A look at the city’s artistic spaces
Art can hardly exist without a space for it to exist in – be it a tangible or imagined space. Where theory and practice meet is also where audience and artist meet, and the sanctity of these spaces is where a local arts scene can flourish and sustain itself. With such a community-minded gearing, either tacitly realized or as a material, affective engagement, Guelph’s arts community offers a plethora of places to engage with a variety of artistic mediums, thought streams, and exhibits.
Zavitz Hall and SOFAM
The home of the University of Guelph’s studio art program, Zavitz Hall features studios for printmaking, sculpture, and painting, as well as a gallery that features exhibits of student works and hosts receptions. Initially built in 1914 and used for over 30 years for the field husbandry program, it has since been the home of the studio art program.
This repurposing of the building itself has an interesting historical subtext, given the art produced out of the building by the studio art program. Contemporary art currents are largely about repurposing and re-appropriating, and this is certainly the case for the current works coming from the studio art program. Tto use the tried-and-true adage of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the medium is indeed the message.
The School of Fine Arts and Music (SOFAM) is responsible for yearlong programming, including the renowned annual Dasha Shenkman Lecture in Contemporary Art. The 2015 edition features a lecture by multidisciplinary artist Michael Snow, whose work ranges from large sculpture installations at Toronto’s Eaton Centre and Roger’s Centre, to influential experimental filmmaking and other multimedia works.
Aside from this, SOFAM hosts a variety of lectures, concerts, and countless other events such as the Thursday at Noon concert series, showcasing music performance and composition students.
The Essex Corridor: Silence, Publication Studios, and Musagetes
Quickly establishing itself as an essential hub for Downtown Guelph’s arts scene, Essex Street is home to Musagetes, Heritage Hall (83 Essex), and Silence/Publication Studio (46 Essex). These organizations, in tandem, offer venues for multidisciplinary thought and art to be practiced and performed, with a general end-goal of bringing art to the community in a meaningful, collaborative way, strengthening the public life of art and artistic thought.
Musagetes is an international, interdisciplinary arts organization, with a foothold in Guelph at the Boarding House Gallery on Essex Street. Their programming features numerous projects, past and ongoing, that seek to make the arts more central to public life, stating in their artistic manifesto that “egocentric and mechanistic values can alienate people from their own inner reality and deprive them of a sense of shared belonging to the human community.” Their ongoing projects include People of Good Will, a multi-disciplinary venture led in part by New Mexico artist collective Postcommodity, in which the project seeks to revisit the underground railroad historical narrative in Canada – Southern Ontario in particular.
Publication Studio (PS Guelph), with its printing press and drawing boards tucked away in a room of the Silence venue, is an integral part of Guelph’s diverse literary life. With its DIY focus and public-life-oriented aims, the studio is an invaluable tool for writers, thinkers, and artists in a variety of mediums to engage with a book’s production and its reception.
I spoke to Steph Yates, programmer and organizer at PS Guelph, about the organization’s history and goals.
“Publication Studio was founded in 2009 in Portland, Oregon, and since then, more than 10 other studios—each one with its own autonomous editorial team and curatorial flavour—have started up in North America and Europe,” explained Yates. “PS Guelph began almost two years ago when we opened up our bookmaking studio and shop at 46 Essex St, also home to experimental music series, Silence.”
A distinctive aspect of Publication Studio’s editorial and artistic preoccupation is its attention to the “social life” of the book. Yates elaborated on this, saying, “Reading tends to be a private endeavour, and most of us love to be alone with a good book. But we are also interested in connecting over books. Book launch events and reading groups are some ways that we call ‘the social life of the book’ into action. Guelph is a hotbed of thinkers and doers. We want to know other book-lovers, people who love to work with their hands, people who write, creative people with wild ideas.”
Macdonald-Stewart Art Centre
The Macdonald-Stewart Art Centre, a joint financial and curatorial venture between the City of Guelph, the University of Guelph, the Upper Grand District School Board, and the County of Wellington, was originally a public school established in 1904. The Macdonald Stewart Foundation was established in 1973, and made an art institution by the provincial parliament in 1978. In 1980, the gallery opened to the public.
While the building has undergone some massive overhauls, it’s not done yet – come September 2015, with the front façade renovated over the course of this summer, it will be known as the Art Gallery of Guelph, further strengthening its status as a renowned public art institution.
I spoke to executive director and curator, Dawn Owens, about one of the current exhibits, Kate Wilhelm’s Yes these bones shall live. The photo series, Wilhelm’s first solo exhibit, focuses on the domestic lives of various members of the Royal City Roller Girls, Guelph’s local roller derby team.
“[Wilhelm] was interested in photographing [the Roller Girls] in their traditional domestic environment – sort of what would happen when you transplant the theatrical persona into an environment where she [the Roller Girl] doesn’t normally perform in that way,” explained Owens. “She performs in different ways within the home […] mother, lover, wife, sister, friend, all the hats we wear in our homes.”
The subjects, identified by their team pseudonyms, range as far as lesbian couples, Mennonites, and various other “renegades in the community,” to use Owens’ words.
“From a photographic perspective, they are very traditionally photographic. So, compositionally speaking they’re highly formal, there’s no fancy photographic trickery, it’s very straightforward image-making. […] I think that very tightly controlled lens is a sort of contradiction when you see the actual women who are posing for the portrait,” Owens said of the composition aesthetic in most of the works.
In addition to Wilhelm’s exhibit, Kelly Richardson’s Terrene is also on display until March 29. The exhibit, and its companion book, published at PS Guelph by MSAC and the Ed Video Media Arts Centre, showcases works early video art works such as Ferman Drive, her Supernatural series, and her latest piece, the breathtaking Orion Tide.
Another room features a donated collection of over 70 pieces of Native beadwork, spanning from the late 1800s to the early-mid 1900s. The artifacts are a crucial part of Canada’s cottage industry history – white families would vacation in cottage country, and the Native communities in these places would make these beadworks to sell to them as souvenirs, placing these artifacts in a fascinating and vital socio-economic context.
To conclude, Guelph is defined in many ways by its vital cultural life, and a visit to any of these institutions offer a salient glimpse into just how vital it is. Be you a literary buff, a chin-stroking philosopher, or a little bit of every kind of artist or enthusiast, there’s always something to be inspired by in our amazing little city.