Please join us on March 22 at 7pm at PAVED Arts for an evening of contemporary sound and video work featuring the Saskatoon Symphony Chamber Players (The Core) and works by Terry Billings, Amber Christensen, Carrie Gates, David LaRiviere, Joanne Lyons, and Karen Polowick.

Please note: One of the performances on the evening involves a video capture of the live audience. These images will not be recorded or reproduced outside of the live context of the Surround Sound event.

Program:
John Cage (US/SK) Five  (woodwind quintet) Video by Amber Christensen and Karen Polowick

The post Surround Sound – March 22nd, 7 PM SOLD OUT first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Please join us for the opening reception of Trail Home on Friday, January 18th at 8PM.

Rowan Pantel, Trail Home

“And when you’re alone there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.”

The post Toon’s Kitchen VII : Trail Home first appeared on PAVED Arts.

For this particular call for submissions we are looking for an artist to respond to John Cage’s piece Five (1988, 5min), performed by a woodwind quintet (watch here). Inspired by Cage’s letter of his time spent at Emma Lake, SK, published in Canadian Art in January, 1966, the piece will address Cage’s relationship to the Canadian landscape while exploring the notion of time vs timelessness. Artists working in video, film, photography and performance are invited to apply. Screening fees as per IMAA schedule will be paid.

Read John Cage’s letter here

Please submit:

Current CV
Project outline
DVD, quicktime, vimeo or youtube (5 min max) or 5 jpgs of proposed work

Please send all submissions to executive@pavedarts.ca by Friday, February 22nd, 2013

The post Call for Submissions – Surround Sound, Deadline February 22nd 2013 first appeared on PAVED Arts.

November 23rd – December 8th, 2012.
Please Join Us for the Opening Reception: Friday, November 23rd, 5:00 to 6:45 PM.

This project begins as a response to harmful stereotypes that are circulated in the mass media, but goes further in a positive direction, to lend voice to those who may otherwise be badly misrepresented in the public record. As the Poet Janet Marie Rogers explains;

The poem, Insult to Injury was inspired by an article in the National Post, written by Christie Blanchford, about the Robert Pickton trial. In the reporting of the victims, Ms. Blanchford called the victims drug addicts and prostitutes. The latter title was true in most cases, but the title drug addict was never reported or proven during the trial.

I found the statement, in print versions of the article and when I researched the on-line version of the article, the accusatory statement was pulled. Media, and particularly in Christie Blanchford’s case, has the ability to commit crimes upon the people they are referencing, just as much as serial killer Robert Pickton. The poem Insult to Injury is informed and based on the National Post’s article.

The post Toon’s Kitchen VI: Insult To Injury first appeared on PAVED Arts.

There will be no equipment or event space rentals during this time.

If you have any questions please call 652-5502 ext 3.

Have a wonderful holiday!

– PAVED staff

The post PAVED arts Winter Holiday Hours first appeared on PAVED Arts.

On the Trail of the Woodcraft Indians
Glenn Alteen Interviews Adrian Stimson

It’s hard to keep up with Adrian Stimson! You have to keep moving. Whenever you think you have a bead on him he shows up somewhere else doing something completely different. You never really know where you’re headed. It’s enough just to follow and keep up- if you can!

I’ve worked with Adrian three times in this past year: on the Ghostkeeper Project where he recreated a 1992 performance work of Ahasiw Maskegon Iskwew at VIVO/OnMain; last April on a project commissioned by grunt gallery; and (as of this writing) he is installing the exhibition Holding Our Breath at grunt- a show that reflects his stint as one of Canada’s official war artists, which brought him to Kandahar a few years ago.

Lately it’s The Shaman Exterminator, a project mounted both at Platform in Winnipeg and at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon. It starts out being about the Spirit Sands but quickly morphs in other directions and changing in scale and scope. We conducted this interview in the dying days of 2012, just as the Idle No More movement was in its genesis, providing an important counterpoint to Adrian’s new work. As we email back and forth the movement gains momentum. There is round dancing in the malls before Christmas, along city streets, and there is the prolonged hunger strike of Chief Teresa Spence.

Glenn Alteen: I’m wondering where to start here. In the Spirit Desert? Burning Man? The Woodcraft Indians? The Shaman Exterminator? The Return of Buffalo Boy? It’s a bit overwhelming! Can you take us through this rich landscape of contrasting ideas and images?

Adrian Stimson: I’ll start at the beginning: Carberry, Manitoba. I really did not know how to proceed with this residency that Platform1 created. Originally, it was going to be a Buffalo Boy performance in the Spirit Sands. Yet the logistics of that became a little daunting, so I decided that it would become a photo/video shoot that would later become performative. Collin Zipp (my assistant provided by Platform) and I headed out on a two day exploration of the Sands. Before we went to the Spirits Sands Park, we decided to stop in Carberry to look for accommodations for the night, which brought us to the Seton Centre, a small museum, art gallery, and gift shop on the main street, dedicated to the life and works of Ernest Thompson Seton. I had no idea that Seton had lived in Carberry. I have used a number of Seton quotes over the years, specifically his calculation that there were 75 million bison in the Americas before contact. This coincidence began the formation of the exhibition. The museum contained many of his writings. Titles such as “The Gospel of the Red Man” and “Woodcraft Indian Lore” excited me, they were totally ripe for the taking or shall I say “re-appropriation” by Buffalo Boy and the Shaman Exterminator. So the stage was set and, since this was a journey, I decided on the idea of “On the Trail.” Where that trail would take me I did not know but trusted that something would form… and it did.

