|
|
|
AKA Gallery's 4th Annual Art Lottery Fundraiser held on November 30th was a wonderful success. Many thanks to the artists and volunteers who's generous contributions made the evening possible! |
|
|
|
|
|
Saturday November 17, 2007, Site and Subject reception Sponsored PAVED Arts and AKA Gallery. The ART LAB LAUNCH AND BUS TOUR will conclude at 12:45 at PAVED/AKA building, 424 20th Street West. A reception will follow at Red Shift Gallery, 118 20th Street West. Clark Ferguson, the first artist commissioned for the new PAVED/AKA billboard will be in attendance. Ferguson's project is part of the "Site and Subject" project which also features artists Linda Duvall, Shane Clintberg and Adrian Blackwell. |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
Our Daily Bread a site-specific installation by Tracy Susheski located at 635 20th Street West, at the corner of 20th Street and Avenue G Project begins Monday, September 23. noon Onsite lecture and tour of the project site with the artist : Saturday, September 29. 2pm |
 |
|
In June, Vancouver-based artist Tracy Susheski arrived in Saskatoon to cultivate 2,000 square feet of land in the heart of the city, planting wheat and canola crop on a vacant lot in Riversdale. Now she’s back to work with the fruits of her labours, installing
sculptures made from bread amongst her crop as a response to the
Terminator Technology currently under consideration for regulatory
approval in food production. Susheski’s wholewheat bread sculptures are adorned with red non-pareil sugar sprinkles, visually mimicking the genetic alteration while representing the sugar-coated promises brought to us by big business and regulatory agencies about the societal, economic, and health effects of a bio-engineered food supply. Though Susheski has handmade her ‘crop’ from bread and candy, she has designed the project as a pseudo-scientific test site, replete with lab equipment and scientific process. She will be on-hand daily from September 23 through October 5 as she installs the work to talk with the public and answer questions about the art. Our Daily Bread comments on the established relationship of the Canadian wheat industry to science experiments performed on this essential staple food item, concerns about the genetic material released into our environment and our food supply through this process, and the use of unwitting humans as guinea pigs in this game. It also touches on important issues such as the farming crisis in Saskatchewan/the big business of wheat (the growing economic disparity between farmers who produce food and the bio-tech companies who own patents to seeds), and accessibility of food (not just affordability, but access to healthy safe, ethical food choices). Gentrification of the food supply doesn’t refer simply to an unfair distribution of profits or the dwindling numbers of healthy food choices, however. There are much graver safety concerns for crops not able to reproduce their own seeds, and for sustainable eco-systems - including organic and sustainable food production – which are affected by pollen drift, pesticide and herbicide use, toxic waterways and factory farm waste. Our Daily Bread presents an ominous vision, where food production is more lab experiment than a product of the farm or kitchen. Once the work has been installed, it will remain onsite indefinitely; Susheski believes that the natural disintegration of her ‘crop’ helps to comment upon the decay of natural and sustainable food and agri-business.
|
|
Site
and Subject: Lecture: Public forum and urban issues fair:
Come and discuss the complex relationships between cultural production and promotion and the ways in which the city of Saskatoon is changing. As Canada changes its economy from resource extraction and industry to information, creative work is becoming one of the key sectors of production, while cultural products are more and more our society’s primary commodities. This fundamental shift has been felt very strongly in the physical and social fabric of Canadian cities, where creative industries act as catalysts for the transformation of downtown neighbourhoods and former working-class spaces, causing widespread gentrification and increasing the segregation of cities along lines of race and class. Artists occupy a pivotal position in this transformation. They act as a research community, serving as a school for commercial design, and experimenting with new forms and styles of creation that can later be appropriated by business. In addition to this professional role, artists also experiment with alternate ways of living, which can similarly be appropriated by real estate developers, fashion designers and the entertainment industry. So, creativity can’t be seen as simply good for the city; instead, it has to be thought of as a concept to be struggled over. Real creativity produces new forms of cultural diversity through inspired moments of productive experimentation. However, the ideological use of the concept by business and political interests involves a very different process and result: intensifying class differences, while evening out experiences of everyday life. AKA Gallery’s and PAVED Art’s’ Site and Subject brings together three artists’ projects that each propose different strategies for rethinking the role of creativity in urban change. Please join us for a discussion focused on the following subjects and questions: 1. Creating a context for conversation across neighborhoods: Real estate development functions to separate neighborhoods through property values. By creating forms for exchange between different urban areas, can we help to change the stark, yet unspoken, segregation of urban space? 2. Representing unrepresented proposals for urban transformation: The city often seems to be produced by distant and powerful forces beyond the grasp of ordinary citizens. If citizens could represent their alternative visions for the city, would they be more empowered to produce them? 3. Renaming places: The inequality of this city is maintained by
a complex symbolic structure. The names of institutions, spaces
and people are one important aspect of this. How could the renaming
of a particular place act as a catalyst for rethinking its social
relations? Adrian Blackwell is an artist, urban researcher and designer, whose work focuses on the uneven development of post-Fordist urban spaces. Recent exhibitions include the 2005 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche and Detours: tactical approaches to urbanization in China both in 2006; and Just Space(s) at LACE gallery in Los Angeles in 2007. He is a collaborator on the team selected to redesign Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square.
