[Test] AGM Reminder + Welcome Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott

Join Us Tomorrow Night!
2020 Annual General Meeting 

Forest City Gallery is inviting you to join us for our 2020 Annual General Meeting on Thursday, September 24^th at 6:00pm. The meeting will take place online on Zoom conferencing. Please use the Zoom link below or visit the AGM Event page on the FCG website.

The AGM is an opportunity to meet our current Board of Directors, elect new members to the Board of Directors, to learn about all that we have accomplished during the past year, and to hear about new programming and community initiatives. We welcome you to share in our success and we always welcome your input and ideas as we develop another year of exhibitions, workshops, talks, and events.

All are welcome to attend but only FCG members in good standing are eligible to vote at the AGM. If you would like to become a member or your membership has lapsed, please visit the membership page on the FCG website to renew or become a member in advance of the AGM. Sustaining your membership allows you to be an active participant in London’s only artist-run centre. A strong membership base is essential in allowing us to fulfil our mandate of supporting innovative artistic practices and emerging artists. If you are a member in good standing and unable to attend the AGM, in accordance with our bylaws you may appoint a proxy to vote on your behalf. If you will be voting by proxy we ask that you contact board@forestcitygallery.com to make arrangements before the date of the meeting.

To review materials ahead of the AGM including Meeting Agenda, 2019-2020 Financial Statements, and all materials that will require a vote, please visit the AGM Event page on the FCG website.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/96410352407
Meeting ID: #redacted 1035 2407

The Employee is a contracted grant-writer and fundraiser hired to support the Forest City Gallery’s single-person staff for a one-year term. Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott has been hired by the artist Joshua Schwebel, who has conceived of The Employee as an artwork contributing to the structural support of the artist-run centre. Schwebel was awarded funding for the project, inclusive of the employee’s wages, from the Canada Council for the Arts. The delegated set of tasks comprising the project are at once the performance of an artwork and productive work benefiting the gallery. The work externalizes grant-writing and the administrative-economic tasks associated with the financial survival of the gallery as a supplementary durational performance enacted on the administrative margins of the exhibition space. 

Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian conceptual artist. His artistic work reconfigures administrative and bureaucratic forms to expose compromises between artistic and economic value systems, and to show how neoliberalism operates through contemporary art. As a trans person who passes as white, cis and male, he uses these intersecting expressions of privilege to infiltrate and deconstruct institutional authority. Schwebel has participated in numerous residencies and exhibited his work both across Canada and internationally. Most recent solo exhibitions include Solvent, at Or Gallery in Vancouver (2019), and The Ground, at Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin (2019), as part of the shortlisted artists for the Berlin Art Prize. The Employee, Schwebel’s current project, is funded by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

In Shade Compositions (2005-present), a series of live performances and videos, the African-American artist Rashaad Newsome explores issues of Black authorship, appropriation, identity and belonging by conducting choirs of women (and sometimes, gay men) of colour who snap their fingers, smack their lips, roll their eyes, and cock their heads, creating expressive linguistic symphonies out of the nonverbal gestures and vocalizations of African-American women. Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) is a three-channel video and sound installation that both responds to and extends this inquiry by focusing on sucking teeth, an everyday oral gesture shared by Black people of African and Caribbean origin and their diasporas, including those of us who live here in Canada.

Referred to variously as kiss teeth, chups, steups, and stchoops, to suck teeth is to produce a sound by sucking in air through the teeth, while pressing the tongue against the upper or lower teeth, with the lips pursed or slightly flattened. West African in origin, this verbal gesture is used to signify a wide range of negative affects, including irritation, disapproval, disgust, disrespect, anger and frustration. Given that representations of African-American Blackness dominate and define mainstream understandings of the Black experience, when it comes to anti-black racism, most white Canadians are allowed to feel comfortable and are supported in their comfort by the historical and ongoing narratives of “not me,” “not us,” “only them, down there.” Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) is thus a response to the frustrations of living within this denial, and an expression of the anger and pain that many Black people often experience living in Canada, where we are always assumed to be better off, if not completely free of racism.
 

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist who works in photography, film, video and installation. Using archival, performative and process-oriented strategies, her work explores the personal and political possibilities afforded by considering experiences of emotions related to longing and loss. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings at Le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; the Royal Ontario Museum; LagosPhoto Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Maryland Institute College of Art; ltd los angeles; and Ryerson Image Centre and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Based in Toronto, Clarke holds an MSW from the University of Toronto, and she received her MFA from Ryerson University in 2015, when she was awarded both the Ryerson University Board of Governors Leadership Award and Medal and the Ryerson Gold Medal for the Faculty of Communication + Design. From 2016-2017, Clarke was artist-in-residence at Gallery 44, and she was the EDA Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough for the 2018 winter semester. Clarke’s writing has been published in Canadian Art, Transition Magazine and Momus, and in 2018, she was a speaker at the eighth TEDxPortofSpain. Most recently, Clarke has been awarded the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts 2019 Finalist Artist Prize, and she was a nominee for the 2019 Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award. She is currently the inaugural 2020-2021 artist-in- residence at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and the Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto (2019-2022).

