PAVED Arts presents a series of new theatrical documentaries in Saskatoon. These films have been screening at prestigious international film festivals around the world. The series showcases a diversity of subjects and is a rare opportunity to see these acclaimed films with the director’s present to answer questions at the screenings.

http://www.arcticdefenders.ca/

*Best Feature Film – Atlantic Film Festival
*Top Ten Canadian Film – Vancouver International Film Festival

Arctic Defenders tells the remarkable story that began in 1968 with a radical Inuit movement in Canada, that would change the political landscape forever. It led to the largest land claim in western civilization, orchestrated by young visionary Inuit with a dream – the governance of their territory – the creation of Nunavut.
________________________________

Tickets are available at the Broadway Theatre before the screening.

The post Arctic Defenders – director John Walker in attendance February 11 – 7pm first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Jane McWhirter (Saskatoon)
Essay by Karla Griffin
January 17 – 31, 2014.
Public Reception: Friday, January 17@ 8:00.

Emerging artist Jane McWhirter has developed a Toon’s Kitchen project by drawing content directly from the “public” yet virtual space of an online dating website. First Impressions is a video artwork based on what people choose to say during their primary interactions with a complete stranger, as it plays out over the internet. Online dating allows people to step out of their shell and approach a potential mate in a way that is very detached and impersonal, mediated by a router and screen, with only an illusion of “intimate” proximity. Such encounters may give people the courage to say things that they would not say in a face to face situation.

The post Toon’s Kitchen XII: First Impressions first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Amber Christensen & Karen Polowick
Essay by Megan Morman
January 17 – 31, 2014
Public Reception: Friday, January 17@ 8:00.

Amber Christensen and Karen Polowick have been working together since 2009 and are inspired by the work of early feminist video artists such as Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen and also by contemporary artists Shawna Dempsey & Lori Millan. Their collaborative project, bearing the full title Daddy Sets the Beat: the subjugation of an orphan girl, is a self-reflexive parody of the dogmatic politics that often accompany “second wave feminism.”
Filmed on Super 8 and hand processed, the medium is employed to evoke a sense of nostalgia, given that the scratches and imperfections of hand processing also reflect qualities associated with found footage. Daddy sets the Beat acts as a performance of an imaginary history, evoking the possibility that these works could potentially be the product of a feminist video artist working in another era. Christensen and Polowick mix this content with a contemporary perspective; one which is caught between rejection and adoration for the didacticism of early feminism.

The post Toon’s Kitchen XIII: Daddy Sets The Beat first appeared on PAVED Arts.

“Memorsion is a feature exhibition of the first annual Saskatchewan Prairie Light Photography Festival.“

“Buildings are received in a twofold manner: by use and by perception.”1

When Marshall McLuhan wrote his famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” he could have been predicting a show like Manuel Chantré’s Memorsion, which PAVED exhibited between 17 January and 21 February 2014.  A feature exhibit of the first annual Saskatchewan Prairie Light Photography Festival, Memorsion creates an immersive, interactive media environment through a highly technical coordination of image and sound projection. It invites visitors into a fractured and fragmentary space. When you enter, you’re enveloped inside a labyrinth of translucent screens, surrounded by flickering, semi-random images, caught in the light of the projector.  Memorsion washes over you, but your experience isn’t passive: through movement, you inscribe yourself on the environment, both by triggering a PS3-eye motion sensitive camera that tells the master computer to reassemble the visual loop, and by writing your shadow, however fleetingly, upon the polyester screens.

The screens are portals into the world of Memorsion.  At PAVED, Chantré suspended eighteen panels in a T-configuration of two columns.  Four projectors – one on each point of the T and one in the middle of the room facing the terminus – cast images through the screens, creating a three-dimensional visual environment.  There’s no predetermined way to navigate the space, but the effects of optical depth encourage you move – or imagine moving – through the openings and corridors of Memorsion’s architecture.  The panels are inviting and preemptive, points of access and barriers to motion.  Just as they filter particles of light while allowing some light to pass, so they frustrate the illusion that you can enter the image-scape projected through them.  You will have to contend, ultimately, with the materiality of the screens.  Through physical contact, you’re given to recognize that your sense of immersion is a technological effect, an impression orchestrated by the media apparatus.

The content of the visual loop conspires with the structure of the installationIt promises, then reneges on its promise, to guide the visitor across the threshold of the screen.  The images invite and prevent the identification of the viewer by registering as familiar and unfamiliar simultaneously.  Chantré’s footage, comprised of shots of human bodies and splintered architectural elements – concrete expanses, graffiti-covered walls, crumbling, abandoned buildings, and bridges – denote “what is normal for us,” what we take for granted “in our day-to-day lives.”2 The fractured, non-linear quality of the loop estranges us from the images, prompting us to reconsider the built environment outside the lens of our regular experience.  At PAVED, Chantré described choosing images that evoke a sense of timelessness: shots of a woman eating, brushing her hair, and washing her face depict common, culturally and historically indeterminate behaviours that he intends to resemble those of the viewer.3 Shots of urban architectures, although specific to Montreal, conceal their actual locations in ways that make them translatable as part of what Chantré called the “nowhere place” of cultural imagination.4 When you move through Memorsion, you project yourself into the visual world just as surely as you’re projected onto the screens.  Your projection can never be complete, however.  The images disrupt any effort that you might make to follow them along a through line or narrative trajectory.

