Shows
Dreams of ConsciousnessSolemnis [Weekly Mixtape 116]Je Est Un Autre • Midas Fall • Drifting In Silence • Sylvaine • Matt Harvey • Jason Blake & Raphael Weinroth-Browne • Eventide • Curse All Kings • Keygen Church • Martin Howth
Music On This Mixtape:
Je Est Un Autre: "Death, The Musagetes"
taken from the album "Flatworm Mysticism"
Midas Fall: "Atrophy"
taken from the album "Cold Waves Divide Us"
Drifting In Silence: "The Embrace"
taken from the album "Winters Past"
Sylvaine: "Livets Dans"
taken from the album "Eg Er Framand"
Matt Harvey: "Silence at the Edge of Memory"
taken from the album "Toward the Cold Light"
Jason Blake featuring Raphael Weinroth-Browne: "Rift and Reckoning"
taken from the album "Candles Bur...
2024-03-2300 min
conscient podcaste67 wanna be an ally'I've been thinking about decolonization and reconciliation and other issues in our relations with indigenous communities. I was reading the 'wanna be an ally' poem the other day that really affected me positively but also emotionally and I wanted to read it to you.'Claude Schryer, Duhamel QCTranscription of monologue conscient podcast, episode 67, ‘wanna be an ally’ I've been thinking about decolonization and reconciliation and other issues in our relations with indigenous communities. I was reading a text the other day that really affected me positively but also emotionally and I wanted to read...
2021-10-1709 min
conscient podcaste67 wanna be an allye67 wanna be an ally is a reading of the poem ‘wanna be an ally’ from Towards Braiding by Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti written in collaboration with Sharon Stein and published by the Musagetes Foundation. Used with authors’ permission.
Transcription of monologue
conscient podcast, episode 67, ‘wanna be an ally’ I've been thinking about decolonization and reconciliation and other issues in our relations with indigenous communities. I was reading a text the other day that really affected me positively but also emotionally and I wanted to read it to you. If you remember last episode, I talked a...
2021-09-1409 minconscient podcaste67 wanna be an allye67 wanna be an ally is a reading of the poem ‘wanna be an ally’ from Towards Braiding by Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti written in collaboration with Sharon Stein and published by the Musagetes Foundation. Used with authors’ permission.
Transcription of monologue
conscient podcast, episode 67, ‘wanna be an ally’ I've been thinking about decolonization and reconciliation and other issues in our relations with indigenous communities. I was reading a text the other day that really affected me positively but also emotionally and I wanted to read it to you. If you remember last episode, I talked a...
2021-09-1409 min
The Secret IngredientJacob Wren: Critical Optimism and the Never Ending Struggle (The Secret Ingredient - 17/06/15)What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects.
“Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in...
2015-09-2554 min
The Secret IngredientPablo Helguera: Art in Dialogue (The Secret Ingredient - 24/06/15)Artist, writer, and educator Pablo Helguera discusses the integration of art and life and the dialogue that occurs between an artwork and the outside world. He considers the beginning point of artistic investigation and describes his latest project: a book about aphorisms for artists. Join us as we reflect on the human desire for continual learning and the possibilities of artistic collaboration.
The secret ingredient in art: “I thought about my mom when you asked me that, mainly because my mom is a great cook. She learned cooking like a lot of people do – through experience. And it’s almost imposs...
2015-09-2558 min
The Secret IngredientFeminism and Aesthetics: Steph Yates on Music and Art (The Secret Ingredient - 03/06/15)This week we talk with Steph Yates, a Guelph-based screen-printer, videographer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist about the relationships between music and art. How has the dialogue between the two disciplines developed over time, in various places, and in her practice in particular? Yates discusses the aesthetic and conceptual choices in her music and art, grapples with issues of identity and gender, and talks about what it’s like being a female lead in the music scene.
“I think for me the secret ingredient is the thing that you can’t know until it happens, the thing you can’t catch, the mistake...
2015-09-2455 min
The Secret IngredientFastwürms: Pirate Cultures, Queerness, and Beautiful Losers (The Secret Ingredient - 10/06/15)Art collective Fastwürms enacts witch positivity, working class aesthetics, and queer politics through their multidisciplinary practice that includes video, installation, and performance art. The duo, Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, discuss queerness, distopias, the biological world, and the act of imagining alternate models. What can be gained through negotiating collaboration, shared authorship, and ways of working that resist capitalist culture?
The secret ingredient in art: “’Do what you will, harm unto none’ is our motto. Love is the law. It comes from love, it comes from light, always.”
Halberstam, Judith, The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press: 2011.
