Make sure you catch Paige Gratland's "Celebrity Lezbian Fist Launch" this Saturday June 21st from 1-3pm at Art Metropole, 788 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Mél Hogan for AT with Paige Gratland

[AT] Can you talk a bit about the story of Cynthia Plaster Caster, the inspiration for your project?

[PG] I saw a documentary made about her practice of casting rock and roller cock. When she started she was a art school student and rock and roll groupie who united those two interests in a project which gave her access to the people she admired. I identified with this aspect as my own projects and collaborations, free dance lessons, tit pin, burdensum, came out of an interest in connecting with a direct public. I was turned on by the strategy.

The winners of Amnesty International's 17th annual Media Awards have been announced. The awards were created to recognize excellence in human rights reporting and to acknowledge journalism's contribution to raising awareness and understanding about human rights issues. It's not exactly art in the traditional sense, but there is the 'art of fact', so to speak, in how the historical “now” is (re)created from the miasma of infinite facts of material reality. And, these are important stories being told by courageous culture-makers and we would like to share in acknowledging their bravery and the importance of their contributions.

This year also marked the first NEW MEDIA award given to Iraqi journalist Sahar al-Haideri, who was tragically killed shortly after her article “Honour killing sparks fears of new Iraqi conflict” was published on the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's website.

The other journalists being honored are:

GABY RADO MEMORIAL AWARD (for a journalist covering human rights for less than five years): Xan Rice, The Guardian

INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION AND RADIO - Eunice Lau, Stephanie Scawen, Tricia Tan, Tony Birtley for The lost tribe - Secret army of the CIA, Al Jazeera English

NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS - Deborah Haynesfor the Iraqi interpreters series, The Times

NATIONS AND REGIONS - Fiona Walker, Dorothy Parker, Fiona Walker, Matt Pinder, Susan McCusker Thompson for Congo to Motherwell, BBC Scotland (television)

PERIODICALS (a winner announced in each subcategory): Newspaper supplements - Jonathan Green for Selling soccer into slavery, Live (Mail on Sunday magazine); Consumer magazines - Fatima Tlisova, Sergei Bachiwin, Alexei Simonov for Russian media freedom, published by Index on Censorship

PHOTOJOURNALISM - Cédric Gerbehaye for Congo unrest, Newsweek

RADIO - Pascale Harter, Ceri Thomas, Mike Thompson for Where there's muck: Mike Thomson in the Congo, Radio 4, Today Programme

TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY AND DOCUDRAMA - Gretchen Wallace, Jane Wells, Annie Sundberg, Ricki Stern, Nick Fraser, Brian Steidle for Storyville: The devil came on horseback, BBC FOUR / Break Thru Films

TELEVISION NEWS - Chris Rogers, Deborah Turness, Tony Hemmings for Too young to die - Children of the frontline, ITV News / ITN

While visiting family in the fabled hamlet of Courtenay, British Columbia, I stumbled in to the Comox Valley Art Gallery and happened upon an incredibly arresting and uncompromising piece of political art. The framed work was entitled "North American Indian Prison" by George Littlechild. I was instantly taken by the vivid colours of the piece. Mesmerized by the ghostly archival photos enmeshed in a mixed media landscape of expert brush strokes of reds and yellows, and by its political stance, I immediately rushed to the front desk to inquire of this incredible artist whose work was nestled between the big box stores and car lots that now dominate the landscape of my once quieter, walkable town.

As it turns out, George Littlechild lays his head in the Comox Valley on the First Nations Reserve between Courtenay and K'ómoks. And so, eager as I was, I contacted him with a local prefix. The result is a short audio interview about his life, his work and his politics. Born in Alberta and of Plains Cree descent, Littlechild has established himself as one of Canada's prestigious contemporary artists combining traditional aboriginal with contemporary mixed media practices. His art interrogates history, memory and identity and forces those of us above the 49th parallel in North America to consider not only the collective pain of First Nations peoples that was hollowly addressed yesterday by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but to consider the lines that intersect between indigenous culture and that of the colonizer. In Littlechild's case, it is the familial and familiar–from both perspectives of his First Nations and European roots that are explored in his most recent work.

A visual artist, children's book creator, educator, activist and cultural hero for his bold but vulnerable resurrections of political and social histories, Littlechild is an artist whose work speaks loudly and truthfully. You can discover his work and read more about him at his personal site, GeorgeLittlechild.com.

Listen to the audio interview here.

