Art
Vernon art gallery paints optimistic picture – Vernon Morning Star – Vernon Morning Star
Work continues to be done behind the scenes to advance the Greater Vernon Cultural Centre, but this fall, the curtains will rise on the public campaign bringing the $39.5-million project back into the limelight.
Vernon Public Art Gallery executive director Dauna Kennedy represents one user group that would call the new centre on the Vernon Block (3103 30th Street) home. She said VPAG has been looking forward to the new facility since talks of a new gallery started in 1986.
VPAG was rehomed to its 31st Avenue home in 1995 and expanded to more than 6,000 square feet by 2004. The spot under the downtown parkade was only meant to be temporary, Kennedy said, and a new state-of-the-art facility can’t come soon enough.
“We had a big exhibition last year where that wall had $60,000 of art on it and the wall flooded. Thank God the art was OK but those are the kinds of situations we’re dealing with,” she said. “This was never built as an art gallery.”
The gallery has outgrown its space and with ongoing issues of leaks and flooding, Kennedy said it’s a challenge to uphold its mandate to bring engaging art to the community.
“We’ve limited what we’ve brought in to the permanent collection. We don’t want any of it to be at risk,” Kennedy said. “We take care of it the best we can given the situation we have, but we really want to be able to provide a proper home and provide the proper care.”
Acknowledging current staff’s ongoing efforts to preserve the collection, Kennedy said a priority is to get temperature and humidity controls to ensure preservation.
“Once we do that and once we get to a Category A gallery, it really opens the doors to us,” she said. “We have a lot of people that would like to donate to us but won’t currently because they know our facility. They’re holding back donations until we’re in a place where we can properly house it.”
Kennedy said proper storage areas and dedicated classroom space are also a must-have in the new space.
“Right now, we’re dealing with temporary space where we have to bring things in and out, while that works for some uses but when it’s art, it’s messy. We need dedicated classrooms to provide different programming for youths and adults.”
In October 2018, voters supported the borrowing of up to $25 million for the construction of the new centre that would house the gallery and the Greater Vernon Museum and 200-seat performance space in a referendum.
Since then, most of the work so far has been done behind the scenes by stakeholders, user groups and the Regional District of North Okanagan.
The RDNO awaits news of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program, a grant funded by the federal and provincial government, and user groups continue to work with private donors to fund the project.
Now, Kennedy said she’s excited to get the public capital campaign rolling this fall to raise between $4 and 6-million.
An estimated $500,000 in direct economic benefit is expected to stem from the centre once operational and welcoming around 60,000 visitors each year. But that trickle-down effect is far-reaching.
The RDNO expects $2 million a year in total economic benefit as the centre attracts longer tourist visits, expands programming and education opportunities, adds employment options and complements other attractions such as the Okanagan Rail Trail.
“The Cultural Centre will bring to the community a creative vibrancy to our downtown,” Kennedy said. “It is going to be a hub, whether they want to come explore art, history or the performing arts, or whether they want to come and have a social opportunity in a new way in a beautiful setting.
“There will be a little bit of something for everyone and it is going to be the go-to place that people want to explore.”
READ MORE: City to donate $5K to Vernon Elks
READ MORE: Square footage may be revisited for Vernon cultural centre
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
Art
Niagara quilt expo to explore history of modern art form – Welland Tribune
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
Art
Art and Ephemera Once Owned by Pioneering Artist Mary Beth Edelson Discarded on the Street in SoHo – artnet News
This afternoon in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, people walking along Mercer Street were surprised to find a trove of materials that once belonged to the late feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson, all free for the taking.
Outside of Edelson’s old studio at 110 Mercer Street, drawings, prints, and cut-out figures were sitting in cardboard boxes alongside posters from her exhibitions, monographs, and other ephemera. One box included cards that the artist’s children had given her for birthdays and mother’s days. Passersby competed with trash collectors who were loading the items into bags and throwing them into a U-Haul.
“It’s her last show,” joked her son, Nick Edelson, who had arranged for the junk guys to come and pick up what was on the street. He has been living in her former studio since the artist died in 2021 at the age of 88.
Naturally, neighbors speculated that he was clearing out his mother’s belongings in order to sell her old loft. “As you can see, we’re just clearing the basement” is all he would say.
Some in the crowd criticized the disposal of the material. Alessandra Pohlmann, an artist who works next door at the Judd Foundation, pulled out a drawing from the scraps that she plans to frame. “It’s deeply disrespectful,” she said. “This should not be happening.” A colleague from the foundation who was rifling through a nearby pile said, “We have to save them. If I had more space, I’d take more.”
Edelson’s estate, which is controlled by her son and represented by New York’s David Lewis Gallery, holds a significant portion of her artwork. “I’m shocked and surprised by the sudden discovery,” Lewis said over the phone. “The gallery has, of course, taken great care to preserve and champion Mary Beth’s legacy for nearly a decade now. We immediately sent a team up there to try to locate the work, but it was gone.”
Sources close to the family said that other artwork remains in storage. Museums such as the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney currently hold her work in their private collections. New York University’s Fales Library has her papers.
Edelson rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the early voices in the feminist art movement. She is most known for her collaged works, which reimagine famed tableaux to narrate women’s history. For instance, her piece Some Living American Women Artists (1972) appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–98) to include the faces of Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, and Alice Neel, and others as the apostles; Georgia O’Keeffe’s face covers that of Jesus.
In all, it took about 45 minutes for the pioneering artist’s material to be removed by the trash collectors and those lucky enough to hear about what was happening.
Dealer Jordan Barse, who runs Theta Gallery, biked by and took a poster from Edelson’s 1977 show at A.I.R. gallery, “Memorials to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era.” Artist Keely Angel picked up handwritten notes, and said, “They smell like mouse poop. I’m glad someone got these before they did,” gesturing to the men pushing papers into trash bags.
A neighbor told one person who picked up some cut-out pieces, “Those could be worth a fortune. Don’t put it on eBay! Look into her work, and you’ll be into it.”
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