As some of you surely know, I’ve been living in Montreal doing my Master’s in Art History at Concordia University. Although it’s been an interesting transition, approaching art history from a criticism and curatorial practice background, I have been happy to pursue my widening interest in cultural policy and its relationship to urban life (and perhaps more specifically, urban citizens and artists). I have chosen, for my thesis, to use Toronto’s 2003 Culture Plan as a case study for exploring a growing range of ideas (which will inevitably be shrunken) concerning the planning of culture and the spatial conflicts that emerge from such projects.

So, as is the norm around here, I invite you to check out cultureandpolicy.ca — an ongoing dossier of my research and findings, thoughts, analyses, and so on. To be honest, I mostly do this as a way to keep motivated about my own work. As such I am happy to note that my motivation is bolstered by your feedback should you have any.

A few things:

1. Subscribe for email updates. I will send information about the projects that receive funding, as well as monthly updates about the status of the overall project.

2. Donate. Donations to supplement my personal investment will be very much appreciated. Every little bit helps, and will contribute to the facilitation of relational projects in the Toronto-area. Some of your donation may be used to cover operational costs. Please remember that the financials of this project are completely transparent. You can request a copy of the budget by email.

3. Give feedback. I’ve set up a feedback forum where you can leave (anonymous or not) comments about the site and project. I would love to know what you think. Alternatively, you can email me if you have any thoughts you’d like to share. Perhaps you know of a link/theory/article/artist/whatever that might be useful for tinygrants. Maybe I’m going about some aspect of the project completely backwards. Seriously, I want input!

4. I will be updating the blog on tinygrants regularly with project updates, research notes, and samples of existing work that fits into the tinygrants mandate. Add this link to your RSS reader or check back regularly.

5. Applications are due no later than 11:59 PM on Sunday, November 22, 2009. Click here to learn more about how to apply.

6. Spread the word!

Anyway, that’s that! I hope you like it. You can email hello@tinygrants.ca if you have any questions or comments.

The impetus behind the project, besides the inspiration provided by Wooster Collective and Ché Francisco Ortiz, is that granting structures in Canada exclude two large groups of artists: student artists, and artists with small projects. I’m hoping that TINYGRANTS will be a plausible solution to fill this significant gap (but for the record, you won’t need to be a student in order to receive TINYGRANTS funding).

Here is a tentative mission statement. I’d love for everyone interested to submit an application once they’re available.

TINYGRANTS aims to facilitate short term interventions that foster creative collaboration, active participation and education opportunities through the distribution of small, non-renewable funding to artists at any stage in their career.

Balint Zsako‘s Old Master Paintings are showing in Toronto at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects from September 18th to October 18th. You may recall I interviewed Zsako about this series when he was showing them in New York. Here’s an excerpt:

Although your new collage work continues to express themes you’ve often worked with — absurdity, humour, the figure — visually they’re a departure from most of your past work. What influenced you to reposition and appropriate the Old Masters?

There are a number of reasons why Old Masters reproductions are very attractive as source material. One of my main goals in this series was to make the finished images as seamless as possible; I wanted the works to look like they could have been painted that way a long time ago. To do this i am looking at thousands of reproductions, sometimes looking for a hand that is the right size, facing in the right direction, that is the right tone, making the right gesture. The quantity of available reproductions of this kind of work is what allows me to make my collages possible.

Most of my source material comes from auction catalogues. I love the high quality of the reproductions and also that the works are obscure or by minor painters. You can’t really collage Leonardo or Rubens these days because everyone will recognize it, after Warhol this would be exploring an entirely different conceptual theme, one that I am not concerned with at the moment.

The style of the painting has to match as well. This is what’s great about old paintings, you can go from Renaissance painting up to the Pre-Raphaelites and find an abundance of source material that can be matched seamlessly.

Also, re-arranging the meaning would not be possible the same way if i were to use modern or contemporary art. There is a language of Old Master paintings which allow for the juxtapositions and contrasts that I am interested in. In my work you notice that the woman completely covered in flowing fabric with everything but her breast and a knife covered looks plausible, but it doesn’t match up with anything else in art history books. This is much more difficult to do after modern art where many more things are permitted, and the rules are more open.