We managed to shoot a lot of video and do a photographic shoot of the Shaman. I was thinking about mystery, the absence of the bison on the landscape, mythology and how stories are created. I was also thinking about the spirits in this land and how it was and is a visioning space where ceremony and quests happen. All these ideas started to form the narrative of my project and the journey.

Once we were out of the desert and I started looking at the video and photos, I began more research into the Woodcraft Indian movement and discovered all its branches, including the Boy Scouts of America. A narrative of colonization, appropriation and dressing up as Indian started to emerge. As I have done a lot of research on this topic over the years I started to form a thesis that the Woodcraft movement and Seton’s books were part of the appropriation of Indian regalia, stories etc, but with an interesting twist: New Age spiritualism. I could see the tenets of religious practice emerging in the writings, yet they had an indigenous flavor, very weird. Anyway, the Shaman Exterminators’ purpose is to bust up or interfere with New Age spirituality, so more of the trail was revealed. It really felt like I was on a journey that was unfolding itself and that I was a vessel being guided somehow.

As this was a journey of coming to know the history of the woodcraft and its various manifestations, it made sense that a performance in Santa Fe and my annual trip to Burning Man would be included in this exploration. Both locations are in deserts, which fit the desert theme, and both deal a lot with appropriation andor the exploitation of indigenous life and material culture. In Santa Fe, I would dress up as a Colonial Ranger, Irish man, White Santa Fe woman stereotype, and finally Indian appropriations and re-appropriations. It was great as the annual Indian market was on, where you could see the spectacle, white privilege, consumption, power and control. At the end of the performance, Terrance Houle, Jamison Chas Banks and I were dressed in loin cloths (car chamois) and fake kids headdresses bought in the market, we circled each other then wrestled each other to the ground, an internal and external struggle. Are we fighting ourselves, each other or the colonial project? Again, the development of “Manifest Destiny,” the taking of the hide but not the meat or the spirit of the animal.

I decided to include Burning Man as I have been going out into the desert annually for the past 12 yearsBurning Man is also rife with appropriations, yet in some weird way it becomes acceptable in the desert. Well, it doesn’t yet. We as a group suspend our judgement for that week and allow radical self expression, which of course includes radical appropriation- I still need to think this one through as I am personally conflicted about it. I do realize that there are a lot of theoretical problems with Burning Man, yet it sure is fun.

So basically that was the journey I videoed and photographed all these places, in hope of somehow weaving a story together. Once back in my studio, I started to stalk the internet for regalia appropriations, to see how the Woodcraft could have manifested into other movements. This is where I started to make the connections to Germany, Hippies, Survivalists, Hollywood, politics and such. It just so happened that a number of fashion houses were being called publicly on their appropriations and had to make apologies – the timing was right as it seems to be a current trend. Several Facebook groups have formed to combat appropriations of indigenous culture. The journey was overwhelming as there was so much to work from; I tried to distill it, yet there are so many images to choose from. My use of the images is also an appropriation, without permission and blatant. Yet I hope it strikes a chord with viewers, so they understand the history and hopefully discover more, which of course is what being On The Trail is all about – discovery.

Glenn Alteen: One thing I do notice though, is how your interests fit into a trend of recent work around the appropriation and misrepresentation of First Nations in early 20^th Century children’s education and literature. Your piece is at least somewhat about Ernest Thompson Seton and his Woodcraft Indians, an early version of the Boy Scouts. Recently I read about Kent Monkman’s work around Karl May’s characters Old Shatterhand and Winnitou and just saw Terrance Houle’s exhibition on Indian Leg Wrestling, a practice invented by the Boy Scout Movement. It seems like there’s something in the air. I’m curious where that is coming from?

Adrian Stimson: I think it has always been there, simmering under the surface. All of our work has played with this subject and it also seems to be a big part of popular culture right now, with the emergence of the Hipsters and the fake headdresses, and various fashion designers ripping off indigenous designs, as well as in the movies, it seems now more than ever that indigenous artists comment. I just saw a trailer for the movie, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, where where white women are Indian warriors.2 It just never ends…

Glenn Alteen: The way this switches into the Seton stuff seems amazingly serendipitous providing an amazing focus for all these divergent elements. Though I do understand what you say about it simmering under the surface. It seemed an earlier generation of First Nations artists were looking at the “disappearing Indian” through artists Like George Caitlin, Edward Curtis and Emily Carr, who were presenting a colonial narrative of the fading and assimilated First Nations. This work seems aimed at the childhood education of that colonial history presented through children’s literature and different scouting activities. Both narratives present a romanticized and idealized vision of First Nations. Representations of the Hollywood Indian (or the Boy Scout Indian) seem to perpetuate heroic views of First Nations at the same time as legislators through the Indian Act are attempting their assimilation. And given the recent events this week around unilateral changes to the Indian Act by the Harper Government those attempts at assimilation are ongoing. How do these appropriations play into these legislated attempts at assimilation and disappearance? It’s as if by mythologizing First Nations they can hasten their extinction. I remember an article in The Walrus a few years back where these German Karl May Indians were flying to Canada and being met by Cree elders. The Germans got off the plane in full Plains regalia to be greeted by the Cree in jeans and cowboy boots. The German’s questioned whether they were “real” Indians.

