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In this newsletter:
- On Exhibition
- Don't Miss Book + Zine Fest!
- Maker Space Official Opening!
- Love Positive Women Events
- Jinian's Take
- In Conversation with Ian McLachlan
- In the Community
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Coming Soon!!!
Performance/Process
Brad Brackenridge, Artspace 2021 Artist in Residence
March 15 - May13, 2023
Performance/Process presents the intense imagination and artistry of Brad Brackenridge, Artspace’s 2021 Artist-in-Residence. Providing a glimpse into the creation of puppets and puppetry, Brackenridge offers the inner workings of his methods and busy studio. His artistic process starts with character building, the forms of which materialize into captivating, stand-alone works of art. By way of movement, manipulation, imagination, and story-telling savvy, Brackenridge breathes life into sculptural objects as performance subjects.
Opening Reception March 15, 7-9pm
CLICK HERE for more information!
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Don't Miss Book + Zine Fest!
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8th Annual Book + Zine Fest / March 3-4
Coming this weekend is our celebrated Book and Zine Fest, a celebration of regional press, zine, and comic arts. Drop in to peruse the work of talented comics artists and graphic novelists, letterpress printers, and other paper arts, both local and far flung.
- Friday, March 3, 6-9pm During First Friday Ptbo events!
- Saturday, March 4th, 10am-4pm
Check our Facebook Event for more info.
Please note masking is strongly requested, unless visitors are exempt. Gallery entrance and washrooms are wheelchair accessible, earplugs available on site.
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Maker Space Official Opening!
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The time has finally come - we have an opening date!
We are so pleased to announce that our new Maker Space is ready to go, and will be open to the public starting next Friday, March 10th!
It’s been a long road to get here, and we are endlessly grateful to everyone who has contributed their ideas, feedback, time, and expertise along the way. Opening our Maker Space has truly been a project BY community, FOR community. We simply could not have done this without you! And, of course, the Ontario Trillium Fund. A HUGE thanks goes to those folks too.
So what does this mean?
Beginning next Friday, the Maker Space will be open on Fridays and Saturdays for our Artist Drop-In Hours, 10AM - 4PM. During this time, artists, makers, and community members are encouraged to stop by, bring their own work, and/or utilize the equipment and materials we have available. Everyone will receive a small orientation before gaining access to equipment.
**It is important to note that during our drop-in hours, community members must demonstrate a level of competency in order to use equipment, and art-consumables/materials are available at a low cost.
Unsure how to use equipment? Hoping to try out materials for free? Looking to learn from other artists and makers?
We have something for you!! Beginning April 10th, we will host a weekly, Monday evening Open Studio event, 6-9PM. During this time, facilitators will be on site to offer instruction and answer questions, and materials will be available free of cost (with some limitations).
Click here to read more about our Maker Space and view the full list of equipment and materials available.
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Love Positive Women Events
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 Last month's LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN (Women with HIV/AIDS Initiative, WHAI) events!
Romance Starts at Home!
Despite freezing temperatures during February's First Friday Ptbo events, we saw a steady flow of visitors to Artspace to celebrate the exhibition, What Fools These Mortals Be, and participate in WHAI's valentine-making workshop. With materials and snacks at the ready, it was a heart-warming and relaxing experience to sit down and create with fellow community. Thank you, from our gushy hearts to yours.
 Following the valentine-making, WHAI hosted a two-part beading workshop in partnership with ReFrame Film Festival.
The workshop was led by local indigenous artist, Janet Dugan. Thanks to WHAI and ReFrame for bringing new acquaintances and hard working service dogs into Artspace to enjoy Janet's kind and generous teaching style as she walked folks through the steps of creating their own beaded brooches.
If you missed the workshop but are interested to learn more about beading with Janet, you can find tutorials on her youtube channel Beginner Beading With Janet D.
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I recently wrote a paper exploring artist-run centers in conjunction with the event discussed above. There is general idea of being unmoored when it comes to situating artist-run Galleries in the modern day. Using this past act of rebellion I discussed with Ian above, I explored those feelings of tension and questioned how we might adjust our thinking when it comes to artist-run centers. The following is an excerpt from that paper.
"While it cannot be said decisively that this event directly led to the dissolution of the Censorship Board it can certainly be said that it exposed the flawed logic in a  very public forum; marking it in the public consciousness in a way it hadn't been before. It was only a year after the trial that Supreme Court of Ontario found the Board of Censors was in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that it “had been ‘vague, undefined, and totally discretionary’ in using its powers under The Theatres Act and that it had no legal right to decide what the public should be prohibited from viewing” (Wise 34-35). The culmination of this one screening at Artspace in 1980 shows the potential power of artist-run centers.
