art-action

Coyote Comforts - Update

Coyote Comforts is a collaborative work that I created with Maggie Winston over the past year. Performing in and out of the character of the coyote, we transformed a big, moldy box of coyote-print squares into functional patchwork blankets. The squares were remainders from a World Urban Forum community art project that Maggie Winston had worked on in 2006.  Each square was first printed with a lovely coyote print (designed by Pat Beaton) and was then altered with texts by the participants of the World Urban Forum. During the past year, Maggie & I assembled the squares into patchwork blankets during marathon sewing sessions (at Centre A, as part of The Living Blanket, the Britannia Library, and 3084). Our plan was to distribute the finished blankets to individuals who, like coyotes, have experienced displacement and insecure housing as a result of urbanization.

The first Coyote Comforter is currently part of an on-line fund-raising auction for the Downtown Eastside Centre for the Arts. Later in December, they will be distributing the remaining 10 comforters to elders in their community. Please consider making a pledge for the first Coyote Comforter or one of the other beautiful blankets. All the proceeds will go towards the development of this emerging community art project.:

Downtown Eastside Centre for the Arts - Online Auction

The final Coyote Comforts performance happened in June, 2009 as part of Jem Nobel's 3084: Short-Term Storage for materialized ideas/ ideated materials. His essay is a good summation of the project. You can read it here: Coyote Comforts at 3084

Garden Gnomad Podcasts

It is time to download!

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Put these files onto your portable player and bring them with you to MOPARRC's Tarten & Tweed Tea Party Means of Production Community Garden on Sunday, September 13, 2009.

The voices of these gardeners will be the sound track to your wandering through the garden during this final public event for the MOPARRC summer art residency in the garden. These audio files along with a set of photos taken at the time of the interviews form the wind up presentation of Garden Gnomad, the project that resulted from my residency with MOPARRC this summer. Please join Sharon Kallis, Lori Weidenhammer and me to celebrate a wonderful year in the garden!

PRESS RELEASE
MOPARRC presents-
Tartan & Tweed Tea Party at Means of Production Community  Garden
Sunday September 13, 1-4pm
North  China Creek  Park: Corner of St Catherines Street and East 6th Avenue, Vancouver, BC

Celebrate the Harvest Moon; join us for finger food and wild-crafted tea. Suggested Party Attire: “plaid, tartan and tweed.” The last of three tea parties planned for the season, the Tartan & Tweed Tea Party will feature on-site artworks by Sharon Kallis of community-made artwork using materials grown on site during a year-long artist in residence.

Lori Weidenhammer will give tours of the MOP Bee Garden and discuss some of the reasons she and co-designer Jean Kindratsky chose to grow certain plant varieties. Weather permitting, (and hive permitting) Weidenhammer will also give you the opportunity to try out her solar powered sonic therapy chair.

Garden Gnomad Podcasts – Lois Klassen’s summer-long Garden Gnomad Project presents a series of short audio works to guide visitors to hidden secrets in the Means of Production Garden. Bring your iPod, portable CD player, transistor (there will be some available to borrow) and load up podcasts onsite from the solar-powered Garden Gnomad machine and Kitchen Radio (Rafael Tsuchida). Download the podcast ahead of time by following instructions posted here: http://loiszing.blogs.com/artaction/2009/09/garden-gnomad-podcasts.html

          Performances by:

The Legion of Flying Monkeys Horn Orchestra   
and special guest Gnomie

Note: Uneven terrain.  Proper foot wear recommended; children must be supervised.

For more information about the garden events, and to be placed on an e-mail listing for MOP garden events, email moparrc@gmail.com. Or visit http://moparrc.wordpress.com/

Media can call Sharon Kallis at 604-215-9501

Project partners: Environmental Youth Alliance, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation,  Community Arts Council of Vancouver

Project Funders: The Mount Pleasant Community Association, Canada Council for the Arts, Vancouver Office of Cultural Affairs.

Blogging Slow Down

I have put blogging low on my priority list during this summer of field work for the Garden Gnomad project and MOPARRC. The development of meaning and artworks through Garden Gnomad has really been open and flexible so I found myself using a specially designated blog to jot down some of the ideas and share its findings: Garden Gnomad is

Since that project is almost complete, I am in the process of putting together a final work for an upcoming event at the Means of Production Community Garden on September 13, 2009. Follow MOPARRC Coming Events for details.

Comforter Art-Action: I have finally uploaded to Comforter photos from both the Sew City event at the Glenbow Museum in May and Coyote Comforts performance at 3081 in June. Browse those photos in the albums on the right of this page. Perhaps you contributed to those blankets in some way?