Adrian Stimson: I think in a weird way it legitimizes assimilation, kind of like we honour your culture by imitating it, therefore it’s okay to take whatever we want, only “the good parts” (in the settlers eyes) and the rest should be forgotten… especially the land and resources. Yes, turning us into myths is a good way to extinction. When I think about what a “real” Indian is, I too have that colonial image seared into my mind, the first thing I think of is feathers and buckskin, the romantic ideal. I know first hand the tenets of brainwashing, I experience this every day, and it started in residential school. Its diabolical really, subtle and constant. It has taken me a life time to what I like to call “change my mind,” kind of stalk it to notice when the colonial program kicks into action, then reprogram. This all kind of sounds like the plot of The Matrix, but I really do feel that we have all been programmed and duped into this Western experiment – media is the pacifier and controller, constantly sending messages that keep us in our place, reinforcing colonial ideas, similar to the Borg, “resistance is futile,” which most of us believe. This is where I see indigenous artists pushing back or reprogramming, maybe even inserting a virus to crash the system. This is where the Shaman Exterminator comes into play. While he/she has parallels with Plains tribes buffalo shaman and dancers, the shaman exterminator is a “virus” inserted into the program to mess things up, to confuse, to scare, to intimidate and ultimately to laugh at. To expose that everything is a construction within the mind and that there are many programs to choose from, not just the colonial project.

Glenn Alteen: And of course this all plays out in Santa Fe and in Burning Man. While your re-appropriations are skillful at turning these images on their ear, is there a fear that it’s only the First Nations audience who get what you’re doing? Given how unconscious most North Americans are to these representations in the first place one wonders if they will get what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Adrian Stimson: For a while I was concerned that non-indigenous viewers would not get it, that I am preaching to the converted or an art theory savvy crowd. Then something happened… I stopped worrying whether people got my work or not. This happened over a period of time of hearing many views of my work, convergent and divergent, I realized that I have absolutely no control over what and how people think, nor should I. I have confidence that the viewer, should they be interested, will find out more about the work. Hopefully my work will trigger something inside, confuse the program and result in a disturbance that ultimately “changes their mind”. Yet I also know that the Colonial Project is a big monster that is relentless and that many people will never get it and that things will never truly change. I’m not naive to this reality, nor do I have delusions of grandeur that my work will change the world. I am but a small story in a huge memory board, and perhaps one day that story will join others to become an agent of societal change. In the meantime, I will continue to play in my own way, and have fun doing it.

Notes
1. Platform centre for photographic + digital arts in Winnipeg hosted a residency with Adrian Stimson and co-commissioned this interview with PAVED Arts.
2. http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/aglimpseinsidethemindofcharlesswaniii/

The post The Shaman Exterminator: On the trail of the Woodcraft Indians with the Buffalo Boy Scouts of America first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Starting November 21st, each Wednesday, until December 12th, the production suites will be available for members to book 2 hour slots of time to retrieve any media.  This time will be free of charge.

This does not affect media saved to the “Audio Suite Archive” or “Video Suite Archive” hard drives.

ALL MEDIA WILL BE DELETED OFF THE PRODUCTION CENTRE COMPUTERS OVER THE HOLIDAYS!

To book an appointment to retrieve media please email technical@pavedarts.ca or call 652-5502 ext 3

The post PRODUCTION SUITE ANNUAL MEDIA REMOVAL first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Please join us on Friday, November 23 at 7pm at PAVED Arts for an
evening of contemporary sound and video work featuring the Saskatoon Symphony
Chamber Players and “Woodrow” by Graeme Patterson with works by Dee Gibson, Danielle
Raymond and Jean-Sébastien Gauthier.

THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT!

This project is proudly presented by:

The post Hear, See, Think. first appeared on PAVED Arts.

The post PAVED arts assisted MIRADOR Nov 2nd/3rd first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Its baaaack! BlackFlash Magazine and PAVED Arts proudly present the most notorious dance party of the year Vampire Beat 2012! This year prizes are valued at $900 and include a night at the Bessborough Hotel, dinner for two at Hollows Restaurant , an original framed artwork by Cate Francis, and more! The event space will be turned into a video drenched environment complete with Saskatoon’s spookiest video projections and DJ’s. Vampire Beat is a sensory overload of video, costumes, music, and dancing. Come if you dare and don’t forget your ID!

Date: October 27, 2012

Location: PAVED Arts Event Space 424 20 St W, Saskatoon, Sk.

Time: 9pm – 2am

Performers:

Unsatisfied Poets

Greenmist

FORM

DJ Mid-Life Crisis

Tickets: $15 in advance, $20 at the door. You can get advanced tickets at PAVED Arts and BlackFlash offices.

 Don’t forget to sign up for the Facebook group here

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: Delta Bessborough, The Hollows,

Great Western Brewing Co, Art Placement, Proprint, Underground Cafe,

Broadway Theater, CTV, City Perks, Jake’s on 21st, Unreal City, CFCR, The Sheaf, Shaw TV,

MOSO Fest, The Rooster.ca,and Beaumont Film and Record!

