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Welcome to weldcast: the filmmakers series. This is a new podcast presented by the weld art collective and hosted by R. Edwin Barnett. In this episode, our last in our special on the 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, we sit down with filmmaker Sien Versteyhe. Versteyhe has a new documentary making its international premiere as part of the festival’s International Spectrum showcase. It’s called: JUNIOR.

Also listen to our review of the new NFB documentary by acclaimed director John Kastner, NCR: Not Criminally Responsible.

For full credits of today’s episode click here

written and produced by weld curator, Sonia Gemmiti & host R. Edwin Barnett. Special thanks to Virginia Kelly, Meghan Parnell, and the Hot Docs Festival, as well as Jennifer Mair and the NFB  for helping us put together this show.

And a special thanks to The Ruby Spirit for providing us with clips of their songs Caligari and Tin Can Bees.

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Welcome to weldcast: the filmmakers series. This is a new podcast presented by the weld art collective, hosted by R. Edwin Barnett. In this episode of our special series on the 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, we sit down with filmmaker Daniel Dencik to talk about his new documentary Expedition to the End of the World. We also speak with Riley Hooper, director of the new documentary short FLO.

For full credits of today’s episode click here

written and produced by weld curator, Sonia Gemmiti & host R. Edwin Barnett. Special thanks to Virginia Kelly, Meghan Parnell, and the Hot Docs Festival for helping us put together this show.

And a special thanks to The Ruby Spirit for providing us with clips of their songs Caligari and Tin Can Bees.

CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON TO LISTEN

Welcome to weldcast: the filmmakers series. This is a new podcast presented by the weld art collective. In this, episode two of our series, we’re continuing our coverage of the 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. We sat down with Dave Carroll and Chris “Wonder” Schoeck, the director and star of the feature documentary Bending Steel.

For full credits of today’s episode click here

written and produced by weld curator, Sonia Gemmiti & host R. Edwin Barnett. Special thanks to Virginia Kelly, Meghan Parnell, and the Hot Docs Festival for helping us put together this show.

And a special thanks to The Ruby Spirit for providing us with clips of their songs Caligari and Tin Can Bees.

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CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON TO LISTEN

On this episode, we sit down with filmmaker and photographer Cheryl Dunn. Dunn`s new documentary Everybody Street makes its debut at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. It’s a fascinating and inspiring film on the world of New York City street photography and the artists who do it.

Also included, is a review of the highly anticipated Canadian documentary, The Exhibition, which is also making its world premiere at Hot Docs.

For full credits of today’s episode click here

written and produced by weld curator, Sonia Gemmiti & host R. Edwin Barnett. Special thanks to Virginia Kelly, Meghan Parnell, and the Hot Docs Festival for helping us put together this show.

And a special thanks to The Ruby Spirit for providing us with clips of their songs Caligari, Ruby Dog.

Well, it has been one inspiring and busy week! Many exciting things coming up for weld including our coverage of the 2013 Hot Docs Festival. We will be featuring exclusive interviews with directors from some of our favourite films of the fest! We will also be posting reviews and recommendations for must see movies.

Check back soon!

Sonia - weld curator

Jim Hake celebrates the forgotten musical idols of the ‘60s utilizing upcycled CDs.

“My work for the most part is self-narrative. Music has always been a very important part in my work process. In trying to figure out how to bring that into my work, I went back to the music that I was listening to when I was a child and my mother’s 45 collection [...] When I was thinking about this project, I wanted to get into the forgotten artists of the ‘60s that I had grown up with.

This is the first piece in the series and it’s based on a conglomeration of features and hairstyles from the band The Crystals. In terms of the portraiture, I wanted it to be more about the glorification of that particular moment and also taking the idea of the ‘60s female, black doo-wop singer and portraying her in a classical pose in a very positive and glorified way […]” – Jim Hake

Jim Reid’s “Terraforms” is an artful re-presentation of the iconic landscapes of the Canadian Shield and Niagara Escarpment.

“They are hybrids of painting and sculpture, and their collisions of traditional artist materials, industrial materials and natural materials collected from the site.

Something I do, which a lot of artists don’t do, is work directly in the landscape. I actually portage the painting panels and my paints in a packsack and take them out into the landscape, and sometimes work for months on a single piece—the weather and the seasons change during that time, and the paintings evolve and erode, and grow and decay.

I like the idea of interpreting the ways I use materials with what’s happening in terms of natural processes […] There is an element of time in them because they take so long to do and there are seasonal changes going on. I am constantly over painting or digging down into the surface and building layers of transformations that slowly accumulate to make the painting.” – Jim Reid

Howard Podeswa reinterprets and deconstructs the works of Francisco Goya.

“I have been doing a whole series of works over a number of years looking at different artists. Goya was the one that started me off, because I had actually gone to see his work in Spain. I finally returned back to Goya and did a whole show just on examining his work.

