With the launch of an inaugural summer residency, Artspace Peterborough is not only making room for a new art collective to create experimental works but encouraging the public to engage with local art.
This summer, a new experimental film collective will be taking over the gallery space and inviting the public to free film screenings, an interactive workshop, and weekly drop-in sessions.
Just months after Artspace opened a supply store with the Art Factory satellite, the artist-run centre is continuing to find ways to serve those in their membership. That means using the re-imagined main gallery space as a studio for artists in residence.
“We draw artists from across the country generally, but we have shifted our exhibition schedules so that the gallery space is actually available to our members to do a variety of things,” says Artspace executive director Leslie Menagh. “We will be continuing to do that over the next year or so-shifting things around in terms of scheduling so that we can actually leverage the gallery as studio space or for other kinds of member engagement.”
Menagh says accepting proposals for a summer residency was also motivated by a desire to create opportunities for the public, outside of the membership, to engage with artwork.
“There’s this huge bank, almost 50 feet of window space that people can look into and get a sense of what is happening at Artspace, but we have heard over the years that very often people walk past, and they don’t know what happens there. I’ve really taken that to heart and was focused on trying to counter that with some really lively engaging activity. Galleries have a long history of being exclusionary space, but actually they’re meant to be really engaging and to create meaning for people.”
Menagh says when Artspace put the call out for applications for the residency, they were “blown away” by the proposal they received from FilmCraft Collective, a new 12-member collective with the intention of promoting experimental film and experimental filmmaking methods to the greater Nogojiwanong-Peterborough community.
Kelly Egan, associate professor in Trent University’s Department of Culture, Art, and Media, formed the collective in response to Artspace’s call for proposals.
“I saw the open call for the residency and, for a long time, I’ve been trying to create something for students after they graduate from Trent to have some kind of link to a film community if they stay in Peterborough,” Egan says.
“Often, I’m finding that after they graduate, they feel adrift, they don’t have access, and they don’t have the same sort of scheduling of projects that you have in university,” Egan adds. “I was trying to create something that would allow current students, former students, and other staff members to come together to create something bigger than ourselves.”
Alongside Egan, members of the collective include Cohen Arndt-Perris, Kathleen Clysdale, Louis Corneil, Anabelle Craig, Athena Emmanouil, Eryn Lidster, Brooklynne Melburn, Eamon O’Brien, Laura Thompson, Matt Waples, and Melissa Wilson.
Egan explains that it is very rare to find a shared studio space outside of a university environment, though those spaces can have an impact on an artists’ work.
“I was thinking about my time in school, what it was like to have studio visits and to have people inside of my studio space and how that activates space differently than if you’re working in isolation in a studio,” Egan says.
“I really did want to engage a community element of filmmaking because there’s so much of the craft that is learned just through simple conversation or looking at someone else’s work and seeing that there’s something that you are inspired by in someone else’s practice. I think bringing together 12 people with a different kind of practice will allow us all to grow as we learn from each other.”
Throughout the seven-week residency, which kicks off on Thursday, July 2, FilmCraft members will have 24/7 access to the studio space to work on their own independent film projects. Each project will use different filming methods, and will be centred on Artspace’s annual theme of “belonging” in various ways.
For her own project, Egan will be taping film-quilt pattern to the Artspace windows to use them as a natural light box.
She will be working on a third quilt in a series called Custom Trailer Series, where she takes Hollywood film trailers and cuts them into quilt patterns to “find out what the narrative of the story would be if it was in a quilt rather than a traditional narrative structure.”
“I will be sticking little bits of the quilt as I’m constructing it on the window, so you’ll see the pattern evolve as it materializes,” she explains. “Then I’ll be cutting it together, sending it off, and getting a print so that we will have a film print available at the end of the residency. “We will leave our working areas up so that people can see what we are doing.”
Every Saturday between 2 and 5 p.m., the studio space will be open to the public to connect with the artists and talk about what they are working on as they go through the residency.
On select Fridays (July 3, July 24, August 7, and August 14) beginning at 8 p.m., the collective will host a free screening of some of the works-in-progress or films rented from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.
On Saturday, July 25 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., FilmCraft Collective will also be hosting a workshop on camera-less animation to give the public firsthand experience with 16 mm filmmaking.
Egan describes the process as a “way of making film that is more in touch with visual art” by taking the camera out of it.
“You play with the film strip and whatever you create on the film strip is then put through a projector,” she says. “There’s a long tradition of camera-less filmmaking in Canada, especially with Norman McLaren, who was at the NFB (National Film Board of Canada), so we are tapping into a history that is very strong here and that we hope to help other people fall in love with.”
Egan says having the opportunity to work in a shared studio space “is a really wonderful way to begin the collective” and gives the collective credit in its early days.
From Artspace’s end, Menagh hopes the residency shows members and artists that the centre is there to support them and the local arts scene.
“There’s been a decreased public awareness of its importance and the arts are, under all intents and purposes, impoverished at the moment,” Menagh says. “So I hope we’re using our resources to be able to support artists in our community to do what they need to do. This summer is going to be about supporting their activities and presenting them to the public.”
Artspace staff and volunteers will still be available on-site throughout the residency, with Art Factory continuing to operate at its regular hours.
For more information about Artspace, including exhibitions, events, and workshops, visit artspaceptbo.ca.
