Self-defense or an Invasion?

Is the invasion of Iraq a legitimate response to the horrific events of 9/11, 2001 or was it a continuum of an undeclared war through successive US administrations? Was it a “war on terror” or “war of aggression”? What role has Canada played? Our panelists discuss issues behind the issues.

Panelists: Raymond Legault (Collectif Échec à la guerre), Omar Dewachi (Iraqi-Canadian, Anthropologist and musician), Louis Roy (Vice president, Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), Jooneed Khan (Journalist, Human Right activist)

Moderator: Robert Stewart

* Please note that Omar will come on the 19th instead of today.

* Also, Vernissage and reception tonight at 7PM at the cafe of the monument national.
The vernissage is free, the panel is free.

“We Made a Deal with the Devil & Indyish is 3 Years old!”
The next Indyish Monthly Mess is produced in partnership with Methinks Presents.
Date: August 15 + 16 2009
Place: 435 Beaubien West, Centre Chat Bleu [2 blocks west of Parc ave]

August 15 at 8pm – Monthly Mess.
August 16 at 4pm – Vernissage + Art Mart and a special performance by Sapo.

Montréal, Québec – July 27, 2009: Indyish! (www.indyish.com), Montreal-based independent artist network (now THREE YEARS YOUNG!), along with Toronto’s METHINKS Presents is bringing you a two-day Monthly Mess & Vernissage at Le Centre Chat Bleu (435 Beaubien Ouest, 4th Floor) on Saturday August 15 8pm and Sunday August 16 from 4-6pm.

“We’re celebrating three years of independent artists coming together”, says Risa Dickens, co-founder of Indyish. “And what better way to do just that than partner with Methinks on their 16 stop art tour, and link it up with the crazy collaborative art + circus + boxing community we work with at the Chat Bleu!”

“METHINKS is bringing their traveling visual and performing art show, ‘We Made a Deal with the Devil’, to Montreal,” says Paul Aflalo, Indyish Producer “and we’re so excited to have them! Performing art antics and dozens of devil drawings and more!”

We Made a Deal with the Devil is a cultural expedition, touring art show, video project and tour blog – check it out at www.methinkspresents.org.

We’re going to have a remarkable show on Saturday August 15, with great performances from Nista (indie electro Swedes? Yes please: www.myspace.com/nistamus), Gypsy fire from Briga (www.myspace.com/briga123), and irony to make you dance your face off by Commodore84 (www.myspace.com/COM84A1) and Garbageface (www.myspace.com/garbagefacemusic), and a brand new collaboration between Franco Proietti (The Franco Proietti Morph-tet) and Brie Nielson (The Unsettlers) a Billie Holiday Tribute like you’ve never seen.

In addition, Rahul Varma the artistic director off Montreal’s celebrated Teesri Duniya theatre company – committed to “socially and politically relevant theatre that supports a multicultural vision of society” – will be presenting a special preview of his new production, ‘Truth and Treason,’ exclusively for our audiences. ‘Truth and Treason‘ takes place in Iraq and, in part, is about what could drive a person toward accepting a suicide mission, it is about the devil with whom we make deals in ourselves, and in our culture. Meet Rahul Varma:

“Come celebrate THREE years of Indyish, check out the reverberant Methinks Presents ‘We Made a Deal with the Devil’ art galleries, and jam with us – it’s going to be a fantastic show”, says Aflalo.

All Indyish Messes are supported with the help of MOOG Audio, the Mcauslan Brewery and Italmelodie (www.italmelodie.com). Each of the artists performing do so free of charge.

For more information, please visit www.indyish.com.

For her show at Galerie Monastiraki, Amy has created a body of work that draws together ideas of play, pattern and perverts. Using her skills as a d.i.y. sewer she makes banners, embroideries and 3-D plush letters to spell out stuff that is funny and sweet and dear to her heart.

Bio:

Amy Drover is an artist living in Toronto who works in a variety of mediums. She makes fibre-based art, multiples of books, buttons, and finger puppets. Amy gravitates towards the homemade, handmade, d.i.y. techniques of silk-screening, embroidery, sewing, knitting and crochet. She often finds herself making performative work that involves baking, comedy and humiliation. She attended Concordia University where she completed a BA in English literature and studio arts. Her art practice continues to evolve as she digs deeper into her research and obsession with graffiti art and the history of repeat printing.

More info:

Galerie Monastiraki
5478 St-Laurent
(514) 278-4879

http://monastiraki.blogspot.com

Concordia Fine Arts student Marilyne Blais is bringing out her innermost demons with her latest art project, which will be featured from September 1st until the 10th, along with the work of Alanna Lynch, at the VAV Gallery. Her work, which is part of “From the Bottom of the Hamper” features drawings which draw inspiration from her Catholic-Quebecois heritage, in addition to “long, boring family holidays, afternoon tea parties, knitting and my mom’s obsession with Victorian furniture,” says Marilyne.

“The first draft of my work comes from an elemental stream of consciousness,” she says. “The grotesque is an important component of my work, as portraying psychosis for me is something that is expressed with humor in order to avoid self-degradation.”