The post VAMPIRE BEAT 2012! first appeared on PAVED Arts.

To Register email technical@pavedarts.ca

Final Cut X, Tuesday, October 2nd, 6:30-9:30pm and Wednesday, October 3rd, 6:30-9:30pm

This workshop is meant to introduce members to Final Cut X, the newest evolution in post production video software from Apple, now available for members use in both our video suite and on our mobile macbook pro laptop.  This version of Final Cut features a completely redeveloped interface and sports many features that will be new to users of previous versions.  Come learn from our resident apple certified instructor Raj!

Instructor: Raj Padmanabh

Lighting Essentials, Saturday, October 13th, 12-4pm

This workshop will give members an orientation of PAVED Arts’ photography lighting equipment. It will cover our tungsten and newly acquired strobe light kits. The workshop will orient members with light meter practices, colour temperature, lighting for film and digital cameras as well as camera settings for correct lighting. Members can bring their own digital or analog camera or use PAVED Arts’ Canon 5D or 7D.

Instructor: Barb Reimer

EQs, Compressors, Reverbs, Oh My! Saturday, November 3rd, 12-4 pm

Taking advantage of audio plug ins and effects can greatly improve the over all effectiveness of your project.  This workshop aims at teaching members the basic functions of the three most common types of effects from both a utility and creative tool perspective.  From learning how eliminate wind from outdoor field recordings to covering how compressors can help your dialogue sit in the mix, this workshop is for anyone trying to figure out how to get the most out of their audio recordings.

Instructor: Reilly Forbes

The post Fall 2012 Members Workshops first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Curated by JJ Kegan McFadden

September 14 to October 20, 2012

Pulling together the work of emerging and established artists in the lens based and photographic arts, Every Line & Every Other Line calls into question the history of portraiture, but also makes evident the political implications of how the face, and the mouth in particular, act as a contested site. Working in photographic installation, framed prints and video installation, these artists exemplify a diverse approach to both the medium and subject matter.

This exhibition was organized and circulated by Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (Winnipeg) and will occupy both AKA and PAVED Arts gallery spaces.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday, Noon – 6 pm; Saturdays Noon – 4pm.

For more information, contact either: David LaRiviere, Artistic Director, PAVED arts, (306) 652-5502 ext.1 or Bart Gazzola, Communications Coordinator, AKA Gallery, (306) 652 0044.

PAVED Arts and AKA Gallery: 424 20^th Street West Saskatoon SK. S7M 0X4 www.pavedarts.ca www.akagallery.org

Free admission to the public with barrier-free accessibility.

AKA Gallery and PAVED Arts acknowledge the support of our members, volunteers and partners, and of our principal funders: Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board, SaskCulture, SaskLotteries and Paddock Wood Brewing. Paved also thanks the City of Saskatoon and the National Film Board of Canada.

The post Every Line & Every Other Line first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Visiting Artist Doreen Girard  (Winnipeg, Manitoba) will be following her special Friday evening presentation of SPEAK AND LISTEN with a special workshop available to all members of PAVED Arts free of charge.

This workshop will explore inventive filmic techniques involving overhead and slide projections. In addition to the hands-on workshop, the artist will speak to a number of other cameraless film techniques.

If you are interested in taking advantage of this workshop please sign up with Reilly Forbes, either in person at the PAVED Arts production area or by phone: 652-5502 ext.3. A minimum of five participants will be required for this workshop to be held so please sign up early!

For more information on the SPEAK AND LISTEN presentation see:
http://www.pavedarts.ca/2012/bent-light-expanded-cinema-and-experimental-film-co-programmed-by-doreen-girard-and-leslie-supnet/

Photo credit:  Curtis Gregory Perry

The post CAMERALESS FILM Workshop first appeared on PAVED Arts.

The 4th Installment of Toon’s Kitchen: The Saskatoon Screening Room

Supper’s Ready
by Callen Diederichs
September 14-28th, 2012

An accompanying critical text will be writen by Marcel Petit.
Please join us for the premiere screening of Callen Diederichs’ Supper’s Ready

September 14th at 8:00PM in the PAVED Arts Media Gallery.

This presentation will coincide with the opening reception of Every Line and Every Other Line, Curated by JJ Kegan McFadden and co-presented by AKA Gallery.

Supper’s Ready is the tale of a Mountie who is captured by 2 outlaws. A humorous and ultimately supernatural light is cast on this Canadian icon of law and order in his interactions with those who didn’t fit in with the status quo he is enlisted to uphold.

Artist Bio: Callen Diederichs is a Saskatoon-based filmmaker. He has completed 6 short films which have screened across Canada. His central focus has been a western series set in 19th century Saskatchewan, with a feature script completed and the newest installment set for production next summer.

The post Toon’s Kitchen: The Saskatoon Screening Room “Supper’s Ready” first appeared on PAVED Arts.

