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.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: crcp, microfunding, ocad, relational practice, thesis, tinygrants

ZONE A

Dead Philosophers’ Limbo, 2009
Susie Burpee

Court House
361 University Avenue (Outdoor rotunda underpass in the Garden of Justice)
Click here to view this location on a map.

Dead Philosophers’ Limbo is a twelve-hour dance to the life of ideas and the death of philosophers as told by the living philosopher Simon Critchley in his, The Book of Dead Philosophers. Each dancer’s boombox emits passages from the book, broadcasting epitaphs as the score for the performers who literally and figuratively use dance to break into that space between life and death, between mind and body and between the here and the now. Find your place in this limbo as twenty-four dancers dance and nearly two hundred philosophers die. Witness the wonder and amazement as these bodies describe a philosophical dictum for the ages. Dance all you dead philosophers – dance!

Le Grand Peep Show
Casa Loma presents Corpus Dance

The Stables of Casa Loma,
328 Walmer Road
Click here to view this location on a map.

A large Peep Show tent, a presence in the Casa Loma Stables, the sound of carnival music. Inside, two marionettes perform an unusual courtship ritual. Dressed in PVC black bodysuits, they communicate only by touch. Their language, at once comedic and sexy, embodies the infinite complexities of the relationship between men and women. For the really curious, a private Peep show is also available at the back…

Bert and Tony’s Block Party
Jenny-Anne McCowan

John Innes Community Centre
150 Sherbourne Street (at Queen Street East)
Click here to view this location on a map.

Shaped by the social dance movements of the 1930s and inspired by the history of the Ward, home to the city’s most dangerous slum at the time as well as some of Toronto’s most famous dance parlours, Bert and Tony host an open invitation dance-off. Dancers from all disciplines take partners and compete while audience members dance the night away.

move
Peggy Baker, Debashis Sinha (Peggy Baker Dance Projects and Canada’s National Ballet School)

Canada’s National Ballet School,
400 Jarvis Street
Click here to view this location on a map.

Twenty-four dancers advance across the floor in a rolling, meditative pattern. Their spiralling movements evoke the raked sand of a Zen garden. After each cycle of the dance, an audio-visual installation by Debashis Sinha energizes the room.

dance like no one is watching
Stand Up Dance and York Dance Ensemble

This is a mobile project. See Zone A Info Centre (at Yonge-Dundas Square) for Schedule
Click here to view this location on a map.

Contemporary dance meets mobile clubbing. Four teams of dancers perform in relay to portable music across the city. Follow along and listen in. Surprise and spectacle erupt in unique locations as dance celebrates and illuminates pedestrian places. Dancers perform choreography and improvisation travelling from the Distillery District, through downtown, up to Casa Loma and Wychwood Art Barns, back down to Queen West and into Liberty Village.

ZONE B

Dances Distilled
Dance Ontario

55 Mill Street, Case Goods Building
Click here to view this location on a map.

Works by five fresh, fabulous,urban dance groups: AX-S Dance’s Break Time, for 6 performers, inspired by a 15-minute shift; Eroca Nichols’ interactive Made To Order, for 10 performers who solicit ideas from the crowd and make dances on the spot; Infestation, HerciniArts’s timely guerilla aerial that compares an out of control pest situation with corporate greed; Gadfly’s street style fusion inspired by sleeplessness  (NOW Magazine’s “outstanding ensemble” at Fringe Fest 2008); and Jay9’s travelling piece, Affects/Effects for 3 performers and drummer Al Bee that takes full advantage of The Distillery’s alleyways. Performance schedule online at danceontario.ca.

The Eros Boulevard Cabaret
Sion Irwin-Childs and Eros, Thanatos & the Avant-Garde

The Rivoli
332 Queen Street West
Click here to view this location on a map.

In celebration of Nuit Blanche, The Eros Boulevard Cabaret will present a multimedia experience for the senses live on the front Patio of the Rivoli at the corner of Queen and Spadina. Drawing on the artistic, cultural, comedic and musical heritage of the Rivoli, The Cabaret features a diverse array of short works created in video and all disciplines of dance, choreographed and performed live by emerging and experienced artists from across Canada. Connected by the epic themes of sex, love, light, death, passion and the avant-garde, these themes have been collected from the performing arts and are universal to all cultures, dance forms and modes of creative expression. This broad spectrum of work accurately reflects the vast cultural and artistic resources that co-exist in Toronto today.