Alanna Lynch says her degree in Psychology, which she earned before switching into the fibres program at Concordia, is an instrumental part of her work. “I like to work with subjects that push boundaries and sometimes make both myself and the viewer a little uncomfortable,” Lynch says.

Lynch says she gets nervous talking about her work, but confronting those issues is pretty much the point: “Using my own body as reference, [via close-up photography] I am forcing myself to confront any private feelings of shame publicly.”

Her Untitled Performance, which was featured in last year’s Art Matters festival, saw Lynch wearing the same brown garment day after day, forcing her to find new stylistic devices and uses for the same banal piece of fabric. “I like to experiment with social expectations regarding appearance and behaviour,” she explains about projects past and present.

This year, her work takes the “form of a large series of [over forty] miniature paintings and drawings, as well as a hand-made book comprised of twenty etchings.” The paintings consist of strange scenes containing “a procession of monstrous ladies, raccoons and odd objects,” all done in pastel colours. As Lynch explains, the facade, not the content, “as a whole ironically conveys the aesthetic of a grandmotherly living room.”

A connoisseur of her own nightmares, Blais also thrives in the perversion of the mundane and the homely lifestyles her Quebecois ancestors: look closer at her work, says Blais and “little girls in their Sunday best are torturing cute, cuddly animals, while old ladies are knitting scarves from their pubic hair and squirrels are shitting teacups.”

From the Bottom of the Hamper will be featured at the VAV gallery at 1395 Rene Levesque W. A vernissage will be held on Tuesday, September 2, 2008, from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Marilyne Blais at Woodenapples

Elif Saydam at Woodenapples

Ok, I really like Woodenapples. This time last year, Amy Johnson opened this craft shop/gallery/workshop space on Parc Avenue. And hey, she and the store survived their first Montreal winter!

Over the year, Woodenapples has been home to numerous workshops on sewing, embroidery, and craftwork. It’s hosted two Clothing Swaps (one and two). It’s shown the work of 10 artists in a monthly vernissage series that Indyish has recently joined in on, helping to promote the shows and working the bar.

Come celebrate Woodenapples’ 1st Birthday this Friday, June 6th from 7pm-11pm at 5319 Ave du Parc!

The walls will be decked out in a year’s worth of art, and there’s going to be a cake walk. A cake walk!

Works by:
Elif Saydam
Rachel Shaw
Tyler Rauman
Gabrielle Parizeau
Caitlin Livingston
Jamie Quail
Marilyne Blais
Farha Dharshi
Serah-Marie McMahon
Ed Janzen

Recently, I was impressed by an email from a vernissage organizer inviting me to come see her and her friend’s work. I was actually struck by how much more inclined I was to post her press release on the Indyish blog, and it got me thinking about what makes an effective invitation.

In a time when you can check a box next to someone’s name to add them to your event’s invite list (or just “invite all”), it seems extra important to actually do the work of inviting people, ie. making them feel invited, not just solicited.

I’ve made a bunch of mistakes in different contexts. Sending invitations to the wrong people, with typos, translation errors, huge attachments, too much text, exposed recipient lists, the wrong time and date….not all at once, luckily. My advice here is gleaned from these mistakes, from my past experience as an Indyish intern, as well as from some personal research online, and 12 years of having an email address.

Many of us are our own publicity people. We organize and take part in various projects and end up contacting press to get the word out about what we’re doing. Even if you’re just emailing a group of friends to give them a reminder about your show, the idea is that :

if the right people find out about your event in the right way, they’ll give you the right kind of publicity, without either person having to grovel or trade in their morals.

How do I send emails to press contacts?

- First of all, if you’re gonna be sending semi-regular announcements to a group of people, no matter how informal, it’s illegal in Canada to not include some kind of information on how a person can be removed from your mailing list.

- If your list includes people beyond your immediate circle of friends and family, you probably want to write the addresses as blind copy (bc), which means each person only sees that they received an email from you that was sent to other people, but they can’t see the addresses of all of those other people. If you make all the addresses visible, it’s likely that people will copy and paste them into their address book and when those people send press out, your friends get messages they never asked for.

- Another reason not to treat your contacts lightly is that for a lot of small businesses and groups, a press list is one of the most valuable assets to foster. I remember hearing from my friend who runs her own business how horrified she was to be asked for her press list as payment from another entrepreneur with whom she had collaborated. “My press list is my entire business! It took years to build up contact with that many people!” And as much as I’m down with sharing, it’s always proven much better to go through the work of making a contact, rather than copying someone’s info without the relationship. Plus, people don’t really listen to what they find annoying, and unsolicited mail is annoying.

- Build your list by making it easy for interested people to join. Have a quick form on your website, or tell people to write you an email with “newsletter” or “signup” in the subject line. Indyish uses Zookoda to organize signup and send out focused newsletters for the Monthly Mess as well as different updates for Indyish Artists, Members, and Visitors. There are lots of others that offer good services.

- Find appropriate media contacts by looking on the Contact or About page of any publication’s website. Make sure you’re addressing the right person and be specific to the department you want to reach. Follow the instructions that every different group has about how, when, who, where, and why to contact them. [Risa wrote a great post about contacting press]

What should the email say?