In his artist’s talk at PAVED, Chantré said that although he shot all of his footage with a video camera, he thinks of the images that make up the loop in photographic terms.  Instead of presenting a complete rendering of the world, his images embrace the fragmentariness of photography—its necessarily partial apprehension of slivers of time and space.  Memorsion activates what Walter Benjamin describes as the “optical unconscious” of photography, the new arrangements of matter that the technology of the camera literally brings to light. Superior to human eyes, cameras record elements of reality that exceed the “normal spectrum of sensory impressions.”5 In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin writes:

“We have some idea of what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), [but] we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person takes a step.  We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or spoon, but we know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal…This is where the camera comes into play.”6

Memorsion updates a Benjaminian theory of photography for a new media world.  It disrupts habitual ways of looking, making possible other kinds of connections between self and other, subject and object.  For Benjamin, “the optical reception of architecture […] spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation.”7 Chantré makes inattention impossible.  His installation overwhelms the visitor with the stuff of reality that tends to evade conscious experience.

The images, projected onto and through polyester screens, don’t resemble photographs so much as they resemble photographic negatives.  Relics of an analogue world, negatives are as obsolete as the buildings that Chantré captures with his digital camera.  Given that the screens are legible on both sides, they have a structural affinity with negatives, which harbour inverted images in translucent space until they emerge, developed, out of chemical vats.  Prior to their development, negatives exist in a kind of archival limbo: they are indexical traces that haven’t yet become icons.  As well as being visual echoes of one another, the screens share with negatives a common semiotics.  In the same way that negative images occupy a moment prior to their incorporation into the larger visual environment, the shots that project through the screens of Memorsion resist integration into any explanatory context.  In an allegorical sense, Chantré’s images are undeveloped.  They refer not to experiences but traces of experience, flash-moments that can’t be assimilated into a coherent and continuous pattern.

Memorsion adopts elements of photography to ask epistemological questions about images, memory, and subjectivity.  The installation makes clear that the camera doesn’t fracture our perceptions of reality or ourselves.  Instead, and as Ulrich Baer argues, it “[discloses] the world – the setting for human experience – as nothing but atoms moving in a void.”8 Photographs are aides-mémoire, but they also present history as unstable, a web of ruptures and bursts that undermines the notion of time as an uninterrupted, sequential, homogeneous flow.  As the medium that bestows light waves and moving particles with an appearance of solid objects and events, photography embodies the psychic tensions at play when we stitch the flashes of images that comprise our memory into stories about our environments and ourselves.  Memorsion frames reality as a jumble of isolated shards, which address the optical unconscious not only by drawing attention to what we might be inclined to ignore, but by doubling the psychological processes at work when we develop some experiences into memories and sublimate others in the basements of our minds.

Architectural ruins and abandoned buildings function within Chantré’s media ecology as metaphors of personal and collective history. Evacuated of human inhabitants, they register as excess: part of and exterior to the lived experiences of urban dwellers.  Instead of being blights on an otherwise pristine landscape, ruins become sites of projection, walls and girders that bear traces of contact, and upon which people write versions of themselves.  Graffiti tags are material remnants of more ephemeral inscriptions—the psychic and psychological imprints left behind by human traffic.  Because the buildings are abandoned, they make themselves available to modes of sensation and perception that exceed questions of use-value.  As detritus, ruins disrupt the flow of bodies that cities aim to facilitate.  They frustrate linear mobility.  As allegories of experience and subjectivity, ruins describe what doesn’t fit, what can’t be contained within the perceptual apparatus, but which flash up every so often, demanding that we attend to them.9

~Text written by Justin Pfefferle

Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Vol. 3 1935-1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.120.
2. Alex MacPherson, “Shadow on the Wall.” Verb Magazine, Issue S277, 14-20 February 2014. 15.
3. Manuel Chantré, Artist’s Talk at PAVED Gallery, Saskatoon, 18 January 2014.
4. Chantré, Artist’s Talk.
5. Benjamin, 118.
6.Benjamin, 118.
7. Benjamin, 120.
8. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002. 5.
9.More needs to be said about the aural dimensions of Memorsion.

The post Memorsion first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Audio Project Show and Tell
Host – Reilly Forbes
Date – Saturday, February 8th 1 – 4
Description:  This class is meant as a casual skill sharing session for people working on an audio related project.  Members can bring in a project file, a recording, or even an idea.  As a group we will critically engage the material, ask questions, and try and solve any problems that might be occurring.  This workshop is meant for members with an intermediate level of audio expertise and experience.  
*** Limited to 5 participants

Grant Writing 2-part workshop
Host – Ellen Moffat
Date – Saturday, February 22nd 1 – 4 and Saturday March 1st 1-4
Description: Part one: will be an informal lecture-based discussion that focuses on preparing successful submissions for grants for visual and media arts (including research, production and presentation). The workshop will break down the process of grant-writing into component parts, discussing techniques for being successful.
Part two: will be a mock jury of submissions prepared by workshop participants. After having attended the previous session, participants will be asked to bring a submission in process, as well as audio or visual support media. Submissions will be presented to the group. This will be a valuable and constructive hands-on process for learning about grant criteria.
***Limited to 10 participants

About the instructor: Ellen Moffat is a media artist who has extensive experience as an artist, administrator, writer and educator.