ZONE C

Dance of the Cranes, 2009
Brandon Vickerd

Liberty Towers Construction Site
East Liberty Street and Pirandello Street
Click here to view this location on a map.

Dance of the Cranes is a collaborative performance piece consisting of a 13-minute choreographed dance performed by two high-rise construction cranes. The dance will be performed at the beginning of every hour, from 7 pm to 3 am, on the night of Nuit Blanche. At designated times, two tower construction cranes standing on the same site and visible above the Toronto skyline, will come to life in a synchronized spectacle of motion. In the darkness they will slowly begin to pivot, rotate and sway in harmonized gestures, each crane performing delicate motions hundreds of metres above the audience on the sidewalk below. This work is a meditation on the movement and labour that takes place on a colossal scale in the physical building of our urban landscape. It is an attempt to draw the audience’s attention to the massive machines that build our city above our heads and the skill of the individuals that operate the cranes. The dance will be performed at the beginning of every hour, from 7 pm to 3 am. From 4 – 7 am,  video projection of earlier performances will be screened.

So, there you have it. Dance in its many forms are abundant at this year’s Nuit Blanche, and each project embodies an innovative take on movement and expression.

Zone A recommendations here. Zone B recommendations here. Zone C recommendations here.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: dance, nuit blanche, performance, toronto

It all starts on October 3rd at 6:55pm.

FIRE AND SAUSAGE: Small Mercies, 2009
Tom Dean
Visual Art

Parking Lot at Liberty Street and Hanna Avenue
Click here to view this location on a map.

The fires and the Liberty district’s remove, the trace of the feral, suggest the aftermath of a collapse, a catastrophe or apocalypse. But what the artist is interested in is the calm after a fall, when we count our mercies and shared the surplus.  An economic collapse that has returned us to essentials, warmth and food and social generosity.

FIRE AND SAUSAGE: Small Mercies is a social sculpture.  It engages and arranges people.  Participants congregate around a fire, a cooking station, clustered radially around food and fire.  The form remains, enlarging and diminishing, a stable form centered around food and fire.  All the complexity and richness and pathos of a social cluster, strangers and friends with some common purpose and focal point, a clustered audience before a spectacle and themselves a spectacle, figures joining and departing the cluster and flowing from one site to another.

After the fall, a hobo utopio. With sausage and hot chocolate by Jamie Kennedy, piano by Hank Bull, and poker by Jim Garrard.

I don’t know what a “hobo utopio” is, but I like the idea of a “social sculpture.”

BICITYCLE (Bike City), 2009
Kyohei Sakaguchi
Interactive Mobile Installation

Lamport Stadium Parking Lot, west side

Liberty Street, at Fraser Avenue
Click here to view this location on a map.

BICITYCLE (Bike-city) is a project about mobile life. Sakaguchi is inspired by the lifestyle, innovation and survival skills of homeless people in Japan. His research focuses on two concepts; mobility and recycling. The houses of the homeless are easy to dismantle and remake because people are forced to move their houses. They separate the infrastructures: water, gas, toilet, and electricity. The houses are made from the scraps of the city, as they understand the materials of urban waste are natural resources. Sakaguchi undertakes this concept further through incorporating used bicycles as a survival action for the city. For Nuit Blanche, the artist will create 11 mobile housing units, each attached to a bicycle. The audience can interact and relocate the works within the area.

More interactivity, this time focused on mobility and recycling.

Take Shelter, 2009
Annie Si-Wing Tung
Maggie Flynn
Meiko Maruyama
Stephanie Nicolò
Jessica Thalmann
Installation

Lamport Stadium Parking Lot, west side

Liberty Street, at Fraser Avenue

Click here to view this location on a map.

Take shelter. Build. Take apart. Rebuild. Make shelter. Recreate.

Bring a can if you can. Take a can if you need.

