Session: Art in Discounted Spaces – Looking at areas which are overlooked, forgotten or just plain ignored.
Friday, November 5, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Location: Hotel Fort Garry
A city is only as engaged as its inhabitants and its inhabitants’ engagement depends upon the manner in which public/private space is managed, how public transport is delivered and perceived, where people walk and don’t walk, and the spaces which are designated as ‘special’, ‘functional’ or ‘non-space’. A city is the sum of its parts, and these include the psychological spaces/constructions that give it its ‘feel’: aspirations, failures, subversions, pride, shame…these join up like so many back alleys to create an urban, call and response soul-map. In Winnipeg, a city boasting the world’s worst urban sprawl, imaginative urban planning has not and still isn’t a priority and this throws up a number of interesting inroads for artists to intervene in public, corporate, and dead space. Artists are by no means expected to adhere to a Good Samaritan ethos, whereby if they see a space that could benefit from their attention they should act accordingly. But art is a means of examining why a space has been overlooked, forgotten or just plain ignored, and this will have social, political, and ethical implications. Why don’t more Aboriginal people live in Wolseley? Why are there BIZ faux police forces? Why do the posters stapled onto WAC public bulletin boards get taken down before the advertised event (usually art or music related) has taken place? This panel hopes to address the physical and psychical reasons why places become, seek to be, or are dismissed as ‘discounted’ and the opportunities this gives to art.
Moderator:
hannah_g - Winnipeg, MB
Presenters:
Michael Neelak Van Rooy - Winnipeg, MB
Crime Fiction as a Tarnished Mirror . . .
Lee Rodney - Windsor, ON
Art and the Post-Urban Condition
Nils Norman - United Kingdom