I’m really looking forward to seeing them in person. The opening reception is on Friday, September 18 from 6 PM to 9 PM. Show ends Sunday, October 18.

Image

Collage by Balint Zsako from balintzsako.com

At the time of the inaugural festival last year, I was taking a Community Arts class, and one of our assignments was to interview a community art project leader. Film festivals in general aren’t considered to be community art projects, but there was something about TPFF that made it feel like one. This interview — with Robert Allison, one of the founders of TPFF — is a year old, but I think it captures the significance of the festival and I hope it drives you to check it out this year.

TPFF runs from September 26 to October 2. Films are scheduled at Bloor Cinema, Toronto Revue Cinema, Jackman Hall (AGO) and Empire Studio 10 (Mississauga). Tickets are $10, or $7 for seniors/students/unwaged. I recommend getting a package of 10 tickets for $75. You can use the package to order multiple tickets for single screenings; share one with a friend.

Loss and losing. Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole people who have learned to live with it as a constant companion?¹ – Arundhati Roy

A skeptic like myself will read the newspapers harbouring a vague suspicion toward anyone being heralded by the corporate media. It is this practice that led me, as a young teenager, to the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict; the story less told, the story revealing illegal occupation, displacement, loss, torture, humiliation and exile. It seemed so easy to stand on the side of social justice, to recognize the wrongs that had been committed, supported and sustained by Israel and its allies, to be aghast at the imposed immobilization, the spontaneous, arbitrary demolition of Palestinian homes, the swelling settlements that encroached the borders of the land formerly known as Palestine. How does a country cease to exist? Who could support this violent, 20th century incarnation of imperialism? When would this be undone—and could it be?

My relief in knowing fragments of the Palestinian story was squandered by the constant reminders indicating that siding with Arabs was unpopular, was equal to siding with radicals, siding with suicide bombers, siding with a people that was deemed unworthy of its own land.

But slivers of hope exist, they have existed between then and now, and they have never been more optimistically manifested than in the inaugural Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF), which took place between October 25th and November 1st (2008) across four venues in both Toronto and Mississauga. It might not be a vast hope, or a promising one, but it is one that exists at last, and one that exists to be shared.

Film festivals aren’t traditionally considered community art projects, but with a mandate combining awareness, education and engagement, TPFF establishes itself as a collaborative group with open arms, reaching out and letting in, building momentum with prior individual film screenings that led to the conception of a fuller, more organized festival. Robert Allison, one of the core volunteers who founded the festival, spoke to me about TPFF, which he says, “belonged to everyone who chose to be a part of it.”

It was July 2006. Israel was dropping bombs on Lebanon. Over a thousand people were dead, Lebanese civil infrastructure was severely damaged, and nearly two million citizens—both Lebanese and Israeli—were displaced. Watching from Toronto, Robert Allison was angry. He ended up at a demonstration in an attempt to channel his outrage toward the unprovoked and undeserved brutality, but he wasn’t sure if it was the right outlet. Allison knew he wanted to make a contribution but kept asking himself, “Where am I comfortable?” And then, a tremendous opportunity presented itself. Allison visited Egypt and Lebanon, and after “standing in the ruins of where bombs had been dropped,” he found a new purpose for activism back home. When he returned to Toronto, it was already a year since the first bombs dropped. He wanted to show a film to commemorate the anniversary.

Allison’s history of showing marginalized films begins here, and his efforts have culminated into a full-fledged festival that focuses specifically on film works about and by Palestinians. It was during this process and configuration of individual screenings that Allison was convinced of the desperate hunger for knowledge and truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amongst Torontonians—every time he showed a film at the Brunswick (which has since closed), he was screening to sold-out crowds that included innumerable unfamiliar faces—people he didn’t recognize from the activist community. By the time the second anniversary of the July War came around, Allison says that he and the people he was organizing with “were forming as a collective,” and it was around this time that he was coming into contact with film works that focused specifically on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Allison’s interest in this particular conflict had little to do with Israel or Palestine specifically. “One of the things that affected me about the whole issue was social justice. Right and wrong. I don’t care who’s doing the killing; I just know that killing is wrong. So I stand on the side of those being killed,” he says. By reframing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of social justice, Allison was able to reach into other activist communities who would share in the process of proliferating awareness and education. By focusing on justice—instead of ethnicity—TPFF was able to “reach out to different communities” based on the mix of the collective, says Allison. They were also able to educate and breed empathy amongst people who had existing prejudices against Palestinians—including Allison’s father and grandmother. By expanding the terms of inclusion, by extending a hand to non-Palestinians, engagement beyond those already in the know was possible.