Perhaps the lesson here is to embrace the institution of it all. To spread out our fingers and grow like vines, thoroughly entangled in the community, to both provide support and be supported. For in this case in 1980 we needed both the rebellion and the anarchy, as well as the lawyers and the money. There is a lesson in using the institutional structures to the artist’s benefit rather than seeing them as diametrically opposed. Perhaps the tension Bronson references between “poetic aspiration” and “empirical reality” doesn't actually exist as Bronson seems to approach himself at the end of his essay.“And what better place to develop the interior kingdom of the soul, than in the humiliation of the bureaucrat… this idealised vision of the "museum", of history, in which the artist animates the quaking body of the institution with his own obsessive will?”(Bronson) Perhaps instead of tension we can reframe this relationship as harmonious, as two sides of a rapidly spinning coin. A Message From Our Sponsor is currently owned by the National Gallery of Canada. What is appropriate evolves over time, and as artists we are often at the forefront of pushing and redefining boundaries. Censorship and artist run centres will always collide because change is a process and artists are the process manifest. So how do we continue to differentiate from mainstream galleries when formal acceptability broadens at a rate to match artist run centers? Maybe we don't have to. After all, mainstream galleries following the lead of artist run centers becoming more inclusive and politically aware is a good thing. Having influenced is not a negative, and perhaps artistic run centers don't have to live in a state of constant opposition. Maybe they can just be, and live in the joyful convergence of it all."
To read the full paper click here
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In Conversation with Ian McLachlan
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Artspace Retrospective
By Jinian Harwig
Artspace has been in Peterborough since 1974. It was one of the first artist-run galleries in the country and has a rich and varied history since its opening. One such event in that history happened in 1980. Canadian Images Festival, a Trent organization, and Artspace decided to screen Al Razutis' film A Message From Our Sponsor as an act of de fiance against the Ontario Censorship Board. I interviewed Ian McLaclan, who was prominent in both boards at the time, and is a former Artspace board member and long-time figure in the Peterborough art community.
I asked Ian about what the atmosphere towards the Censorship Board was like during the time of this decision. “I think everybody held it in contempt in art circles, and also in the sort of left wing political circles that I was involved in. I was sort of somewhere between Marxism and anarchism in my own sort of thinking, a bit of both. And so the whole idea of censorship and what it was protecting thought to protect people from was a big topic of debate generally.”
The film, Al Razutis'  was part of a film package curated by the National Gallery of Canada. However, when it came time for the film to leave the gallery the Censorship Board would not approve the film for screening in Ontario-based galleries without edits. Ian describes the Board's point of contention with the film.
“A Message From Our Sponsor is about ten minutes long and it's all sort of layered. Most of Al's work has got layers, so [the film] was about advertising, but it was also linked with images from films that were considered by the Censor Board to be pornography. And so there was about 15 seconds of fellatio in there, which you could read as being fallatio, just about despite all the other images that were going on. So our lawyer later on described it. It was the quickest and most expensive blowjob that has ever been."
"And so Al Razutis films came up because there was just generally this move to resist censorship at that time at a whole variety of different levels. There was a long discussion at the Canadian Images board, first of all, about whether we should go ahead with this film or not in the programming. And there were two university presidents on the board of Canadian Images, Donald Thiel, who is the current university president and Tom Simons, who had retired as the founding president of Trent. And there was a unanimous agree ment on the board that we should go ahead with trying to show the film. And there was a lot of disagreement about how we should do that. One of the solutions that we found or thought we found was that the film should be programmed for an invited audience and then we should invite everybody as the audience to come. And we gave tickets out to people who then became guests of the festival. Then it went to the Artspace board after that. And the Artspace board voted almost unanimously except for a lawyer who was on the board who resigned from the board not because he was opposed to showing it, but because he didn't want to deal with the fallout of doing something that was then found to be illegal. And so the decision was made [for Canadian Images Festival] to show it and program it at Artspace.”
For the full interview CLICK HERE
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A portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, which has hung in the Peterborough Memorial Center since 1980, is being accepted into the Art Gallery of Peterborough's permanent collection. The painting, produced by one of Artspace's founding members, David Bierk, has made its mark in the memory of Peterborough community m embers. As stated in the original commission of the portrait, it was to be donated to either the AGP or the Public Library upon its removal from the Center, where it could continue to be enjoyed by community members new and old. Read more about this at Global News.
The Peterborough Arts Collective will be hosting a Canvas Combat on March 11th, Artists will go head-to-head in a live, competitive painting event featuring food, and music. Read more about this at The Peterborough Examiner.
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Artspace gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the following organizations.
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