2015-09-2456 min
The Secret IngredientThe Benčić Youth Council: Work and Play in Rijeka, Croatia (The Secret Ingredient – 24/09/14)Preuzmimo Benčić was a video project by Canadian artist Althea Thauberger depicting a decommissioned factory in Rijeka, Croatia, occupied by 70 children ages playing the roles of its former workers who have re-skilled as artists. The Benčić Youth Council, a group of young people who learn about and create culture in the city, which takes its name and protagonists from the video, provides the context for this discussion of how children can gain agency in planning cities. We discuss models of education in relation to early learning experiences. Weaving in the voices of some of the Youth Council members, we t...
2015-07-2454 min
The Secret IngredientCreatrix of Culture Jenny Mitchell (The Secret Ingredient – 22/10/14)Omnichordist, multi-instrumentalist, record label executive (Label Fantastic), mother, bus driver, instigator of Golden Throats Karaoke, and youth DIY music savior, Jenny Mitchell talks about living a life grounded in music. Having started The Barmitzvah Brothers at age 15 with co-conspirators Evan and Geordie Gordon, Jenny reflects on the specialness of youth musical creation prior to the self-censorship that an adult self-consciousness can instill. Her mobile recording studio The Golden Bus aims to bring DIY culture to young creators in the city and offers a platform and training for the many different ways to make music.
“The secret ingredient is yourself. You’re t...
2015-07-2457 min
The Secret IngredientThe Secular Sacred: The Primordial Hum of the Earth (The Secret Ingredient – 01/10/14)Shawn Van Sluys discusses the non-supernatural sacred in relation to artistic practices. He identifies the sacred as the source of new meanings, a genitive creativity ultimately rooted in the great and deep vibrations of the earth, which Shawn calls the “first metaphor.” Hear about Ursa Major, Robert Bringhurst's polyphonic mask for singers and dancers centered on the sacredness of the bear in many civilizations. Consider how art can help us reckon with the three flaws of humanity: mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. Reflect with us on green spaces as the darkness between the stars of a constellation, setting ourselves in relation as r...
2015-07-2457 min
The Secret IngredientBik Van der Pol’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (The Secret Ingredient – 26/11/14)Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Bik Van der Pol discuss their approach to art making in relation to the social geography of Sudbury, Ontario. In preparation for their event-based art project Between a Rock and a Hard Place—11 outdoor concerts in 11 different locations—the pair engaged their senses to take in all the elements around them with the intention ‘not to work with a site specifically, but to make a site specific.’ Imagine the artists on hand and knee, washing the rocks stained by nickel smelting, peering deep into the trembling meteor vibrations that cre...
2015-07-2452 min
The Secret IngredientDuane Linklater and Tanya Lukin Linklater(The Secret Ingredient – 28/01/15)Today we hear selections of a talk given at the Guelph Black Heritage Society on December 13, 2015. Performance artist, choreographer, and poet Tanya Lukin Linklater speaks at an event by People of Good Will, a collective seeking to reimagine the underground railroad as a living history and a metaphor culture determination for immigrants and culturally diverse people living in Guelph. Tanya presents her experience as an Alutiiq woman experiencing other people’s art works, such as Janet Cardiff’s 40 Part Motet and Layli Long Soldier’s poem Grass. Also listen to Duane Linklater’s take on an Indian section of his record c...
2015-07-2458 min
The Secret IngredientCrazy Quilt: Feminist Killjoys and the Queer Art of Failure (The Secret Ingredient – 19/11/14)This show combines threads of different spools to affect a powerful audio wake-up call. Chock-full of rad new music that will shake out the cob webs out of the attic, in this episode we talk about failing as a style and way of life, as the orbital path of creativity itself. We talk about power imbalances as a human sickness, feminist killjoys, the burden of proof on marginalized voices, the loss of memory as a power outage. We spin a few hat tricks of transcendent tracks (and did you know that the expression “hat trick” originates with Guelph’s former junior...
2015-07-2459 min
The Secret IngredientClayton Windatt: Intentional Resilience (The Secret Ingredient – 05/05/15)Visual artist and Métis curator of the White Water Gallery in North Bay Clayton Windatt reflects on the false divide between artist-run and community centers on the one hand and high art and contemporary theory on the other. Community art can be as excellent as high art and also most responsible to local reception and understanding of that work. Re-conceptualize the image of the artist as a solitary studio genius and think through the collaborative development model, especially in the context of Indigenous art within a neo-colonial context. Join us in reflecting on Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, Whi...
2015-07-2456 min
The Secret IngredientReading Laura Marks (The Secret Ingredient – 13/05/15)In the age of the selfie, where we make private moments public through an image or video, what does it mean to think through video’s own body in relation to the bodies that it presents? Using Laura U. Marks’s text Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, we talk about the material nature of analog vs. digital video and consider the specific sort of physical mediation offered by each. Might analog formats contain a more direct relationship between content and form? Has digital video given up its body in the sequence of 1s and 0s? Think about how early vide...