With the planning of a coherent festival underway, I ask Allison where TPFF found financial support. Although he wasn’t in charge of that aspect of the festival, he admits to taking a cue from his parents, who ran a theatre for ten years without receiving a dime of government funding. “The key is that they got to do what they want,” Allison says, while admitting that TPFF did receive nominal support from public funding bodies (the receipt of which was protested by Conservative bloggers in the city). “My personal feeling was that we should apply for the grants, but not rely on them,” he says. Instead, TPFF found the support of local businesses to fund the festival but more importantly, they partnered with local festivals and organizations to co-present films, creating an expansive network that colludes with other initiatives that are either ethnic-specific or arts-based. With an attitude that claims “we don’t need to do somersaults to get these people to support us,” Allison found that “people came out of the woodwork,” including Frederick, a French journalist-turned-restaurateur from Le Select Bistro who not only gave organizers free meals and donated cash to the festival, but distributed TPFF programs to his customers before and during the festival.

Programming the festival introduced new challenges that ensured little else but the promise of spontaneous improvisation. Allison’s only specification for screenings—which took place every Sunday in his home after a meeting with volunteer committee members—was that at least one Palestinian be present. Over 200 films were submitted to the festival, and though a rating system was devised, selections were made on a case-by-case basis. Allison shares a devastating story about Palestinian filmmaker Hanna Elias to exemplify this selection process. Elias, who teaches filmmaking to kids in Bethlehem, was traveling from Los Angeles to Bethlehem with a stopover in Switzerland, where he boarded an Israeli airline. Airline staff obliterated his film equipment and poured salt into an already deep wound by searching his personal belongings. Despite his films having exorbitant screening fees that the festival had already passed on, “you hear this story from him and you want to support this guy,” Allison says. “He’s going through hell.” Elias’s The Olive Harvest and The Mountain were both screened during TPFF to packed audiences.

The only guarantee in selecting films is that “it’s a balancing act,” says Allison. All told, the selection process allowed for another layer of community to emerge amongst committee members and filmmakers. Mohammed Alatar, director of The Iron Wall and Jerusalem: East Side Story said, “I don’t care about money, just show my film.” Other artists, like Palestinian filmmaker and producer Annemarie Jacir (the sister of visual artist Emily Jacir, whose installation came to A Space last year), were phenomenally accommodating in making professional connections for Allison to acquire films that seemed shrouded in red tape. And still other factors were working in TPFF’s favour.

Allison is conscientious of the apprehension sponsored events have to program this kind of content. “There’s a reason why 23 of the films were Canadian premieres,” Allison says, explaining that TPFF’s opening and closing films—Salt of This Sea and Slingshot Hip-Hop—were both turned down by the Toronto International Film Festival, even though they had been around the international film festival circuit and were Official Selections at Cannes and Sundance, respectively. He also notes that Hot Docs gave a total of six minutes to Palestinian content. The wedge created by reticence was enthusiastically filled by TPFF. “We created the space,” says Allison, and it was one where an existing community was fortified by the awareness and education of new audiences.

TPFF sold thousands of tickets in the eight days of the festival. That’s thousands of opportunities for awareness, education, empathy and hope. But Allison admits there were shortcomings, things that would certainly be applied in subsequent presentations of the festival: context, conversation, and educational materials. Allison’s first regret is that “we did not appropriately build in a mechanism for these people to talk about what they had just seen.” He also thinks that there should have been “information for people to walk away with.” Although many of the films explicitly used the political crisis as a backdrop to their stories, “we need to spend $2000 on educational materials,” says Allison. He also plans to continue individual screenings throughout the year, so that education doesn’t stop on November 2nd.

