VAL Desjardins is Montréal-based photographer and a video artist who uses performance as a way to express her ideas about gender and queer sexualities. I was able to attend her Coming Home show, after she'd been away for years in New York, finessing her photography and becoming evermore involved in performance art.

[Interview by Mél Hogan for Art Threat]

AT: You are an artist who appears as much in front as behind the camera--can you talk a bit about what those different positions offer?

VAL: Breaking down the boundaries that have traditionally existed between the camera/artist and the subject has been pivotal in my work. Being able to move between the back of the camera where I plan images and engaging my body in performance for the camera allows me the freedom necessary to express my ideas and include myself as a source of exploration. I love creating images but also feel a strong need to be seen, therefore I need the dance between the two positions to be extremely fluid and open. Sometimes I work with models and shoot traditional portraits, sometimes I set up my camera on a tripod and perform alone for the camera, other times I collaborate with people and create images that record a live performance. It’s always different, there are no rules in my image making world…just feelings, ideas and the desire to express them by making images.

Dayna McLeod is a Montréal-based performance artist and video maker… and she’s very funny. Winner of many prizes and awards, her work speaks to the masses with rare and powerful humour rooted in visionary feminist politics. It’s very likely that you’ve seen Dayna, but didn’t even know it: she embodies her message everywhere and in every way–from her infamous Santa Beaver to her newer (picture on the right) Monarchy Mama–her art travels far and wide.

[Interview by Mél Hogan for ArtThreat]

AT: Hi Dayna.
So, it's all about tits lately, isn't it?

Dayna: Totally.

Just a few weeks ago Emily Carr performed at a small café in Montréal’s NDG. The show was pure melody as one would expect from listening to the few tracks available on her MySpace page. I had the opportunity to ask Emily a few questions, and invited her to play on air, on CKUT’s Dykes on Mykes in early October, available to all via podcast.

Mél Hogan for Art Threat: In my CD collection, my favorite songs are the ones that tell a story, but just a part of it. They leave you feeling like you're in on something--they are intimate--but leave you insatiate. You do this in all your songs, which makes me think you are not new to song writing. Tell me about what makes you write... how thoughts become songs.

Emily Carr: When I started singing original music I was in high school. I was in this punkish band and the lead guitar player wrote all the songs. I was the singer, I was trying really hard to scream and yell and rock out but shamefully, I’d go home and listen to Jewel and Lisa Loeb, and oldies radio. I started writing songs myself out of frustration. I wanted to sing songs about my own feelings and experiences. The first songs were painfully slow and awkward. I would go the open Mike at the Cock ‘n ‘Bull and get booed off the stage…

When I sit down to play guitar I’ve usually got a specific feeling, happiness, anger, frustration, sadness, and often a few words in my mind. I wind up using my life experiences to illustrate the emotion. When people ask me what my songs are about I usually say they’re about nothing. That’s not really true, but the meanings change over time. Sometimes I just want to play something fun. I’ll write some really quickly, those are always the songs people like the most. The songs that take a long time to write usually don’t even make it to the recording.

[More...]

A sad day, Copyleft guru and founder of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig has stepped down from his ten year movement, to focus on US politics. No he's not running, unfortunately, but putting his backing to Barack Obama. He announced this news during iCommons iSummit 07, and his own description and thoughtful reflection on his 10 year commitment, and where he needs to put his focus now, is worth the read on his blog.

Onward my copyleft comrads.

By Lucine Kasbarian, originally published in Hairenik / Armenian Weekly.

A financier is provoked to discover himself, his life, and the world anew when he awakes one morning lost, bewildered and alone, having contracted retrograde amnesia through the night.

A photo assistant scribbles his phone number on a chalkboard prop photographed for a "Crate & Barrel" catalog, only to receive 15,000 phone calls from around the country. He organizes a “National Dinner Tour” to interview his newfound friends and make art from these encounters.

An “accent elimination course” spurs a New York woman to produce a sound-art pastiche and social commentary about cultural preservation and assimilation by trying to acquire her Lebanese-Armenian father’s and Finnish-Swedish mother’s foreign accents, while they unsuccessfully try to lose theirs.

In response to rampant shoplifting and gross consumerism, an artist collective leaves behind hand-crafted objects on grocery shelves to make political statements known as “shop dropping” and “culture jamming.”

