‘Vishnu to Woodstock’ at Kif
Did well today, thought Kif on Parr St was closed again but you just have to knock on the door. This is the case with a lot of the small independent places of course, sometimes there’s a bell or intercom. Kif is part of the LivingBrain collective (or vice-versa?) of artists and musicians. Seems to be a few of these cropping up lately which is all good so far as I’m concerned.
One of the Kif artists, James Pagella, was there working on designing a poster but he broke off to chat about the place and the exhibitors. There’s pictures by Keith Connolly from NYC, member of No Neck Blues Band; the Canadian Kerry Hodgson; Steve Krakow aka Plastic Crimewave as well as Pagella and other Kif artists and the ‘mega-weird’ W van Duyn. As you may suspect all the pics have a music/poster/psychedelic/fantasy thing going on but the colours seemed a bit muted to me, perhaps they’d just faded over time but when I was a young hippy dude in the ’60s the colour of these things seemed a lot brighter.
Kif
LETS Create at ArtSpeQ Quiggins
As mentioned earlier, this was curated by Lis Edgar of Creative LETS which according to the handout “is an organisation that aims to give all artists, from all disciplines, a platform for their work.” Sounds good. So there’s pictures in various media as well as sculptures and even fashion designs.
HORTUS botany and empire
at the Travelodge building in Old Haymarket (near the tunnel entrance).
This falls into the ‘must see’ category because its just so different form the run-of-the-mill gallery exhib. The space is three floors of large rooms which will eventually become office space. From the entrance you go up to the mezzanine then down different stairs to ground level then down again to the very dimly lit basement. Its spooky down here, there are strange noises and voices saying ‘parsley’ coming from speakers on the walls, there’s also the Global Feed project. At first glance you think this exhibition is just about plants and pictures of flowers but there’s a lot more to it, there’s a big greenhouse full of holes and pictures of a snowman with a candle on his head!
Oh, and the Parsley installation takes its title from a brutal massacre in 1937 in the Dominican Republic during which Creole Haitians were murdered if they were not able to pronounce “parsley” (perejil) in the appropriate Spanish manner, by rolling the “r”. Thanks to Billy for pointing that out (glad someone reads the literature). Seems bizarre but no more so than any other ‘ethnic cleansing’.