In crisis, solidarity breeds empathy, empathy breeds hope and hope breeds change. TPFF proves that solidarity can extend beyond the borders of ethnicity and touch the hearts and minds of Torontonians who know social injustice when they see it—and feel enough to contribute to its amelioration.

¹ Roy, Arundhati. “Come September.” Lannan Foundation Reading & Conversations. Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe. 18 Sept. 2002. 9 Aug. 2009. 11 Nov. 2008.

You’ve had quite a prolific career in several different media — street art, painting, children’s books. What binds all of these formats together for you, especially since some of your themes, like maps and portraits, carry over through much of your work?

It’s all done in the spirit of learning and exploring. Making connections and sharing.

Your paintings on exhibition at Angell Gallery are deconstructed/abstract
 self-portraits on maps. Where do you find the maps, and what is their 
significance in particular? What is the correlation between each map and
 subject?

Back in the early 1990s while studying at the School of Visual Arts I used to search through dumpsters for free paper… I couldn’t afford much back then so I looked for materials everywhere. There was one dumpster on 17th and Broadway that always had large rolls of blueprint paper from a nearby architectural firm. The paper was perfect for painting upon and nice and thin for gluing onto walls. I also liked how my loose paintings were juxtaposed upon the structure and rigidity of the building designs. Equally interesting to me were how these paintings atop designs of New York City buildings were then reintroduced to the streets via my gluing of them up outdoors.

From the blueprints I moved to maps, a pretty natural next step. I’ve always loved looking at maps and learning about the design of our world. I began to seek them out everywhere, eBay is a big help. I favor antique maps for their softer colors, more human feel and gentle surface. New maps are too glossy and plastic to the touch. I love to travel and install my works around the globe and I figure if I can’t yet physically get to a place, I can metaphorically do it by marking or painting on the maps.

I continue to paint on blueprints and maps and, as a matter of fact, I’ve installed some self portraits in the streets of Toronto that were created on both.

I really loved how in some cases, the maps were totally obscured by layers 
of paint, and the only evidence of the map beneath was the creases and folds of its surface. When do you know a work is finished?

The acrylic paints and pigments I use are home made by an artist in New York. The colors are very rich and the acrylic and urethane mediums are very versatile. They can be any range of finish from matte to high gloss and its viscosity can be completely controlled. These qualities changed the way I paint. By using rich, concentrated pigments I was able to push and pull the liquidity of the paint without compromising my control of color, opacity or transparency.

As for when a painting is finished? I like what Brice Marden once said, “When the painting really lives, has a right to exist on its own strengths and weaknesses, I consider it finished. When I have put all I can into it and it really breathes, I stop. There are times when a work has pulled ahead of me and goes on to become something new to me, something that I have never seen before; that is finishing in an exhilarating way.”

Where does this process begin for you? Do you start with the surface or the 
subject?

I begin by mounting a single map or multiple maps to a canvas. For the single maps, I have a stretched canvas the same size, for others I’ll tear the maps and overlap them to fit. I’ll keep the map borders so that the framing quality or design is retained. This overlapping results in the creation of new geographies. Land masses and bodies of water mix and conjoin to create new places. I paint on top of the maps once they’re mounted.

What about a particular surface draws you to paint on it?

It’s in the spirit of collaborating with that surface… it’s a dialog, a relationship. It’s the same as working in the streets.

Street art has a spirit of intervention. In terms of production, is there an element of this in the work you show in galleries, or is it a different 
process altogether?

The works in the streets aren’t as built up as the ones mounted on canvas. If I use too much paint on the paper pieces intended for the streets, they won’t age or decompose in the gradual manner that I prefer. One of the most important aspects of working in the streets for me is allowing the work to wither away and disappear. Heavy application of acrylic would prevent that.

–

Michael De Feo’s work is on exhibition at Angell Gallery until August 29th. Next up, De Feo participates in the Hacia Afuera public art festival in Harlem, New York City, August  22nd and 23rd. If you keep a lookout, you just might happen upon some of his street pieces–including the flower motif for which he is perhaps best known–in Toronto.

Take a look through De Feo’s website to see documentation of his street art from around the world.

Images

Top: Untitled (Self Portrait), 2009, acrylic and antique map on canvas, 24″ × 18″; bottom: Untitled (Self Portrait), 2009, acrylic and antique map on canvas, 40″ × 29″. Courtesy the artist.

There are quite a few things that stood out to me in the pieces on exhibition at Angell Gallery. First of all, your use of buildings/dwellings (or objects that resemble either). Can you talk about the significance these sorts of spaces have in your work? (By the way, I thought the use of buildings/dwellings in your work read really well with De Feo’s portraits on maps).

Thanks, I had only seen De Feo’s work online and wasn’t even aware that they were all painted on maps, very cool relation!  I use buildings to signify human interaction/impact without having to include people. I try to build the habitats with a certain amount of anonymity so that they don’t necessarily refer to anything specific.  Although the landscapes are deserted they appear as though they could have been habitable.

I was also very drawn to how accurately you render real-life materials. There’s wood, acrylic (or plastic, or candy), shells, water. These materials co-exist in your environments with imagined materials as well. I notice as well that some of the imagined elements — namely, the bubble-like clouds — are suspended with string within your images. What is the relationship between reality and fiction in your work, and how do you balance the two? The clouds, for example, obviously don’t need to be hanging from strings, since you are fully designing the scene, and yet they do, as if it was a physical maquette.

It’s important for me to make sure that the objects look like they could exist in real life, but exist only as a representation (or maquette) of transforming matter.  By doing this I can remove site specific associations by making environments that are completely fictional.  That, and I really like train sets and models, so it ends up coming from a mix of aesthetic and conceptual  reasons.

Some of your work reminds me of old video games — and, sometimes, glitches in old video games. They also evoke a number of random things, like movies, candy, and children’s books. It’s an odd mixture of future and nostalgia. What sorts of visual experiences inform your work?

Any of those, sometimes music videos and art installations too.  Point-and-click adventure games made a huge impact on me because they had the luxury to pre-render scenes, which resulted in really great graphics that were incomparable in any other genre.  Granted they were probably the coldest type of game, but they seemed the most authentic to me.

Can you say anything specifically about the works that were selected to be in this exhibition? I found them to be a lot darker than some of your other work, both in colour and composition. They had a more sombre tone amongst them than I was expecting, considering the work I had seen on your website.

They are the newest work, except City Flicker Stars, which was one of the first compositions I started and only recently finished for this show.  I think they are only half darker, maybe because I’ve been watching a lot of Hitchcock films.  I don’t really have a good answer for this one, I apologise.

And finally, a question you don’t have to answer, but I’m curious: How close are you to constructing these scenes in a giant warehouse so that people can walk through them and experience them physically?

Maybe one day.  I have been in talks with IMM Living about designing ceramic gifts through them, not really walk through-able but definitely physical!  I would really prefer to take an industrial design approach to making physical work and ensure it has another function other than being an art object.

–

What’s next for Alex? Apparently, lots of stuff. The group show, Peep Show at Lonsdale Gallery features work by McLeod, until September 27th, and his work will also be a part of their anniversary exhibition in November. South of the border, he will be exhibiting in a show upcoming at Concertina Gallery in Chicago. The summer group show at Angell is up until August 29th. Keep an eye on alxclub.com — McLeod updates frequently.

Images

Top: C-Island Airport; bottom: Mountain Greyskull. Courtesy the artist.

This essay was written for YYZ‘s exhibition of Dax Morrison’s The Willing and Able, on until Saturday, August 8, 2009.

It’s a rare thing for galleries to find themselves as the subject of an artist’s exhibition. Yes, there have been plenty of artists who have staged interventions within a gallery space (Vito Acconci); some who have made galleries the subject of their visual work (Michael Merrill); more who have temporarily modified the purpose of the gallery (Rirkrit Tiravanija). But galleries—specifically, representations of Toronto ones—lie at the forefront of Dax Morrison’s The Willing and Able, in a way that, though visually abstract, clearly eschews the hierarchical constructs of an art “scene,” quietly redefines a community as such, and sharply highlights a methodical process in a smirk-ridden nod to conceptualism.

