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Posts Tagged ‘art’

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Queen St. West history

In Uncategorized on January 26, 2011 at 8:40 pm

I have decided to provide my input to all the Queen St. West history (some of which has felt like revisionism to me). Below is a letter to The Globe and Mail.

Peter Pan wait staff Hilary & I circa 1978

Dear Editor,
It takes nothing away from the magnificence of The Cameron to remember what everyone seems to forget when writing about the history of Queen  St. West – both The Cameron and the music scene built on what was  already established by other artists in the 70s. I lived over Jacob’s Hardware (beside The Cameron) from 1975-1988 and most of the “new  dance” community as well as the infant modern dance Dancemakers  rehearsed there in the mid-70s. General Idea’s Art  Metropole moved from Yonge St. to Richmond and Duncan in the mid-70s  and CCMC opened The Music Gallery on St. Patrick St. just north of  Queen. The Centre for Experimental Art and Communications (CEAC) was on Duncan and the independent film organization, The Funnel, was in  its basement. Lots of artists lived in the lofts along Queen St. W. around Spadina (protected by provincial rent control) including John Scott, Peter McCallum,  Randy & Bernicci and many others. Before The Cameron we drank at The Beverley and occasionally The Rex Hotel or Horseshoe (speaking personally of course).  The Cabana Room of The Spadina Hotel was the original artists’ bar of area.

The restaurants were key to the scene and provided employment for visual artists, dancers and musicians. Peter Pan opened in the fall of 1976 and was the game-changer to hipsterism. General Idea’s Jorge  Zontal and myself were amongst the first wait staff. Le Select opened  up before The Peter Pan and was a hangout for theatre people including  Montreal emigrés from Bill 101 who opened the Soho Theatre on  the second floor in the building that later became The Rivoli. Around this time, the hippie Beggar’s Banquet changed to The Parrot and its  owners and chefs were the soon-to-be-superchefs Greg Couilliard and  Andrew Milne-Allen. The Clichettes are other dancers formed most of the wait staff.

But don’t take my word for it - see The Toronto Star article, “A new village lures the creative crowd”, Saturday, June 125, 1977 by Bruce Kirkland.

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Artists' Survey: The Greenbelt

In Uncategorized on March 10, 2010 at 8:52 pm

I am very pleased to have The Guardian of Niagara: The Great Lakes and The Guardian of Niagara: The Soft Fruit Industry included in the exhibition, Artist  Survey: The Greenbelt.  The exhibition is part of the Greenbelt Foundation’s 5th anniversary celebrations. I responded to the Call to Artists by Gallery 1313 in Parkdale (Toronto) in January, completely thrilled there was a suitable opportunity for the Guardian to appear in public and even more thrilled when she was accepted. The exhibition was curated by Gallery 1313 Director Phil Anderson and Harbourfront visual art curator Patrick Macauley and the other artists are Brad Emsley, Daniel Durocher, Irene Cymbal, Jeremy Drummond, Martha Eleen, Michael Davey and Delwyn Higgens, Steve White, Vid Inglevics and Warren Quigley. It showed at Gallery 1313 from February 17 – 28. There was a panel discussion with Christopher Hume, Diane White and Maralynn Cherry moderated by Russell Smith. I was not in town that day and not about to make an extra trip to Toronto so I missed it. I would have been curious to see Russell Smith, whose men’s fashion column in The Globe and Mail has given me many smiles.

 The exhibition was at the Royal Ontario Museum for one day, for the Greenbelt Foundation’s Friends of the Greenbelt  awards celebration, given to farmers including St. Catharines’ Whitty Farms. Presenters included  two ex-premiers and Sarah Harmer.  The sour note was that the ROM refused entry to Warren Quigley’s sculpture of wooden spheres (potential biological threat!) and Steve White’s metal sculpture was reported to not fit into the elevator (very hard to believe actually). The artist drove 5 hours to the opening and was understandably upset. Lunch was amazing deluxe locavore food and excellent Cave Springs and Henry of Pelham wine at the free bar. I do not know the names of the chefs. Drinking at lunch is not usually a good idea for me but I indulged nonetheless and survived to tell the tale. I enjoyed so much the experience of seeing a lot of people looking at my work.

At the Gallery 1313 opening. Photo courtesy Greenbelt Foundation.

I was delighted with the whole affair as I am increasingly leaning towards wanting to work with food security issues and the exhibition was a perfect combination of interests. I would love to leave arts management and be part of a team in Niagara in some kind of organization working with food and anti-poverty issues, a Foodshare Niagara type thing.

 On my way out and back to the office, I realized I could take a quick nip around the ROM for free. I was so happy to see the hundreds of children there on school trips. By coincidence the reception was on the same floor as the bird exhibit. I spent time there while researching for Part 4 of Song For A Blue Moon, probably in 2004. The ROM is a great place and I was happy to see my work there if only for one day.

