Inside The Frozen Mammoth Launch Party!

Help us celebrate at our official blog launch this coming Friday the 6th at Il Motore (179 Jean Talon W)!

Come early (9pm) for short films, and stay late for:
Tune-Yards http://www.myspace.com/merrillgarbus
Shapes and Sizes http://www.myspace.com/shapesandsizes
Nut Brown www.myspace.com/nutbrownsinger  
and DJ Khiasma http://www.myspace.com/khiasma

$6 and the first 100 people get art prints, lucky you!

You can check out our facebook event page in hopes that your secret crush will be attending.

Much thanks to Elif Saydam and Christine Hale for their beautiful posters!

Teeny Tiny Valentines

The World’s Smallest Postal Service is Lea Redmond’s project, she is the Postmaster so to speak. Lea takes letters up to 120 words and transforms them into the smallest letter you ever saw (1 X 1.5 inches) complete with postage and a wax seal. I think this would be an awesome way to send that special someone a Valentine, even if it’s your mom. Lea is based out of San Francisco where she and her tiny post office roam around offering people this odd and amazing service.

Each tiny letter goes into a tiny envelope which gets addressed, stamped, and sealed with a miniscule wax seal with your initial on it. The letter then goes into a see-through folded coin case and is packaged up with a magnifying glass in a larger glassine envelope, finished off with a large “World’s Smallest Letter” wax seal and the best part is it’s affordable!

To any potential secret Valentines I might have I just want to let you know that I think this is a grand idea (no preassure).

XO Amy

Cloaca machines

I’m utterly tickled by Wim Delvoye’s CLOACA project, which has him building machines that literally create shit. Series of glass jars, tubes and chemical processes transform food into stuff that smells like, looks like, and is - poo. It’s dressed up in the guise of a faux company, with customer testimonials, early sketches and even the (now sold-out) option to buy your own Cloaca shit.

Because of its whimsical dressings, Delvoye’s conceptual art because instantly accessible and way more thought-provoking than it would be with some dense artists’ statement. All by myself, without any direct prompting, I get to thinking about the nature of humanity, and life, and technology - in a deep, rewarding way. It’s more than just a gimmick.

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Joshua Allen Harris

Maybe you’ve seen Joshua Allen Harris’ inflatable street art before, but if not it’s worth seeing. I saw a video of his first piece, a bear made of shopping bags, last summer but never heard anything else about the artist. I recently found some more videos of his pieces in action and though I would share them with you. Joshua makes sculptures out of shopping and garbage bags and attaches them to subway air vents. When the subway passes underneath the wooshing air turns what looks like a pile of garbage into an animated creature and as the subway leaves it deflates and blends into its surroundings again. To see more visit his youtube channel.

Diane Obomsawin Wins

I was introduced to Obom’s work for the first time during the 2006 edition of the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Her NFB-produced short film, Here and There, was in competition. I (literally) saw everything the festival had to offer, it was awesome, and Obom’s film was the awesome-est. That is, not only according to me (which should already be enough), but also according to the jury of the festival who gave it the Best Narrative Short Animation (under 35 minutes) prize.

The film’s a honest yet stylized re-telling of “the bewildering events of her rootless early years” where “she fleshes out an uncertain identity and takes control of her life.” On top of having a style (black naive outlines and flat color fillings) and a story (a child torn between continents) that definitely resonate with me from the get-go, the film showcases Obom’s brilliant control over subtle details of expression, gesture and language. As cheese-tastic as it sounds, I’d never seen such a deliciously seamless blend of humour, bitterness, resignation and hope. I still remember how inspiring it was that the characters were both involved yet a bit detached from everything. Plus, they were all bird-like but instead of using their wings to fly, they were bouncing all over the place with a very satisfying ‘boing’ sound, which is obviously really great. You should get the DVD.

Diane’s genius graphic novel, Kaspar, has just been released in English by Drawn & Quarterly (both Kaspar and her other graphic novel, Plus Tard, have been previously published in French by L’Oie de Cravan). It is a moving (but not melodramatic) adaptation of the real life story of Kaspar Hauser, a teenager found in the streets of Nuremberg in 1828 after having spent the first 16 years of his life confined in a dark room. This beautifully printed book demonstrates how Obom’s talent translates just as well in graphic novel format: the story is somewhat harsher, but her touch of ambiguous and bitter sweetness still transpires.

The book will be launched at the Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore (211 Bernard West) on Tuesday, February 3rd at 7pm. Original pages of the book will be exhibited there as well. I’ll leave you with 4 shots of Diane’s pug, Mimi, who will hopefully show up at the book launch as well.

Yeondoo Jung

I first became aware of Yeondoo Jung’s photographs when someone showed me his Wonderland collection, photographs taken based on children’s drawings. For this series he collected over 1200 drawings and then chose only 17. To recreate the images he enlisted the help of costume designers and set designers to sew and build clothing and objects the way children draw them, such as shirts with uneven sleeves and 2 dimensional tables.