The Willing and Able seems simple enough, with tall, lean vertical stripes of multi-coloured paint covering one wall, while a long list of Toronto galleries, in alphabetical order, sits on a perpendicular wall in undecorated black type. Although the visual result of Morrison’s installation appears minimalist in style, the precision with which it is implemented is highly (and obviously) labour-intensive. There are two-hundred and twelve, 1 5/8”-wide stripes in total, each painted flush with the next and stretching from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The stripes themselves, painted using samples collected from the listed galleries, are ordered according to the alphabetical listing.

Morrison’s regimented practice for this exhibition started in January 2009, when he began crafting an extensive list of Toronto art galleries. Scouring the usual sources—Now Magazine, Eye Weekly, Mass Art Guide, Slate and the Yellow Pages—Morrison effectively establishes a text-based representation of the Toronto art scene, one that would lay the groundwork for his site-specific installation at YYZ. Morrison notes that galleries are usually divided into smaller subsections (private, commercial, public, artist-run, rental) and that this hierarchy is, he says, “constantly being reinforced not only between the different types of galleries, (an exhibition at a public gallery is more desirable than one at a monthly rental space), but also within these different segments, (one commercial gallery is better than another because it sells more or has higher profile artists).” Morrison wanted to present all of these spaces as equal participants in an art-based community, and in order to do so he uncovered the most common denominator amongst them: paint.

There is a level of tedium that laces every point of The Willing and Able, much of which existed prior to the exhibition itself and namely with Morrison’s attempt to establish contact with the galleries on his master list and finally collect the paint samples. Taking the list he developed in January (and continually updated through June), Morrison began getting in touch with the galleries, first by email or post (if an email address wasn’t available in the guides he consulted), and then in person. Patience and perseverance were at the crux of this process as, Morrison observes, each gallery is truly its own entity, and “what might convince one gallery to participate doesn’t necessarily work with the next. If there’s a large staff then you sometimes end up in a guessing game with regard to whom to ask. In other circumstances, you hope that the message you leave with the reception desk makes its way to the owner/director/decision maker(s).” Although his primary aim was to acquire a small sample of paint, his first goal was to get a response and a simple yes or no would do. The participants—the willing and able—were visited again to collect the sample.

The extent of toil employed by Morrison to enact The Willing and Able is finalized in the painted wall. Witnessing the installation of the project, one encounters roll upon empty roll of blue painter’s tape, painstaking climbs up and down a ten-foot ladder, hundreds of paint samples organized and arranged so they may be applied in the correct sequence. The result is visually sparse but requires acute patience and attention to detail to execute, particularly as well as Morrison has. It is, as he describes, “a painted wall,” but knowing the timeline of how that painted wall came to be is what makes The Willing and Able an extraordinary example of meticulous care and conceptual methodology; a methodology that Morrison has long excelled at.

Take, for example, “The Rent Gets Paid; Toronto,” a 2006 work that employs a similar methodology and visual effect. The process-driven piece is culminated in a single framed work that features a grid of red dots—the international gallery symbol for “SOLD”. Collected from ninety-two Toronto-based commercial galleries (or non-commercial spaces that occasionally sell artwork, like Open Studio and Red Head), the list was developed in the exact fashion that the list for The Willing and Able was. The dots are equally spaced along the matboard from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, according to the alphabetical listing of participants. Although the ubiquitous symbol is in and of itself rather innocuous, seeing ninety-two of them side by side reveals how loaded the red dot is within the context of an art gallery. The piece is a reminder of the diversity allowed within the term—the range in size and hue unveils how uniquely this symbol correlates to the institution it comes from. It likewise evidences the difficulty institutions themselves can have with the entire concept of the red dot—Clint Roenisch rejects the shape of the symbol in favour of a red star, while it is the colour itself that moves Jessica Bradley to opt for an orange dot instead. The same rejection of convention can be seen in The Willing and Able, where multi-coloured stripes punctuate the many shades and finishes of the white and grey stripes that surround them.

