Over the summer the Gardiner Museum got to together with the community and cultural partners to have art in residence that played on themes of interactivity, performance, community-engaged arts, and city building. VIBE Arts was among the 5 organizations selected to participate in the Community Art Space named, Make it Real Project. You can click the links below to learn more about the projects that were free to see thanks to the Ontario Trillium Foundation and its’ generous donation.
http://www.gardinermuseum.on.ca/exhibition/community-arts-space-2016#
VIBE Arts theme for the Community Art Space was titled, Shaping the Real, that was a collaborative project featuring eight artists working in pairs to create new multi-disciplinary works that explored how to make the creative process real and engaging for audiences. The art pieces developed during these residencies were exhibited at the Gardiner and reflected the community and its rich stories. Shaping the Real is a unique mash up, remix, co-creation, and celebration that included the artists :
- Sandra Tarantino and Andrenne Finnikin with the project titled Portrait. The two sculpted a giant face out of cardboard and adorned with layers of ink drawn papers created with paint brushes made out of branches and tree leaves. Ink was donated from Jason Logan of Toronto Ink Company who provided the generous donation of handmade inks harvested from Toronto streets for the Gardiner Museum residency. Check out his website www.torontoinkcompany.com.
- Pamela Schuller and May Chook theme was titled Circles. Pamela evoked stories of memories to be told through string, and wire intertwined in tree twigs. Hung together the circles showed the diverse and rich community that came through the Gardiner Museum. May chook created songs with musueum patrons that envoked the stories each cirlce told.
- Jen Chin and Amanda Foulds project ‘Lost and Found’ played on the idea of how museums archived items and how lost and found objects were like an ‘”unconscious community collaboration”. “The objects were photographed as though they were accessioned by the museum and then curated into narrative groupings lending themselves to an exploration of questions about ownership, aesthetics, authenticity, and cultural values.”
- Dara Gellman, Fitzroy Facey, and Kevin Kai Ye’s project was titled Surface used portraiture in photography to demonstrate that the people that pass through the halls of the museum are a part of the art itself. They explored diverse image-making techniques that captured the richness of the community that exists at that moment in time. The portraits were then projected onto large printouts of parts of the museum playing on the idea of the contrasting nature of the museum itself—static objects that are surrounding by an ever changing human context.
Click to see photos of the process of the photos and ending celebration of Community Arts Spaces at the Garidner Museum.