2015-07-2457 min
The Secret IngredientModel Minority: Overturning Stereotypes (The Secret Ingredient – 21/01/15)This show delves into the false stereotype of the “Model Minority” and what it means from a radical perspective. Hear us discuss Gendai Gallery’s year of programing around Model Minority, which was recently published as a collection of texts and art projects by PS Guelph. The book forms an alternative history, probing the way we imagine the model minority citizen in Canada – those of immigrant communities who have succeeded to a relatively high degree within the neoliberal economy. Edited by Chris Lee and Maiko Tanaka, the book explores how such stereotypes of the successful immigrant conceal differences and specificities of parti...
2015-07-2456 min
The Secret IngredientScott McGovern on Working Outside of Space and Time (The Secret Ingredient – 07/01/15)Scott McGovern, Program Director of artist-run centre Ed Video, has just returned to Guelph after spending the fall in Paris, France with his partner Jenn E Norton and their daughter Edie McGovern Norton for Jenn’s Canada Council Residency. Hear his take on what it means to be a Canadian artist abroad and getting cred back home, his upcoming partnership with Parallel Oaxaca, travelling with Toronto’s Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, SOMA in Mexico City, and Art-Athina in Athens, Greece. Reflect on Kelly Richardson’s work The Great Destroyer, a work he recently curated at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre...
2015-07-2458 min
The Secret IngredientArt in Public: Guelph at Twilight with Mark Clintberg (The Secret Ingredient – 10/12/14)What are the risks in cracking open binaries? Is community engagement akin to using a copper wedge tool, simultaneously changing the pryer, the pryee, and what is being used to pry? Delve into boundaries, thresholds, doorways, and outskirts with Montreal-based artist, curator, art historian, and critic Mark Clintberg as he encounters Guelph’s post-industrial terrain with a flâneur-type strategy to urban space. His tailored workshop with the Boarding House Arts Incubator Residents, Public Scenes at Twilight: Shadow Economies, explores the city at a time of transition and ambiguous onset, of change in atmosphere, and shifting uses of space in the...
2015-07-2456 min
The Secret IngredientPublication Studio: Uncertain Times and Alternative Economies (The Secret Ingredient – 03/12/14)Making books fresh like pour-over coffee? Publication Studio (www.publicationstudio.biz) is a network of 13 tiny publishing houses in which books are made one at a time by hand, envisioning the productive work of bookbinding to be more like a bakery or coffee shop than a factory. Hear PS co-founder (with Patricia No) Matthew Stadler talk about the art of economies, multi-scalar assemblages, plus N.E. Thing Co., and Anne Focke as precedents for PS. Think through the nature of hegemony with Jean Beaudrillard, the shared imagination a book creates over time and space, Fuse Magazine and the Ladies Invitational...
2015-07-2452 min
The Secret IngredientSpherical Sphagnum and Paul Chartrand (The Secret Ingredient – 17/09/14)Socially-engaged artist Paul Chartrand discusses his work Kokedama: A Fragmented Garden at the Niagara Artists Centre in St. Catharines Ontario. Hear about the political side of houseplants, spider plants, staghorn and boston ferns, morning glories, and succulents: these green guerrillas that rebel against the concrete jungle and accelerate the reclamation of the city by nature. Consider plant balls as new communities and red wigglers that munch on constitutional documents in this artist’s search for nature’s self-renewing propulsion in the face of the stagnating structures of urban systems.
“There’s not necessarily one miracle ingredient, but it definitely involves the abil...
2015-07-2053 min
The Secret IngredientBik Van der Pol’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (The Secret Ingredient – 26/11/14)Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Bik Van der Pol discuss their approach to art making in relation to the social geography of Sudbury, Ontario. In preparation for their event-based art project Between a Rock and a Hard Place—11 outdoor concerts in 11 different locations—the pair engaged their senses to take in all the elements around them with the intention ‘not to work with a site specifically, but to make a site specific.’ Imagine the artists on hand and knee, washing the rocks stained by nickel smelting, peering deep into the trembling meteor vibrations that cre...
2015-07-2057 min
The Secret IngredientAlessandra Pomarico on Free Home University (The Secret Ingredient – 10/09/14)Education is too often an automated process of preparing the learner to become a part of the neo-liberal capitalist economy. Paolo Freire calls this a transactional process of education, where learning is “deposited” into students, who are empty receptacles. In Lecce, Italy, a group of artists and cultural workers are gathering together to create an ongoing collaborative platform to educate in a different way. Free Home University’s Alessandra Pomarico talks with us about what happens when we live together while learning, and how we can create collective intentions for shared living, both with each other and with the earth.
