The Art Collective

You are invited to come and draw and paint with us at one of our regular Friday morning sessions. We meet from 10 to 1:30 in room 315 of Concordia University's Visual Arts building, at the corner of Crescent St. and René-Lévesque Blvd. in downtown Montreal. We do collaborative art making, meaning participants work on each other's work, blending creativity and conceptual frameworks to come up with a unique type of art. Fine Arts students, graduates, instructors and professional artists are welcome.

For more information, please contact The Art Collective's co-ordinator, Robert Winters, at robertwinters@videotron.ca

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Welcome to the website of The Art Collective, a group of artists based in Montreal who are experimenting with collaborative art-making, with sometimes surprising results. The Art Collective works in collaboration with the Studio Arts department of Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts. The group also is co-sponsored by the university's Fine Arts Student Alliance.

What we do: Each piece of artwork we produce involves the work of several artists working in turn, adding layers of meaning and expression.

Collaboration, risk and reward: It can take a substantial amount of trust to turn over artwork you've just completed to somebody else who can, for example, take the piece in a completely different direction, if that seems warranted. But that's just part of the collaboration process, which involves setting aside some of the traditional ideas surrounding art and artists. One of these involves the idea of the individual artist as genius, an idea that was popular in some circles during the Renaissance. In collaborative art-making, each artist tries to build on what is already on the page, amplifying or clarifying what is there.

Who we are: The Art Collective operates in collaboration with the Studio Arts Department of Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts, which is known as one of the leading art schools in Canada. We do much of our work in one of Studio Arts' drawing studios and receive advice from faculty members who are professional artists with strong careers in the art world. Student members of the group bring their own artistic preoccupations and the latest techniques and thinking coming from their classroom experiences. Other members of the group are professional artists who wish to remain in contact with the art-school milieu.

Links with other collectives: We are interested in exchanging ideas with other art collectives in Canada and elsewhere, with the goal of exploring the potential for collaborative art-making, both within our group and with other collectives.

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The Trans-species Collective is the forerunner of the current project, The Art Collective. One of the pieces done at the Feb. 3, 2006, session of The Art Collective refers to trans-species relationships; it can be viewed in Our Work.

In April 2003, Simone Rochon, Rodrigo Marti, Robert Winters and Emily Stoddart presened their show: trans-species collective* - Why are we so species-centric? The show was at the Belgo Building in downtown Montreal, the city's leading fine arts centre, with top galleries such as Galerie René Blouin, which represents such top Canadian artists as Nicolas Baier and Geneviève Cadieux. The Trans-species Collective show was co-sponsored by the Montreal Gazette, which provided $3,400 in advertising support, and the VAV Gallery, which supported an interactive collaborative art making event on the last day of the show. Work done that day was exhibited in November 2005 as part of the VAV Gallery's Inter/Activity show where The Art Collective led an interactive art making event.

Several Concordia Fine Arts alumni and students, undergraduate and graduate level, participated in the interactive event, including painter Kylie Sandford. Concordia Magazine published a photo and item about the interactive event. To read this item, click here:
interactive event story

Rodrigo went on to help co-found the current art collective and has provided advice on a continuing basis. Emily attended several of the first sessions of the current collective and helped develop the conceptual framework for the group's first show in November 2004 at the VAV Gallery. Simone, an affiliated artist with the collective participated in the interactive event at The Art Collective's VAV Gallery show. To read about an art project Simone worked on with Montreal artist Ulgen Semerci, click here:
Story about Simone

Montreal artist Juliana España Keller, who curated the Trans-species Collective show, is an affiliated artist with The Art Collective. Juliana attended the founding meeting of the current project and made the official First Mark that was placed on Interactive Wall No. 1 at the November 2004 show by The Art Collective at the VAV Gallery. To visit Juliana's website, click here:

Juliana's site

To visit Galerie René Blouin's website, click here:
René Blouin's site

Posted by Robert W at 04:16 PM | Permalink

How The Collective creates its art pieces owes a great deal to the processes of the Royal Art Lodge, a Winnipeg-based art collective whose world-class work is worth checking out.

Art Lodge

Adrian Williams, a founding member of the Lodge, gave a detailed account of the group's processes and thinking during a presentation in January 2004 in VA-317, a painting and drawing studio in Concordia University's Visual Arts Building in downtown Montreal.

Williams's visit, which was attended by about 60 art students and faculty was arranged by painter Eleanor Bond, a Studio Arts professor at Concordia. An account of the event was prepared by Collective member Robert Winters for the university's Thursday Report publication. You can read Robert's story and see a photo taken at the event at:

Link to news item

Information about Adrian Williams and his work can be found on the Other Gallery's website, at:

Adrian Williams

The Royal Art Lodge's work is featured in the touring Ask the Dust show, whose last stop, unforunately, is at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it runs until Feb. 14, 2005. Here is the page on MOCA's website that describes the show and the Royal Art Lodge:

MOCA's site

MOCA's site describes the Royal Art Lodge's process in this way:

"Since 1996, The Royal Art Lodge has met every Wednesday evening in their studio at a nondescript Winnipeg warehouse. The collaborative process of drawing is unique: One member starts a drawing and then passes it along, giving each member an opportunity to alter, augment, and finally deem the drawing complete."

Ask the Dust, whose show catalogue is a must for anybody who enjoys contemporary art, was previously presented at such high-profile venues as The Power Plant in Toronto and The Drawing Center in New York.

Power Plant

Drawing Center

Excerpts from the Museum of Contemporary Art's description of the show and the Royal Art Lodge include the following:

Continue reading "Inspired by Royal Art Lodge" »

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