Taxing Time For Artists
Host – Randy Clay
Date – Sunday, March 2nd 1-3 PM
Description: The workshop will cover the following topics: records for tax purposes;inventory; grants and royalties; tax returns; expenses; self-employment status; capital costs and other areas of special interest for artists. Also covered will be whether or not an artist should register for the GST and PST. Sources for further information and assistance are given, including the CARFAC SASK Financial Advisory Service for members.
** This workshop is a partnership with CARFAC SASK

Guitar Pedal Building (Attendance Full)
Host – Bryce Ennis
Date – Saturday, March 22nd 1-5 PM and Sunday, March 23rd 1-5 PM
Description: PAVED Arts is excited to offer a new workshop experience for our producing members.  Pedal Building with Bryce Ennis will offer attendees the chance to hone their soldering skills under the guidance of an experienced builder while also learning the ins and outs of how guitar pedals work and what elements go into changing the colour and character of a specific pedal.  Best of all each attendee will get a chance to build and take home a custom pedal.

– This workshop is for members with a basic understanding of soldering
– Registration for this workshop is capped at 8 attendees and the deadline to register is February 15th
– Cost to attend this workshop is $75.  This will pay for the pedal kits and extra parts that you will use to build your own pedal.

About the Instructor: Bryce Ennis holds degrees in Education, Music, and Engineering Technology.  By day, he designs rapid deployment storage silos for heavy industry.  By night, he designs, builds, and plays guitars, amplifiers, and pedals.  He rarely sells the pedals he builds, preferring to show others how to build their own.
If you would like to attend this workshop please RSVP immediately by emailing technical@pavedarts.ca

More workshops to be added soon!

The post Winter Workshops 2014! first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Silence, Time and Dead Air

On the radio silence is not permitted. Dead air – the absence of audible programmed material – suggests instability and disorder: warfare (an attack on a transmission tower), loss of revenue (advertising), human or technical error. A radio performance in 2005 of John Cage’s 4’33” required that the BBC disable a ‘dead man switch’ that would otherwise have launched recorded programming.¹

By contrast to Cage’s 4’33” which frames silence to support listening, Bates uses silence to explore notions of time, transmission, silence/signal/noise, technological change, voice, authority, and the refusal to speak. Two short stories were influences: Walter Benjamin’s “On the Minute” and Heinrich Böll’s “Murke’s Collected Silences”. Each story addresses aspects of silence in radio broadcasts. Benjamin depicts a scenario in which the demands for punctuality cause tremendous anxiety for the guest broadcaster who misreads the studio clock and cuts short a live recording session only to discover his error barely in time to prevent (too much) dead air. Böll weaves several subnarratives together – the dynamics of hierarchy and defiance within and between radio administration and staff, bureaucratic policies and the commodification of silence as physical units (celluloid tape).

The installation, Dead Air, includes four works: A Minute for Walter Benjamin, Start. Stop., To End, To Begin and Beacons. The first three works are video and sound documentation of connected performances. The fourth is a sound piece.

A Minute for Walter Benjamin uses 24 clock radios tuned to the same FM frequency for transmission. ‘stop’… ‘stop’… ‘stop’… ‘stop’… ‘stop’… ‘ok, that’s enough’… ‘ok’… is transmitted as polyphonic vocal sound. A period of dead air lasts for a measure of time equal to the sound. Then, the word ‘start’ breaks the silence spoken as a chorus followed by a lone ‘start now’. Then, dead air again. The cycle of spoken word and dead air continue. In reset mode, the 24 clock radios accompany the broadcast as a syncopated rhythm of blinking red and green quartz light. Clustered on the gallery floor, radio cables and electrical wires intersect and overlap as a tech-organic rhizome.

Start. Stop. is a series of mediated performances of durational time presented as documentation. Participants are videotaped individually as they perform one minute of time for the camera using subjective awareness or guesswork as their internal timer. Performances range from 0’30” to 03’00” in duration. The video depicts varying states of concentration and psychological effort of the participants. Ambient sound from the recording sessions – music, coughing, and bodily shuffling – is the soundtrack for the video, heard on headphones.

The second video, To End, To Begin, is a projection, its subject is the environment of the recording studio. The video is banal, subtle and (almost) monochromatic. Near-still images of walls, the texture of the wall surfaces, architectural details and peeling paint are accompanied by subtle shifts in light. The quietness of the video proposes a visual equivalent to the audible silence.

In Beacons, a snare drum functions as a signifying object and amplifier for recordings of radio broadcasts of international time beacons. The sound is low; audibility is difficult. As a symbol, the snare drum references colonization and the militarization of time and society.

The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. ²

In “The Aesthetics of Silence”, Susan Sontag muses on notions of silence in relation to art, pedagogy, rhetoric and paradox, in particular, the extent to which sound is employed to articulate concepts of silence. She acknowledges the ability of art to enhance the quality of attention of a viewer, heightening the sense of awareness and consciousness. Silence allows for a more immediate sensuous experience of art or a confrontation with artistic production in a more conscious, conceptual way. It provides time for an ongoing exploration of thought as punctuation, giving space for thought, suggesting the absence or the completion of thought. Silence can indicate a determination to continue one’s activity deviously as rhetoric.