It’s not often that you visit a major civic gallery and come away amazed, disturbed and politically provoked. Rebecca Belmore’s current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery does exactly that and more. It is a remarkable retrospective for an artist deeply engaged in some of the most defining and difficult politics of our time.

Belmore’s practice encompasses sculpture/installation, performance, video and photography. The exhibition includes video documentation of five of Bellmore’s performances, and the much talked about video installation Fountain (2005), which is projected on a wall of falling water in a darkened room. The exhibition also includes some of her sculpture work and components from her performances. There is so much to see in this collection and all of it so very good.

Belmore’s art is an embodied practice, and as an aboriginal woman, her body is a complicated site where colonial, cultural and resistant tensions are inscribed on a daily basis. Wild (2001-2008) is a four-post bed with a red satin bedcover woven from beaver pelts and (black) human hair. The bed was created for an exhibition in The Grange, a colonial building that served as the original location of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Belmore sleeps in the bed unannounced. Nearby, hangs the disturbing Fringe (2008), a near life-size backlit photograph of a woman, naked but for a white sheet over her hips, lying on her side facing away from the viewer. On her back is a huge transversal wound starting at her right shoulder and ending below her left hip. The wound is sewn together, and hanging from the stitches are the beginnings of beadwork, small red beads decorating threads hanging from the grotesquely damaged skin.

(more on the exhibition...)

Despite statements made to the contrary at the time, the $2.5 million that the Conservative government cut from the National Film Board of Canada's budget in March is resulting in more jobs being lost, including in programming.

The NFB, Canada's sole publicly-funded film agency, has announced it will be eliminating 22 positions, including two of its three remaining staff directors.

Paul Cowan and Beverly Shaffer, two of Canada's most renowned documentary film directors, with a combined 46 NFB films to their names, will now be joining the ranks of Canada's private filmmakers (including other NFB alumni who have seen their jobs disappear during previous rounds of Liberal and Tory backed cuts).

The sole director remaining on staff will be Alanis Obomsawin.

Bredan Kelly has more in a good article from today's Montreal Gazette.

Opposition keeps growing to the Conservative government's Bill C-10. The controversial bill would allow the Minister of Heritage to rescind tax-credits from television programs and films after production should they deem it 'contrary to public policy.'

Today the mayors of Montreal and Toronto made the nickel and dime argument against C-10 to the Senate banking committee:

“This industry is of incredible importance,” said [Toronto Mayor David] Miller after telling the senators that it employs 35,000 people in his city — more than the manufacturing sector. Its artistic and financial success depends on its “continued ability to work in a field where the boundaries are well defined and political interference or censorship will not be tolerated.”

Mayor Gerald Tremblay of Montreal told the committee that the film industry has been active in his city for 60 years and that the industry is worth $1.3-billion to his province.

“Having read the bill, we feel obliged to state that the measures relating to tax incentives introduce an element of uncertainty which would have a negative financial impact on the production of Canadian and Quebec film because the minister might be able to call for the repaying of tax credits after the film has been completed,” said [Montreal] Mayor [Gerald] Tremblay.

The mayors also presented letters of support from Sam Sullivan, mayor of Vancouver (which takes in the most money from TV & film production in North America after New York and Los Angeles), and Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly, who argued that hits like Trailer Park Boys may never have received the financial backing necessary if Bill C-10 had been in place.

The saga continues as it is now up to the Senate to vote on the bill. Part of an income tax bill, the government has said the vote on the bill is considered a confidence motion. While many senators have voiced opposition, it isn't clear whether they are willing to force an election over the issue.

There is a war being waged far from the carnage of Iraq or Darfur. It connects to the war on want, but is more about making peace with our environment than anything else. The documentary Garbage Warrior is the story of renegade architect Michael Reynolds, who has been quietly waging a battle in New Mexico for the right to make mistakes when designing housing. Reynolds has been building “Earthships,” sustainably self-contained housing units in the desert of New Mexico since the 1970s.

The film traces the growing community of like-minded builders that work with him and the decade-long fight Reynolds embroils himself with, first with municipal zoning boards then with the state legislature. His goal: to have a bill passed that would allow experimental housing such as his Earthships legal and physical space to develop and grow.

The documentary is funny and inspiring, well shot and aside from the odd overdone cliché of a hammer hitting dirt to drive a point home, is skillfully edited. Reynolds is the driving force of the film, and as a character study he emerges as enigmatic, driven, excentric and innovative. Despite my near-capacity tolerance for documentaries about white men doing good, this story is important, entertaining and inspiring.

