very significant. We need to talk about themes for this event and the others, whether we include collage.

Our preliminary conclusion is we should probably have a separate table for collage and mixed media and one for painting and drawing, if there is enough space.

Wednesday March 8, noon to 4 p.m., Reading Room: This one may be too much to handle with our other events. We have been offered a show here as well which could be an alternative. We apparently can draw and paint on the walls here if it comes off. If we go ahead with this one, I’m going to check whether we might be able to work directly on the walls, in a controlled, planned way, with materials that would stay on walls. This could make the event more interesting. Now that we have tv event looking like a go and three other major events, we should talk about whether we should drop this one.

Tuesday March 14, noon to 5 p.m. in new EV building, Halle des Vernissages: The other top event is an interactive session in the Halle des Vernissages, on the ground floor of the new EV building, at entrance to new Faculty of Fine Arts gallery. The gallery has said it is interested in being involved in this project. The Fine Arts alumni chapter might invite its members to join us.

Thursday March 16, 11 to 3, UQAM’s Café des Arts: Also we’re doing collaborative drawing at UQAM’s Café des Arts on March 16, 11 to 3, a repeat of last year’s successful event. Mathieu Lacroix, a UQAM student who participated in all of last year’s event, helped in setting up this year’s event which will have a lot more UQAM students than last year when the strike was going on.

Finally, we have been offered a show at the Reading Room, which could be an alternative. The plan now is to do an interactive session there on March 8, noon to 4, although we’ll have to figure out if this now is too much to handle.

We will be able to put up examples of our collaborative work, mini-shows, at least some of these events, two of which involve galleries.

With the busy early March period, and our giving up our slot before Art Matters, we’re now looking at the week of March 19 or 26 for our show, or else putting it to early. Let me know what you think at Friday’s session. I’m leaning to March 19 week over the 26th week but maybe April 2 or 9 week might be better to leave some breathing room after Art Matters.

Collective member Jarmila Kavena’s show is about to start at Galerie d’Art du Parc, in Trois Rivieres, 864 rue des Ursulines, tel 819 374 2355. Opening is on Sunday Feb. 12, 2 p.m. Show continues until March 26. Tuesday to Friday:10 -12 and 13.30 -17
Saturday and Sunday: 13 -17. See the show’s excellent card in our Photos section. Congratulations to Jarmila!

Also, collective member Kyla Chevrier is preparing for a show of her work at Bain Mathieu in downtown Montreal, as part of the Art Matters festival. Kyla, a third-year Studio Arts student, presents work in a show titled Own Yourself from March 3 to 9, 2006.

On our website, you’ll notice some history about the Trans-species Collective, the forerunner to The Art Collective. One of our pieces last week dealt with trans-species issues, making it relevant to fill out some of our roots in this show, which involved Rodrigo Marti, Simone Rochon, Emily Stoddart, curator Juliana Espana Keller, and myself. The show, at the Belgo Building in April 2003, was co-sponsored by the Montreal Gazette, which gave us $3,400 in advertising support, and the VAV Gallery, which co-sponsored the Interactive Day on the final day of the show. This is when the large-scale pieces were created that were exhibited in the lobby during our show at the VAV Gallery in November.

Robert Winters
co-ordinator of The Art Collective
robertwinters@videotron.ca