Also found in my photo vault: While in Calgary, I spent a nice early summer day with my parents at the local zoo. I had a moment of primal connection when two female gorillas had a friendly tousle over a pile of worn blankets:

Give Peace A Chance x 40

Forty years ago today, John Lennon and Yoko Ono used a Montreal bed to stage a highly influential art action. They were protesting peace in the midst of massive public demonstrations against the Vietnam war.

This video combines their anthem with footage from Montreal and massive protests in major American cities:    Give Peace A Chance

What makes the bed a stage for displays of social revolt or activism? It is an object that seems to expect human involvement or participation of the most vulnerable kind.  It is the place where we give up consciousness to sleep or to the intimacy with another. The site of a bed implies that we share with others the need for comfort and protection. It reminds us of pleasure and deep peace. Its presence in art or in an activist display, is enough to make us remember and sympathize with those who are without a bed or without peace and safety at night, at a time when their bodies are most trying to free the self of the daytime demands of consciousness. We can feel it.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Art currently has on exhibition:  Imagine: the Peace Ballad of John & Yoko

(Let me tell you now)
Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
Revolution, Evolution, Masturbation, Flagellation, Regulation,
Integrations, mediations, United Nations, congratulations
All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance
(from www.absolutelyrics.com )

Poverty Homelessness Blankets

Jason Granger of Winnipeg takes part in a sewing circle at a social forum Wednesday at the Telus Convention Centre. From left: Katherine Reed; Vicky Dalton; Lois Klassen; Granger; April D'Aubin; and Gloria Brehm. The forum continues today.
Photograph by : Ted Jacob, Calgary Herald
The full article is here: Tax credits...

I need to counter that very bland report on the Canada Social Forum as printed in the Calgary Herald (next to the obituaries on Thursday) with this much more urgent initiative to get Federal Government attention focused on Homelessness: The 2010 Homelessness Hunger Strike Relay - Passing the Burnt Wooden Spoon

On the weekend the Glenbow Museum in Clagary was buzzing with sewing machines and murmuring with conversation, not to mention chatter, and laughter... it was a place to make stuff: to learn to mend (with Linda Hawke), to learn to embroider (with Adina Edwards), to learn to make one-of-a-kind shoulder bags (with Mary Swain) and to participate in the biggest ever Comforter Art-Action sewing circles (with Lois Klassen). We made about 20 blankets that were piled in the lobby on top of a gorgeous Victorian-style oak bed from the Glenbow's collection (c.1905). 

I will stay in Calgary for the rest of the week to get the blankets finished and to explore the city's community art projects and gardens (for the Garden Gnomad project).

A big laugh at the Canadian Social Forum

Does Comforter Art-Action make you laugh? Well Mary Walsh managed to use it for a laugh at the first Canadian Social Forum here in Calgary! She was asked to do announcements from the podium yesterday. One of those announcements involved a description of the sewing circle that I hosted outside of the conference hall. She described how the delegates were bringing fabric to make a blanket for a local shelter. She looked out at the crowd of 500+ delegates and considered the enormity of their topic at hand -poverty- and she said "Only one blanket!?!" At least that is how it was repeated to me...

 Yes, delegates brought some interesting fabric from many distant places and situations. Tetteh Kofi Hadjor from the Green Pastures Society in Toronto and Isaac Akrong from Humanity in Harmony brought two beautiful Kenta Clothes from Ghana and asked us to choose one for use in a blanket. I chose the blue and yellow piece because I knew that it would look stunning with the black polar fleece backing (supplied by a local fabric store). Veronica (from the Glenbow's family programs), chose the fabric to border it and Alexis (a Glenbow volunteer) sewed it all together on the old singer that I brought along. This blanket top as well as all of the interesting fabric samples will be finished as blankets at this weekend's sewing circles in the Museum on Saturday and Sunday.

Meanwhile the princess bed in the museum lobby has a small stack of blankets. Tonight I will participate in  a one hour panel about art and social change. The moderator is Dick Alverns and the other artists from 'This is my home' project in Calgary: Linda Hawke, Adina Edwards and Mary Swain. Art and Social Action, 6:30pm, ConocoPhillips Theatre, Glenbow Museum.

SEW CITY and Greenwich Village

I am in the final stages of preparing to take Comforter Art Action to Sew City at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. The Museum staff tell me that donations of blankets and materials are piling up. This is good news because my installation will be a reenactment of the most enduring image from Anderson's The Princess and the Pea. I am suggesting that the big pile of comforters that have been donated and hand made for those displaced from homes and comfort, can today signify a pile of social capital rather than class distinction which was the tale's original meaning.