|
|
 |
|
|
DANIEL BARROW - THE FACE OF EVERYTHING performance : Friday, June 8, 8 pm The Face of Everything, directed, written, animated and performed by Daniel Barrow. Music by Matthew Adam Hart 2002, 45:00 minutes The Face of Everything is a live animation that tells a story based on the life experiences of some of Liberace's most notorious boyfriends. "Hillbilly" is a poor, dejected teenager, who travels to the big city (mid-1970s Las Vegas) to discover love, vision and identity in a much older, outrageously superficial nightclub entertainer. The symbol of the face as a blank canvas or template is central to this piece and acts as a stage for transformation and meaning. |
WINNIPEG BABYSITTER Free film screening at the Roxy Theatre, Winnipeg Babysitter has been described as "jaw-droppingly entertaining" by Toronto Xtra and "screamingly funny" by the CBC. In the late 1970s and throughout the '80s, Winnipeg experienced a "golden age" of public access television. Anyone with a creative dream, concept or politic would be endowed with airtime and professional production services. A precedent was set in the late '70s when the infamous performance artist Glen Meadmore sat in front of a television camera and silently picked at his acne for 30 minutes in a program called The Goofers. Winnipeg Babysitter traces this and other unique vignettes from a brief synapse in broadcasting history when Winnipeg cable companies were mandated to provide public access as a condition of their broadcasting license. The local public access archives were destroyed when larger cable
companies gradually bought the smaller ones, and consequently the
programs could only be found in the VHS collections of the original The work from this program can be located in an under-recognized zone outside the mainstream of art and video circulation. While some of the artists from the program have since established tremendous critical success (notably Guy Maddin, Kyle McCulloch, and members of the Royal Art Lodge), it should be noted that every producer included in this program was driven entirely by creativity and enthusiasm without any commercial participation in either the art world or the television industry. The artists of Winnipeg Babysitter are unified by the idea of presenting work voluntarily in a public realm. This program provides a critical framework for work that has often been misunderstood by the general public and overlooked by the art world. Winnipeg Babysitter addresses histories of open airwaves, grassroots and D.I.Y. culture, 1980s queer politics, and the Winnipeg "prairie gothic" sensibility. Many of the featured programs were designed to provoke and were, as a consequence, maligned or censored in the 1980s for their experimental or transgressive content. Most Winnipeg public access programming, however, was created specifically to delight and entertain a diverse audience. Winnipeg Babysitter features work made by: Winnipeg Babysitter presents two screens: the video projection and Barrow's handcrafted, overhead-projected liner notes. The hand-turned transparency pages provide an appropriate edge of the personal, the unrehearsed and the homegrown to complement the ad hoc nature of public access television. Barrow's performance alongside of the video image provides a depth and context to these video artifacts. Winnipeg Babysitter is sponsored by Videopool, Winnipeg. Special thanks to Saskatoon Diversity Network, our community partner in this and other Pride Festival programming, and to the Roxy Theatre/Rainbow Cinemas for supporting this project. Artist Biography: Daniel Barrow is a Winnipeg-based media artist, working in performance, video and installation. He has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. Recently, Barrow has exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), New Langton Arts (San Francisco), and The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). Since 1993, Barrow has used an overhead projector to relay ideas and short narratives. Specifically, he creates and adapts comic book narratives to a "manual" form of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on mylar transparencies. Barrow variously refers to this practice as "graphic performance, live illustration, or manual animation." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dressware 2 Ana Rewakowicz Artist Talk: Saturday, May 19. 2pm Dressware is long-term, research and development project, inspired by the legacy of Archigram that investigated the relation between cities and new technologies, regarding fun, play and pleasure as their projects rationale. Expanding on Archigram's concept of 'clothing for living in', Dressware project evolves around the idea of clothing as portable architecture in 'you never know WEAR?' situations of local and global emergencies. Considering how our lives have become multi-dimensional and multi-demanding, this work attempts to comment on global uncertainties and the relation between technology and everyday life. Dressware brings our individual needs to the basic, everyday experience of survival and consists of three prototypes: SleepingBagDress, ParachuteDress and LifesaverDress. To date only the first prototype of the SleepingBagDress has been developed in two versions. This prototype involves a multipurpose kimono-dress that when inflated changes into a cylindrical container inhabitable by one or two people was used in walking performances in Mexico City (Mexico), Toulouse (France), Brussels (Belgium) and Tallinn (Estonia) as part of the as part of the International Symposium of Electronic Art - ISEA 2004. For the Dressware 2 production residency at AKA Gallery the artist
