CAMPER: Call for Submission

Submission Deadline: MAY 16, 2014

We are currently seeking submissions for new or pre-existing short films to be included in TRUCK’s Bike-in Cinema thematic screening: Main Course Discourse

The snow is gone and the outdoor grilling season is here and TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary wants to see your artful videos based on accumulating, consuming, or preparing edibles under the sun. From valuable survival tips around en plein air cuisine to entertaining step-by-step grilling guides for your favorite patio provisions this thematic screening hopes to serve up some tummy tickling topics of entertainment.

Bike-in Cinema is an outdoor screening series hosted by TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary’s CAMPER (Contemporary Art Mobile Public Exhibition Rig). Using the CAMPER as a site for projection, Bike-in Cinema encourages exploration of Calgary’s urban environment, presenting screenings around the city.

TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary is a non-profit artist-run centre dedicated to the development and public presentation of contemporary art. TRUCK’s CAMPER is a 1975 Dodge Empress motor-home, modified to become a portable public exhibition and project space. CAMPER’s mandate is to investigate the places where art, education and recreation meet, and to explore these intersections in a participatory manner that fosters public engagement and appreciation of contemporary art practices.
Submissions will be accepted until Friday, May 16th, 2014 at 5:00PM. Films should not exceed 20 minutes in duration.

ALL SUBMISSIONS MUST INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

1. A brief film synopsis (maximum 250 words).
2. Artist biography (maximum of 1 page)
3. Curriculum Vitae (maximum of 3 pages)
4. Film: Please submit only the film(s) you wish to be included in the screening. Films should be formatted as Quicktime movie files in H.264 codec limited to 8000kbps with a resolution of 1920 x 1080. Films should be no longer than 20 minutes in length.

Please Note:
All written materials should be saved in a single PDF file and burned to a separate disc from your video. Must be Mac OSX compatible.
Submissions will NOT be returned unless a self-addressed pre-paid envelope is included in your package.
DO NOT E-MAIL SUBMISSIONS. Late, incomplete, faxed or e-mailed submissions will not be accepted. Please deliver or send via mail (submissions that are post-marked for May 16th will be accepted).

Submissions should be addressed to:

Bike-in Cinema
TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary
2009 10th Ave SW
Calgary AB
T3C 0K4

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO

MUTATIONS: José Luis Torres

I feel a tinge uneasy when I go to José Luis Torres’ website (1) and see the word “Sculptor” under the banner that bears his name. I notice that there are 27 different projects under “Installations”, whereas clicking “Sculptures” leads only to one. In interviews, he makes it clear that his work is a hybrid between sculpture and architecture. Attentiveness to site, place, and landscape also permeate his oeuvre.

Limiting the discussion to the kinds of works in Mutations, discarded wooden furniture and plastic appliances are precariously stacked, cantilevered, and tied off with skillfully knotted fragments of frayed rope. A make-shift base supports a jury-rigged arch of improbably assembled junk items.  Paint-chipped surfaces rub together, further distressing their already worn patina. A string of teetering chairs is patched together by a bricolage of ingenious but barely sufficient engineering solutions. Poised at the brink of instability, these forms also evoke beings caught in a moment of graceful and dynamic motion.

All of this encourages a playful meditation on the mysterious metaphysical process by which new “things” come into being, and what their relationship is to their constituent parts, especially when the chairs do not lose their “chairness”, the ladders their “ladderness”, or the palettes their “paletteness.” In their right to claim status as “things”, Torres’ constructions are clearly ahead of mere piles of stuff, but they have the potential to collapse back into that at any moment. In parallel fashion, this exhibition also implicitly raises the question of how much of Torres' other work (landscape interventions and architectural installations) can be grafted onto a term like “sculpture” before the category itself starts careening.

To be fair, every artist learns early on that the most accurate description of their practice as a whole tends not only to be long-winded, but paradoxically, to result in gross misunderstandings, which is often worse than outright ignorance (better to know that one doesn’t know than to think one knows when one doesn’t). Claiming a familiar label can be pragmatic: “sculptor” inspires more confidence than “installation artist” for juries selecting public art projects intended to withstand Canadian winters. In a 2009 documentary(2), Pipilotti Rist looks over her shoulder as she fills out a form: “What am I? Artist? Video Artist? Fine Artist? Multiple choice.” Pen to paper, she mumbles, “Artist ... I think.”

My unease with Torres’ provisional label “sculptor” is nothing new. Already in 1979, Rosalind Krauss lamented, “categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything.”(3) This led her to posit four logical positions that “sculptors” could occupy in relation to a matrix of cultural terms, of which sculpture (defined negatively as not-architecture and not-landscape) was only one. Much of Torres’ work seems to find a home in categories like site-construction (architecture and landscape) or axiomatic structures (architecture and not-architecture). Unfortunately, Krauss’s “expanded field” still doesn’t translate well to institutional contexts.

