Insubordinate Automata

The Cheaper Show #9

This Saturday, June 26, the ninth installment of long-running and ever-evolving art-event-series, Cheaper [formerly: '...than-a-one-night-stand'] will take place at Storeum, 151 Cordova, in Gastown, Vancouver BC.  Curated this year by Lisa Giroday of the LES Gallery, event managed by Danny Vermette, brainchild of Graeme Berglund, crewed by a valiant army of volunteers, the cavernously defunct-history-museum-cum-event-space will again play host to this massive annual community art show. 200 artists. 400 works. $200 per piece.  One night only.  Cash only.  First come first served.  Some restrictions apply.

Lisa invited my participation this year, so here’s my sneak preview to help drum up the anticipation:

I’ll be showing three 8″ square by 1″ deep 2D/3D framed shadow-box dioramas, loosely entitled:

Svartalfaheim Wunderkammers

Steve Calvert, spring 2010:

ON SATURDAY JUNE 26, THE CHEAPER SHOW NO. 9 WILL TAKE OVER W2 STORYEUM, AT 151 WEST CORDOVA STREET, FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY.

200 Artists, 400 Pieces, $200 each

DETAILS!
- Doors open at 6pm and close at midnight.
- No IN/OUT
- Entrance is by donation, recommended minimum donation $5+ (Everyone is welcome, no one will be turned away).
- Get in free to all the after parties before midnight with a $10+ donation
- official after-parties taking place at The Astoria, The Biltmore and Fortune Sound Club

ART SALES
- Art purchases are limited at 3 per person
- First come, first serve
- Cash Only (ATMs on-site)
- All art must be picked up Sunday June 26th between 1 & 5pm

IMPROVEMENTS FOR NO. 9
There have been significant steps taken to ensure that The Cheaper Show No. 9 will be accessible to everyone who wants to experience the event. The W2 Storyeum space offers 30,000 sq. ft of exhibition space, close to double the space for The Cheaper Show No. 8. Additionally, the sales, bar and entry/exit systems have been overhauled to provide better access for everyone.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there.

www.thecheapershow.com
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=129603217068728

———————————————————————-
Lisa Giroday | Director/Curator

www.lesgallery.ca

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SCION PRESENTS OUR OFFICIAL AFTER PARTIES:
GLORY DAYS x SCION presents WHITE LUNG ALBUM RELEASE PARTY -http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=128425533851191&ref=ts

JASON LEV, ROB RIZK, MJE playing Official Cheaper Show Party http://bit.ly/bEyH2l at Fortune Sound Club

SCION presents THE CHEAPER SHOW AFTERPARTY & SLED ISLAND KICK OFF -
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=121016587939402

Patcha Mama, Ave Maria, Freya and Clio be praised!!  Marian Bantjes‘ TED Talk!!   My heart leaps!!

The NFB has produced this clever interactive web project to present the haltingly marvelous, tongue-twisting language works of Jordan Kujawa Scott, a Vancouver conceptual poet whose phonetic formalist word constructions address his own speech impediment, while making a rigorous exercise and muscular task of both the speech act and of reading.  Scott pushes his own vocable skills to their physical limits,  entrancing his audience with disquieting invocations, and demonstrations, of fissures of concentration and control, moments of cognitive seizure provoked by syllabic sound-clash.

Attentions trip up in the haptic-imaginary of the listening voice, nerve-clusters connecting language to lips twitching and slurring, blurring the synaesthetic inner-eye-ear-tongue-pen, as rationalizing synapses stammer and strain to process his near-nonsense flows and eruptions of syllabic color and phonetic cadence; shapes and sounds of letters becoming heavy material as they leave Scott’s lungs, as cascades of contrasting thought-forms make strenuous play not only of Jordan’s committed reading, but implicating itself also, physically and tangibly, in a tactile awareness of actively ennervated fibers connecting the reader’s face to her brain.  ”You will learn to use your mouth.”

I saw this painting hanging at the Fall a few days ago, and it rattled me.  Invoking Lawren Harris and Adam Dodd, Jack Shadbolt and Etienne Zack, I reveled in its deft cubist composition and minimalist pallette.  I love to see the confident paint-handling of graf artists approaching vocabularies of modernist abstraction.  So I just looked him up, and found this great website cataloging his works.  Looks like this formalist direction is fairly new for him.  Let’s keep watch for this kid’s tag in futures near and far.  Really nice work, Peter, well done.  More of these, please…

The Lions, and their Lionspile.  Ongoing Vancouver collaborative drawing group.  Still and always so awesome.