A complete schedule of the Sounds Like… Audio Art Festival can be downloaded here

FREE ADMISSION/ PWYC

PAVED Arts is proud to present an evening of sound with the experimental Montreal based collective minibloc, comprised of sound-artists Anne-Francoise Jacques and Nicolas Dion. This presentation is the culmination of a month long residency in which minibloc conducted a workshop series with a number of Saskatoon based audio artists. At the Sounds Like… festival minibloc and workshop participants Terry Billings, Joel Carignan, Constantine Katsiris, Dallas Kruszelnicki, Tanjalee Kuhl and Jon Vaughn will present a series of performances that reflect the collaborative and experimental work that they have produced over the course of the residency.

The evening will commence with a special ‘live’ presentation of Dallas Kruszelnicki’s “Forrest Man” as a part of the Toon’s Kitchen: The Saskatoon Screening Room Series.

Minibloc is an ongoing collaborative project shared between Nicolas Dion and Anne-Françoise Jacques (Montreal). Minibloc uses amplification of objects, small electronic circuits and recontextualisation of field recordings as the material to create live hands-on sound performances, sound installations and radio art pieces. The duo often perform live and have participated in many festivals including Club Transmediale (Berlin), Send & Receive (Winnipeg), Mutek (Montréal), Festival des Musiques de Création (Saguenay) and Rencontres de musiques spontanées (Rimouski). Their first sound installation entitled “Oreilles”, a germinal project that has provided the impetus for much of their current research and production, was curated by Eric Mattson and presented at Centre Clark (Montreal) in 2009 and at Galerie Séquence (Chicoutimi) in 2010.

PAVED Arts acknowledges the support of our members, volunteers and partners, and of our principal funders: Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board, SaskCulture, SaskLotteries, the City of Saskatoon and the National Film Board of Canada.

For more information, contact: David LaRiviere, Artistic Director tel. (306) 652-5502 ext.1 artistic@pavedarts.ca

PAVED Arts: 424 20th Street West Saskatoon SK. S7M 0X4  www.pavedarts.ca
Free admission to the public with barrier-free accessibility.

The post The Sounds Like…Audio Art Festival July 26th to 28th, 2012 first appeared on PAVED Arts.

DSLR cameras can do amazing things for cinematographers, but one area that has always been challenging is how to record high quality audio with only a single 1/8 inch input on the camera body. This new addition to our mobile gear offers a great solution. By attaching this little device to the bottom of your DSLR camera body you get access to 2 balanced, mic/line switchable, XLR inputs, Headphone monitoring, viewable level meters, and AGC disabling. Learn more here…

Akai MPC 1000

Inspired by our recent Urban Radio Lab workshop with MPC guru Aries, PAVED arts was convinced that we had to have one of these in our Audio Suite. The MPC1000 inherits all of the essential MPC features such as 32-voice stereo sampling, 64-track sequencing, and 16 velocity and pressure-sensitive MPC pads, fitting all the production capability into a compact, affordable package. 16MB of on-board memory comes standard and can be expanded up to 128MB. You can save your work to a Standard Compact Flash Card (up to 2GB). A preloaded CF card with popular Akai Pro samples is included to get you going. Learn more here…

Matrox MXO-2 with Max

Have you ever had the experience of working on a project where you love how it looks in the suite, but are disappointed when you see it projected or on a television. This handy little device will allow the LCD television in our video suite to become a professional quality video monitor with many colour calibration tools, including blue only.  Learn more here

The post New Gear at PAVED arts first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Dallas Kruszelnicki’s
Forest Man
July 24 – August 3, 2012

An accompanying critical text will be written by Mark Ferguson.

Please join us for the premiere screening of Dallas Kruszelnicki’s FOREST MAN – Friday,July 27 at 8:00PM. The artist will accompany his 8mm horror film with a live experimental soundtrack during this special Sounds Like… presentation of FOREST MAN in the 2nd floor event space. Otherwise this Toon’s Kitchen presentation will occupy the PAVED Arts Main Gallery space from July 24 to August 3rd.

Filmed in beautiful 8mm film, the Forest Man emerges as a menace spawned from under leaves and other dead vegetable matter of the earth. Dallas Kruszelnicki’s brief study in horror doubles as an evocative ground on which the artist mounts an intense barrage of sound. From the accompanying text by Mark Ferguson:

As he is introduced, Forest Man emerges from under a pile of leaves. Disoriented. How long has he been asleep? Do the leaves act as a warm blanket, or has Forest Man been awoken from hibernation? His clothes appear Neanderthal.

It is the subtle nuances that give the film momentum and leaves us as viewers to interpret and predict the reasons why.

The post Toon’s Kitchen: The Saskatoon Screening Room “Forest Man” first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Send your submission now!

PAVED Arts is excited to offer a fantastic opportunity for seven audio-artists based in Saskatoon. As part of the Senior Residency being staged by the Montreal-based sound collective Minibloc, a series of audio production workshops will be staged as well as a live performance.

PAVED Arts invites interested audio-artists to participate in the workshop series, culminating in a live performance and a corresponding publication! There are seven spots available for artists to work and collaborate in an intensive, “laboratory” environment conducted by Minibloc.

Artist fees of $300.00 will be paid to each participant for their performance contribution at the “Sounds Like audio Art Festival” following the workshop series, scheduled for Friday, July 27 at PAVED Arts!