Part of Krauss’s motivation in shifting critical discourse from medium to cultural terms lay in the fact that “sculpture” was being covertly invoked as a way of slotting new and difficult “vanguard aesthetics” into a comfortable and familiar tradition—a move that in some contexts is necessary and practical, but simultaneously limits art’s potential to act on us:

[Historicism] makes a place for change in our experience by evoking the model of evolution, so that the man who now is can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by simultaneously being seen—through the unseeable action of the telos—as the same. And we are comforted by this perception of sameness, this strategy for reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are. (4)

Torres was born in Argentina and has been living in Quebec since 2003. He sees his work as a reflection on displacement, on his condition as immigrant. I find myself wondering whether “immigrant”, like “sculptor”, is also a provisional category, essential for navigating political realities, but limited in accounting for the varieties of contemporary nomadic experience. The mutation or conceptual expansion of such categories is exactly what is on the table: the incongruous arrays of objects in his installations seem held together by the same stuff as the narrative thread with which language users cobble a chronology of discrete experiences into fixed identities. Like subject positions constituted by sometimes incommensurable worlds, Torres’ constructions dramatize the possibility of tenuous, provisional, and hard-earned fictions of stability among barely assimilable components.

Essay by: Paul Robert

---

1. José Luis Torres | Sculpteur / Sculptor. Accessed February 6, 2014, http://joseluistorres.ca.

2. The Color of your Socks: A Year With Pipilotti Rist, directed by Michael Hegglin (2009; San Francisco: Microcinema Int'l Inc.) DVD.

3. Rosalind Kraus, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”. October. Vol 8. (Spring 1979): 30.

4. Krauss, 30.

Follow us on TUMBLR!!!

TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary is now on tumblr - follow us HERE

DOCUMENTATION: Sagala Regalia

Documentation from Kuh del Rosario's Sagala Regalia

Sagala Regalia: A Regal Procession

The term Sagala Regalia combines both Filipino and Latin words and translates to "Regal Procession," an apt title for Kuh Del Rosario's exhibition of sculptures at TRUCK. The term sagala refers to a religious-historical procession, during the Flores de Mayo festival held in the Philippines. (1) Participants or 'Muses' for the sagala are hand picked for their vitality and beauty. Adorned by a menagerie of colours, fabrics and seasonal flowers, the muses elicit inspiration and awe from the many onlookers and other participants of the sagala. The pageantry of the event eclipses the religious purpose of the parade, which is to celebrate Santo Nino (the infant Jesus), instead the procession and festival have become part of the Filipino traditions celebrating youth, love and romance; transformed beyond the intangible, spiritual origins and historical meanings of the festival. 

Having witnessed many of these sagalas in her early youth, Del Rosario pulls from her vivid memories to create a new procession of sculptures that seem to stand in for the muses that have reshaped the meaning of the event so poignantly. Del Rosario presents us with a procession of works that utilize materiality as a conduit for the transformation and celebration of meaning. Using salvaged materials and found objects harvested from TRUCK's throw away pile Del Rosario presents us with a pageant of a history of forms where meaning and materials are precariously reconfigured as 'interested simulacra' becoming a structural part of Del Rosario's sculptures. 

This approach to material and meaning is well grounded in modern sculptural practices as well, the French structuralist Roland Barthes had suggested that in place of "a [prevailing] mechanical=materialistic formalism," the exploration of an object's form is a theoretical act, rooted in its "materiality and functioning." (2) In his 2002 essay on Contemporary Sculpture and the Responsibility of Forms, New York based independent writer and curator Klaus Ottmann prescribes the concerns of contemporary sculpture as new variant of the materialistic formalism of Barthes - what he terms as 'spiritual materiality,' "one that is based in part on a structuralist analysis of the world that attributes ideological meaning to the materials themselves or inscribes linguistic codes onto them and in part on a participatory humanism - a renewed involvement in the question of being, transcendence, and the social by way of its materiality - a new variant...(3) This spiritual materialism includes art that either reconstructs 'material,' in a manner that is "reflexive or poetic, in such a way as to manifest thereby its rules or ideological structure." 