 The exhibition has since travelled to Ajax and at the time of writing is in Hamilton. No Niagara venue could be found – the show was a pretty last minute affair for the Foundation. The Guardian had another outing in February as Soft Fruit Industry hung in the clients’ show at Toronto Image Works. Nice, but of course it means more when it’s in a curated show. Now, if only I could sell her! How to sell work without a dealer? The Guardian was always intended to hang in a public place like the Region of Niagara headquarters, for example.

P.S. – Stop the presses – the show is coming to St. Catharines after all.


Want and Value

In Uncategorized on November 10, 2009 at 11:44 am

Poster5Artists often have experiences of diminishment in a society that does not value what we do.  I take it as a given that many people in the arts do not buy into the dominant culture’s reductivist view that value is based on money, however, it is next to impossible to live in this culture and not be affected by that worldview. That worldview makes money the organizing factor of our thoughts and interactions with the world. It can make money the only way to understand the world. And it doesn’t matter if you are materialistic or have taken a vow of poverty – they are ends of the same spectrum. As my teacher Ken McLeod says, if you take a train and turn it around in the opposite direction, it is still running on the same track.

I was a nascent artist in the time of conceptual art when the rage was to not make objects that could be sold. At one time in my early career, I was “hot”, and I experienced that my work had value because I received lots of invitations to show my work (for which I would receive payment) and my work was written about. My video work was represented by Art Metrople (back in the mists of time) and was sold to institutions including The National Gallery of Canada. But since then, my work has had no monetary value.

In the past couple of years, I have made two large photographs, valued at $1,000, which I have been unable to sell*. I of course have made all kinds of installations in my life, none of which have sold or are in collections. I do not have a dealer and am therefore an artist without value in the art world/art market. Intermediaries between artists and the public – dealers, curators, critics and other power brokers – determine what – wait, let’s call a spade a spade – who, has value. Value is created by the 3 Cs; curators, collectors and critics.Poster1

In keeping with my identity as an artist of no value, I have posted flyers bearing the transcriptions of the audio files from the summer’s three Wants. (My logic being that posters, like my work, have no value - as opposed to fine art prints, for example.) Postering is illegal in this nice, clean city and I have posted neatly on the designated kiosks. Each flyer is titled “WHAT THE PEOPLE OF ST. CATHARINES WANT” followed by a numeral in the series (there are six). They are printed on vellum which I chose both because I expect it to bear up to weather better than plain bond paper and as a marker of the notion of value, being different and more expensive than plain bond.  They bear no identifying mark, in keeping with my value-less identity (since artist signatures are part of the notion of market and value).

 * Recently, I experienced the shock of these photographs being rejected for exhibition in my workplace. My workplace isGrLakesjpeg the fantastic Centre for Social Innovation and its programs and tenants are all about social action. Imagine my surprise when the Guardian photographs, about Great Lakes pollution and land use, were unconsidered inappropriate.  The most literal art I think I’ve ever made, complete with word balloons, was somehow still unread in terms of its content to the selection committee of laypeople. Disappointments of this sort are what feed feelings of worthlessness and the personal work of not attaching to them.

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Want – 2

In Uncategorized on August 9, 2009 at 9:35 pm

The second instalment of Want, a community-based interactive installation/performance took place on St. Paul St. in St. Catharines as part of Art City on August 7 from 6:00 – 9:00. I will post text later and here are some photos. For more information, see Want – 1.DSC00293DSC00297DSC00306

SCAAC intern Alana Leprich exits from recording her want.

SCAAC intern Alana Leprich exits from recording her want.

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The Wheels on the Bus – Mila

In Uncategorized on August 5, 2009 at 9:26 pm

I was planting feverishly in a mild panic that the garden was underplanted and not good enough when she came upon me and dropped down on her knees. She liked it very much. Her name is Mila and she came to Canada from Russia fourteen years ago. She talked of how she is between the two places. She asked me why some seeds and plants don’t grow and when I said that it is often from not watering enough, she corrected me that, no, the reason was not enough love. She talked about having roots damaged and her words swerved between speaking of plants and herself. She kissed my hand which was caked was soil and asked me if she could embrace me, “human to human”, which she did twice. Although she reached her arms passionately towards me, she never stepped over the boundary of the garden’s curb, staying on the sidewalk, recognizing the garden as sacred space or the curb as the divide between stage and audience. Of course she was very drunk. She was beautiful. When she left I wept as I dug in the last morning glory. Is this not the only reason there is to make art – to move someone? to make the experience of walking down the street vivid?