2015-07-2056 min
The Secret IngredientFan Fiction, Art Writing (The Secret Ingredient - 29/01/14)This week we dig into writing and artists. We first introduce a hand-written letter to co-host Alissa from artist Pablo Helguera and discuss how the handwritten letter can tug at one’s heartstrings and trigger our imagination. We examine the work of Helen Reed, artist and editor of Art Criticism and Other Short Stories, in which Reed as gathered artists and writers together to write fan fiction on other artworks and their makers. The work is a playful approach to critical writing about art work, as many writings (particularly in the Canadian context) do not engage with the works content in...
2015-07-1053 min
The Secret IngredientReading Rijeka (The Secret Ingredient - 30/04/14)After a trip to Rijeka for a gathering to check in on the ongoing artistic programming Musagetes has been doing there, we talk cities, people, and soft architecture. The Promise of a City was an event that brought artists, architects, municipal figures, etc. to a number of exciting events, including a screening of Althea Theaburger’s Film Preuzmimo Benčić, walking tours of the city, and a series of discussions about Rijeka’s cultural dynamic and built environment. We chat about the real and imagined cities in connection with a number of books, including Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Michel De Certe...
2015-07-1056 min
The Secret IngredientNathan Lawr: Dismantling The System Through Music (The Secret Ingredient - 05/07/14)Minotaurs frontman Nathan Lawr joins us in the studio this week to talk music, space, and activism. We discuss the music of The Funkees, an afro-rock group formed in the 1960s in Nigeria. Influenced by Indigenous music and political stagnation, we discuss this band and how people can bring down the system by reclaiming public space for human expression. Lawr discusses his work with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association as an activist and musician. How do you constructively re-claim liberties when many have taken them for granted?
"The secret ingredient in art is action: just doing it. So many years...
2015-07-1056 min
The Secret IngredientFlorian Wüst: To Have and To Need (The Secret Ingredient - 14/05/14)We are joined in studio this week by Berlin-based visual artist and independent film curator Florian Wüst. Wüst’s interests lie in the history of post-war Germany and modern social, economic and technical progress In his curating work, Wüst is interested in creating a physical experience for the viewer through choosing spaces specifically, and asking viewers to move between films. While discussing his visit to Guelph, we discuss the transformation of cities. We talk about the gentrification that has taken over in Berlin in the context of the project Haben und Brauchen (To Have and To Need) with...
2015-07-1055 min
The Secret IngredientLuis Jacob: Sticking with Weirdness (The Secret Ingredient - 28-05-14)We hear from Luis Jacob this week on Rijeka, DIY culture in Toronto, and collaboration. Together, we talk about the collaboration in Toronto that developed in the 90’s after Mike Harris made cuts to the arts and collaboration. We dig into the intersection between theater, arts, film, and queer communities, and human agency in the arts. We explore the way an experience can be beautiful, and what happens when the rules don’t fully account for our experience. When we remain with the weird in art, the incomprehensible can make connections, giving us new inspiration and new energy.
"Agency is the...
2015-07-1057 min
The Secret IngredientLaetitia Sonami: Shower of Sound (The Secret Ingredient - 04/06/14)This week we discuss the work of California-based artist Laetitia Sonami, including a current project of hers in Rijeka. We hear from her about her interest in creating works of sound that evoke immersive environments of memory, curiosity, and ambiguity. Her recent piece, Soundgates, showers visitors to the Rijeka Pier in sounds collected by both Sonami and Rijeka’s youth. We discuss ambiguity in art, where a work can find a balance between precise intention and obscurity. We discuss her work as a soft engagement, and discuss how a work may lose its ability to be interpreted if it is to...
2015-07-1058 min
The Secret IngredientCities and People (The Secret Ingredient - 15/10/14)Musagetes Executive Director Shawn Van Sluys and Project Assistant Danica Evering co-hosts for a discussion about cities, art and resilience. How do we creatively navigate and experience the city and the spaces we hold in common? How we can we experience the overlap between the two in order to make the places we inhabit more resilient and livable? Cities for People, with its four focus areas—new economies, cityscapes, citizen spaces, and art and society—explores the how we can employ the virtues of improvisatory practice to the cultivation of flourishing urban spaces. We discuss how improvisation can create new form...
2014-10-1556 min
The Secret IngredientPostcommodity: Third Space (The Secret Ingredient - 16-04-14)It’s Postcommodity’s third trip to Guelph, and they join us in the studio to discuss the project they have been developing, establishing a DIY space working with Guelph’s immigrant and racialized communities. We discuss the third space, a concept of theorist Homi Bhabha, as a place where anyone can cross the threshold and engage in the space easily. Their efforts to be generative in Guelph are linked with Guelph’s own history and spirit as a place to experiment and take risks.
Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008.
2014-08-2853 min
The Secret IngredientRoberta Smith: Gut Feelings (The Secret Ingredient - 09-04-14)“Reactions to art typically stop at the neck,” Smith argues in a taped interview before her Shenkman lecture. Most people believe they are not art critics, and yet we often have opinions about everything is mass society. While we are all critics of pop culture, we become uncomfortable when asked to critique art culture. If we are lucky, we can have intense reactions to art, exclaim our pleasure for a piece, and follow it up with talk, comparison, and advocacy. Exploring visual pleasure, we discuss how criticism is the process of making what’s implicit explicit. How do things work? What i...
2014-08-2837 min
The Secret Ingredientcheyanne turions: A Problem So Big it Needs Other People (The Secret Ingredient - 26-03-14)This week curator and writer cheyanne turions joins us to discuss A Problem So Big it Needs Other People, an exhibition at Montreal’s Galerie SBC about negotiation and sovereignty. We discuss privilege and improvisation, and engage with how we generate meaning from the things that we encounter in the world through turions’ ongoing project No Reading After the Internet. turions talks with us about the spirit of feminism as listening to other kinds of voices and taking them seriously, and thinking outside our own subject position.
"For me, the secret ingredient is art as a curator is approaching exhibitions prop...
2014-08-2847 min
The Secret IngredientBrad McInerney - Kazoo Fest: A History Of Music & Community (The Secret Ingredient - 05-03-14)Founder of Kazoo! Fest Brad McInerney joins us in the studio this week. We talk about the intersection of pop and experimental music, freedom of expression, and pancake breakfasts. We engage with Griel Marcus’s book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century to discuss the powerful way in which music attempts to change the world. We discuss the balance between the experimental process of instigation and interrogation, desire and expression. How do we transmit our hopes into music?
Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
2014-08-2840 min
The Secret IngredientClip Show: Revisiting The Past (The Secret Ingredient - 05-02-14)We revisit our first two shows with Christian Giroux and Janet Morton through the lens of the "clip show" television trope (the flashback-heavy episodes pieced together from already-aired footage often brought on by writer's strikes), looking at how we can see the act of putting two different interviews in conversation as a creative act. We engage with the power of ambiguity, interpretation, and discussion. We look at these episodes through the lens of artist Charles Stankievech, who creating narratives through unlikely parallel texts. In the spirit of investigation, we explore Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s concepts of paranoid and reparative readings, either dr...
2014-08-2839 min
The Secret IngredientNo Place/Good Place: Jenn E Norton’s Site Lines and Urban Utopia (The Secret Ingredient - 22-01-14)This week we re-visit Norton’s public project Site Lines, a suggestion box placed in Saint George’s Square which invited downtownites to suggest fantastical improvements to public space. Norton discusses the project in relation to utopia, that “things are created in a specific context and a specific time and place by a specific person.” We discuss a book written by Simon Brault, called No Culture, No Future, exploring the idea of the democracies of culture, that while we can all enjoy culture at different levels, we cannot choose what is inaccessible to us. In relation to this, Norton talks about th...
2014-08-2841 min
The Secret IngredientAdrienne Spier: Overlooked Objects and Unwanted Spaces (The Secret Ingredient - 15-01-14)Artist Adrienne Spier joins us in the studio to talk about her practice. Spier works with unwanted objects and overlooked spaces, taking what people have thrown away and seeing them with new eyes as art. Her practice allows her to be open to possibility, and to explore new angles. As Spier notes, anxiety can be a powerful fuel to make it happen. Spier is a resident artist in the Arts Incubator at Boarding House Arts, a program offering studio space to seven emerging artists.
"Over the years as I’ve thought about process and how things work, I believe there ar...
2014-08-281h 00
The Secret IngredientCommunity Building Through the Memory of Will Munro (The Secret Ingredient - 08-01-14)This week, we talk about artist, social worker, and DJ Will Munro and his extensive work in community-building before his death in 2010. Through his work, we discuss queer culture and collective otherness, and the desire to be recognized. We talk about strong communities as inherently political, resistant, and resilient. We discuses the book Army of Lovers: A Community History of Will Munro, as well as how he stitched communities together with his record needle. In artist Luis Jacob’s words, Munro’s work “fill[ed] the blanks of this community in waiting.” Read more about Will in Sarah Liss’ excellent book, avai...