This transformation as a 'new variant' of materials is a vital part of Del Rosario's process, which involved the selection of materials culled from TRUCK's recent move out of our basement level gallery space in the Grain Exchange. Salvaged materials otherwise destined for the landfill became grist for the mill- "object[s] of the everyday...dredged up from the sediment of the urban quarry." Emerging from our subterranean vault were the material participants to the 17-year history of TRUCK's tenure in that underground venue. Del Rosario then employed an artistic process that favoured happenstance, mistakes, and corrections that cultivate an "organic development of the work." (4) A dialectical process that is as much a product of chance and circumstance, as a means of transforming materials, an imperfect solution to perfecting materiality and meaning.

The resulting sculptures in Sagala Regalia are adorned with the remnants of our past; our precious exhibitions, events, correspondences, identity, layered under the weight of paint, foam, wood glue, and whatever medium the artist can summon. The artefacts and their histories are transformed through the power of the artist, as an agent of change, reconstructing and perhaps revealing an ideological structure that is at our very heart. This procession is then paraded before using a sovereign pageant of deepened meaning, vitality and beauty.

Essay by Renato Vitic

1. "The Phillippines: Flores de Mayo & Santa Cruzan." Faculty of Education, The Utrecht [n.d]. Viewed January 15th, 2014. www.philippines.hvu.nl/culture2.htm

2. Roland Barthes, "Digressions," in The Grain of Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. op. cit., p. 115

3. Kluas Ottmann, "Spiritual Materiality: Contemporary Sculpture and the Responsibility of Forms," Sculpture Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 4, April 2002. www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag02/april02/ottoman/otto.shtml

4. Del Rosario, "Stmt.," 2013

 

    

TRUCK GALLERY CALL FOR: USED FURNITURE/ INTERESTING OBJECTS

Truck Gallery is in need of the following items for an upcoming exhibition by José Luis Torres. All donated items will be consumed by the artistic process so please only donate items you no longer need.

- old wooden ladder

- old wooden desks

- old chairs

- mattresses

- armchairs

- ordinary objects worn by time

- rare & interesting objects

Donations can be dropped off at TRUCK Gallery, 2009 10^th Ave SW. Calgary, AB. T3C 0K4 during regular gallery hours.

PLEASE CALL IN ADVANCE & LET US KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE

TRUCK Gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 11am – 5pm & Saturdays 12pm – 5pm

TRUCK Gallery is a non-profit registered charity and can provide tax receipts for any donations when proof of value is provided.  

Contact TRUCK Gallery with any questions:

p: 403-261-7702

e: info (at) truck.ca

Resonant Field @ TRUCK

Artists Sylvia Matas, Warren McLachlan, and Tanya Rusnak think about nightshades, mechanical waves, optical phenomena, and unfathomable distances. They wander through fields of the in-between, while convergent forces in spaces not easily seen testify to the density of voids as generative spaces. An essential, but nebulous, question emerges: what is happening in the darkness?   

In The moon is moving away from earth at a rate of about 4cm per year (2013), Sylvia Matas makes a gesture intended to span a distance that cannot be fully comprehended by sight alone. Her arm is traced on the gallery wall, a reimagining of our very first artworks: Lascaux now. It is a simple, personal act that both emphasizes and belies the distance between bodies (astral and corporeal), while measuring the intimate sensitivity of our own body to register where we end and everything else begins. Matas’ outstretched arm is a generous full extension of its own distance, but it also brings her that much closer.   

The moon is but a member of a family of particles in the drawings of Tanya Rusnak. Her images are intricate, precise. In this exhibition she presents an encyclopedic record of dust and the forces that propel it: rocks, star fields, clouds, meteor showers, and volcanic eruptions. Her drawings, accompanied by mounds of resting salt, are executed with the patience and care of a manuscript illuminator, reminding us of mystical pursuits. Several times removed from their original sources, these images approach the spectral, revealing visitors from another realm. Together, they are like a library of the unknowably far away – long past or distant future.   

The darkness also includes creatures of the night. Warren McLachlan has built two bat houses, each large enough to house a small colony of Myotis Lucifugus, the brown bat. Copper clad, they double as antennas – passive receivers of incessant radio waves. There is a house for the outside, mounted on the gallery’s facade, and one for the inside. I wonder which the bats will choose, but more pressingly: what effect will a bat’s echolocation sonar have upon incoming radio waves and what effect will these waves have upon the bats? Would freak resonant frequencies allow a bat’s ear to inadvertently tune into midnight concertos?   

Among other artworks in Resonant Field, these projects recognize unseen realms and the forces and desires that span them. Forms begin to emerge from the invisible when these artists look to the deep memory of the self-organizing system, the elusiveness of language, conductivity, ratios of the body, constellations, specks, calendars. Matas, McLachlan, and Rusnak create works like palindromes; they can be read in multiple directions, as ideas that begin at their own center, their outstretched hands reaching into the rich, ripe darkness.   

JdH 

Jason de Haan is a Canadian artist, his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.