Bates uses silence to reduce the information clutter that clogs the senses, giving (us) pause to hear-see sonic and visual silences and to reflect on aspects of our contemporary context. Dead Air points to issues of censorship and the militarization of global time and of society. But he also offers hope. The failure of the performers to perform time with scientific accuracy proposes that internalization of military time and regulation of human behavior is not (yet) complete.

Dead Air is an open work that requires active engagement by the viewer to connect the parts. For me, the exhibition was best experienced alone in the gallery. My desire for solitude was not nihilistic. Rather it allowed me to hear the nuanced sound of dead air.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech… and an element in a dialogue.

~Text written by Ellen Moffat

1 “(Re)Marking Time in the Audition of Experimental Music” by Virginia Anderson, Performance Research: On Listening, 15(3), 2010. p 33

The post DEAD AIR first appeared on PAVED Arts.

PAVED Arts is looking forward to seeing all our friends at our year end party on Wednesday, December 11, 2013.
We’ll raise a glass (maybe have a cookie or two), and celebrate with the launch of our minibloc book publication.
It is also a chance to thank our members and supporters for all their contributions this past year.
And you’ll be the first to hear about upcoming plans for 2014!
All the fun starts at 6pm
Please rsvp to artistic@pavedarts.ca

The post Holiday Get Together & minibloc Book Launch first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Buy Tickets for the Friday Show
Buy Tickets for the Saturday Show

The 3^rd edition of the Core Series premieres on November 29 & 30. PAVED Arts presents an evening of contemporary sound and video/film work featuring the Saskatoon Symphony Chamber Players (The Core) and works by Jennifer Sparrowhawk, Alice Teichert & Hri Neil, Gerald Saul, Callen Diederichs, Reilly Forbes & Devin McAdam. The Core Series was the recent recipient of an artsVest Outstanding Partnership Award between collaborators PAVED Arts, the Saskatoon Symphony and Affinity Credit Union.

“This is a great opportunity to experience the Saskatoon Symphony in a very unique and intimate space, as artists from different fields collaborate to produce a one of a kind performance” says Erin Brophey, Principal Oboe for the Saskatoon Symphony and a founder of the Core Series. “With the theme of Process/Failure, simultaneously the music is made more interesting by the visual and the visual is made more exciting by the music. This artistic experiment explores the magical experience of sensory happenchance.”

Program:
Failing – Tom Johnson (US) (solo Double Bass)
-Video by Reilly Forbes and Devin McAdam (Saskatoon)

a small piece of sky – Lia Pas (SK) (Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Viola and Double Bass)
-Video by Jennifer Sparrowhawk (Saskatoon)

Improv – (Oboe, Bassoon and Double Bass)
-Video by Gerald Saul (Regina)

New Woodwind Quintet – Paul Suchan (SK) (Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Clarinet and Horn) –
-Super 8 film by Callen Diedirchs (Saskatoon)

Sinfonietta – David McIntyre (SK) (The Core)
-Video by Alice Teichert, Hri Neil, and Glyn Roberts (Toronto)

image credit: Alice Teichert and Hri Neal 2013

The post Core Series III Process/Failure Nov 29th and 30th 2013 first appeared on PAVED Arts.

They Pull the Wolves Over Our Eyes attempts to explore technocratic and bureaucratic communication strategies as physical and conceptual barriers to access to information. The work incorporates stereograms (commonly known as Magic Eye images) accessible only from AKA Gallery and PAVED Arts’ balcony. These images require a special perceptual technique, difficult for many, which once ‘decoded’ offer alternative readings of the billboard itself.

They Pull the Wolves Over Our Eyes is an original billboard project commissioned by PAVED Arts.

Nous sommes loups, tout de laine vêtus

by Jean-Sébastien Gauthier

Jean-Sébastien Gauthier est un artiste fransaskois qui habite et travaille à Saskatoon, SK, Canada. Son approche artistique résulte d’un remaniement expérimental de pratiques de vidéo, de sculpture et de performance au service de la création d’œuvres temporelles.

Nous sommes loups, tout de laine vêtus tente d’explorer les stratégies de communication technocratiques et bureaucratiques comme étant des barrières physiques et conceptuelles à l’accès à l’information. Le travail intègre quatre stéréogrammes accessibles seulement du balcon de la Galerie AKA et de PAVED Arts. Ces images nécessitent une technique perceptuelle spéciale, difficile pour plusieurs, qui, une fois «décodées» offrent des lectures alternatives du panneau lui-même.

 Nous sommes loups, tout de laine vêtus est un projet original d’affichage commandité par PAVED Arts.

The post They Pull the Wolves Over Our Eyes – Jean-Sébastien Gauthier first appeared on PAVED Arts.

The multi-channel video School of Athens was shot in Saskatchewan in 2013. Dramatic figures populate rural landscapes, seemingly incongruent with each other and their surroundings. Characters act out a surreal morality play full of charged allegory. Central to the piece are two sets of contrasted characters: demure and virginal Greek nymphs, and their Orientalist shadow selves—looming veiled women who are at once gothic and sci-fi. Keeping an eye on the women are mysterious men, robed in history and power.