They said they wouldn't do it 1999. And again in 2003. But now the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommmunication Commission is getting set to regulate the internet and they want Canadians to help them set the terms for an upcoming hearing on the matter.

The CRTC is Canada’s federal communications regulator. In 1999, they took the position that the internet was mostly alphanumeric text, not technically sophisticated enough to provide audio and visual content easily, and not of sufficient interest to consumers of audio and visual content to warrant regulation. Well, that’s changed, and regulations are coming. In Broadcasting Public Notice 2008-44, the CRTC has announced a major investigation into the feasibility and scope of regulating content on the internet.

But before they rip open the discussion, they want input from Canadians about what questions to ask -- What areas to focus on? What concerns should get priority? For example, should questions about net neutrality be raised?

This is may be an opportunity to have legislation put into place that will protect net neutrality.

The Commission wants to know if the upcoming hearing should ask questions like:

Are there practices that effect distribution of and access to Canadian new media broadcasting?

Is the new media broadcasting environment contributing sufficiently to the achievement of the broadcasting policy objectives of the Broadcasting Act?

Who are the relevant stakeholders in the creation and distribution of Canadian programming in the new media environment?

This is crucial stuff that will effect internet communication for a long time into the future. Check out the document. It is totally worth 10 minutes of your time to give it a read. Send an email to the CRTC and have your say. Broadcasting Public Notice 2008-44

Even wonder what you’re not getting access to on the internet? New technologies and new powers that be are increasingly capable of filtering websites from online use. A new book from MIT Press Access Denied gives the skinny on internet censoring strategies and motivations. From a review at neural.it:

Ten OpenNet Initiative (ONI) researchers were involved in this seminal report for a few years, focusing on general internet filtering strategies and motivations, and analyzing the filtering conditions and legal/ethical tactics state by state .. Every sensitive country has its own mix of motivations and consequent strategies. So, showing a warning or a disguising error web page is a political choice, directly reflecting the government policies, as well as using passwords, IP classes or entire services (Skype) as the censorship technical targets. Scanning the different filtering politics is like viewing a social and political atlas, revealing what a formal territory fear most. And the resulting patterns constitute a contemporary geography of mute networks.

How can a democracy work if the citizens don't know what the government is up to? Access to Information - the little rules that manage the sticky territory between what the government thinks we need to know and what the government is actually up to - is all about organizing the public imagination. It's an intellectual game of hide-an-seek. The government hides and we seek, and it begs questions about the foundations of trust in democratic systems of governance.

For Reasons of State takes this tricky bit if state business on directly. The exhibition, which opened on May 16 at The Kitchen, explores government secrecy and censorship. Installations involve a myriad of information technologies - surveillance video, voice mail, 16 mm film, photography. From Ed Halter's review at Rhizome.org:

Ben Rubin's Dark Source (2005) offers a bank of microfiche readers displaying copies of documents that appear to be nothing but hand-scrawled bars. During a 2002 security snafu, Rubin was able to acquire the software code for Diebold's controversial voting machines, but then blacked out each line--in accordance with corporate trade secret laws-- before exhibiting it. Rubin's self-imposed censorship mirrors Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings (2006) mounted nearby, comprised of enlargements of classified US government documents released via the Freedom of Information Act, still containing large swathes of darkness ... Lin + Lam's Unidentified Vietnam (2003-Present) series recreates a sloppy card catalog from the Library of Congress's collection of hundreds of propaganda films produced with the help of the American government for use in South Vietnam, while Mark Lombardi's Neil Bush, Silverado, MDC, Walters and Good c. 1979-90 (2nd Version) (1996) serves as an example of the late artist's obsessive sketches of conspiracy-style flow charts linking together powerful individuals, government bodies and corporations in tightly-bounded nests of sometimes inscrutable interconnections.

As art expands its territories of investigation, we can begin to see new ways of coming to terms with the social and political complexity of the times. Art can interrogate the ways and means of power -- the political institutions, political reasoning, political moralities -- and transform them into accessible, visual stories and experiences.

A congressional investigation is one thing - say, a 4000 page type-written manuscript documenting some abuse of authority - an art exhibition is another. If a grade school class can be amused for a short time while rummaging around in the uncertain dustbin of what is, what should be and what is not a state secret (as compared to how they might respond to a 4000 page report), I say more artists into the fray.

The transformation of what government is and does into public art is long overdue.