2014-08-2844 min
The Secret IngredientBen Grossman Brings the Music to Guelph Through Silence (The Secret Ingredient - 19-11-13)The founder of Guelph’s own Silence, Ben Grossman, joins us in the studio today to talk live music and how Silence has become a locally iconic epicenter of culture in Guelph. Grossman also brings up the science fair meets party meets nerd-fest event known as Handmade Music, which offers participants a chance to try DIY music and instrument making. He argues that improvisation is no longer merely an embodiment, but instead a metaphor for social intervention. Looking at book The Fierce Urgency of Now by Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, we discuss freedom, improvisation, and its relation to...
2014-08-0750 min
The Secret IngredientFastwürms: Interspecies Collaboration & Ecological Resilience (The Secret Ingredient -13-11-13)Having recently participated in The Mulch Project, we discuss the art collective FASTWÜRMS, who alongside the Specialized Studio students of the University of Guelph have developed this project in the local neighborhood known as The Ward. The Rhizome collaboration looked to grow roots out into the community through affection, art, and community exchange. Custom designed burlap bags were filled with mulch at the Tytler Public School, where local residents could come and take as many as they needed. In this episode we talk about the FASTWÜRMS’ practice of DIY aesthetics, social exchange, and blending high-end pop culture with bent...
2014-08-0739 min
The Secret IngredientAlthea Thauberger on Work and Play (The Secret Ingredient - 06-11-13)This week we talk with Vancouver-based artist Althea Thauberger and her work in Rijeka, Preuzmimo Benčić. Thauberger calls into question to future of Rijeka through the occupation by over 70 children between the ages of 6-13 of a local heritage site Benčić, a former sugar refinery, tobacco factory, and machine parts site. Thauberger became interested in the way watching the children work became like watching the children play, and watching the children play became like watching the children work. The inclusion of children in art and community is also addressed through our discussion of Darren O’Donnell’s essay “Toronto: T...
2014-08-0746 min
The Secret IngredientArts Incubator Residents Annie Dunning and Monika Hauck (The Secret Ingredient - 03-10-13)This is a special episode as part of CFRU’s Raise your Voice campaign, and we sit down with Art Incubator Residency participants Monika Hauck and Annie Dunning in our local coffee shop, Planet Bean. Monika speaks with us about her varied practice, looking specifically at marginalized and unused spaces in nature. Annie Dunning is currently working on an interactive sound sculpture, based around a collaboration with a woodpecker hammering away at a tree. Both artists are making the city of Guelph a key character in their work, as it is a good place to explore and grow as an em...
2014-08-0749 min
The Secret IngredientGhouls, Gendered Ghosts, and Democratic Discussion (The Secret Ingredient - 23-10-13)As Halloween approaches, we talk haunted houses, specifically Killjoy’s Kastle by Allyson Mitchell. Filled with, demented women’s studies professors, straw feminists, and the ghost of Valerie Solanas and gravestones marking the death of the Gender Binary, this feminist haunted house demands that you actively participate in the work. The project also offered the chance to reflect on your experience in a processing room with real-life feminist killjoys like Anne Cvetkovich. However, it is also recently the subject of an active online conversation about restrictive spaces and the more complex aspects of feminism’s ghosts. In this context we also d...
2014-08-0741 min
The Secret IngredientFriendly Rich: Improviser, Composer & Musician Extraordinaire (The Secret Ingredient - 04-09-13)Today’s interview with Rich Marsella tackles a number of topics including musical production, collaboration, and community involvement. An improviser, composer, and musician, Marsella talks with us about his recent project Scheherazade which is part of Musagetes Improviser-in-Residence program. It included a wide number of performers from Guelph’s own creative audience to perform Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade dramatically rearranged for electric guitar, orchestra, and whoopee cushion organ, among others. Later, we discuss a passage about a composer suffering from amnesia, from Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia. Through the narrative we discuss the ability improvisational music has to create a presence when peo...
2014-08-0744 min
The Secret IngredientSYN: Building New Ways to Bring Us Together (The Secret Ingredient - 27-02-13)In our studio this week, two members of SYN - atelier d'exploraine urbaine, Jean-Maxime Dufrensne and Jean-François Prost, talk with us about their project INFRACAMPUS and their work in re-organizing public space. Working with university students and staff, SYN explored misused, underused, or ambiguous spaces to answer the question: How can we engage the campus as a place for fostering new kinds of actions and social configurations? SYN has been working with the built environment to bring us together. How can we solve solitude?
2014-08-0723 min
The Secret IngredientJanet Morton Crafts the Answer to Value and Time (The Secret Ingredient 20-02-13)Janet Morton talks with us about time, money, and the value of everything. Morton’s playful work critically addresses crafting and labour, as Morton herself knits works to address “measured time” and the value we associate with the handmade. In a culture where most of our products are made wherever cheaper labour can be found, Morton’s practice aims to critically analyze our notions of value.