With his work, I wanted to zoom in on very small parts—this is probably a few square inches of the original painting—but for me it’s the essence of that painting; what speaks to me about it is actually the abstract marks that are in there.

I like that at this level you can’t tell anymore whether is there a circus going on here? Is it a Caravan? Are these refugees who are marching through? You really can’t tell the context for it and for me the original piece has that about it, although it is obscured by all the details. When I zoom in like this, it sort of pulls that aspect out.” – Howard Podeswa

Gareth Bate’s work is focused on subjects of landscape and our effect on the natural world.

“This show is using three different bodies of work from my past work, and it shows a bit of an evolution. This was the “Lament” series. It was all about the kind of lament for environmental destructions, and then it moved its focus to grasses and then it shifted up to the skies and became all about storms over these fields.” – Gareth Bate

Liz Pead utilizes discarded hockey equipment to create landscapes inspired by her study of the Group of Seven.

“When I did painting and drawing at OCAD a few years ago, I was looking to find a really Canadian material. I play hockey, too, so I spend a lot of time at hockey arenas. In the garbage cans you see all these broken sticks and odd bits of stuff and I thought it just seems kind of wrong to throw it out. So, I started to recycle it.” – Liz Pead.

Sonia - weld curator

I am so very proud to announce weld art collective’s Artist of the Month for January 2013, Vikram Dasgupta’s Calcutta Taxi has won the Oscar Qualifier at the Aspen Shortsfest for Best Drama.

Best of luck from all your friends at the weld art collective!

Check out the trailer for Calcutta taxi here 

Sonia - weld curator

The Icelandic band Sigur Rós gave a dozen filmmakers the same small budget, along with complete creative freedom to create fourteen music videos for their latest album, Valtari.

Although difficult to pick just one, my favourite video from the Valtari mystery film experiment is the visually stunning and inspiring short film “Varúð”, by director Björn Flóki.

Check out their latest album on iTunes:

Sonia - weld curator

A big congratulations to our March 2013 Artist of the Month, Jesse Bromm, who was voted as the People’s Choice for Favourite Emerging Artist at this year’s The Artist Project!

In addition, our October 2012 Artist of the Month, Keita Morimoto, was awarded 1st prize in the Faces competition. Other winning artists  in this category include Bromm in second place, and Adrienne Dagg in third.

The People’s Choice was awarded to Elizabeth Lennie, and lastly the OCAD Award went to former Ontario College of Art and Design Alumus, Kate Hogg.

If you did not get a chance to check out The Artist Project, take a peek at a video we put together for the event:

The Artist Project was held February 21-24th 2013 at The Better Living Centre at Exhibition place, and features over 250 artists. For more information on the event click here.

Sonia - weld curator

Walking past the AGO for the last couple months, you can’t miss the large banners advertising the recent Diego Rivera exhibition. The banners consist of a snapshot of his face and words that read ‘He painted for the people’. But the motto of the art world now seems to be the exact opposite. The goal of most artists now is to create work that appeals to critics, and to other artists, but most definitely not to the people. Appealing to the people is now a negative; you aren’t supposed to appeal to the mainstream. If your art is accessible or enjoyable to the average person walking down the street then it must be too simple, or passé, too mainstream. I don’t completely disagree. I don’t think that art should be easily digestible, something that the viewer can see, understand and move on from within a minute, but there should be a compromise between making art that is meaningful and making art that is honest and accessible.

We want to see art that isn’t one dimensional, work that will endure for years to come, that will maintain its depth and meaning. However in the quest for that it feels like so many artists translate that into making work with the sole aim of it being incomprehensible. It becomes art that can only speak to us on an intellectual level, not on a basic emotional one. As much as I appreciate art that forces me to reason out its meaning, to me it feels more like an academic exercise, and less like the deep, visceral, gut wrenching experience I want to have while viewing art.

The art world has become its own enclosed space, isolated and inaccessible to the rest of the world. You need to be educated in the arts before you can hope to understand most contemporary art. The art world has developed a language of representation and signifiers where colours, lines and shapes are coded with meaning. If you don’t speak the language then you are alienated from the process, unable to read the message. The goal for so many young artists is to create work that will end up in galleries, that will be bought by collectors, that will receive positive reviews from critics. Those only encapsulate a small portion of the population though, and in the effort to appeal to them they create work that is incomprehensible to anyone not intimately involved in the art world.

It’s my greatest wish to make art that draws from the viewer a deep, visceral response. I want to create works that does not have a clear cut concept that you simply need to reason out through the language of art, but instead speaks in wordless emotions. When we try and find new and obscure ways to represent concepts we lose the honesty and reality that can make art so compelling. In the attempt to make art more meaningful we run the risk of completely removing art from the rest of the population. Perhaps we already have.

Elly Smallwood