Yeondoo Jung’s most recent work still plays with the ideas of skewed reality and imagination. Nostalgia Documentary is an 84 minute HD video shot in one take where workers in orange jumpsuits walk in and out of the scene to change it completely. They place bird’s nests in trees, remove roads that are really carpets and change backdrops to countrysides. To get a better idea visit his website where some selected clips are available. Below of some screen shots from the film.

Of things just around the corner…

And in this case, I mean JUST around the corner, at Fairmount and Parc, aka where that fancy lady always waits for the 80, everyday, with the fur and the pearls and the dog(s) and the coke-induced glares.

On her way to her stop, she passes Articule, one of Montreal’s beloved local Artist Run Centres, currently hosting ARTARTAR it’s first ever Members’ Exhibition in its new space, a giant cacophony of art meets food meets fancy lady barfing up her dinner on her dog as she gets on the bus.

There are 2 events coming up for it over the next few weekends, a film screening to do with gastronomical-esque themes on the 24th of January at 7pm (which also includes a bowl of soup oh yeah, did someone say free hot dogs?) and InTerreArt, in collaboration with articule Special Projects, a performance event curated by Nicole Fournier (happening on the 1st of February at 3pm).

The members exhibition includes works from over 22 Montreal artists, and the events happening over the weekend(s) will present works by Nicole Fournier, Eric Letourneau and Tagny Duff, along with other performers including dogs, (did someone say free hot dogs?) plant food, micro-organisms and other interconnected matter. And yeah yeah, I’m in it too, so this is clearly a cheap plug, which is what 98% of my life consists of anyhow, so no surprise there.

And on a completely (un)related note, I know the image here is kindof small and maybe a bit thematically awkward but it was the first image I found googling, “fancy coke lady”, so it’s staying.

They are sexy people

SEXY PEOPLE is a blog that posts photo portraits, usually from the 1970s or 1980s. The “sexy” bit is a joke, but I’m fascinated by the way these dated, hilarious images capture something essential not just about their subjects - but about the aesthetic of hopes and self-image at the time they were taken. Thank goodness we’re beyond all that.

POSTRS!

The aptly named show, POSTRS!, is a collection of Tyler Rauman’s Montreal show posters from 2007 and 2008. He’ll be presenting his art prints at Cafe Zigoto this Friday with the help from some musical friends.

Friday January 23rd 7pm

Le Zigoto 5731 Ave du Parc

Performing the evening of the event will be
TUNEYARDS
Adam and the Amethysts (solo set)
Mussaver
and possibly more

My New York Diary (Kind of)

Sorry y’all Julie Doucet fans, I’m actually going to talk about my own trip to New York City, and not about the awesome cartoonist’s. That will happen some other time (and maybe somewhere else), but not today. Anyhow, this January I hopped on a greyhound overnight-party-machine and went for a carefully google mapped out visit of the city. 

I vividly remember Funny Not Funny, curated by Becky Smith and Allison Kave over at the Bellwether gallery (134 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets). According to the press release, it’s a group show that deals with “the language, content, and representation of humor in overt and subtle ways. Artists who incorporate wit, absurdity, or satire into their practice create and confront the challenge of making serious work with humorous content, and question our understanding of “what is funny”. The exhibition aims to reveal the careful balance of levity and intellectual rigor inherent to works by artists who take the risk of using the language of humor in a discipline that is not a joke.”

I spent most of my time in the gallery in the final room for many reasons, one of them being Tamy Ben-Tor’s video, Normal (2006); in which she brilliantly performs as a familiarly overbearing and anxious (but latently fragile) character leaving voice messages after voice messages. The video showcases her excellent role-playing skills, as well as her fine sense of humour which resonates in many ways with the realistically grotesque style of Ryan Trecartin, Erica Eyres and Prettythingsss (btw, it turns out both are youtube subscribers of Trecartin, the more you know…). Speaking of Trecartin, he was also part of the show with his collaborator Lizzie Fitch and their elusively (and genitally?) humorous installation:

David Shrigley was also on hand, exhibiting a few giggle-worthy drawings. And although I will admit I prefer to enjoy his art in book or pocket format, props must be given to him regardless, for his masterful wit and sense of comedy. The crudity of his lines and letters, and his queasy use of space and text, seems to transform the way words are internally read into something invariably funny that make me pee my pants, hard. You can get 2 of his artbooks, a set of postcards and two smaller booklets by him at the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore (211 Bernard W), just saying.

I suggest you take a look at this to see more of this show’s jewels. Coming up soon: MOMA, PS1, New Museum and Greene Naftali kind-of-coverage, plus cool zinesters and more?