2014-08-0726 min
The Secret IngredientScott McGovern: Hacking Systems, Reinventing Culture (The Secret Ingredient - 16-10-13)This week Ed Video curator Scott McGovern Joins us to talk about hacker culture, the spirit of exploration, and their relation to the art community. We talk about University of Guelph student Edward Kim’s, Science Hack Day at Ed Video Gallery. We explore hacking as a way of combining technology to create unique solutions to sometimes complex problems. We call in recent SOFAM grad Omar Elkharardly to break down hacking in the spirit of re-invention, working with existing systems, and creating your own rules.
2014-08-0645 min
The Secret IngredientShawn Van Sluys talks Ships, Sounds, and Social Responsibility (The Secret Ingredient - 09-10-13)Today we have Shawn Van Sluys, Executive Director of Musagetes, in the studio to talk about the current projects in Rijeka and Lecce. His most recent paper, A City and its Pier, looks at the projects that are happening in Rijeka, to address questions of social responsibility, de-industrialization, and the pains of transition. Artists Laetitia Sonami and Matthew Mazzotta are both working on projects that position Rijeka’s breakwater pier as a transformative space. We move from curiosity to metaphor in our investigation of how smaller cities envision new futures during transition times.
Van Sluys, Shawn. "A City and Its Pi...
2014-08-0650 min
The Secret IngredientReflecting on the Musagetes Guelph Café (The Secret Ingredient - 02-10-13)This week we reflect on the events and happenings of the Musagetes Guelph Café, which happened from September 25th – 28th. Postcommodity’s visit as part of the weekend encouraged stimulating dialog, mobilizing language to challenging the structure of the Café itself. Postcommodity’s own performance invited local Guelphites to join them in creating a playable instrument, Game Remains: Golden Horseshoe, that encouraged strategic planning and respectful collaboration in ways that responded to Guelph as a city and a site. Using Pablo Helguera’s book, Education for Socially Engaged Art, as a lens, we discuss the evolution and dismantling of communities as the peo...
2014-08-0645 min
The Secret IngredientPostcommodity: Game Changers(The Secret Ingredient - 25-09-13)Postcommodity join us in our studio. The members of Postcommodity are interdisciplinary, and work together to build trans-disciplinary work through a shared indigenous lens. We discuss their practice and what it means to create discourse through complexity and confusion. Comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martinez, Kade L. Twist, and Nathan Young, they have currently installed a four person musical instrument that is designed as a video game in Guelph’s own Boarding House Arts. Game Remains: Golden Horseshoe requires four players, and produces a new sound and game with every different interaction. The artists goal is to create spaces tha...
2014-08-0649 min
The Secret IngredientJenn E Norton: Site Lines & Artistic Interventions (The Secret Ingredient - 18-09-13)Artist Jenn E Norton is talks with us about her latest project, Site Lines. Norton made a suggestion box in which ideas for how St. George’s Square could be reimagined can be entered. The big ideas shared by individuals in the space will later be rendered by Norton as a form of concept art, placed in the square itself as a poster. The work itself addresses need and lack through our desire, using a playful and imaginative process that allows individuals to both participate in the work, but also to find themselves in a space where they can imagine wh...
2014-08-0636 min
The Secret IngredientJanet Morton's The Stack: An Industrial and Creative Production (The Secret Ingredient - 11-09-13)This week we talk with artist Janet Morton about her project for the Musagetes Guelph Café, The Stack. This stack for the creative and artistic production happening in the building is made up of a couple thousand cassette tapes, recycled doilies, and some resin. Morton herself refers to the work as a vessel of memory; a mix tape is a vehicle for love and connection. We discuss capital and value in art; elitist value, social value, and the idea that “time equals money”. What gets sacrificed for the sake of capital?
Sontag, Susan. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. Edited by David...
2014-08-0632 min
The Secret IngredientJoshua Cleminson: Residencies and Reinterpretations (The Secret Ingredient - 10-04-13)In today’s episode, we interview artist and Guelph grad Joshua Cleminson to discuss the Treehouse Residency in Brooklyn, New York. Cleminson worked with a group of seven artists who host a residency in their gallery space, allowing others to experience New York. His own practice touches on humour, simplicity, and absurdity. One of his recent works was a re-interpretation on Gerald Ferguson’s piece, A Million Pieces, from 1977. 36 Dollars an Hour saw Cleminson walking around Madrid dropping pennies. If a passerby were to pick up the coins, and if they dedicated themselves to it full time, would be able to m...
