If so, come on down to XPACE’s ART SUPPLY SWAP!

Bring your new and useless, or gently used and collecting dust supplies. Meet, greet and swap with other artists to get what you REALLY wanted for Christmas. We all have leftover gesso or weird pens from a class or a well meaning (but misinformed) aunt taking up space in our tiny studios. Bring it here.

We will accept paper, pens, paint, ink, markers, crayons, pencil crayons, brushes, canvas, material, thread, tools, collage resources, clay, sculpey, etc etc etc

Just in time for the holidaze, pick up great handmade items from local artists. There will be zines, comics, bookworks, prints, knit and crochet items, crafts aaaand incredible edibles. etc etc etc! neat stuff.

ALso to delight your senses, musical stylings by:
DJ taz’s_mom_butters_ (Sarah Butterill)
DJ AS IS (Cameron Lee)
MC Escher (Arielle Gavin)

COME on down! We got what you need.

Poster by Matt King!

CUT AND PASTE your way to fame, right this way,

XPACE will be hosting an afternoon of Collage and Mail Art making. Totally broke for the holidays? No problem! Make something special to give to your people, or send some REAL mail to friends and family far away. We will provide some scissors, glue sticks, paper and source material, as well as envelope templates and stamps!

We will be screening ‘How to Draw a Bunny’ a documentary about legendary collage and mail artist Ray Johnson.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Johnson

We encourage you to bring:

MAGAZINES, BOOKS, PHOTOCOPIES, FOUND GARBAGE, FABRIC, GLUE STICKS, EXACTO KNIVES, SCISSORS, ENVELOPES, PAPER etc

*Value Village, Salvation Army, Reference Library used book store (at Bloor and Yonge) are all great places to find magazines and books to cut up!

Of course resenting this phenomenon from the age of printed magazines now appears quaint.  At this stage one longs for the tenuously justified “criticism” of professional music journalists – drowning as we are beneath mucousy sea of opinion all too freely offered and all too horribly available through blogs – a word whose phonal qualities can’t but summon to mind a throat clearing expectoration.

So when I was asked to submit a list of texts for the XPACE curated library I returned to whatever sense of justification a reactionary mind could cling to. Reproduced here are large parts of readers from my Undergraduate classes.

I want you to trust me here: everyone who has actually contributed readings to this reading list has a PhD. These people are experts. Within their areas of specific competence these people might be the most expert the world can produce. This selection of readings is, in effect, licensed by major academic institutions – these are horribly legitimate opinions.

The university reader is a weird thing and itself probably a dying archaism today. These poor documents copied and copied, passing for the third and fourth times through the bowels of the document feeder at Alicos on College Street long to rest. Buried under layers of marginalia, circulated from the Library original through the first generation of photocopies and passed on to the next, dust and fingerprints on the platten glass, edges and borders of original pages, enlargements and contractions, notes and underlines both profound and baffling. These poor edifying documents that in the end may be barely legible through all the sedimented and encrusted legitimacy that clouds the copy. Tied to an endless wheel of reincarnation through reproduction these readers were born anew every semester to travel their own weird path.

And of course, that weird path included me. These selections might have originated with a PhD but obviously I’ve chosen what to include. The first selection I made was in 2003 and when I put all the things I thought I would ever want to see again into a box and put everything else from University into a grey bin for recycling. The second selection came sitting at my desk with a scanner and the phrase “I don’t have time for this shit” hovering over my head while Adobe Acrobat crashed for the fourth time after scanning 100 or so pages. The present selection represents about 1/4 of the surviving reading material I salvaged from University. How much of it I remember and how much I then and now merely mechanically processed is anyone’s guess.

Of course, that these opinions are licensed by academia this way means increasingly little. After all, it’s hard to devote your life to studying something you don’t care about – even the pros are always and eternally just ‘fans.’

Fans forever.

Steve Kado
Steve Kado graduated with a Ba (Hons.) in Semiotics from U of T in 2003. He founded the Blocks Recording Club in 2003 with Mark McLean. In 2010 he picked up an MFA in Art at CalArts. He’s been living in Copenhagen and Los Angeles for most of the last four years. His talks, installations, photo and publication work has been widely exhibited in Europe, North America and Oceania. He co-hosts Talking Show, a show for talking, on Los Angeles’ KCHUNG radio with composer Nicolas G Miller.

DJ FoodCourt will take the lid off your id and dish out the dirty dance-pop ditties you …secretly crave. Feast on guilty pleasures from across the decades as we launch the bedroom dance party into XPACE.

FEATURING:

OCADU Hip-Hop Collective, I.B. Scene to kick-off the night with a freestyle throw-down! Starting at 8:00pm.

OCADU Zine Collective will be selling zines made by OCAD U students, showing samples of the zines from their library, and teaching people how to make a quick book with just a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and a pair of scissors.

*Dress code is definitely not mandatory! Wear what makes you comfortable!

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ABOUT:

“Dancing With Myself & Others,” by Lindsay Denisewith documentation by Jenna Denise, a 2nd year Photography student at Ryerson University.

I.B. Scene Hip-Hop Collective:
“Determined to keep Hip-Hop culture active within the OCAD U and Toronto community. As a group, we intend to participate in social Hip-Hop events in the school and around the city. Our goal is to facilitate the spread of Hip-Hop through graffiti, DJing, MCing, and Breakdancing events and workshops.”
An exhibition throwdown that I.B. Scene did in May this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ako1FeVfLmI

OCADU Zine Collective:
“We are a collective of zine makers. Zines (rhymes with beans) are
little handmade self-published magazines that are made by artists,
writers and other folks who want to share something with a community of people. Our group brings together people who are interested in making zines and beginners are very welcome. When we meet, we usually work on making zines but we are also planning workshops, a zine swap and a zine fair in March.”

XPACE acknowledges the Province of Nova Scotia and Goldsmith’s University for their support.