You are invited to experience art during Culture Days 2023
Sponsored by Culture Days and SaskCulture, all ages are invited to reinvent their thinking about landscape and how they value the land and art.
Join us for free events supporting the exhibition View from the Edge of the World, including board game nights, sound art performances, 'zine making, and conversations with the artists. These interactive experiences for all ages are made possible with the collaboration of many local organizations and business supporters, including Comic Readers Downtown, Common Weal Community Arts, the University of Regina's Department of Visual Arts, Holophon Audio Arts, exhibition sponsor TD Canada Trust, and reception sponsor Casino Regina.
Kitchen Table Conversations with Vera & Sue
DATE: Saturday, September 23
TIME: 2-4 PM
LOCATION: Art Gallery of Regina, 2420 Elphinstone St.
COST: FREE
REGISTER for 15-minute sessions: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/699327877507?aff=oddtdtcreator
Saltzman and Bland, white settler people living in rural Saskatchewan, are concerned about the disappearance of remnants of wildland and marshes that have been turned to agricultural productivity as family farms give way to industrial farming practices in the province. These small pieces of "wasteland" are valuable habitats for many animal species.
A kitchen table is a non-intimidating place for people to share thoughts and experiences about the landscape we share. While conversations are a powerful but intangible way of reflecting on changing human use of and relationships with the land and loss of species, the artists also engage people with tangible objects and activities to consider these issues.
Repeating the motif of a buffalo silhouette used in their artworks, the artists invite gallery visitors to create a buffalo postcard, which participants can also place in the landscape. The activity uses natural cardstock and a custom stamp and is accessible to all ages and abilities. The artists instruct participants to cut the buffalo from the card, creating a window through which to view the landscape. (An accompanying adult should assist small children.) The empty outline serves as a vivid reminder of a
once-plentiful animal now mainly gone from the lands around us.
This event is presented with support from the Neil Balkwill Civic Arts Centre.
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Artists Vera Saltzman and Sue Bland invite people of all ages to create a postcard and share conversation over a kitchen table in the gallery.
'Zine Making PLAYshop & Exhibition Tour
DATE: Sunday, September 24
TIME: 1-3 PM or 2-4 PM
LOCATION: Stitchery Room, Neil Balkwill Civic Arts Centre & Art Gallery of Regina, 2420 Elphinstone St.
COST: FREE
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/zine-making-playshop-exhibition-tour-tickets-706318576877
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The 'Zine Making PLAYshop begins with a youth-oriented tour of the exhibition View from the Edge of the World led by AGR Curator Sandee Moore. Participants will share their insights and experiences prompted by the various ways artists in the exhibition depict the landscape, encouraging an understanding of the land as more than a commodity to be bought, sold and mined, but a living entity intimately connected to our experiences of this place.
Artists Vera Saltzman and Sue Bland will help youth define their responses to the exhibition, which will be the subject of their 'zines (hand-made, photocopied magazines).
Participants will pose themselves for Saltzman, who is celebrated for her sensitive photo portraits. Working with cartridge paper prints of photographs of themselves, participants will then learn how to make a 'zine, including cutting, folding and making covers. Using a range of readily available materials (cartridge paper, pens, photocopies, gluesticks), participants will acquire a skill that they can apply beyond the exhibition and PLAYshop.
Completed 'zines may be deposited at the gallery to share with other visitors, or participants may take their creations home.
This event is presented in partnership with Nature Saskatchewan and Nature Regina's Get Outside Kids Club.
GAN of Living Skies – Sunset Bathing and Soundbath Night
DATE: Thursday, October 5
TIME: 7-10 PM
LOCATION: Courtyard, Art Gallery of Regina, 2420 Elphinstone St.or the AGR's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/live/IBvJri6_ghg?si=udmTA_qY-qcUg6ke)
COST: FREE
LET US KNOW YOU'LL BE THERE: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/699342059927?aff=oddtdtcreator
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What if we could hear a sunset? GAN of Living Skies - Sunset Bathing and Soundbath Night imagines one answer to this question.
