THE BEST VIDEO DANCE PARTY OF THE NINETIES!!!!

Friday August 7th 9:30 PM
The Paper Apartment Gallery (formerly My Hero Gallery)
3655 St. Laurent

It’s like a MuchMusic Video Party…but not.
Come dance the night away with the best music videos from your past.
This is a fundraiser for an Art Festival we will be putting on soon.
This awesome party will feature a tasty bake sale where you can buy yummy delights like…

Smashing Pumpkin Pie
Stone Temple Pie-lettes
Pearl Jam Cookies
Sub-Lime Tarts
Notorious P.I.E
Nir-Flan-A
Candy Apples in Stereo
Pave-Mint Chocolate Cupcakes
and much much more….

Chum-BEER-Wumba will be available for sale

Pay What You Can Suggested $5

RSVP on Facebook here

I <3 Giant Animals

I just had to share this giant wooden bunny that I saw on the DesignSponge blog. It’s by artist Florentijn Hofman, who is most well known for the giant rubber duckie (2007) pictured below. I hope you enjoy over sized animals as much as I do.

A show I don’t want to avoid concerning a topic I would…

This Thursday the 30th at the always-to-keep-on-your-arts-radar Emporium Gallery in Montreal, Patrick Tsai of My Little Dead Dick fame and compadre Coley Brown will be showing their latest photographic collaborative efforts, entitled Growing Up.

From the mouths of those proponing to be in the process of growing up themselves:

“Growing Up was spurred by a spontaneous scene we witnessed together at Shibuya station in Tokyo, Japan- where two high school girls were leaning against a wall, one was crying while the other was trying to comfort her. Even though they were surrounded by a city of millions, they were the only ones that existed for that brief moment. The photograph we took of them that day eventually became the genesis of our project, a project whose intention was to document and explore the inevitable process of growing up.”

Sigh. Although part of me still refuses to deal with the whole concept of growing up, I still think it should be interesting to see what two photographers, almost a decade apart in age (ok, 6 years…but a big 6, as Tsai is in his late 20s and Brown, his early) have to say as a collective mass together on the whole topic. A show that will likely leave a bit of an impact, sentimental or otherwise, and an opening that I suspect you won’t want to miss…

All the practical details can  be found here.

Who doesn’t want another excuse to make a sketchbook?

Personally, I think it’s always a good idea to have at least one sketchbook on the go, as the little friends above will testify to. Over here, at the Art House Coop website, you can sign up for this pretty interesting looking project where they send you a sketchbook, which you then fill up or leave empty or smear honey in, and then send it back to them by mid-December-ish. Then your book, alongisde countless others, will go on a tour through the U.S. of A. They are even offering to bring them to your city if you can find a gallery to host the event. All in all, it seems like a really fun thing to do, and a great motivator for those who like this kind of thing but need external forces to help push their inertia button into the  ”on” mode.

You DO have to pay for the sketchbook, but it’s a small fee considering the scope of the project. If you decided to head over to their website to take a look at this in further detail, consider sticking around, they’ve got a neat thing going on worth poking at.

For The Blog of Love

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I just found out that the remarkable quarterly arts magazine Bad Day has an equally remarkable blog. It’s fresh and constantly updated with badass art: just on the frontpage, I see wool fetischists, Amy Lockhart, Fever Ray, Asher Penn, Aiden Shaw and a post on Butt magazine. Hard to be instantly totes’ sold.

Get your MPD on tonight

If you want to see everything there is to see tonight, you better work your multiple personality disorder to your advantage:

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• The animations of Stefan Gruber at Monastiraki (5478 St-Laurent) tonight at 8pm. His work has fluid animation and a trippy aesthetic that echoes the nonchalant sophistication of comix artists like Ron Regé Jr.

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• Before that though, you should stop by right next door, over at Le Cagibi (5490 St. Laurent), for the vernissage of an exhibition featuring the costumes, props and photos from the in-progress short film, Smile Stealers. This is happening from 5pm to 7pm.

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• The second edition of the Montreal 60 Second Film Festival is having its (free) Registration Party down the street at La Sala Rossa (4848 boul. St-Laurent) from 8:30pm to 11:30pm. The idea is simple: the first 120 filmmakers to sign up each make a 60 second film that will be screened in september. Entertainment will include performances by Julie Lequin (of her “This American Life” submission), magician Sébastien Talbot, zoetrope workshop, screentests - not to mention doorprizes featuring original art created for M60! More info on this incredible project here.

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• For the 18th year in a row, Groupe Intervention Vidéo presents Vidéos de femmes dans le parc (VFP), showing 17 short video works by awesome ladies, including forever-mammoth-favorite Kim Kielhofner. This is happening at the Théâtre de Verdure in Parc Lafontaine, 9 pm.

FULL-ON ANIMATION FOR FULL-ON MONDAY

The Astronomer’s Dream (2009) from Animalcolm on Vimeo.

Malcolm Sutherland’s The Astronomer’s Dream, in full, right here. He’s this generation’s Norman McLaren, folks, so listen up. Or watch up or something….

Proof 16

Attention Torontonians! Gallery 44 is having their Proof 16 show again and it’s a good one. One of our favorite Montreal artists Katie has some amazing self-portrait photo based weavings in the show. Here’s the details from Gallery 44.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond St W. Suite 120 Toronto ON M5V 3A8 www.gallery44.org 416.979.3941

Proof 16
Gallery 44’s annual exhibition of emerging Canadian photographer’s works

Tanya Busse, Sarah Febbraro, Katie Jung, Yuriko Kubota, Mark André Pennock, Sabrina Russo, Jim Verburg, Cameron Young

July 10 – August 8, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday July 10, 6 – 9 pm, artists in attendance
Artist in residency talk: Friday July 10, 6 pm

Gallery 44’s annual exhibition of emerging artists features the latest photographic practices from across the country. This year’s exhibition is unique for its representation of a diverse range of media including sculptural and hand crafted pieces. The show includes a book work (Busse), images from YouTube (Febbraro), jacquard weavings (Jung), multiple prints mounted together with layers sliced away (Kubota), a video work (Pennock), an interactive table installation and flipbook animation (Russo) and gum bichromate prints (Young). Gallery 44’s 2009 artist in residence is Jim Verburg, whose multimedia installation is a culmination of his work during the residency.