How To Submit:

A brief statement of interest (no more than 200 words), online sound samples or CD-R recordings and Curriculum Vitae can be delivered by email or regular mail to:

David LaRiviere, Artistic Director, PAVED Arts
424-20 Street West, Saskatoon, SK. S7M 0X4
artistic@pavedarts.ca

Phone David at 652-5502 for more information.

Submissions must be received by no later than Friday, June 22 at 6pm.

PAVED Arts Senior Residency 2012-2013: Minibloc (Montreal)
Minibloc is an ongoing collaborative project shared between Nicolas Dion and Anne-Françoise Jacques (Montreal). Minibloc uses amplification of objects, small electronic circuits and recontextualisation of field recordings as the material to create live hands-on sound performances, sound installations and radio art pieces. The duo often perform live and have participated in many festivals including Club Transmediale (Berlin), Send & Receive (Winnipeg), Mutek (Montréal), Festival des Musiques de Création (Saguenay) and Rencontres de musiques spontanées (Rimouski).

The post Minibloc Audio Residency first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Clark Ferguson’s
Tales From the Deep
July 06 – 19, 2012

In the spirit of full disclosure I feel it necessary to begin by stating that I have known Clark since high school some twenty odd years ago and participated in the shooting of this video. He had me pull his little stuffed fish across the mermaid scenes.

Clark Ferguson is a funny guy. Anyone who has had the pleasure of his company knows this. When I was asked to write this short essay on Clark’s work, and this new video in particular, my thoughts immediately went to questions of Canadian content and to the comedic history of regional art and performance television programming in Canada such as SCTV, Kids in the Hall, CODCO, and Corner Gas. Iconic, regional and funny folklore, thanks to informed and principled people like Clark, are subjects which remains not only open to critique and a constant re-framing, but are also subjects which thankfully never go away. What I did not initially suspect to find buried deep within the work was the way in which multiple histories are invoked and reworked to include ideas of absence, antiquity, settler history and abject loneliness. Perhaps I should have expected the latter after Clark spent several months one summer not long ago renting my empty basement apartment and feverishly sewing the fish and other inhabitants of his undersea world. During that summer Clark himself became a character in his work and a projection of the displaced inhabitants of the prairie past. Through his own personal geography and a little bit of fantasy, he found humour, satire and a sense of the macabre as a strategy to question the dominant and official histories present within the working relationships and the inclusion/exclusion of the local and historical narratives that make up the province of Saskatchewan. These tensions between the iconic and the domestic nation that one encounters in Ferguson’s work become the embodiment of the settler narrative that has become Canada’s dominant national identity. And while the work does not specifically address Canada’s east/west urban versus rural tensions, it does remind us of the historic us and them solitudes and realities at play within regional identity politics.

For many Canadians, the prairies represent a “sublime” landscape, one that is protected by those from within and without. This identity allows for a sense of self which paradoxically has the effect of negatively representing economic expansion (greed), settlement (tourism and development), and civil order (bureaucratic rationality). This irony is not lost on those who dabble in regional politics and identity and so the desire for a “sublime” nature, with its pure, authentic moments within that space represent the heart and soul of prairie identity and the desire to connect through a collective origin and memory. As such, the re-imagining of the original prairie landscape as an undersea world offers us the spirit of a timeless region, from a mythic past all the way to its glorious future. Simply put, the feel good narrative that is created within Clark’s small town caper allows that part of our history that caused the collapse of this earlier, simpler way of life to escape scrutiny as the success and progress of the region moves us beyond the past and into a promising future. And so thinking about Ferguson’s call to re-imagine the prairie landscape, and the profound loss so well hidden behind sight gags and sophomoric humour, we begin to see the space where one can challenge the historic framing of a certain kind of white European masculinity inherent in this country’s history and search for the domestic, female and Indigenous voice that is also at the heart of this province’s actual history.

Ferguson is interested in these stories of cultural reconstruction for what they tell us about life in rural Saskatchewan, of the place new world settlers hold in the ever changing landscape and the development of Canadian identity. Saskatchewan history and its ever changing present is in fact not that easy to reconcile. When Clark first started on this video, Saskatchewan and in particular rural Saskatchewan had gone in a span of about fifty years from that of boom times to a reality that has any rural town within a commute of the larger centres to be either thriving or if beyond commute distance, quiet and, at times, vacant. And while this is a reality that is again in flux with the advent of oil and gas exploration, Clark’s story reminds us that a sense of place connects us to our communities, to our stories and most importantly, to our sense of self. Clark’s work forces us to take into account the relationships individuals have with each other and the spaces we assign meaning to, spaces formed through history, ideology and circumstance. He plays within the tropes of difference, identity and a stereotyped depiction of prairie inhabitants as ‘backwards’ in order to move us past the universal framing of the regions imaginative geographies. He does this by looking past the politics of difference, past the colonial framing of the settler narrative, to a land free of predetermination, to monsters and magic, wonder and transformation. In doing so, he confronts the abject loneliness many feel in the vastness that is the prairies, the loss of love and life, and reminds us of our connection to the the history of the land and its peoples. We become suspended in an animation between the past and the present. And in doing so, Ferguson asks us to contemplate how history is represented, how stories about place and the past circulate in contemporary culture, how social memory informs regional transformation and in turn how a re-imagination of the landscape effects the social relations contained within. Thanks Clark, nice work.

