art-action

Give Peace A Chance x 40

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

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

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

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

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

Poverty Homelessness Blankets

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

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

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

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

A big laugh at the Canadian Social Forum

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

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

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

SEW CITY and Greenwich Village

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

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

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

Hope to see you in Calgary next week!

Signal & Noise 2009

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

NEW YORK and then CALGARY's Glenbow Museum

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

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

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

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

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

Download Sew City email

Garden Gnomad in Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keet tract of MOPARRC events here .

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

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

LFP Store Closure & Gallery Opening

Unfortunately I had to take the Light Factory Publications Pay Pal Store (Widget) off of this site. Though cute, it was a beta site full of bugs and it finally became impossible to work with from the back end. Good Bye store... 

Instead, please step into the new gallery that you will find in the photo albums section in the right column of this page or here. On the first page of the LFP Gallery album, you will read this description of what Light Factory Publications has become:

Light Factory Publications is an itinerant production house that swings into action whenever the need for some swell, small edition multiples emerges. In its selection criteria it privileges projects that make obvious their reliance on collaborations or distribution between individuals over coffee or drinks. LFP relies on the handwork of anyone who needs a lesson or practice in book arts like binding and small publications.

With the help of those who exchange their hand work for binding lessons, Lois Klassen is LFP's editor, designer, publisher and distributor. From 1991-2001 Klassen participated in the Eternal Network (mail art) where she developed a keen interest in easily disseminated publications and collaborations across great geographical and cultural distances. In 1998 she hosted The Renegade Library: Collaborative Mail Art in Book Form at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (Brandon, MB Canada). Renegade Library archived in a open public display some 570 book-like items that had been created by at least 730 individuals from 37 countries.

Enjoy the gallery and contact LFP if you would like us to send out some of the inventory.

Light Factory Publications
Box 74540
Vancouver, BC Canada
V6K 4P4
loiszing[at]telus.net

Mystery Received

Today's mail:

???

While in Calgary

Slipping away from Banff on Thursday, I went to Calgary to do some prep for the Comforter Art-Action installation at the Glenbow Museum in May. I met with community members who are involved in humanitarian projects through the many quilting guilds and sewing circles across the province.
This is how historic quilts are stored at the Glenbow:
 
More about that project later.
Also in Calgary, I screened Flowers for Joyce at the $100 Film Festival, Calgary Society of Filmakers, which took place here: