FIELD TRIP #1

FIELD TRIPPING: 

Alderney Ferry, the Happy Face Museum, and Fisher's Stationary Store 

*** Due to the physical size of our destinations, I only have room for 10 participants on this trip. Please RSVP me (Kate) at paperscissorsrock@gmail.com quickly to reserve your spot ***

On Saturday July 6th, we will meet at the Halifax Ferry Terminal at 12:45 for a brief orientation. At 1pm we will take the ferry to Alderney Landing and, while on the boat, discuss Critical Art Ensemble's notorious 2002 visit to Halifax, their approach to public art and the ramifications of the projects they did here.  

Arriving in Dartmouth shortly after 1pm, we will walk for 10 minutes to the Happy Face Museum, owned and operated within the home/dog-grooming business of collector, Debbie Power. 

After touring the museum, we will end the trip by visiting Fisher's Stationary, an office supply/card shop that has been around for 50 years. While it is certainly an excellent resource for old notebooks, lettraset sheets and other art supplies, we will also discuss Fisher's dual function as vernacular museum. 

At this point (probably 2:30pm?) we can disband and you can take the ferry back to Halifax with me if you like. 

I know this is FREE school but please bring $2.25 for the ferry ride or you'll miss the boat (plus another $2.25 if you need to get back). The Happy Face Museum's admission is by donation, but I strongly encourage bringing five bucks...to quote Happy Face Museum owner Debbie Power: "Kindness is the oil that takes the friction out of life."

Summer 2013 - Workgroups and Workshops

Workgroups and workshops have no predetermined length. Contact the facilitators/organizers below for details.

B.S. 101

Believe what you say to be true, or convince others that what you're doing is interesting. Through collectively suggested strategies, this group will encourage artists to describe their work to each other in order to comfortably and confidently engage artists and non-artists in discussions about their practice.

Contact Becky for time, date and location: becky.welter.nolan@gmail.com

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CREATIVE TACTICS: RESPONDING TO STREET HARASSMENT
Forget what your grandmother told you about not talking back. This is an informal workshop/discussion group with the intention of creating tactics to safely respond to perpetrators of street harassment. This discussion is aimed at building community support and collectively developing effective ways to counteract public shaming, violence, and oppression.

Contact Beck for time, date and location:
beckgilmerosborne@gmail.com

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ECO MATERIALISM

Call it "eco materialism" (or maybe "eco conceptualism"?), this open group will focus on discussing and developing environmentally conscientious art practices through our consideration of material choice and material restraint. 

Contact Craig for time, date and location: halifaxfreeartschool@gmail.com

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ET AL. READING COLLECTIVE
A discussion group for anyone interested in the casual perusal of short texts, audio or video material pertaining to art history/theory/criticism. It is hoped that this collective will be conducive to a free + open exchange of whatever its participants are into right now. Material for weekly discussion is to be suggested by 1 or 2 members of the group on a rotating basis, which, in addition to meeting details, will be determined based on common consent. An initiatory meeting will be held to discuss logistics and mutual interests. 

If you're feelin' it, contact Merray: merray_gerges@hotmail.com

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FERMENTATION 

Fermenting foods gives them more complex tastes and does not require special equipment. Join in the experimentation with naturally occurring yeasts and kefir grains to preserve foods and make them more digestible and nutritious. Some favourites have been sunflower 'sour cream' and sourdough breads. 

Contact Liz for time, date and location: making.strangers@gmail.com

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FIELD TRIPPING 

Be part of the monthly Halifax Free Art School Field Trip Series to local points of interest including vernacular museums, alternative exhibition spaces and private art collections on public display. Led by Kate Walchuk, she hopes that we will have great discussions about the use of public space, tourism and art patronage, antique stores and their dual function as museums, spectacle, souvenir objects as art, etc. Kate is excited to show us some unfamiliar spaces, but she also looks forward to the challenge of presenting familiar spaces in the alternative context of a free art school.
Contact Kate for details: paperscissorsrock@gmail.com

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HANDMADE LIFE
A work and discussion group about the greater discipline of a handmade life using basket-making as its ground. Most meetings will take place in Lunenburg, NS. 

Contact Theo for details: teheffler@mta.ca

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INDEPENDENT ARTISTS AND THE OWNERSHIP OF ART ONLINE
Copyright is, at face value, the legal rights of a creator to copy their work and/or receive reimbursement. On June 29, 2012, however, bill C-11 was passed, making many changes to existing Canadian copyright law. How does copyright relate to broader conceptions of art and ownership? This discussion group focuses on art, ownership, and copyright in a digital age.

Contact Lachlan for time, date and location: lachlan902@gmail.com

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INTRODUCING A NEW ROUTE
This is a workgroup that won’t formally meet until the end of summer at the opening of a new sculpture park in Dartmouth Crossing. This is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, August 27, 2023 in the area around Frenchman’s Brook, located at the far end of Dartmouth Crossing and accessible from the Walmart parking lot or the one behind Canadian Tire. The area has been restored by Clean Nova Scotia (http://clean.ns.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Frenchmans_Brook_Restoration_Plan.pdf) and the production of sculpture for the park should respect their efforts toward environmental renewal. Whenever the participants complete and install their sculpture for the park you can send me documentation, artist name, title, material list, etc and I will start an ongoing catalogue and map of the work online. It needs to be noted that whatever you produce for the park should be removed following the August event. The #56 bus can take you to Dartmouth Crossing.

Contact Ryan for more information: ryanwitt8@gmail.com

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LISTENING

A meeting of people interested in listening and sharing things for listening. Themes may be provided or suggested beforehand or may develop naturally at each meeting.

Contact Adam for time, date and location: adam-gunn@hotmail.com

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MCNABB'S CLAY CLIFF SCULPTURE TRIP
Over on McNabb's Island there's a natural clay deposit on the face of a gently sloping cliff. Now, we're not allowed to remove the clay, but we can still have fun with it where it already is. Join Ben Woodyard and other ceramics artists for a day trip (and potential overnight camping trip) to sculpt the face of the cliff into a to-be-determined public temporary sculpture. The piece will erode back into the cliff, so when considering subject matter, this should be remembered as one quality of the piece. The day is yet to be determined, but likely this will land on a weekend. If you have a real keen interest in participating, send us the dates that would be best for you and we'll try and accommodate everyone. Be prepared to spend a little money getting over there, usually the ferryman asks around $10 a head round-trip (I'll have to verify this with him though), and bring food and water as they are not available on the island.

Contact Ben for time, date and location: bkwoodyard@gmail.com

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O.K. ELECTRONICS

Basic skills, scavenging, repurposing, and conversation. An open rhizome for discussion, troubleshooting, collaboration, and skills/knowledge sharing, in relation to electronics or electronics-related projects.

Contact Magnus for time, date and location: magnus.vont@gmail.com

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PRACTICAL COMMONS

The idea of the commons refers to both actually existing common resources (spaces, culture, land, energy, institutions, mutual aid) and to a horizon of possibility or an alternative social paradigm.  We'll look at the history and theory of the commons, and also some methods for "commoning" or reclaiming the commons through art, activism and community organizing.

Contact Max for time, date and location: maxhaiven@gmail.com

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STUDIO CRITIQUE GROUP

Departing from the pejorative sense of critique, the Studio Critique Group will run on a weekly rotational basis. Each week participants will gather at an individual's studio, living room, or other common space wherein work presented may be freely discussed. The "critique" is intended as a means for the artist to receive valuable and constructive feedback in a supportive, yet critical, environment.

Contact Robyn for time, date and location: rmitchell3@saic.edu

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THE INTERNET AND ART

An opportunity to discuss and learn what doors the Internet can open, while inspiring ideas for future sessions. Open discussion may be around new projects or around tools that are useful to the arts.

Contact Charles for details: charles.verge@gmail.com

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WRITING ON ABOUT AS

A workgroup to discuss the relevance of writing to art practice and a forum to exchange writing ON, ABOUT and AS art with emphasis on forms of distribution.

Contact Craig for time, date and location: halifaxfreeartschool@gmail.com


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TO PROPOSE A WORKGROUP OR WORKSHOP, or to ask a question, email Craig at halifaxfreeartschool@gmail.com

Introducing the Halifax Free Art School

In terms of “art education”, the institutional model always already limits art’s potential directions and is burdened with: the costliness of tuition, administrative control, rigidity of course offerings and duration, pre-requisites toward a degree, infrastructure dependency, etc.

Alternatively, the idea of a Free Art School is to “free up” these limitations as much as possible through an alternative organizational structure while offering these possibilities as “free” as possible from monetary concerns.

The Halifax Free Art School shall be:
- self-defined and self-managed;
- a “school” as an assemblage open to constant flux and spontaneous content;
- about an engaged community that encourages collaborative learning and action;
- limited only by our enthusiasm along with our will for resourcefulness —— in other words, if the will is there, the resourcefulness can be found; if the will isn’t there, nothing will happen.

Akin to the “anarchist free school” model, a vision for the Free Art School takes the horizontally-oriented rhizome as the model for organization and growth, as opposed to the vertically-oriented “tree-like” institutional model. The definition of a “rhizome” is “a continuously growing horizontal underground stem which puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals, where being “adventitious” means "happening as a result of an external factor or chance rather than design or inherent nature." (Grass is an example of a rhizome.)

In A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, they write: “Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified [i.e. imitating a tree], it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.”

This rhizomatic organizational model allows interest groups to become outshoots from outshoots and so on, always staying connected to one another, expanding organically from which “courses”, “workgroups” and "workshops" can spring up spontaneously based on our multiplicity of interests, curiosities and concerns, as opposed to fulfilling requirements within a restricted program with more rigid and finite options.

The educational possibilities of the Halifax Free Art School will be limited only by our enthusiasm and resourcefulness, and therefore will be completely learner/learning-driven, self-defined and self-managed.

Although we can say the Halifax Free Art School is now taking root, we must seek to maintain its rhizomatical structure over time. Again, to quote A Thousand Plateaus: "The multiplicity necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections."