Art Threat is pleased to announce the grand winner of its national Framing Harper portrait contest. The goal was to portray Harper’s appreciation of the arts. The 100+ submissions were hilarious, cutting and poignant.

The $1000 grand prize will be awarded to Jack Dylan at an exposition of submitted works on Monday, June 1 at Montreal’s Eastern Bloc Gallery, 7240 Clark St. The event begins at 8pm and admission is by donation (suggested $3).

The exhibition will include a multi-media show of all submitted works, 23 short-listed entries, five honorable mentions, and the Art Threat editor’s choice. Prints of some of the entries will sold through silent auction as a fundraiser for Art Threat.

Stephen Harper’s relationship with the arts in Canada has been a match made in controversy. When he announced the axing of the National Portrait Gallery in Ottawa, it prompted the editors at Art Threat to launch a national portrait contest. “Framing Harper” was a call-out to artists and activists across Canada to create a portrait of Stephen Harper that would capture the PM’s “appreciation” of arts and culture in Canada.

After reviewing the submissions, our esteemed jury (former Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, comedian Mary Walsh, visual artist George Littlechild, filmmaker Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze), and multi-media artist David Jhave Johnston) has chosen Dylan as the winner.

There will be drinks, music, and of course our favourite – political art!

So join us Monday, June 1 at 8pm at Eastern Block Gallery, 7240 Clark St., 1.514.284.2106

There is a kind of hubris we share about time.  We often forget to remember the future.  How we treat the environment is one obvious example - our unclever depletion of fresh water supplies.  Or oil.  We trade away futures in part because we can’t see them.

Contemporary architecture, according to Nicolas Graspierre and Kobas Laksa, must shoulder some of the blame for this shortsightedness. Our cityscapes are pocked with glistening edifices, a little like arrogant jewels in a crown, so shiny and new they seem like the future itself.

The Afterlife of Buildings by Nicolas Graspierre and Kobas Laksa hungrily challenges both architectural arrogance and our reluctance to admit some of the less attractive consequences of our ways.  Originally conceived for the 11th International Architectural Exhibition in Venice 2008, this second installation takes six new high-profile buildings in Poland and transforms each into palimpsests of urban use.  The images are playful and thought provoking.  There is something about how we render urban space over time - how the ways we use it intensify, densify and ultimately transform everything we build into decaying clutter - that humbles even the most ostentatious moments of  financial celebration.

The full exhibition can be viewed online.

BC for Sale from Twyla Roscovich on Vimeo.

British Columbians woke up with a terrible hang-over today. After eight years of a provincial government lead by anti-environmentalist, profiteer and sexist Premier Gordon Campbell, his Liberal party was given a third four-year mandate. Propaganda, ignorance, laziness and apathy (helped along by a distracting Stanley Cup play-off stretch) defeated an important election reform referendum question that would not have allowed such an democratic atrocity as this one from happening again. The proportional representation system being proposed would prevent future ridiculous “victories” that the Liberals have just won this time: 23% of British Columbians voted in a government with 60% of the Legislative seats.

It is no secret that Campbell and his money-hungry Liberals hate the homeless (homelessness has risen 400% under his leadership) and the poor (child poverty is at record levels in the province) but environmental concerns barely registered in the very right wing CanWest media cartel in the province. Yet Campbell has been moving toward privatizing water, selling it to America under NAFTA, refuses to protect wild salmon and other wild life, is pushing forward off-shore drilling, and more. These concerns were eloquently represented in the above video by Twyla Roscovich of Calling from the Coast, which went viral perhaps too late to swing the 48% who voted to caring enough about the environment to vote Campbell out of office. Four years from now, we need 100,000 media interventions like this to go viral.

The wind was brisk and the day bright.  In front of the Canadian Parliament, dapper men and women in their suits and skirts shimmied about, their hands holding flapping ties and dresses down against the wind, faces as serious (no doubt) as the webs of imaginary and real intrigue they weave as minions and titans on The Hill.   A group of students juggled shiny chrome cups in a circle on the grass by the Peace Flame.  Nearby, a lone anti-abortion protester (who resembled a rather unsavoury character with his pasty face, sunglasses and trench coat) stood sentinel over his little domain of gruesome pictures, craziness and, ultimately, a lonely kind of fear.  Ahhh, Canada.  Circuses, nutters and suits: We stand on guard for thee.

The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has called hearings into the “crisis” in Canadian broadcasting.  I was invited to testify - as witness to transformations threatening to dismantle local television throughout rural and not-so-rural Canada – and on behalf of a group I work with, Campaign for Democratic Media.  Commercial broadcasters were screwing up, and some of us were given the chance to let the government know that there were other ways to save local television than by giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the major networks.  I put on a tie and trotted off to Ottawa to have a say.

Getting into Parliament, as you might expect, at least without an election, is a little more complicated than walking in the front door: x-rays, metal detectors, security guards and those guys in suits who stand around scanning crowds talking into their sleeves.

Thankfully, the line for people with name tags was short, one of the perks of being a very temporary insider.  I made my way to Centre Block Room 237-C, the Hearing room, a large high-ceilinged chamber with stone walls covered in faded murals. Dominating the room was a square arrangement of tables for the MPs and witnesses participating in the hearing.

