We’re very excited (freaked actually!) to present Uncle Bad Touch‘s first Montreal show, with guests Desert Owls and Griefer, this Friday night at La Sala Rossa. The show is a fundraiser to help us put out our next issue which is very nearing completion (also very exciting after a year and a half of hard work!).
So please come on out and show four minutes some love, these bands really rock, and it’s going to be a kick-ass night to remember (or not)!
For those that know me personally, Sept. 3rd will also mark my very last day at Cossette. I’ve decided to leave the day job behind to focus on teaching and my own projects. More on that soon, but for now it’ll be another good reason to celebrate!
Last weekend, I was in Toronto to protest the G20 summit and the now all too obvious emergence of a full-out police state in Canada. During most of the weekend, and especially during the evening jail solidarity demonstration, I was fortunate to be with friends far more reasonable than myself, and I owe them a debt of gratitude for keeping me out of trouble, out of jail. Considering what I’ve now seen and read, my weekend was spent in relative safety and I left Toronto unscathed and unharrased. The same cannot be said for many friends, comrades and random passers-by.
Much has been written, recorded and revealed over the last week. Many disgusting and disturbing things about the excessive force exerted by the police/state. The assault on basic democracy and civil rights. It’s a disservice to gloss over it, but also rather pointless for me to address here. Do the (easy) research yourself and see how much you can stomach.
Imaging Apartheid, a project I’ve been working on for the last few months is getting set to launch this Wednesday evening at Casa del Popolo. Despite my long-standing beliefs on the issue (and on the implicit ideological implications), taking a vocal stand on this; by calling apartheid apartheid and working actively for the cause of Palestinian liberation, is not an easy position for me to take. Which in my mind, makes it all the more important to do so now, clearly, firmly, and lucidly.
First up, check out the wonderful work of Montreal-based artist and illustrator Kirsten McCrea. Her illustrations have recently graced the covers of the Winterhouse designed Poetry magazine (I’m so jealous and impressed!), and having had the pleasure of hanging out with her a bit lately, I can tell you that there are great things on the horizon for this talented and prolific lady.
I recently finished teaching my third course at Concordia University, a portfolio class for graduating students. It was a challenging class, but I’m quite happy with the results and think that my students were as well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the time to properly document their very well crafted print portfolios, but here’s a selection of their portfolio websites: Gaia Orain, Catherine Wakim, Zacharie Delavertu, Emmy Huot, Rebecca Rosen and Stefan Spec. Great work guys!
A quickly designed poster for this Sunday’s Words and Music event, hosted by the one and only Vince Tinguely. My main goal in doing this was to design a poster on the theme of climate change without using a) the globe, b) icebergs/polar bears, c) smokestacks, or d) any shade of green.
I’ll be giving a presentation about Four Minutes to Midnight and its relationship to language/morality at Wednesday night’s Pecha Kucha event. 20 slides, 20 seconds each! Hope to see you there.
The eleventh issue of Four Minutes to Midnight will represent a dramatic change in format, an hors-série as it were, featuring the work of American poet F.A. Nettelbeck and Montréal visual artist Sophie Jodoin. I’m very excited and honoured to be working with such talented artists on this issue, and am happy to say we actually have a real editor/production manager on board this time around too. It’s going to be beautiful…
The issue itself will be split into two booklets. The main booklet will feature F.A. and Sophie in all their glory, and the other booklet will consist of the Fugue (XI) that we’re starting here. For those that are unfamiliar, the typographic fugue is a collaboratively written “poem” loosely inspired by the exquisite corpse surrealist technique. It’s our goal to use this approach to find/create a resonant/dissonant collective voice, marked in time, and through type.
In honour of International Women’s Day yesterday, I wanted to write a post on a few of the women designers that have impacted my practice. I remember during my final year of undergrad (in 2000) being asked by my professor to name some female designers that we admired and, very ashamedly, drawing an almost complete blank (not that I was that aware of design culture or history in general at the time).
I asked my portfolio class this same question last night and was happy to see them fare better than me, but not by very much… So as always, there’s work to be done, and I’ll start with a (very) select list of women who’s works have directly guided my own.