I was intrigued to hear recently that the term social capital originated with Jane Jacobs. On this day, I think about how her life as a mother in a vibrant community informed her activism and theorizing. "Jane's Walk" through Greenwich Village with historian and educator Nicholas O'Han, was a highlight of my recent travels to NYC. Thank you Nic O'Han for generously showing us the neighbourhood and telling great stories about key moments from NYC's past. I am intrigued and inspired.

[The fresh copy of Dark Days Ahead that I had picked up at McNally Jackson, a Canadian subsidiary planted near the village where it is busy building reading communities, was unfortunately left behind on a bench at the JFK Airport. Darn.]

Hope to see you in Calgary next week!

Signal & Noise 2009

Meet me at VIVO's  Signal & Noise tonight!
http://www.signalandnoise.ca/

NEW YORK and then CALGARY's Glenbow Museum

Last week I put Garden Gnomad on the road: that is, I took it on a garden visit to meet Ruth Tschannen at Cascadia Garden, and I set it up at the Mount Pleasant Community Centre's Earth Day event. Both trips seemed very successful to me. The gardeners were inspiring and the weather was completely suitable for the machine and its work.

The Earth Day at the Mt. Pleasant CC was a quiet event with a few local gardeners coming by to gather up plants and information about gardening. Madame Beespeaker and I hung out at the dry wading pool where she was getting the kids to do some eco-play. They made lovely dandelion honeycomb on the pavement and under water drawings inside of the pool. I had Garden Gnomad make some pretty awesome photo-postcards of kids and families in the honeycomb with randomly generated Vancouver area gardens in the background.

Garden Gnomad is a little slow, but it works! After a few minutes of playing with the computer and flash drive, a picture postcard does come out. The delay is good for conversation! I was pretty inspired to hear about how a number of gardeners are using their allotments (including a traffic round about - called an 'island' by the gardener!) to grow herbs for salves and soaps. A young couple told me that they will be gardening their sister's garden this year as a memorial after her recent death. Everyone is eager to have GG show up for a visit and to document their efforts and pleasures. I can't wait.

But I have to wait, because soon I will leave for an 8 day trip to NY. There I will check out Laura Silver's Soft Core NYC and Wagner's Ring Cycle and Printed Matter and Exit Art and many great art museums and who knows what else.

After the NY trip, I will be in Calgary as an artist in residence at the Glenbow Museum to offer Comforter Art-Action at the Sew City events. It will include a sewing circle at the Canada Social Forum, a panel on arts and social action, sewing circles inside the museum, and a growing installation of comforters inside the museum lobby. I will blog more about that as the time nears. For now, if you are in the Calgary area during May 20-24, please consider participating in a sewing circle -- or bring a blanket to add to the growing stack in the lobby of the Glenbow! Please spread the word!

Download Sew City email

Garden Gnomad in Action

The tools... machinery... that will travel with me through a summer of conversation with gardeners is finally road-worthy. Garden Gnomad is a mobile,  solar-powered documentation implement that records isolated features from community gardens and innovative sites of urban agriculture. On site, it produces lovely postcards that are randomly generated images from gardens in the region. Gardeners can take the photos to send to far away friends/family or leave them for other people encountered en route. Some postcards feature questions or 'unknown's'. Gardeners can look through those postcards and mail answers back to the gardeners who generated the inquiry.

Mostly Garden Gnomad is an invitation to have a conversation in the garden about growing food, trees, pollination habitats and more in the city, in 2009. 

The photo-postcards are stored here:
Garden Gnomad Postcard album

Photos of Garden Gnomad in action at the Means of Production Community Garden and other sites are here:
Garden Gnomad in Action album

EVENTS:
Saturday, April 18 (1-3pm) - Garden Gnomad will be at the Earth Day Celebration at the Mount Pleasant Community Centre (16th & Ontario, Vancouver, BC) as part of the MOPARRC meet & greet. Mt Pleasant CC is one of the supporters of MOPARRC Events & Activities. Lori Weidenhammer as Madame Beespeaker will be there eco-tagging the site from 11-2. Sharon Kallis, another MOPARRC artist will be at the Means of Production Community Garden (6th & St Catherines) hosting a garden work party.

Sunday, April 26 (1-4pm) - Earth Day Artists Tea Party at Means of Production Community Garden. This is the first of three public celebrations resulting from three artists in residence at MOP. On-site performances from a number of local performers combine with garden-brew teas and other goodies.

Keet tract of MOPARRC events here .

Saturday, May 9 (12-5) - Garden Gnomad will be at the Stone Soup Festival at Britannia Centre (Napier & Commercial) where issues of urban agriculture is combined with artworks of all kinds.

At all of these events, I am hoping to pick up some dates for visits to gardens and farms... and give away a lot of gorgeous garden postcards!