Allysha Larsen’s multi-channel work School of Athens will be presented in the Toon’s Kitchen, opening November 8th along side of the Main gallery presentation of Dead Air by Steven Bates.

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

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.

The post Toon’s Kitchen XI: School Of Athens first appeared on PAVED Arts.

19+ ID Required

Get your costume and your dancing shoes ready because PAVED Arts and BlackFlash Magazine are bringing back Saskatoon’s favorite Halloween video dance party!  With the always legendary costume contest, huge prizes, and performances from Helium3, Ravewind, DJ Market Mall, VJ Carrie Gates and many more, this is the Halloween event everyone will be talking about.

It’s all happening Saturday October 26th upstairs in the PAVED Arts event space.  Tickets are $20 and doors open at 9PM.

As always PAVED Arts and BlackFlash want to extend massive thanks to our sponsors. With more support from local businesses than ever before, Vampire Beat 2013 is sure to be the best yet and as always, full of surprises.

VAMPIRE BEAT 2013 is sponsored by: Shift Development, Daybreak Consulting, Great Western Brewery, Barndog Productions, The Delta Bessborough, CFCR, The Broadway Theatre, Lucky Bastard Distillery, Hot Yoga on 20th, The Mendel Gift Shop, Park Cafe, Ominocity, The Two Twenty, The Sheaf, Unreal City, Pelican Travel, Planet S, Jakes on 21st, Pop Quiz

We are also stoked to welcome back SweetGif to this years party!

questions? email technical@pavedarts.ca

The post VAMPIRE BEAT 2013 Saturday October 26th (Sold Out) first appeared on PAVED Arts.

**Workshops are free for producing members in good standing.  If you would like to become a member please call 306-652-5502 ext 3. 

Blackmagic Cinema Camera Introduction
Host – Devin McAdam
Date – Thursday, September 26th 6:30 – 9:30
Description:  The newest camera available for PAVED Arts members, the BMCC has been impressing members all summer.  Now is your chance to get an up close look at what all the hype is about.  This workshop is meant for beginner to novice shooters looking to find out more about the unique qualities of the camera, how to take advantage of all that it offers, and what to potentially avoid based on your specific project.  

Audio Suite 101 (Attendance Full)
Host – Reilly Forbes
Date – Saturday, October 5th 1-4 PM
Description: Whether you are interested in learning how to mix your most recent project in 5.1, or just curious on how to record some voice-over dialogue, the Audio Suite at PAVED is here for you!  This workshop beginner level workshop will take members through the basic workflow of operating the audio suite using Pro Tools 9 software.  After which the workshop will focus on project specific questions in a group learning environment.

* If you have a project with a specific audio related question that you would like addressed at the workshop be sure to mention it during your sign up email

Digital Panorama Workshop (Attendance Full)
Host – Laura St. Pierre
Date – Sunday, October 6th 1-4 PM and Sunday, October 20th 1-4 PM
Description:  Participants will learn how to combine digital photographs to create large panoramic images.
The workshop will introduce:
-Panoramic shooting techniques
-Stitching tools (Photoshop and beyond)
-Automated and manual perspective correction
-Manual repair and assembly
-The use of layers and masks in the creation of panoramic images.
-Colour and tonal corrections, noise reduction and sharpening

* Class limit 6 participants
* Participants should have a basic knowledge of photoshop
*Cameras, tripods and computers will be available, however please bring your own if you have them.
*Questions? Please contact Laura St.Pierre at laurastpierre1@gmail.com

Social Media For Artists and Non-Profits
Host – Lindsey Rewuski
Date – Saturday, October 19th 1-4 PM
Description: Social media can be a powerful tool for promoting your practice or your organization.  But where does one start?  And how does one get noticed amidst all the chatter?  This fun, casual, workshop will explain the basics of social media while also focusing on best practices for beginners within the art world as learned from one of the members of the outstanding communications team at the Mendel Art Gallery.

WordPress Basics
Host – Troy Gronsdahl
Date – Saturday, November 2nd 1-4 PM

Last spring this workshop was a real hit, so we are bringing it back one more time! WordPress website authoring tool is experiencing massive popularity from artists and organizations looking to create professional looking web content as easily and efficiently as possible.  This workshops aims to get those members new to WordPress started, and also answer questions from members who have experience in wordpress but have run into problems that they can’t figure out.  Topics include: Basic layout, theme integration, media management, and social media connectivity.

More workshops to be added soon!

The post Back to School At PAVED Arts – Fall Workshop Series first appeared on PAVED Arts.

September 13 – October 19, 2013

Between 13 September and 19 October 2013, Paved Arts held Outer Space, a show that put Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen’s multimedia exhibit, Space Fiction and the Archives, into dialogue with Ryan Park’s video installations: Rabbit and Dark is the Night (Voyager).  United conceptually by the artists’ similar concerns with relationships between imagination and space, the show invited gallery visitors to consider some of the most fundamental ways in which we interact with space, broadly conceived.  In Nguyen’s and Park’s works, “space” didn’t refer just to the deep, boundless “out there” of extraterrestrial planets and beings.  That sense of outer space obtained, but the show examined local, boundaried spaces as well, from the disciplinary political space of the nation to the equally demanding formal and aesthetic space of the frame.