These are some of the eclectic, eccentric, and enigmatic stories heard on Tania Ketenjian’s provocative programs airing on radio stations around the country and the globe. Many of her storylines emerge from the depths of creative expression—from the lives of visual artists, actors, writers or musicians. Other interviewees are not artists at all. The common thread throughout is that the voices, ideas and emotions brought to the airwaves—and facilitated by Tania’s own discernment, aptitude and finesse—serve to tell stories that often are not, and to spotlight or question prevailing standards, preconceptions and realities held and presented in our increasingly pre-packaged and sanitized world. [More...]

Martha Stiegman’s two short documentaries are currently featured on the National Film Booard's CitizenShift website United We Fish. Her works tackles the fisheries in Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy and in Bear River First Nation. As a videomaker, Stiegman's work connects community and activism.

Martha is presently working on her PhD at Concordia University where we met to talk about her amazing projects.

[Interview by Mél Hogan for ArtThreat]

An interview with Annabelle Chvostek, a Montréal-based folk singer and songwriter. She is currently working on her new solo album after recently leaving the popular Canadian band, The Wailin' Jennys. Her career has taken her across the ocean and back; her roster is filled with road songs attesting to her journey, as well as political pleas and tales of love. I had the pleasure of interviewing Annabelle after her show at Casa Del Popolo earlier this month.

[By Mél Hogan for Art Threat]

Art Threat: Hi Annabelle. You're show on Thursday night was amazing—great vibe and high energy. You played quite a few upbeat songs in a row—is this a new direction for your music?

Annabelle Chvostek: Thanks! Well, I’m certainly having fun with the more upbeat stuff. I’ve been fairly gentle in the music I’ve been putting out there for the last few years, so there’s part of me that has been dying to bust out and get a bit crazier or heavier, or louder. I still love the intimate contemplative beautiful stuff, but I also am liking the grooving and the catharsis.

AT: You played a lot of "road songs"—is this a sign that you are happy to stay put for awhile or will you be touring a lot this year?

AC: Well, I seem to be still moving around a fair bit, but not with the full speed ahead tour schedule that I had with the Wailin’ Jennys. The idea right now is to lay low until I have another record out, enjoy building my little home nest again, get some living happening, get to some universals and some basics that seem to disappear with road life. I love the road, but I hate it too. It’s a mix of feeling completely ungrounded and like life is constantly on hold or uprooted, and being elated by contact with audiences, new people and new scenery.

The road songs come out of that struggle, figuring out how to live within the flux, the shifts, the always being gone. I am actually very happy to be staying put for a while though, doing short trips out for shows and coming home again. I am loving soaking up Montreal. And visiting places for more than a day. It’s pretty luxurious actually, but something I’m letting myself indulge in. Who knows, maybe I’ll start writing songs about tulips and tomatoes soon. It’s the first summer in a while where I’m getting to garden. You write what you know. In nine months, when I have a record, I’ll hopefully start touring a lot again, but I will always incorporate more home time, and/or work towards sharing the road life with people I love.

On Saturday April 21st at 7pm there will be the Montreal Launch for "Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith, & Sexuality" (in the York Amphitheatre (EV 1.615) at Concordia University, located at 1515 St. Catherine St. West). The launch will feature readings and discussion by contributors, Shadi Eskandani and Nuzhat Abbas, followed by a book signing.

Nuzhat Abbas is a writer based in Toronto, Canada . She was born in Zanzibar , educated in Karachi and immigrated to Canada in 1981. On receiving Canadian citizenship, she promptly left to work in Spain, Turkey , and the UK , and later studied for several years in the US. She returned to Toronto in 1999 and since then, she has published literary non-fiction, reviews and poetry in Fuse, THIS magazine, CV2, Herizons , the Globe and Mail as well as Znak (inPoland). At present she is working on a novel as well as a book of essays about Zanzibar. She has taught literature at Ryerson, OCAD and George Brown College and currently works as an educator and consultant on anti-oppression, human rights and equity issues.

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Patti Schmidt, voice of the CBC's recently axed and widely missed underground music program Brave New Waves, about political art, copyright, and the launch of Art Threat Magazine. The interview aired earlier today on Cinq à Six, a weekly program about art and culture in Quebec.

If you missed it you can listen to the interview here.

The current issue of Socialist Worker features and interview with the hard working Nigerian afrobeat star Femi Kuti, talking about his music, colonialism, Live 8 and African independence.

“What I do is communication,” he told Socialist Worker. “My music says the struggle is not over. Africa still has a very long way to go, but the fight is on.”

The full article can be read here.