The Art Collective

Art Collective newsletter for Feb. 2, 2006:

Next session: Friday Feb. 3, 10 to 130 in room 315 of Visual Arts Building. Fresh bagels, coffee and grape juice.

We’ve been doing some very strong work lately, some of our new pieces are posted on the website along with some photos from recent sessions and the Painting and Drawing Association show, where several of our members showed work.

I have posted some details of the Art Machines piece on the website as well, which we discussed as possible elements for the invitation for our next show.

Montreal artist Holly King has agreed to curate part of our next show, and is coming to our session on Feb. 10 after her class finishes around 1230 to do a selection and arrangement of work she likes. We can look at work that session 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, who has work in several museum collections and had a solo show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, visited a recent session and really likes how the Art Machines piece has developed. It looks like Jarmila will have time to put a few finishing touches on the piece before it is show, as she feels it still needs a bit of work, and we gave her responsibility for completing the piece, implementing advice on the finishing stage of large-scale pieces, given to us by David Moore, a Montreal artist and professor at Concordia University’s high-profile Studio Arts Department.

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

We have some strong high-profile events planned, including an 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.

Our show delayed: There was a scheduling conflict with this VAV show opening on Feb. 28 and our planned vernissage the same night as the lobby space is to be a performance space that night. Art Matters and everything around it makes the use of these spaces more complex, and so our show will be delayed, unfortunately. But it’s important to adapt to major projects going on at the same time, and our relationship with the VAV Gallery is an important one and we want to work with them to help them achieve their goals. We will figure out new dates shortly.
We need to talk about themes for this event and the others, whether we include collage etc.

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, noon to 5 on March 14. The gallery has said it is interested in being involved in this project.
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 at least some of these events, two of which are related to galleries.

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 Saturday Feb. 12, 2-5 p.m. Show continues until March 19. Tuesday to Friday:10 -12 and 13.30 -17
Saturday and Sunday: 13 -17.

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.

Robert Winters
co-ordinator of The Art Collective