In Space Fiction and the Archives, Nguyen interrogates Canada’s image of itself as a welcoming space by comparing how two different groups of aliens occupied the national imagination in 1967, the year of the Centenary.  Her exhibit combines archival materials, including reproductions of government documents, cultural and historical artefacts, and kitsch objects, to tell a story about how the people of St. Paul, Alberta, celebrated the national birthday—by building “The World’s First UFO Landing Pad.”  Nguyen uses this minor event in Canadian history to challenge the official national discourse about immigration, the fiction of Canadian inclusivity and multiculturalism.  Some aliens, her exhibit makes clear, are better welcomed than others.  The Landing Pad, built as a monument to “western hospitality,” was meant to provide Martian visitors with an ideal place to touch down in Canada.  Aliens from within planet earth have no such place to land: their access to national space is considerably more circumscribed than that of their extraterrestrial counterparts.

Nguyen highlights the functional, symbolic, and economic valences of the Landing Pad in order to make a subversive point about how the State views those who seek entrance into Canada’s so-called cultural mosaic.  Prints of the St. Paul Journal underscore the multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways that the monument signified for the people of the town.  The Landing Pad was counted upon to bring national, even global, fame to St. Paul.  A headline from 25 May 1967 reads: “St. Paul Landing Pad Receives World Wide Publicity.”  As a tourist attraction, the Landing Pad created its own culture industry.  Mass-produced trinkets, bought and sold in the town gift shop, indicate the financial legacy of the event.  Pyramid, a mixed-media sculpture that displays a souvenir plate bearing an image of the Landing Pad, and The Centennial Star, two inkjet prints that represent, in diptych, either side of a commemorative coin, invoke capital as the primary motivator of the “Centenary Idea.”  So too, Nguyen argues, do economics govern how the State evaluates immigrants—as citizen-consumers, subjects who will (or will not) conform to the demands of capitalism.  In Immigration Policy (point-based system), she duplicates the 1967 “Norms for Assessment of Individual Applicants” on a series six large acrylic plates.  Categories like “Education and Training,” “Occupational Skill,” and “Knowledge of English and French” determine the degree to which an individual might be expected to contribute to the Canadian economy.  Once their files reach the desks of government bureaucrats, immigrants aren’t people so much as they’re investments.  The number they’re assigned corresponds not to the merits of their character, but to their capacity to buy and sell things like the souvenir plate.

The focal piece in Space Fiction and the Archives is a nineteen-minute video called 1967: A People Kind of Place.  Stitched together with footage transferred from Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm films, the video is, in part, a documentary about the Centenary and the unveiling of the Landing Pad.  The disruptive form of the collage complements the subversive qualities of the narrative, which develops along a familiar logic of the alien invasion film.  One scene, lifted from a singularly schlocky sci-fi movie, takes place in the office of an Immigration Agent, whom we see seated at his desk.  Across from him (but, importantly, outside the frame), a Martian invader wants to know whether or not he will be permitted into the country.  The Agent describes the quota system of Canadian Immigration, telling him that although the country has room for a certain number of black, brown, and yellow people, “we don’t have any quota at all for green people.”  The scene provides a key for understanding the satire of the exhibit as a whole.  The notion of Canadian diversity operates according to a rigidly enforced ideology of racial and economic superiority, not some benign ethos of universal inclusion.  The Martian says that he intends to stay in Canada “until mankind learns to love his neighbour.”  With his application denied, he returns home a casualty of a system of immigration that views some people as more desirable than others.

Ryan Park’s video installations foreground different sets of relationships between discipline, imagination, and space.  Rabbit and Dark is the Night (Voyager) combine philosophical reflections about outer space with performances that highlight the physical and formal demands of interior space—both the space of the frame and that of the gallery itself.  In Rabbit, Park contorts his hands into the shape of the titular animal and holds them before a projector, casting a shadow puppet onto the facing wall.  Over the course of the roughly twenty-minute video, he struggles to control the involuntary movements of his fingers and hands as his muscles cramp under the strain of trying to hold still.  The image that he creates, suggestive of the “moon rabbit” of East Asian folklore, is at once abstract and visibly corporeal.  A gestalt that looks different to each viewer (and in each viewing), the rabbit draws attention to the living form as it writhes and crumples in on itself.  As Park struggles, micro-details like the curvature of the fingers, even individual nail beds, become pronounced.  The viewer’s focus is thus divided.  On one hand, the video encourages us to think about the different, culturally conditioned, ways that we imagine outer space.  On the other hand, it calls to mind the discipline required to maintain form within the circular boundary of the projection lens.

Dark is the Night (Voyager) manages several vectors of discipline, imagination, and space.  The installation – a roughly two-hour, continuous, single-shot video in which Park faces the camera and cranks a handheld LED light into the lens – disciplines the viewer at the same time as it functions as a performance of discipline itself.  The physical turning of the crank generates light and sound: as Park gains and loses stamina, the light becomes more or less intense, while the soundtrack, comprised of music and sounds captured by the Voyager space probes, comes in and out of audibility.  Like Rabbit, Dark is the Night (Voyager) renders the human form visible and invisible.  Intermittently, Park’s torso appears behind the glow of the light, then disappears into the blackened, seemingly limitless, space out of which the light emanates.  The viewer, standing or sitting in the pitch-black of screening room, occupies a similar space.  With light shining into our eyes, we are immobilized and reminded of our immobility.  What does it mean, Park asks us, to be singled out in (and of) the darkness, by someone – or something – on the other end of the light?  What kinds of subject positions are available to those for whom the expansiveness of space becomes contracted to a single point of illumination?