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Feelings are Facts – 1

In Uncategorized on August 2, 2009 at 12:43 pm

Last month I finally purchased Yvonne Rainer’s auto-biography, Feelings Are Facts: a life, part of the MIT Writing Art Press series and published in 2006, having been reminded to do so by its reference in the essay Irene Loughlin wrote about my work for the exhibition I had in March at Hamilton Artists’ Inc.  (if you open the link, scroll down).

Studies of Yvonne Rainer and the Judson Dance Theatre of New York were the single most influential part of my university education, which took place at York University in the very early days of the Dance Major program there, which was the first in Canada. (The fact that it was the last art form to be embraced by academia reflects the status of the art form; while my relationship with it has waxed and waned over the years, its underdog status has always been a selling point for me, which I understand as our culture’s fear of our bodies within the context of the Cartesian mind/body split.) A young Selma Odom was my prof – she very recently retired and I regretted not getting to her farewell dinner.

I have read precious little for many years with the exception of Buddhist books. It is an activity that I have allowed to fall away in the choices one makes while cramming as much as possible into too little time. I have always been cranky about the degree to which critical theory overtook the practice of art, however, I read theory during the three years it took to write the essay, Asserting Our Bodies, for Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women, published in 2004.

 I read a little of the Yvonne Rainer book while visiting my Sis, Margaret, in Finn Slough  after performing in the 30th anniversary of Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre August 2008.  I am only in Chapter 5 at the moment, still in her adolescence. So far, I feel vaguely depressed each time I read, as it reminds me of my own adolescence. Not that the details match by any means, but the general sense of not belonging, that is the experience of many artists. I remember Margaret talking about it when we were young as “being from Mars”.

Yvonne Rainer suffered greatly as a child but came from a family that might appear “interesting” inasmuch as its Italian anarchist politics were not mainstream. I just read with enjoyment her description of the movie theatre her father took her to as a child in the basement of San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, where she saw Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc at the age of nine. I enjoyed, and benefited greatly, from my own parents’ love of the arts and I have learned to understand that it is not necessarily usual that a working class family made the arts so much a part of life.

Here are some of my own childhood and adolescent memories: a nascent National Ballet of Canada at The Palace Theatre on St. Paul St. in St. Catharines. We regularly went to The O’Keefe Centre in Toronto and back then you could whip up in an hour and ten minutes on a barely-travelled QEW. Highlights there at the time were Béjart’s Sacre du Printemps and Peter Brooks Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here in St. Catharines, in the early days of the Brock theatre program, I was transfixed by Anouilh’s Antigone and I still have my hand-written copy of her monologue, “I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life – that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness – provided a person doesn’t ask too much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now!”. Ah, yes, youth. At Brock I remember also Toronto Dance Theatre’s performance of David Earle’s Atlantis (and Susan Macpherson’s naked breasts if I remember rightly.) We went to Stratford every summer but nothing stands out in my mind. Another O’Keefe memory is of my father wangling us into a reception honouring Margot Fonteyn and being introduced to her along with my best friend at the time, Janice Alton (Kate Alton’s mother). It was not my father’s habit to crash receptions and it was a very loving act. Janice was beside herself with joy and I wasn’t far behind.

Regardless of having regaled the reader with memories, I cannot imagine going through the work that Yvonne Rainer did to write her autobiography.

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The Wheels on the Bus – 2

In Uncategorized on July 26, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Photo: Alison Chitty

Photo: Alison Chitty

July 26, 2009
I planted today. The soil needed a couple of days to settle and there has been tons of rain, but the main reason I wanted to plant today is because I like to plant by the moon whenever possible and today and tomorrow are “best days” for annuals. I planted the perennials too though as there are no more “best days” for them for a while. I had to insert small, black nails into the tires, particularly for the Black-Eyed Susan vine. I planted from 8:00 – 11:00 a.m. and will return later. I have to park illegally while I am on site and in any case, I prefer being there early in the day. It’s always interesting to be in a city early before “normal” life kicks in. I did the previous planting at 6:00 a.m. I made 5 trips this morning, mostly because I am using only one (although large) watering can to water the plants in.

Here, by the way, is copy from the artist’s garden sign. When it is in, I will post a photo. The sign has all the logos of the partners and funders. The garden is a project of St. Catharines and Area Arts Council and City of St. Catharines with support from St. Catharines Transit.