When I arrived, only the Committee clerk was dashing about, slightly stooped, with his two rather elderly-looking helpers, collecting and distributing papers, placing name cards, directing people this way and that.  One senses that whatever we have left of our sovereign democracy - at least in its executive guise -  rests, not on the backs of politicians, but on the more humble shoulders of these tireless facilitators.  As I waited, the room began to fill with boisterous energy, laughter and collegiality, the click of leather shoes and well coiffed hair: the MPs had begun to arrive. Read more →

The Centre A Gallery in Vancouver is celebrating 10 years of exhibition excellence and innovation. Centre A’s mission and focus has been contemporary Asian art that “engages, educates, stimulates a reflective experience and provokes critical thought … The underlying belief,” they website says, “is that art is about people”.

Indeed.

In its 10 years, Centre A has hosted the work of more than 300 artists from across Canada and around the world.

Tonight, Centre A is hosting an art auction.  The work to be auctioned can be previewed online.

Happy Birthday, Centre A!

Image: Sharmila Samant’s Contamination, Part I, Against the Grain, 2008

The Age of Stupid: Daredevil Distributors

OK, The Age of Stupid is a pretty fantastic film. I even said so here on this site some time ago. I also lamented how annoying it was that they weren’t letting any grassroots screenings happen in Canada before their UK launch (screenings where rights for the film would be paid for). They’ve since found a Canadian distributor, and the film will undoubtedly pop up here and there in Canada over the summer. But since I tried to program the film for Cinema Politica and was turned down, I’ve somehow ended up on an email list that every three days tells me how incredibly absolutely unbelievable and fantastic all the people (and especially the filmmakers) are behind the film. It was funny and quirky at first, but the very frequent feather fluffing wore thin quickly. Oh well, I thought, they’re pumped up and they’re trying to pump up their base - that’s pretty standard fare for the indy doc scene.

But now they’ve launched a site, called indiescreenings.net where you can screen indy films, wait, where you can screen an indy film (The Age of Stupid of course), and help change the world through cinema. This is all fine and dandy as well, but what the self-aggrandizing has hit steroid level, and now these cheeky Brits are claiming to have INVENTED DIY distribution! Excuse me? Um, have they looked around? Have they seen what’s been going on in Canada, America, Columbia, Brazil, India, Indonesia…should I go on?

Promote your film, fine. Fluff your filmy feathers, OK. Set up a dandy system for DIY distribution and exhibition, excellent. But c’mon guys, claiming to have invented this stuff, is just taking it too far. I’m not making this up - from one of their how-to downloads:

Three days before your screening date, a high-quality screening DVD will arrive on your mat…. and a whole new era of film distribution begins. No, really, that’s not a complete exaggeration: nobody has attempted this before. When you order the DVD on the website, you’ll confirm that you agree to the conditions: the DVD must be returned a few days after the screening, by registered post and obviously if you lose it you’ll have to pay a fine. (The DVD isn’t on general release until much later in the year – you’re paying for the right to show it before it’s in the shops or on TV).

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Community art is the under-sung cousin in the art world, often ignored and overlooked, only sometimes included as a category in art indexes.  Community art is the aesthetic collaboration by artists with communities — not unlike the work of Augusta Boal (see below) — using the creative arts as a way for communities to participate in cultural production: to celebrate, to tell their own stories and share experiences, to criticize, to remember, to envision futures, to argue against ‘old’ ways of seeing the world and to present ‘new’ ones …

“Documenting Engagement: A Community Arts Media Institute” is a DVD of short videos created by nine Canadian community arts practitioners brought together from across Canada to explore new media as a means to document the aesthetics of engagement in community art. Artists include puppeteer Cathy Stubington, visual artist Pat Beaton, dancer Karen Jamieson, theater director Ruth Howard, among others.

The three-week internship took place in 2004, but the DVD is little known and rarely referenced.  It is an excellent introduction to community arts practice in Canada and to some of the artists who have helped to establish this under-recognized and yet vibrant sector of Canadian art.

The DVD is available from Pacific Cinemateque.

Props to Linda Frye Burnham at the Community Arts Network for the story.  Check out her article for more details about the videos and links to youtube postings.

Heidemarie Schwermer goes penniless in "Living without Money"

The new documentary by director Line Halvorsen, Living without Money (LWM), couldn’t have come at a better time. It won’t be released until Feburary 2010 but one assumes we won’t be out of this current global economic mess we are in now. And if I can be sure of one thing, it’s that radically alternative visions and philosophies of the planet’s economic system will still be shut out of the public discussion when LWM is relesaed. Turn on the news or pick up a paper and it’s the same: we need to get back on track, we need to stimulate the economy, get people shopping again, get manufacturing moving at break neck speed, etc, etc. With this myopic worldview of economics has come massive bail-outs for the corporate crust at the top of humanity’s cake. And as was said by Mary Walsh on This Hour has 22 Minutes some years earlier, “everyone knows the upper crust is really a bunch of crumbs held together with dough.”

Considering there has been little to no discussion in the mainstream media on the topic of alternative ways of constructing an economy (and you’d think this would be a rich moment for such alternative, radical and incendiary ideas to be given space), it is a delight to learn of a documentary that charts one woman’s 13 year odyssey of living without money. In the trailer, which you can watch on the film’s site, Sixty-seven year-old Heidemarie Schwermer is shown surviving withoug money by trading work for food, work for lodging, and work for even her own funeral. What is starkly apparent in this short introduction to the film, is that Schwermer is confronted by total hostility from so many people. It seems that challenging the very foundation of the organization of human society—in Germany, and the “world system”—that is, capitalism, is not met with open arms and open minds.

The film looks like it will be fascinating, and so I sent filmmaker Halvorsen a few questions to pique our interests while we wait for the release.

[Art Threat] How did you find out about Heidemarie Schwermer?

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