Canned food and cardboard boxes form the basis of this participatory installation. Using these materials, viewers are invited to pack, fold, and stack to create a shelter. Participants may take food items as needed or may bring non-perishable food items to contribute to the piece. Remaining food will go to the Fort York Food Bank. As participants add to, take from, and alter the shelter, they are implicated in a struggle for stability in a system where stability isn’t possible. The cyclical and temporal nature of this exhibition is reflective of the situation perpetuated by superficial solutions supposed to remedy issues of poverty and homelessness. In donating leftover food to a food bank, Take Shelter simultaneously participates in and problematizes one of such temporary solutions. The experience may be playful, reminiscent of building a fort with the box that the refrigerator was delivered in. But it also may be desperate: how do we create shelter when our resources don’t make sense?

Another interactive project, still referencing sustainability and homelessness (like Sakaguchi) but folding in a limitation of resources and a building experience that includes the audience.

These three projects complement each other well, all raising some combination of similar themes: mobility, domesticity, home, sustainability and reusing/recycling. And they all seem to be tackled in different, creative, critical and engaging ways.

Zone A recommendations here. Zone B recommendations here.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: dwelling, homelessness, interactive, makiko haro, mobility, nuit blanche, take shelter, tom dean, toronto, zone c

Monopoly with Real Money, 2009
IAIN BAXTER&
Performance Art, Multimedia Installation

TMX Broadcast Centre Gallery,
The Exchange Tower
130 King Street West (Viewing area outside venue)
Click here to view this location on a map.

Money becomes a conceptual and tactile medium as Toronto celebrities play the iconic real estate board game throughout the night at the TSX. This timely restaging of the artist’s 1973 event draws an eerie connection between the 1970s era-defining recession and today’s market meltdown. Monopoly, patented during the Great Depression, gains new relevance with every boom-and-bust cycle. Does it provide an escape from the grim reality of stock-market crashes and factory layoffs, or offer a training ground for the next generation of would-be entrepreneurs? See how unlikely combinations of artists, musicians, journalists, authors, media personalities, and (yes!) financiers and developers vie for prize properties in an uncertain investment climate — all played in cold, hard cash.

This project is timely, perfectly suited to its zone and somehow manages to make watching a game of Monopoly sound immensely enticing.

Wild Ride, 2009
Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan
Performance Art, Multimedia Installation

Bay Street
(Between Adelaide Street West and King Street West)
Click here to view this location on a map.

Bay Street – emblem of Canada’s banking industry – is closed. The smell of cotton candy and raucous music fill the air. Two midway rides reflect the whirling, tilting exhilaration of the bull market and its less than thrilling collapse. Free to the public and staffed by recently downsized businesspeople, the rides invite audience members to kinetically contemplate the ups and downs of the recent economic crisis. Out of the darkened financial district, screams will be heard!

No additional comment necessary except to say that those carnival-induced screams out of Bay Street are sure to be blood-curdling.

NO, 2009
Santiago Sierra
Sculpture

Temperance Street (East of Bay Street)
Click here to view this location on a map.

Santiago Sierra’s works address structures of power in art and society. His performances, installations and interventions have been featured internationally at venues such as Ikon Gallery, P.S.1/MoMA, Museo Rufino Tamayo, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the ICA (London), and the Sharjah and Moscow biennials. At the 2003 Venice Biennale, he exhibited at the Spanish pavilion. He is represented by the Lisson Gallery (London), Galería Helga de Alvear (Madrid) and Prometeogallery (Milan). At the artist’s request, this biography serves as the description of his piece until it is unveiled during the night of Nuit Blanche.

Hello. Did you read that last sentence? This is some mysterious business. The only clue we’re given is that it’s a sculpture. I won’t even attempt to imagine what it might be. I will just try to be there at 6:55pm when it is unveiled. Anticipation!

Seriously, I could go on and on. Anna Friz’s Respire, Dan Mihaltianu’s Vodka Pool, Marcia Huyer’s Wasted Breath... Spend a lot of your evening here.

Zone A recommendations here. Zone C recommendations here.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: display cult, iain baxter&, jennifer fisher, jim drobnick, lorri milan, nuit blanche, santiago sierra, shawna dempsey

Zone A, in Downtown North — most of which is accessible by the Yonge-University subway line — features 53 projects, some curated by Gregory Elgstrand and others by Thom Sokoloski. Here’s what I think you should make a point to see. Zone B recommendations here. Zone C recommendations here. (Images and descriptions lifted from the Nuit Blanche website.) It all starts on October 3rd at 6:55pm.