2014-08-0624 min
The Secret IngredientGordon Monahan & Scott McGovern: Art, Music, Kazoo!Fest (The Secret Ingredient - 03-04-13)This week, start by chatting with musician Gordon Monahan about his experimental practice and then hear about Scott McGovern’s art curatorial philosophy. Monahan’s work is influenced by the New York Scene, John Cage, and his own experiments with music and science. Monahan explores sound in many facets in his own practice: it’s physics, culture, and in the context in which it can be manipulated. Ed Video curator Scott McGovern talks about using his position there to facilitate exhibitions and art.
"The secret ingredient in art is being open to discovering new things. Don’t have too much of a fix...
2014-08-0651 min
The Secret IngredientDave Hickey Shakes Down the Art World (The Secret Ingredient - 27-03-13)In a spirited interview with the man himself, we talk art and music with the bad granddad of American art criticism Dave Hickey (author of Air Guitar, which we read last week). After his appearance at the Shenkman lecture earlier this week, Hickey elaborates on his perspective of the arts as a discourse of objects, a social buffer where one can talk about whatever they want to talk about through objects without screaming at each other. Hickey investigates communities of desire and the world of art that rises from an underground place, a space outside of the academy, government-funded art...
2014-08-0627 min
The Secret IngredientUnderstanding Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar: Alternative Economy (The Secret Ingredient - 20-03-13)This episode we discuss a selection of texts from Dave Hickey’s book Air Guitar as the University of Guelph’s School of Fine Art and Music prepares for his upcoming Shenkman lecture. We address the difference between spectatorship and participation; the ways in which people connect with the work that are not dictated by an institution or popular culture. Hickey proposes an alternative economy, one where people who are really into things should buy into them. The power in art comes from a supportive audience, not from its financial value. How does our engagement give art value?
Hickey, Dave. "Roma...
2014-08-0620 min
The Secret IngredientAllyson Mitchell talks Sexuality, Autobiography, and Change (The Secret Ingredient - 13-03-13)The co-founder of FAG (Feminist Art Gallery) Allyson Mitchell joins us on the phone this week. Mitchell, along with her partner and collaborator Deirdre Logue, has started a number of initiatives promoting queer and feminist art practices, including an art shows, a letter-writing campaign, and queer life drawing class for non-drawers. Mitchell’s own immersive sculptural practice plays with ideas of sexuality, autobiography, and her own body as her work encourages viewers to physically interact with it instead of passively responding to it. Mitchell and Logue’s work with FAG aims to create ambiguity between the studio and the gallery, as w...
2014-08-061h 00
The Secret IngredientReading Claire Bishop: Participation and Politics (The Secret Ingredient - 06-03-13)“Participatory art values what is invisible,” Claire Bishop writes in her recent investigation of participatory art and its ability to engage in politics, public space, and community building. Using Bishop’s book as a tool for discourse, we work with the idea that participatory artists are the producers of situations. We talk about artist Pablo Helguera and his creation of a traveling school, The School of Panamerican Unrest, and how it promotes community building, cooperation, and negotiation. We reflect on artists who practice in the white cube, and others who bring their practice to public space, co-creating with people and ideas...
2014-08-0622 min
The Secret IngredientDiane Borsato: A Curious Mind (The Secret Ingredient - 13-02-13)Using all manner of social engagement to inform her life and work, Diane Borsato investigates her everyday pursuits and curiosity artistically. This week she talks to us about joining clubs and societies based on her interests in the senses, and how those interests dictate her life and performances alike. The subject of her work is about learning and having embodied experiences, social engagement, and her practice from those discursive experiences.
"The secret ingredient in art is the investment of the artist - care, risk, - pushing something in the world or in themselves to make a piece appear. How much...
2014-08-0622 min
The Secret IngredientChristian Giroux talks Film, Space, and Public Art (The Secret Ingredient - 06-02-13)This week, SOFAM professor Christian Giroux speaks with us about his practice with collaborator Dan Young in public art and film installations. The two recently won the 2011 Sobey Art Award for their work, which includes a film trilogy addressing how spaces in Canada have changed on a domestic, municipal, and national level. Their practice explores how space affects our bodies and how our bodies affect space.
"Ultimately art is all this stuff. Why would you go on just making more and more stuff? But in the moment, it is a proposition. There is this idea that this proposal has a...
2014-08-0619 min
The Secret IngredientThe Secret Ingredient - Emilio Fantin 19-03-14Free Home University Curator Alissa Firth-Eagland and Musagetes' Project Assistant Danica Evering spoke with Free Home University Mentor Emilio Fantin last December 2013 about his thoughts on the sacred, education, and how we want to live together. The episode was aired as a segment on The Secret Ingredient, an ongoing discussion of the invisible elements of art that make it powerful and relevant: how artwork connects many publics, inspires cooperation and collaboration, and is created through conversation. We talk about new views on local, national, and international art where it intersects with the social. How can we add new voices to...
2014-04-0455 min