ARTIST WANTED Collective
Wing Yee Tong
Rita Camacho Lomeli
Rodrigo MartÃ
Co-presented with Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts
May 1st - 31st, 2013
A common response to the declaration “I’m an artist” is often: “How do you pay the bills?”
“Talking shop” refers to the jargon of specialized work and talking about work during off-work hours. In an effort to problematize this work-centric valuing of time and energy, ARTIST WANTED will use SHOP TALK SHOP search centre as their home base to organize conversations on issues of labour in the arts. In an effort to engage in numerous forms of dialogue the group will host three facilitated conversations at Whippersnapper Gallery. The venue will also be the home of individual projects La fête permanent and DAY- and NIGHT- Job Interviews.
La fête permanentSaturday May 4, 2013 6pm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Seminar Room 1, FreeSaturday May 11, 2013 7pm, Trinity St. Paul Church, Free?
La fête permanente is a project that consists of a series of promotional materials that the artists give as gifts to the audience. The name of this undertaking and the 4-D cube symbol that is used in these souvenirs: pennants, buttons, postcards and stamps intend to be reminders that artists could have multiple types of actions; in this case the potential is on their labour and its intrinsic notions of playfulness and feast to self-organize.
DAY- and NIGHT- Job InterviewsMay 1 -15, 2013 between 12 – 3 pm, and 4 pm – 7 pm, FreeWhippersnapper Gallery, 594b Dundas Street West*Interviews with GTA artists by appointment.To participate please visit http://shoptalkthejobsofartists.wordpress.com or e-mail artistwantedcollective@yahoo.com
Drawing on her job experience as a market survey researcher, Wing Yee’s DAY- and NIGHT- Job Interviews seek to collide and challenge the day- and night- job dichotomy of working in the arts by eclectically fusing various interview forms such as a job interview, opinions poll, fortune telling and quiz games. The interviews will serve to map and re-imagine with participants the ways in which artists negotiate conditions of their “working” world, having multiple occupations, employable skill sets and how these relate to sustaining a viable art practice. Interviews will be staged at the SHOP TALK SHOP search centre throughout the run of Mayworks Festival.
SHOP TALK: public conversationWednesday May 15, 2013 6:30 pm, PWYCRobert Kananaj Gallery, 1267 Bloor Street West
A public conversation expanding on previous discussions and considering the organizing potential of local artists as workers will be hosted at Robert Kananaj Gallery, where ARTIST WANTED will speak about their work as a collective in conversation with guest speakers Karl Beveridge, Amber Landgraff, and Devon Ostrom. The guest speakers will speak on and lead further group discussions exploring questions intersecting art and labour.
*For details on the three facilitated group discussions and to join, please visit http://shoptalkthejobsofartists.wordpress.com or e-mail artistwantedcollective@yahoo.com
ARTIST WANTED is an art group focused on the relationship and tensions between art and labour. The collective is comprised of members Rita Camacho Lomeli, Rodrigo Martà and Wing Yee Tong. A common interest in thinking about the value of cultural labour and the agency of artists informs their major group project SHOP TALK, a platform exploring the labour performed by artists to sustain their practices as cultural producers, focusing on practitioners in the greater Toronto region.
Rita Camacho Lomeli is a Toronto based artist. She has been working on performance-based projects concentrating on gift methodologies to examine points in time, gaps, intervals and tracts where the gift could possibly exist. Rita has served as a board member of various artist-run centres and recently graduated from The Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media & Design program from OCAD University.
Rodrigo Martà is a Mexican-Canadian artist working between sculpture, performance and drawing. His practice considers modes of political efficacy in contemporary art and culture production. His focus on communality and forms of shared ecstasy has led to thematic streams such as insurgent barricade, the intersection of education and activism, and spatial politics via unsanctioned structures/activities such as festivals. Rodrigo received his MFA in Public Practice from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA.
Wing Yee Tong is a Chinese-Canadian artist working in drawing, sculpture and intervention. Her work is focused on processes of cultural location through everyday actions of learning, work and play. As an object maker Wing Yee tinkers with surplus materials and vernacular objects in spatial responses to locality and notions of cultural membership. Wing Yee received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