Michael Farnan, 2012

 Clark Ferguson is a film/video maker but also works in photography, sculpture, print-media, and performance. His work takes on multiple concerns regarding issues of gender, sexuality, identity, existential quandaries regarding consciousness and has recently been talking more about his ‘place’ within his work. For example, he is becoming more interested in place as a defining element of all of the above rooted issues. And as such, he has become more interested in developing work about Saskatchewan and making it both interesting and accessible to those within and outside these borders. Much of Ferguson’s work has been presented within art gallery and festival contexts and has been to broadcast.

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Come check out our end of summer Final Cut Pro workshop at PAVED arts hosted by Apple Certified Instructor Raj Padmanabh.  This course is intended for beginners and will cover all the important entry level concepts including.

Introduction to Final Cut Interface

Input and Output Formats/Codecs

Basic Editing Tools

Creative Editing Considerations

Workshop Times:  Tuesday August 28th/Wednesday August 29th 6:30 – 9:30

To register for the workshop please call the equipment desk at 652-5502 ext 3, or email technical@pavedarts.ca

The post End Of Summer Final Cut Pro 7 Workshop first appeared on PAVED Arts.

The month-long Minibloc residency at PAVED Arts will be structured around a four-part series of workshops that culminate in a live performance. The first workshop will focus on different aspects and considerations of sound amplification; workshop two will involve field-recording projects; workshop three will be on building contact microphones and hydrophones; and the final workshop in the series will implement all of the technologies touched upon in the series within the context of performance/installation. Each workshop will touch upon areas that have been a focus of Minibloc’s own research and production, and parallel to this activity the duo will develop a site-specific sound installation/performance piece for a live event to take place at the culmination of the residency. Nicolas Dion and Anne-Françoise Jacques are developing the performance component as a collaborative project that will involve participants in the workshop series.

For the Friday, July 27th edition of the Sounds Like… audio-art festival minibloc and workshop participants Terry Billings, Joel Carignan, Constantine Katsiris, Tanjalee Kuhl and Jon Vaughn will present a series of performances that reflect the collaborative and experimental work that they have produced through the workshop series.

Check out some photos from the first Minibloc workshop here

This residency was funded with generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts section, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

The post PAVED Arts Production Residency 2012-2013 Minibloc (Montreal, QC.) first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Skills that PAVED Arts will share with the youth this summer include, cultural teachings, song and lyric writing, beatmaking/MPC, studio basics and more. The program will take place every Monday for the month of July. The final works will be broadcasted on CFCR Radio upon completion of the project.

The camp concludes with a very special live performance from the group on August 3rd from 2pm to 4pm in the PAVED arts event space

Come out and enjoy some refreshments and some very special entertainment

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Saturday July 21st, 2012

PAVED arts Event Space

424 20th Street West

Saskatoon, SK

Check out the event on Facebook here

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by Lysanne Thibodeau

Screening: Friday July 6th in the event space beginning at 8pm!

StéréoKULTUR (www.stereokultur.org), an organization for German-Canadian cultural exchange, is proud to present a panorama retrospective of independent film and video works shot in Montreal and Berlin by Quebec filmmaker Lysanne Thibodeau. This program will tour Canada from June 21 2012 onward, with the support of the Canada Arts Council.

Lysanne Thibodeau lived in Germany for more than 14 years, and this experience profoundly marked her artistic path. The Montreal, Berlin and Back program offers seven films and videos of hybrid genre, combining documentary, fiction and essay – including works made between 1978 and 2003, before, during and after her “Berlin exile”. Through the works presented, StéréoKULTUR creates a bridge between Canadian films shot in Germany and Canadian films inspired by a German experience, connecting the two cultures and producing intercultural exchange between artist and audience.

SCREENING
Montreal, Berlin and Back will be screened Friday July 6th in the event space beginning at 8pm. The program offers seven films of various genres, combining documentary, fiction and essay. Duration: 104 min

WORKSHOP
Lysanne Thibodeau will present a “master class” workshop on Saturday, July 7th beginning at 2pm. Please register early by contacting Reilly Forbes HERE

Artist Bio of Lysanne Thibodeau
Independent filmmaker since over twenty-five years, Lysanne Thibodeau was born in Montreal. From 1982 to 1996, she lived in Berlin, Germany where she explored different art forms, directed short and medium length films, video clips and artist portraits for various production houses and broadcasters. Active in music she also played with various bands both in Berlin and Montreal. Back in Montreal, she wrote feature films scripts, produced and directed documentaries and film essays all presented in international festivals (Ankara, Barcelona, Berlin, Bonn, Calgary, Caracas, Dresden, Hamburg, Krakow, London, Manila, Manchester, Melbourne, Milan, Moncton, Montreal, Namur, Paris, Rome, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Turin, Toronto, Vancouver, Venice, Wroclaw and last but not least Yellowknife). She also acts as curator of events and as consultant in the community of independent filmmakers and artistic creators in Quebec and Canada.

The post Lysanne Thibodeau: Montreal, Berlin and Back first appeared on PAVED Arts.