Using a type of machine learning known as generative adversarial network or a GAN, GAN of Living Skies by Spekwork Studio projects fake sunsets based on a dataset of real Saskatchewan sunsets, thus the Land of Living Skies becomes GAN of Living Skies.
For Culture Days 2023, the artists will expand their project to include a one-night performance of generated and altered live sound in collaboration with the Regina artists' collective Holophon Audio Arts.
SpekWork Studio (Cat Bluemke & Jonathan Carroll) invite you to join them in the Art Gallery of Regina's open-air courtyard or online as they generate sounds by processing the simulated sunset images generated by GAN of Living Skies through MAX MSP software.
Members of Holophon Audio Arts will improvise an audio art performance built upon these sounds. The curious can seize this opportunity to learn and participate in generating and processing sounds to create audio art with electronics. Members of the public of all ages are invited to come (and go) and enjoy a relaxing, healing and revitalizing sound bath while basking in the glow of fake sunsets created by SpekWork Studio's solar-powered machine in the courtyard or via live-streamed video.
This event is presented in partnership with Holophon Audio Arts.
Golboo Amani Artist talk at University of Regina
DATE: Friday, October 6
TIME: 12-1 PM
LOCATION: University of Regina, RC 050, 3737 Wascanca Parkway or on Zoom (https://uregina-ca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAucuipqDsrH9fYNhOS_BEwfyZ-z_FCxd0A After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.)
COST: FREE
Artist Golboo Amani will speak about her art practice from the perspectives of social justice, socially-engaged art and pedagogy. Amani often intervenes in systems that produce knowledge and works in forms traditionally excluded from institutional contexts, including board games. Amani views games as "ready-made" sites for informal pedagogy. In particular, her expansion pack for the popular game Settlers of Catan exposes the racism embedded in and promoted by the game. Further, Unsettling Settlers: Intervention introduces game mechanics that not only question the Capitalist and expansionist
underpinnings of Settlers of Catan but introduce positive qualities of cooperation and negotiation.
Amani will also give audiences a unique insight into the process of creating an expansion pack for a board game. Golboo invites a free exchange of ideas and conversation with students, faculty and members of the public throughout their talk. The discussion will be simultaneously translated into ASL and can be viewed on YouTube for those who are unable to travel to the University of Regina.
Golboo Amani is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who creates works focused on process and research through various media, including photography, performance, space intervention, digital media and participatory practice. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and her Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including the Hemispheric Institute at FOFA (Montreal), FADO Emerging
Artists Series (Toronto), TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art (Mexico City) and the LIVE Biennale of Performance Art (Vancouver).
Presented in partnership with the faculty of Media, Art + Performance.
Unsettling Settlers: Intervention Live Board Game Play Event
DATE: Friday, October 6
TIME: game play event begins at 3 PM
LOCATION: Art Gallery of Regina, 2420 Elphinstone St.
COST: FREE
REGISTER: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/692078855487?aff=oddtdtcreator
An afternoon of live board game playing facilitated by artist Golboo Amani engages ardent gamers and novices alike in critically reflecting on colonialism in every aspect of our lives, including recreation, through her artwork Unsettling Settlers: Intervention.
Amani's socially-engaged artwork is a board game that interrupts the colonial narrative of the popular game Settlers of Catan by employing strategies that strengthen players' ability to imagine critical alternatives to and counter hegemonic narratives of settlement. Local artists trained by Amani in collaboration with Common Weal Community Arts host players at three tables in a re-invented experience of the popular board game that favours dialogue, negotiation and collaboration over conquest. Through game-play, participants confront biases that games such as Settlers of Catan strengthen and gain an understanding of the real effects and stakes of protest strategies to create change.
This event is presented in partnership with Common Weal Community Arts and Comic Readers.