For Nguyen and Park, the very notion of outer space entails an inner space within which things and people either do or do not belong.  Whether imaginary or material, the boundaries that demarcate one space from another determine how we conceive of ourselves in relation to those on the other side of the divide.  Access to space, perhaps the defining problem of our contemporary condition, carries certain privileges for some, and, of course, certain restrictions for others.  To exist in space is to observe (and, maybe, to transgress) the limits of that space, to seek beyond where we are told not to travel.  Some of us navigate space more easily than others.  Those of us who attended Outer Space gained a new awareness of precisely how we move across and between the multiple, and multiplying, spaces that we inhabit.

~Text written by Justin Pfefferle

The post OUTER SPACE first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Featuring the work of member artists from EMMEDIA in Calgary, FAVA in Edmonton, the Sask Filmpool in Regina and, of course, PAVED Arts in Saskatoon! The PAVED Arts contribution will feature new video and film works by Callen Diederichs, Peter Stinson, and collaborative works from Amber Christensen & Karen Polowick, as well asJ.S. Gauthier & Adrian Stimson & Jason Bearg.

Free of charge! Refreshments will be served!

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PAVED Arts is very proud to collaborate with the Mendel Art Gallery on the presentation of an artist talk by renowned Media Artist Jennifer Steinkamp. (www.jsteinkamp.com)

This talk coincides with the Mendel Art Gallery presentation of Rewilding Modernity (September 27, 2013 to January 5, 2014) Curated by Lisa Baldissera. The talk will be staged in the 2^nd floor event space.

Jennifer Steinkamp is an installation artist who works with video and new media in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception.

Upcoming and Recent Exhibitions by Jennifer Steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp, Leeahn Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, 2014.
Jennifer Steinkamp, Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong, China, 2014.
Mike Kelley, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington, curated by Rock Hushka, 2013.
Madame Curie, Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, curated by Margo Ann Crutchfield, 2013.
Street Views: Jennifer Steinkamp, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, curated by Lisa Melandri, 2013.
Garlands, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California, curated by Dr. Bruce Samuels, 2013.
Murmuration, Governor George Deukmejian Courthouse, Long Beach, California, curated by Marc Pally, 2013.
Windows on Fifth, National Academy Museum, New York, NY, curated by Marshall Price, 2013.
Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State, American Consulate, Guangzhou, China, curated by Virginia L. Shore, 2013.
Jennifer Steinkamp: Orbit 12, Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, curated by Kristen Watts, 2013.
6EQUJ5, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota, curated by Elizabeth Armstrong, 2013.
Jennifer Steinkamp,  Public Art, Felton Properties, Portland, Oregon, curated by Matt Felton, 2013.
Jennifer Steinkamp: Madame Curie, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, curated by Toby Jurovics, 2013.
Joanne Greenbaum Jennifer Steinkamp, greengrassi, London, England, 2013.

Jennifer Steinkamp Mike Kelley, USC Brain & Creativity Institute, Los Angeles, CA, curated by Karen Moss, 2012.
Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan Hospital, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, curated by Jody Rassell, 2012.
Soledad Sevilla Jennifer Steinkamp, Soledad Lorenzo Gallery, Madrid, Spain, 2012.
Jennifer Steinkamp, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, curated by Alison Greene, 2012.
The Vanquished, Anderson Gallery, VCU, Richmond, Virginia, curated by Ashley Kistler, 2012.
The Death of the Moth, The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, curated by Kippy Stroud, 2012.
ACME., Los Angeles, California, curated by Randy Sommer and Robert Gunderman, 2012.
Jennifer Steinkamp: Mike Kelly, Inova, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Wisconsin, curated by Bruce Knackert, 2012.

The post Artist Talk: Jennifer Steinkamp Wednesday, September 25 at 8PM first appeared on PAVED Arts.

BIOGRAPHY: Tammi Campbell (born in Calgary, Alberta; lives and works in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) has exhibited throughout Canada and taken part in residencies at The Banff Centre, the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop, the International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul, and Plug In ICA. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions: The Painting Project, at Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; The Thick of it, Mercer Union, Toronto;  Fool me Twice at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Saskatchewan; and They Made a Day Be a Day Here at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Alberta, travelling to the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, and the School of Art Gallery, Manitoba. Artworks by Campbell are in public and private collections, including the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Mendel Art Gallery, the University of Regina, and the University of Saskatchewan. Campbell also operates Make Work Projects, an independent storefront studio and project space.

The post Tammi Campbell receives Members Production Fund first appeared on PAVED Arts.

A screening of recent members’ short film and video projects presented in partnership by EMMEDIA (Calgary), Film And Video Arts Society – Alberta (Edmonton), PAVED Arts (Saskatoon) and the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative (Regina).

This call is open to all current members of PAVED Arts in good standing.