Old tires are usually associated with dumping grounds – this garden recycles bus tires as plant trellises. Situated by the bus terminal, the garden celebrates public transit as a key strategy of “green” and sustainable communities. To further “green” downtown, the garden is planted with plants that are attractive to birds and butterflies. The title of course references the song familiar to toddlers everywhere! I hope that those driving by on a local or inter-city bus pulling out of the nearby terminal may notice this garden hiccup in the urban landscape and smile.
-  Elizabeth Chitty

July 26 AGPlant Material
Alyssum; Asclepias incarnate ‘Ice Ballet’; A. tuberosa – Butterfly Weed; Buddleia davidii ‘Pink Delight’ – Butterfly Bush; Coreopsis verticillata ‘Moonbeam’ & ‘Zagreb’ – Threadleaf Tickseed; Echinacea purpurea ‘Primadonna White’ & ‘Prairie Splendour’; Heliopsis helianthoides ‘Summer Sun’ – Orange Sunflower; Hibiscus moscheutos ‘Southern Belle Mix’- Rose Mallow; Ipomoea  tricolour “Heavenly Blue” & “Split Personality” -Morning Glory; I. coccinea – Cardinalis Morning Glory; Monarda didyma ‘Raspberry Wine’ – Bee Balm; Rudbeckia fulgida  ‘Goldsturm’- Black-Eyed Susan; Thunbergia alata ‘African Sunset’- Black-Eyed Susan Vine and Trapaelum majus - ‘Empress of India’ & Tall Mixture – Nasturtium.

Photo: Alison Chitty

Photo: Alison Chitty

 p.m.
Returned around 6:00 under a suddenly black sky. I hadn’t watered in the last batch of alyssum (having run out of water) and it was astounding how much they managed to deteriorate in 7 hours of sunlight even though the rootballs were very wet. Planted more alyssum and one last straggling Morning Glory from the ones I sowed at home and my sister took more photos. Most is done but not all.
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My Blundstone's which are about 20 years old, have seen 4 gardens (including this one), worked at Niagara Nurseries and are really about shot. I take Size 7.

My Blundstone's which are about 20 years old, have seen 4 gardens (including this one), worked at Niagara Nurseries and are really about shot. I take Size 7.

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The Wheels on the Bus – 1

In Uncategorized on July 26, 2009 at 1:26 pm
AG1

July 23

July 9, 2009
 This morning I met at the site of my artist’s garden, The Wheels on the Bus, with Stewart Green, landscape architect with the City of St. Catharines and Mauro Becchetti, Acting Horticultural Foreman, Recreation and Community Services. Finally, there is action on getting the garden in.

 AG2The garden was selected on May 22 and City approval for the tires was communicated on June 19 – almost a month delay. Patti Broughton of SCAAC and I made numerous queries but there was no action and on July 6, we learned that the City liaison was on vacation. I went ballistic. (That is when I wrote p.s. to Want expressing my feelings about St. Catharines – using very reserved language compared to how I felt.)  Mauro is totally great and on the case. I bought plants in early June and he advised me to put the perennials in, rather than waiting for the installation of the tires.

 July 10, 2009
The sprirea has been removed. There will be a further delay because it is necessary to do locates for utilities.AG3

July 12
I planted the perennials. To my great surprise, I discovered the soil is only 10” deep. Oh dear.

July 23, 2009
This morning, the tires finally went in my artist’s garden. Three City staff put them in (well, two to do so and one to watch). I was very excited. The crew foreman started out AG4with a cynical vibe, but I engaged him by enlisting his advice and by the end he was entirely supportive and helpful. I am terrible with names but I think his name is Lee. (He didn’t want to be in the pictures but the others were fine with it.) He was faster digging than the younger man and apparently previously worked at the cemetery. I told him of my surprise about the soil and he knew all about it and explained that the site is nothing but fill with a shallow layer of soil. He suggested asking Mauro for topsoil which I did.AG5

 I took my secateurs to trim the dying Echinacea purpurea (it took a few days for City watering to kick in) which I tranplanted from my home garden and I left them there. I realized the second I pulled in at home and went back but they weren’t there, hopefully Lee and his crew have them. I hope so, although they are extremely beat up they have sentimental value. I bought them at the Chelsea Flower Show when I went to England on a Canada Council ‘A’ grant back in the old days when there were such things and/or I could get them.

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forget2forget

In Uncategorized on July 2, 2009 at 11:46 pm
photo: Athena Madan

photo: Athena Madan

photo: Athena Madan
photo: Athena Madan

I participated in a global event commemorating the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. My dear friend, Bernicci, e-mailed me information about the project and I instantly decided to join. I had used video of the Tank Man in an installation I did in 1997 and have always found it such moving imagery. I sent out a mass e-mail, was joined by one wonderful person, Dana, and we were witnessed by three friends as we performed the Tank Man Tango in front of St. Catharines City Hall on June 4 at 4:00 pm. Athena attended and was roped into photographing. The website for this event is www.forget2forget.com - check it out. Here are a few video traces provided by the Sydney, Australia artist and organizer, Deborah Kelly:
Some people making the dancing vigil in Bristol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i569iMX7cBcTankmantango_invitation

These people in Brussels are part of Amnesty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdGQJnBgC1k

Here it is in Singapore, at the Substation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/raisondetre/sets/72157619666974881/

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