FASA funding/VAV show (David Elliott, François Morelli, Adrian Norvid)/Moore on collaboration/Ed Janzen show/Juliana Keller in Sweden/Damien Hirst's Dead Shark
Drop by our meeting this week; make some fresh art while enjoying fresh bagels and grape juice. 10 to 130, VA 315 each Friday morning.
Damien Hirst: To read an excellent New York Times article about British artist Damien Hirst and the Dead Shark, his battle to restore his famous Dead Shark piece, check out excerpts on our website (under news) at: www.theartcollective.net
2) We received $522 in funding from Concordia’s Fine Arts Student Alliance to do interactive projects and you can be involved in co-ordinating one or more of these event. We have to figure out when they should take place, what themes we should have and what kind of special guests we might want to have. If these events are in the evening, this could allow several Collective participants to join us who can’t make daytime events. The money will cover a full roll of stonehenge paper and supplies for each event, so there are interesting possibilities to talk about.
3) Don’t miss the excellent Salon Rouge show at the VAV Gallery in downtown Montreal, which continues until Nov. 10, which includes work by three high-profile Montreal artists who have helped The Art Collective: David Elliott, François Morelli and Adrian Norvid.
David Elliott, chair of the Studio Arts department, presented a major show at Joyce Yahouda Gallery in the Belgo building in late 2004. You can read about the show here:
http://ctr.concordia.ca/2004-05/oct_21/16/
You can read about François Morelli’s recent shows at the Belgo building in this article in The Journal:
http://cjournal.concordia.ca/journalarchives/2006-07/oct_12/007793.shtml
Adrian Norvid, who is giving feedback on the Collective this year, has a show opening shortly at Joyce Yahouda Gallery.
In the VAV show there is also video work by Juliana Pivato, whose Fine Arts Reading Room project helped the Collective in its early development. You can read about a previous project she did at the VAV Gallery here:
http://ctr.concordia.ca/2003-04/april_22/14/
Another not-to-be missed show coming up at the VAV Gallery runs Nov. 27 to Dec. 8. It’s called Bulwark and it includes Collective members Sonomi Tanaka, Bea Parsons and Shawn Kuruneru.
For information about the VAV Gallery and its shows: http://www.vavgallery.com/
4) Collaboration: As part of our project’s reflection on collaboration, Montreal artist David Moore stopped by last week and passed on a note on the value of creative collaboration, a citation from Jorge-Luis Borges, a Nobel prize-winner, who wrote about collaboration in The Aleph and Other Stories. David, a Studio Arts professor, said he was impressed with Borges’s frankness in describing his collaboration as having led to work that was better than anything he had written himself.
Jorge-Luis Borges: “I have often been asked how collaboration is possible. I think it requires a joint abandoning of the ego, of vanity and maybe of common politeness. The collaborators should forget themselves and think only in terms of the work. In fact, when somebody wants to know whether such-and-such a joke or epithet came from my side of the table or Bioy’s, I honestly cannot tell him. I have tried to collaborate with other friends – some of them very close ones – but their inability to be blunt on the one hand or thick-skinned on the other has made the scheme impossible. As to the Chronicles of Bustas Domecq, I think they are better than anything I have published under my own name and nearly as good as anything Bioy has written on his own.”
If you have a reflection about collaboration, or want to pass on something you come across, that would be great; we are collecting this type of information for a journal which will be called Collaboration.
5) Two Montreal artists, Ed Janzen, president of Concordia’s Fine Arts Student Alliance, and Hélène Brousseau, FASA’s v.p. finance, are presenting work at the Espace Perspective gallery, at 19 Fairmount East. The show runs until Saturday, November 13.
6) Juliana Espana Keller, who curated The Art Collective’s one-week CDEx show in May, is in a show in Sweden that is worth checking out.
When you have a chance, take a look at images from our CDEx show in the Photos section. Collective members Judith Brisson, Angeliki Gketsou, Marisa Hoicka, David King, Celine Lapointe, Sylvain Vachon and Robert Winters spent a week turning the gallery into an installation, complete with murals and reborn found objects, with the participation of artists and other visitors who collaborated with our process.
Robert Winters
Co-ordinator of The Art Collective robertwinters@videotron.ca