May 4th – June 16th, 2012

In retrospect I would say that my first encounter with the work of Stéphanie Chabot was quite telling. Upon entering La Centrale Gallery in Montreal on the occasion of her 2006 solo exhibition, the unsuspecting gallery patron is introduced to what appears to be a man seated on a lazy-boy recliner. From the angle of the gallery entrance we see this person only from the back, his unkempt hair surmounting the top of the recliner, an elbow on the armrest, and an outstretched right leg extended onto the attached footstool. Entering the gallery we inevitably approach this relaxed figure, one component of an installation entitled Deaf Forever, only to be shocked by a sudden revelation: all aspects of this body in a chair are missing except for the pieces that describe a man from the particular angle of the doorway. In the time that it takes to “read” the situation, a quirky, form of time-based sculpture has forcibly stripped away all of our assumptions, and with this act of subtraction the artist has drawn us into the wilds of the imagination. From there the artist surrounds us with other bent objects and humorous motifs, and the visit becomes one of curiosity prompting further curiosity.

This theme of the missing figure or missing parts, whether submerged, amputated, broken or dissolved, plays a recurrent role in Chabot’s artistic production, one that is repeatedly characterized as “uncanny”. While it is true that her work trades on an ontological contingency that forces a certain un-grounding, a flight from “common sense” that may be accurately described as uncanny, it is also true that in so doing we must redress the Freudian conception of the uncanny with something quite divorced from the “mommy-daddy-me” theatre of that rumpled old cigar-wielding curmudgeon. At heart Chabot is compelled by a decidedly feminist-punk impetus to problematize dominant narratives and their attendant explanations, investing in even the most familiar or mundane object with a surplus that resists encapsulation. Understood in the light of an acerbic wit, these objects are not confessional revelations of some festering, repressed trauma– quite the reverse! At every turn the artist emancipates her subjects, and it is the out-bounding character of what cannot be taken for granted that lends her work a monstrous, uncanny presence. Chabot has alluded to this method of producing a surplus of language, stating in an interview, “I like to think my work contains secrets I haven’t discovered yet.” It is in this sense that her gargantuan pocket combs, featured in her 2008 installation Time of No Reply, become enigmatic, imbuing the everyday object with an amplified presence that is attenuated at points with scaled-up broken teeth. While the intonations of such gestures are genuinely disturbing, more precisely the “disturbing” of a “ground,” the moral component of the Oedipal reading (as the judgemental and relentlessly reductive basis of a Freudian diagnosis) is suspended and replaced with a mischievous and complexifying affirmation of contingency itself.

Famously, Deleuze and Guattari recall the schizophrenic Judge Schreber, who once claimed to have “sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus.”¹ In so saying, the Judge entered into a schizophrenic state by intuiting “nature as a process of production”, and thus engaged head-on in deterritorializing nature, producing folds in the vastly complex aggregate that always forms the context for such a line of flight. Chabot proceeds with just such a schizo-agenda, the strangeness of her work is in large part synonymous with “the new” that constitutes a creativity unrestrained by an Oedipal theatre. None of this commentary is meant to romance the medicated and tragic (society-fulfilling-prophecy) form of schizophrenia we collectively seem to be so scared shitless of. And to be clear the artist is not this unfortunate case. Rather she is able to manoeuvre freely, generating an array of bizarre and disparate forms that are free of any fearful, prescriptive, mollifying chemical gag-orders. Here we find deep blue, wrinkled, boney hands, silken mannequin appendages that emerge directly from the wall, and a bestiary that includes a bemused Bear and a menacing jumping spider that can only dwell at a brilliantly intense spike of phobia. In fact Chabot’s production harvests alternate realities that in turn constitute an atypical expression², one that places what we think of objects into variation, thus displacing the “constant” (or centre) of the classical (patriarchal) status of the art object.

With her billboard project for the current exhibition, Chabot symmetrically arranges four finely textured hands, two blue and two white, in mirroring gestures around a nebulous green ball of energy. At the risk of contradicting the atypical program discussed above, the forced symmetry of the composition seems to immediately brand the front of our building with a “you are here” centrality. However, be this as it may, the follow-up question must be asked: where is this “here” that we are? Well, PAVED Arts and AKA Gallery occupy a presence on 20^th Street in the Riversdale district of Saskatoon, and yet this image seems to suggest an elsewhere that is utterly alien, somewhere of heaven or hell, a hitherto undisclosed germinal point to the building, the street, the city. After all, the inversion is indeed consistent with her decentering program insofar as the reveal embodies some form of witchcraft that is operative just under the veneer of our street side edifice. The rest is left up to the encounter, a ticklish storefront affair in which a sense of dark wonder is put into motion.

Stéphanie Chabot is a multi-disciplinary artist that works primarily in painting, sculpture and installation. She received her Masters Degree from York University in 2008. Chabot’s work has been shown in many Canadian artist-run centers including La Centrale Gallery Powerhouse, Clark Gallery (both in Montréal) and YYZ in Toronto. Her work has also been presented in the United States, Spain (Sala Riekalde, Bilbao), England (Sassoon Gallery, London) and in Australia (H-Block Gallery, Brisbane). She is a member of the curatorial collective L’Araignée, and has been involved at La Centrale Gallery Powerhouse as both a member of the selection committee (2008- 2011), and the interim artistic coordinator (2010). Chabot currently lives and works in Montréal.

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