Ghost Chorus — Dirge for Dead Slang, 2009
Katie Bethune-Leamen
Installation

Larry Sefton Park
Corner of Bay Street and Hagerman Street
Click here to view this location on a map.

From the dead centre of Larry Sefton Park the sights and sounds of Ghost Chorus – Dirge for Dead Slang rise up into the trees and into the ears of onlookers, rubberneckers and passers-by. These ghostly apparitions raise their voices to the driving melancholic baseline from the beyond to revivify outmoded slang of the long and recent past. See the dead rise to life! Hear the dead rise to life! Sing. Sing. Sing.

A little bird told me that this chorus will feature volunteers who do not necessarily have vocal skills. Obviously this needs to be witnessed.

Battle Royal, 2009
Shaun El C. Leonardo
Performance Art

Toronto Coach Terminal
610 Bay Street
Click here to view this location on a map.

Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, 20 men will enter Toronto’s original bus depot with lingering art-deco design and step into a 17’ steel cage. Shaun El Conquistador Leonardo (artist and trained fighter) along with 19 of Canada’s elite pro-wrestlers will fight blindfolded until only one man is left standing.

The match is an intense, theatrical recreation of the book’s opening scene also entitled Battle Royal. Occupying a space between literary representation, wrestling spectacle and art performance, Battle Royal is an unscripted event harkening back to the actual fight to-the-end bouts African Americans were encouraged to enter for prize winnings during post-slavery American South; while manifesting the artist’s own personal fear of societal invisibility.

Beginning at 7pm members of the audience are invited to be blindfolded and escorted into the cage where they will have the opportunity to feel the intimidation and potential of aggression Battle Royal encompasses. Gradually, as the night reaches its peak, professional wrestlers will be introduced to the ring, initiating the action while the artist, Shaun El C. Leonardo, seeks to withstand the pain, embarrassment and discomfort of struggling in front of eyes without having sight himself.

Honestly, I can’t explain why I want to see this. The printed catalogue didn’t include the last paragraph that indicates audience members will be participating; I think this adds a whole other dynamic that may be even more painful to watch. It sounds brutal and violent, and I am ashamed by my own curiosity.

Artscape Wychwood Barns
Several group exhibitions/installations

601 Christie Street
Click here to view this location on a map.

I am recommending Artscape Wychwood Barns as an entire venue because they have five independent projects that all seem compelling and worth checking out. There’s Home Sweet Hogar, a group exhibition that is part of the Allende Arts Festival; Things With Wings, a large-scale sculpture exhibition by Charmaine Lurch; sound(e)scape by Darren Copeland and Tree Prosthetic Project by Jane Tingley, both sound art presentations; Memoir, a video installation by Peter Horvath; and a group exhibition called 1001 Stories.

The photo above is from Home Sweet Hogar.

There is lots of other stuff happening in Zone A (click here for a map), of course. Obviously Nuit Blanche is partially intended to be a psychogeographic experience, but in the past I’ve found it best to plan for the things you really want to see. Otherwise, you might never get to them!

Zone B recommendations here. Zone C recommendations here.

Share & Save

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: artscape wychwood barns, gregory elgstrand, katie bethune-leamen, nuit blanche, shaun el. c leonardo, thom sokoloski

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.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Post tags: community, education, intervention, microfunding, microgrants, relational aesthetics, thesis, tiny grants

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.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: balint zsako, collage, exhibition, katharin mulherin

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 <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=945405493000735497>.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: film festival, palestine, robert allison, tiff, toronto, tpff

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.

Untitled (Self Portrait), 2009, acrylic and antique map on canvas, 24″ × 18″

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.”

Untitled (Self Portrait), 2009, acrylic and antique map on canvas, 40″ × 29″

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.

Heading image: Untitled (Self Portrait), 2009, acrylic and antique map on canvas, 20″ × 16″
Images courtesy the artist.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: angell gallery, maps, michael de feo, painting, portraits, street art, toronto

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.

[Header Image: city flicker stars (detail) by Alex McLeod; courtesy of the artist. Rollover images for details.]

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: 3d rendering, alex mcleod, angell gallery, concertina gallery, landscape, lonsdale gallery, switch contemporary