2 Islands- Art is bird Poo from Krisdy Shindler on Vimeo.

Krisdy Shindler, recently returned to Vancouver from some years in Glasgow with artist collective Low Salt, is making more of her extraordinary stop-motion-animated-paintings. Reminiscent of William Kentridge’s stop motion drawings,  her loose biomorphic bushwork in wet oils on  invokes a scientistic, expressionistic, psychologically politicized iconography, blending palimpsests of cumulative symbolic and nonfigurative abstractions… her hand and color sense has held my attention since our time in artschool. Now she’s back in the neighborhood, and showing strongly in Barcelona, Stockholm, Glasgow, London… Insubordinate Automata is pleased to welcome back our friend, action-painter and harlequin clown, Krisdy Shindler. Liberté tourjours.

Krisdy Shindler

Kris also serves as Minister of Propaganda and Court Jester for the dance movement and party-pop ubergruppe, Top Less Gay Love Tekno Party.

Our good friend and comrade, animation concept designer Sterling Sheehy, has a rebuild underway for his stellar Wayward portfolio.  He also now presents a podcast offering updates on his recent drawing and animation studies.  His abstract animations and new viscosity, wave-flow, and lighting studies in maya 3d demonstrate the depth and rigor of his imagination’s will to materialize itself.  Sterling represents an extraordinary degree of personal skill and development of technique.  With a commitment to the exploratory narrative potentials of traditional cel animation, he deftly translates his painterly, cinematographic sensibilities, to the conceptual terrains and imaginative precedents opened by Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli in relation to the Disney studios: a syncretic style merging western and eastern visual aesthetics, traditionalism and experimentation.

Sheehy’s polymathic, autodidactic, broadly interdisiplinary proficiencies in any and all media generate constant astonishment in his colleagues.  Case in point:  Sheehy’s gorgeous sketchbooks.  And storyboards.  His alien and dragon character and landscape studies, proposals for animated features, saturated with inspired potentials, will arouse marvel in audiences young and old. Watch for Sterling’s distinctive visual aesthetics on screens big and small, past present and future.  Incidentally, he is also an endearingly gifted musician, photographer, conversationalist, climber, surfer, cook, friend, husband, and dad.  Take a walk in the timeless worlds of Sterling Sheehy:

Found some fantastic videos of one my favorite orators: interaction-designer, information-philosopher, visionary futurist, utopian technologist, bon vivante, inspirational speaker, poet-prince,  first-order cosmopolitan aesthete, polymath, and gentleperson; Ben Cerveny delivers the transmission from Netherlands and New Zealand via youtube.  Were Neb wired-to-podcast whenever his vocal chords engage, I would keep collection-drives spooling perpetually.  With inspirational and cautionary forecasts  for networked social technologies ever-more radically augmenting the interaction-architectures of urban reality, his data-visualization research for design companies  Vurb and Stamen work toward developing conceptual tools to garden these vastly proliferating ecologies of metadata, presenting civic designers and client-states with more organismic, agricultural models for its relationship with an emergent environment of  information.

Ben weaves radically optimized tomorrows into everyday realities with the concatenating baritone of his voice.  Cerveny crystallizes syllables into invisible cities, ever-articulating the perception of paradigm shifts and data flow, intoning the refreshing sound of exhilarating possibility into perpetual rejuvenation.    His deft metaphors will echo their transformations in memory forever-after; saturated insights of cognitive models slipping beneath geologic plates of your reality, shifting your experience of the now to reveal always-already-present-futures.  His joyful memes busily replicate themselves in all worlds that hear, concatenating social machines to rebroadcast catalyses of self-propagating confabulations, mapping collective awareness and developing strategies to steer the multi-participant Real forever closer to those optimal instantiations it sets as meaningful targets.   The Nebula is deep.  Let him grow your mind.

Generative artist Kate Armstrong is coming over again tomorrow, which always gets me excited.  She cracks me up.  Check out her laborious works of sly genius:

“Kate Armstrong is a writer, artist and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice merges networked media, written forms and urban experiences to create work that examines process and accumulation. …  Her work focuses on the creation of experimental narrative forms, particularly works in which poetics are inserted within the functional framework of computer programs, and performative pieces in which computer functionality is merged with physical space. She has worked with a variety of forms including short films, theatre, essays, net art, psychogeography and installation. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally.  [She] has lived and worked in Canada, France, Japan, Scotland, and the United States.”  - Grafik Dynamo

http://katearmstrong.com

Haydex Li makes a return in what I hope will be a sequence of features, with a hot new portfolio website of his amazing mechano-surrealist drawings.  Yougottacheckitout.  Haydex, call me.  I know I’ve said it before, we should work together.  Your work kills.