- I recommend a personalized introduction. The vernissage organizer started her email, “Hi Tessa”. You can hand type the introductions and paste in the body of your email, or you can look into (sometimes costly) email merge software that uses spreadsheets of your contact list to form introductions. If people sign up for a newsletter from you, don’t worry about using their first name, since they’ll be expecting to receive your messages, and are used to a newsletter voice.

- Speak directly to your audience. “I just wanted to invite you to…”. Use a professional, objective tone in your press release, but when you send the release to people, introduce it with a friendly couple of lines of personal text. You don’t necessarily need to use “I”, especially if you’re speaking on behalf of a group, but use the tone of your organization. If your organization doesn’t have a tone, get one. Also, I think that even if you’re speaking for a group, it really impresses on people to hear from a human being, whoever it may be, introducing the show.

How do I avoid being read as junk mail?

- Don’t use a spam-like subject line (“Have you heard about the VERNI$$AGE OF THE CENTURY????!!!!!!”) Caps are bad, weird characters are bad. Informative titles are best (“Pictionary, May 19-30, Vernissage May 20, 7-9″). It also makes your message easy to find in someone’s inbox.

- Don’t send big attachments to people who haven’t asked for them. You wouldn’t deliver an elephant to a stranger’s house and make them deal with figuring out what to do with it. The people you’re emailing receive tons of messages each day, and even if they don’t, most people have spam filters to avoid being delivered an elephant. Either your post will end up in someone’s junk bin (this elephant analogy is turning into a feel-good movie premise) or your big file will fill up their inbox and crash their computer. As an organization, you don’t want either.

- Include a jpg of the poster/flyer or a pdf of the press release. This is why your press release or poster should say and show everything that would be important to a news writer, while staying simple enough to be legible and interesting. You want them to come to your show, not feel like they’ve already got the show in their inbox. Your message is like an enticing party favour from the world of your event.

- As for the actual message, keep it short, and don’t use crazy colours or fonts. This will help you not look like spam.

- End your message with “Feel free to contact me if you’d like more information”.

Bottom line: You’re putting tons of energy into your event and it’s a huge deal for you, but for anyone else it’s just an art show. Learn to strike the balance between conveying the style and image of your event while keeping it contextually digestible. Otherwise, your invitation will get written off, instead of written about! And that would be a shame, considering how much effort you’ve put into the event itself. Just make it easy for people to wanna put energy into talking about it.

>> More tips on running an Independent Arts Organization at the Indie.Biz tag archive.

IndieBiz is an open column with multiple contributors. To become a contributor, Indyish Artists can title their blog posts “Indie.Biz” and tag them “indiebiz”. Anyone else can send their writing to info @ indyish . com with “IndieBiz Submission” in the subject line.

PICTIONARY
MAY 19TH TO 30TH, 2008
VERNISSAGE MAY 20TH, 7 – 9, ARTIST TALK 6:30
GALERIE VAV GALLERY, 1395 RENE LEVESQUE OUEST

Pieces by Jessica Campbell:

The paintings in Pictionary are about an image’s relationship with semiotics –
signs, as well as a sign’s dependence on multiplicity of representational factors
like an unexpected colour, texture or line quality; each of which affects the
potential meanings of an image. The forms act as margins for the transcription
of the language of colour and materiality, rather than signs equivalent to
language. Strong and inviting colours act as bait convincing the viewer to engage
in a dialogue with what is represented – ultimately, a jigsaw puzzle with no
solution. What was the decorative is overwhelmed with an excess of colour,
thus becoming hyper-decorative, excessive and distasteful.

Pieces by Darcy Cooke:

The series “Some Scans” is a playful engagement with the materials and the
process of one of the many contemporary tools of image making available to
artists today. The simple scanning of objects with the digital flat bed scanner
allows for an examination of scale, colours, texture, negation and other ideas
which interest visual artists. Working in a painterly fashion, these photographic
images also convey a melancholic sense of loss and sadness.

[...] No More Wild Ones consists of a series of acrylic paintings that contain certain absences, displaced animals and elements which may cause your consumerist impulses to irk. Her works appear to critique a lack of natural elements in the modern urbanite’s (or suburbanite’s) daily life and how this loss is made up for with banal objects such as fake plants, stylish console tables, and lamps shaped like maggots. However the artist does attempt to make the audience remember their wild side by inserting animals into the imagined domesticated space of her paintings and therefore provides a certain nightmarish quality resonating from the total commodification of these nostalgic creatures. Her work demands the viewer to complete the scene or perhaps the incompleteness of them all is a reflection of the viewer’s own lack of something else that can only be compensated with one of her canvases hanging in their living room underneath a Kryssbo Ikea wall lamp. Rhodenizer’s work immediately grabs your attention and cleverly exploits your consumerist gaze in that she acknowledges your appetite to return to the wild and fulfills this void through a safe canvas that you can take home.

-Salma Shariff

Photos by Marilis Cardinal

Check out Tyler’s work in person at Atelier Woodenapples.