We are looking for short video or film works, from one to 15 minutes in length, to comprise a 20 minute section of an 80 minute screening (to be divided equally among the Red Rover participant-centres). All submissions, including those shot on film or High Definition, should be delivered as a quicktime H264 .mov file — either on a data DVD disc or by upload through Dropbox. Please ensure that the sound on the submission is in a stereo format.

The deadline for receipt of submissions is Friday, August 30^th, 2013.

The Red Rover Screening will be staged simultaneously at FAVA in Edmonton, EMMEDIA in Calgary and co-presented by the Saskatchewan Filmpool and PAVED Arts in Saskatoon. All screening fees will be triple the IMAA standard in observation of the three-city presentation.

The Red Rover screening will be held on Friday, October 4^th, 2013.

For further information please contact:

David LaRiviere, Artistic Director, PAVED Arts: artistic@pavedarts.ca

Phone: 306-652-5532

Please note: PAVED Arts summer hours will be limited through the month of August. However, staff will be collecting mail and retrieving messages on a regular basis through the month, and the adjudication process for Red Rover will be undertaken in the week following the deadline.

The post Red Rover – Call for Submissions first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Raven Fourhorns

Beskkaai Paul

Tinease Montour

Shady LaPlante

Achai Fiddler

Bradley Hendry

Tekkina Quewezance

Digital Gaze
Station 20 West Community Centre
1120 20 St W
August 2-September 2, 2013
Opening Reception, Friday, August 2 at

The post Digital Gaze – Opening Reception first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Starting the week after Friday August 3rd, the PAVED arts production center will only be open Tuesdays and Fridays from 12 – 6 PM

We thank you for your understanding with regards to the reduced hours.  And we encourage you to still take advantage of the production center during the month August.

Regular production center hours will resume Tuesday September 3rd 2013

If you have any questions, or would like to make an appointment or booking for August, email equipment@pavedarts.ca, or call 652-5502 ext 3.

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!

The post PAVED arts Summer Hours first appeared on PAVED Arts.

July 2: Artist talk by Joi Arcand.

July 8: Photography/Photoshop workshop by Joi Arcand.

July 11: Artist talk by Adrian Stimson and photography workshop by David Werner

July 15: Photography/Photoshop workshop by Joi Arcand.

July 17: Photography/Photoshop workshop by Joi Arcand.

July 24: Artist talk by Ruth Cuthand and photography/Photoshop workshop Joi Arcand

August 2: Opening reception of exhibition @ Station 20 West Community Center

Deadline for application: June 14, 2013 | Please provide a short bio and letter of interest.

Please contact:
Biliana Velkova
306 652 5502 ext 2
executive@pavedarts.ca
or come in person to PAVED Arts 424 20th St West

Installation by Joi Arcand
photo credit: D. Barbour

The post Digital Gaze – Workshop Series and Exhibition first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Miki Mappin (Saskatoon)
A Critical Text will be written by Andrea Ledding
July 5 to July 19, 2013.
Public Reception: Friday, July 5@ 8:00.

Transqueery, Miki Encounters the Neil Richards Collection

Miki, a somewhat eccentric trans gender individual is asked to submit a proposal for an artwork which would engage with a queer collection at the University of Saskatchewan Archives. Despite being in the middle of an awkward life transition and knowing nothing about the collection, she agrees and proposes to make a video of her encounter with the Neil Richards Collection. As she is introduced to the archives and begins exploring the collection, she becomes fascinated with the collector, Neil Richards. In the archives she engages with the staff and discovers material that relates to her own personal experience. Largely hand held, using existing light and the camera’s microphone, Miki Mappin’s disarmingly simple technique results in a direct and entertaining engagement with her subject.

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

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 20^th Street West Saskatoon SK. S7M 0X4 www.pavedarts.ca

Free admission to the public with barrier-free accessibility.

The post Toon’s Kitchen X: Transqueery first appeared on PAVED Arts.

Camera Obscura Workshop July 4 and July 11th 6:30 – 9:30 PM

This will be a two day workshop in which participants assemble a small portable camera obscura that will allow for the creation of 3.5″x4″ small photographic print and drawing (and you get to keep the camera!).

Parts and materials are provided as part of the workshop. The workshop will cover the assembly and operation of the cameras with participants creating a photographic print and a
camera facilitated drawing. Participants that wish to combine their drawing with the photograph can do so by attending the subsequent Liquid Emulsion Workshop.

Liquid Emulsion Workshop July 13th 1-4 PM

This one day workshop will cover the basics of working with liquid emulsion as a means of creating unique hand made photographic prints on almost any surface.

Participants will learn how to coat surfaces with emulsion and how to determine exposure times and how to process the prints.

Each participant will make a liquid emulsion print that they can keep. Participants may bring a sharp medium to high contrast negative or positive photographic print that they wish to copy or use provided examples if they do not have one. If applicable, participants can use the drawings and prints that they created in the Camera Obscura workshop but having attended the Camera Obscura workshop is not a requirement for this one.

Andrew John Milne Artist Bio:  At the age of 31 years old Andrew quit his career as an Engineering Technologist and began a self-taught artistic practice in Vancouver involving photography, sculpture and contemporary dance. Working in the Winnipeg exchange district he develops technologies, devices and machines that act as both product and process within his art practice.

The post Andrew John Milne “Camera Obscura” and “Photo Emulsion” Workshop Series ATTENDANCE FULL first appeared on PAVED Arts.