What does The Willing and Able and, certainly, the rest of Morrison’s oeuvre, say about convention, neutrality and hierarchy? For one, attempts to steer clear of either often seem sadly unavailing—in the case of Roenisch and Bradley, the desire to avoid the red dot ends up establishing a new one that fulfills the same communicative goal and carries the same symbolic meaning. As for the stripes in The Willing and Able, everything ends up looking like a neutral colour, even the bubblegum pinks and emergency oranges (noticeably, there are multiple samples of each). Morrison’s great effort is to treat each paint sample, each red dot, with equal space and unbiased sequence. In doing so he reveals not only the multiplicity between galleries, but also the common threads that link all of these spaces—and the people who visit them, and the artists who show in them—together.

Image

Installation view of The Willing and Able by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Wooster Collective recently asked their readers, “If I gave you $50 today, with the condition that you had to spend it on ‘art’, what would you do with it?” They received immediate feedback, and though it wasn’t their intention when they asked, they decided to give $50 to the individual behind one of their favourite ideas, Ché Francisco Ortiz. His idea was simple and effective — to “buy a ton of sidewalk chalk and give it out to every kid i saw at the park or boardwalk.” Ortiz bought the chalk, headed to the boardwalk, and a brilliant moment of intervention, community and creativity happened. For only $50. It got me thinking: is microgranting the future of art?

What happens when money runs out? What happens when banks won’t lend, and when grant programs get cut? Microfinancing has been a growing trend in the last couple of years, and with Kiva — a microfinancing organization that typically lends to individuals in developing countries — launching their lending to U.S. citizens, its pertinence in the “developed” world is growing too. It seems an apt thing to apply to arts-funding as well. For $50, Ortiz engaged an entire community of people to unleash their creativity in a public space, and facilitated a fun, collective experience. Ortiz’s idea is so brilliantly simple — the chalk ensures that nothing is damaged; it’s a perfect material for drawing on concrete and asphalt; it inspires excitement in kids and nostalgia in adults — that it almost isn’t shocking that he did it on a dime.

Working within limitations can often be a true test of creativity. A microgranting funding model could challege artists who are up for it. And as for people providing the funds, wouldn’t it be interesting if, instead of buying a framed print or a painting or a glazed bowl, you funded a community or public art project and were named a partner or producer?

Wooster Collective is on to something.

(Just to be clear — I do think that $50 is on the extremely low side of a microgrant. I believe in artists getting paid for their time, and I don’t think $50 did that in the case of Ortiz. But it seems to me that innovative, collaborative and community-minded projects can be executed for a couple of hundred.)

Image

From Ortiz’s Flickr.

REPLYall, presented by Art Metropole and SAVAC, is a six-week-long, collaborative art exhibition between Daniel Barrow (Winnipeg), Divya Mehra (Winnipeg/New York), Lorna Mills (Toronto), Peter Morin (Victoria) and Shaan Syed (Toronto/London, UK). Although you can view the work online at any time (and you should go, if only to see Mehra’s “Money in the Bank” video), if you work at a gallery, you certainly can’t make it to the public art talk at Art Metropole on Saturday, June 13th. It starts at 2 pm.

Another thing I can’t attend is Balint Zsako‘s book launch, also at Art Metropole. Presented by MOCCA, Works from the Bernardi Collection is Zsako’s first book, and it sounds like a work of art in and of itself (and is a steal, at $45) — “The fully-illustrated, [and hardcover] 156-page publication features a text and interview with the artist by renowned Winnipeg writer and publisher Robert Enright, a short text by New York writer and advisor Robert Curcio, and a foreword by MOCCA Artistic Director and Curator David Liss.” The launch is this Saturday, May 30, from 1 pm to 3 pm at Art Metropole. The artist will be present. (You can read my interview with Zsako here.)

(Also at Art Metropole, which already passed last Saturday, was the launch of Dan Adler’s new book, Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 1880-1983. If you know Darboven‘s work, you know this book was a huge undertaking, and though I haven’t read it, I’ve heard Adler speak about it, and he has tackled the subject with unerring patience and a devoted curiosity. I can’t wait to pick up a copy. It was published by One Work/Afterall Books. Each book in the One Work series focuses on a single work by an artist. It’s available at Art Metropole.)

Ok, fine. It looks like it’s just Art Metropole and I who can’t seem to make it work.