will focus on research and development of the remaining two prototypes: |
Artist Biography: |
|
|
|
|
Our April 27th fundraiser a great success! AKA would like to send a special shout out to our performers Funeral Songs, Quadrant Kahn and We All, Us Three, Will Ride. An extra special shout out to our wonderful volunteers! |
|
|
|
Handheld Landscape Tim van Wijk, Toni Hafkenscheid March 30 - May 5 This exhibition was curated by AKA’s selection jury on the theme of re-visioning the landscape into pocket-sized portions. Hafkenscheid’s photographs, though actual images of real grand-scale landscapes, create the illusion of miniature landscape models, and Van Wijk’s Landscape Generator is a kinetic diorama of an ever-changing landscape. The word landscape is centuries old and originates from the Dutch, "Landschap" or German "'Landschaft' which reference small patches of land. Its original use suggested a worldview strongly connected to land and an individual’s grounding within it, eventually falling out of common use long before landscape art was popularised, in favour of words that suggested larger political structures such as territory, country, and domain; concepts that are difficult to picture and even more difficult to capture in an image. Both of the artists in this exhibition talk about an altered view of the land; a skewed perspective stemming from the scene outside the moving window of a childhood roadtrip auto. Both artists grew up to become the gods of their own worlds, though as mere mortals were unable to breathe life into their creations. Their worlds are made of styrofoam and cotton batting, the castoffs of a manmade planet that has become so attached to its toys it no longer recognizes nature and instead mistakes it for another of its creations. It’s only when the landscape is fake that it becomes concrete in our minds. Landscape art is an attempt to recreate something vast, making it tangible. Van Wijk and Hafkenscheid’s tiny toy landscapes suggest that the reality of our relationship with land and place has become so lost that they’re compelled to bottle it, essentially; to miniaturize it so that it can be held, felt, touched with the fingers and placed on our pocket. Making the landscape small enough to hold in the hand makes it small enough to hold in our brains, to conceive. It reminds us that the world responds to our touch, that it is fragile and that we need to be mindful of how we play with it. Cindy Baker, AKA Gallery |
|
|
|
|
|
8th Annual Edible Books Festival April 1 If you enjoy food for thought, eating your own words or want to take a bite out of literature, AKA and The Saskatoon Public Library have prepared something delicious for you! Interested in getting involved? Here’s how: Edible books
can be celebrated and created by everyone from children, artists,
chefs, individuals, and families. Members of the community are encouraged
to participate, regardless of age or skill, in creating their own
edible book. |
|
Donna Akrey SHOWROOM* Saturday, February 24 - Friday, March 23 Open House: We are accepting donations of objects and materials that you are ready to part with... Anything... a shoe, string, an old blender, 15 twist ties, a piece of wood... But must fit into a 12 inch square. To be transformed in the *Central Recycle And Processing Unit. Drop off begins Saturday, February 24 at noon and continues during gallery hours until Friday, March 16. The 'new products' will be for sale to the public for $2 each. All proceeds will be donated to AKA. Sales conitnues until Friday, March 23. |
WORKSHOP SERIES 2007 Preparing A Successful Submission - Free to AKA and Paved Members! Saturday February 10, 12-4pm & Saturday February 17, 12-4pm The first of this two day workshop provides an introduction to the hows and whys of preparing a successful submissions to artist run centers and other presentation venues. The second day provides hands-on learning, as the workshop participants bring in their completed work from the first day, form a mock jury, and are led through the process of how selection committees work using their own submissions as examples. |
|
|
|
|
I Hate Valentines Day Dream Art Lottery! On February 9th, AKA presented its 3rd annual dream art lottery fundraiser. We would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to the artists who contributed work and the volunteers and budding art patrons who made the event a smashing success! |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
ARCHER PECHAWIS - Elegy Artist talk: Monday, January 29th at 7pm Elegy is a memorial to the missing women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Using video projections and an original score by singer Anthony Favel and cellist Cris Derksen, Elegy is a meditation on the lives of these women and the tragically indifferent response of the Vancouver Police Department. The performance will feature live cello accompaniment by Cris Derksen. As a special addition, Pechawis will be performing a new short piece entitled Horse which was premiered this month in Calgary at the International Festival of Animated Objects. Horse is an historical re-imagining of the West told with voice, drum, video and cello. Archer Pechawis is a media-integrated performing artist, new media
artist, writer, curator and teacher who has been creating solo performance
works since 1984. His practice investigates the intersection of
Plains Cree culture and digital technology. Archer also works as
a "First Nations Stand-Up Essayist," webmonkey, technician
and MC. |
|
design by Troy
Gronsdahl