Video still from Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome)
3-channel, HD video installation with sound
16 x 9 format, 9:47
2018

The Artist would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Toronto Arts Council.

Join Us Tomorrow Night!
2020 Annual General Meeting 

Forest City Gallery is inviting you to join us for our 2020 Annual General Meeting on Thursday, September 24th at 6:00pm. The meeting will take place online on Zoom conferencing. Please use the Zoom link below or visit the AGM Event page on the FCG website.

The AGM is an opportunity to meet our current Board of Directors, elect new members to the Board of Directors, to learn about all that we have accomplished during the past year, and to hear about new programming and community initiatives. We welcome you to share in our success and we always welcome your input and ideas as we develop another year of exhibitions, workshops, talks, and events.

All are welcome to attend but only FCG members in good standing are eligible to vote at the AGM. If you would like to become a member or your membership has lapsed, please visit the membership page on the FCG website to renew or become a member in advance of the AGM. Sustaining your membership allows you to be an active participant in London’s only artist-run centre. A strong membership base is essential in allowing us to fulfil our mandate of supporting innovative artistic practices and emerging artists. If you are a member in good standing and unable to attend the AGM, in accordance with our bylaws you may appoint a proxy to vote on your behalf. If you will be voting by proxy we ask that you contact board@forestcitygallery.com to make arrangements before the date of the meeting.

To review materials ahead of the AGM including Meeting Agenda, 2019-2020 Financial Statements, and all materials that will require a vote, please visit the AGM Event page on the FCG website.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/96410352407
Meeting ID: #redacted 1035 2407

The Employee is a contracted grant-writer and fundraiser hired to support the Forest City Gallery’s single-person staff for a one-year term. Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott has been hired by the artist Joshua Schwebel, who has conceived of The Employee as an artwork contributing to the structural support of the artist-run centre. Schwebel was awarded funding for the project, inclusive of the employee’s wages, from the Canada Council for the Arts. The delegated set of tasks comprising the project are at once the performance of an artwork and productive work benefiting the gallery. The work externalizes grant-writing and the administrative-economic tasks associated with the financial survival of the gallery as a supplementary durational performance enacted on the administrative margins of the exhibition space. 

Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian conceptual artist. His artistic work reconfigures administrative and bureaucratic forms to expose compromises between artistic and economic value systems, and to show how neoliberalism operates through contemporary art. As a trans person who passes as white, cis and male, he uses these intersecting expressions of privilege to infiltrate and deconstruct institutional authority. Schwebel has participated in numerous residencies and exhibited his work both across Canada and internationally. Most recent solo exhibitions include Solvent, at Or Gallery in Vancouver (2019), and The Ground, at Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin (2019), as part of the shortlisted artists for the Berlin Art Prize. The Employee, Schwebel’s current project, is funded by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

In Shade Compositions (2005-present), a series of live performances and videos, the African-American artist Rashaad Newsome explores issues of Black authorship, appropriation, identity and belonging by conducting choirs of women (and sometimes, gay men) of colour who snap their fingers, smack their lips, roll their eyes, and cock their heads, creating expressive linguistic symphonies out of the nonverbal gestures and vocalizations of African-American women. Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) is a three-channel video and sound installation that both responds to and extends this inquiry by focusing on sucking teeth, an everyday oral gesture shared by Black people of African and Caribbean origin and their diasporas, including those of us who live here in Canada.

Referred to variously as kiss teeth, chups, steups, and stchoops, to suck teeth is to produce a sound by sucking in air through the teeth, while pressing the tongue against the upper or lower teeth, with the lips pursed or slightly flattened. West African in origin, this verbal gesture is used to signify a wide range of negative affects, including irritation, disapproval, disgust, disrespect, anger and frustration. Given that representations of African-American Blackness dominate and define mainstream understandings of the Black experience, when it comes to anti-black racism, most white Canadians are allowed to feel comfortable and are supported in their comfort by the historical and ongoing narratives of “not me,” “not us,” “only them, down there.” Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) is thus a response to the frustrations of living within this denial, and an expression of the anger and pain that many Black people often experience living in Canada, where we are always assumed to be better off, if not completely free of racism.
 

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist who works in photography, film, video and installation. Using archival, performative and process-oriented strategies, her work explores the personal and political possibilities afforded by considering experiences of emotions related to longing and loss. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings at Le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; the Royal Ontario Museum; LagosPhoto Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Maryland Institute College of Art; ltd los angeles; and Ryerson Image Centre and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Based in Toronto, Clarke holds an MSW from the University of Toronto, and she received her MFA from Ryerson University in 2015, when she was awarded both the Ryerson University Board of Governors Leadership Award and Medal and the Ryerson Gold Medal for the Faculty of Communication + Design. From 2016-2017, Clarke was artist-in-residence at Gallery 44, and she was the EDA Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough for the 2018 winter semester. Clarke’s writing has been published in Canadian Art, Transition Magazine and Momus, and in 2018, she was a speaker at the eighth TEDxPortofSpain. Most recently, Clarke has been awarded the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts 2019 Finalist Artist Prize, and she was a nominee for the 2019 Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award. She is currently the inaugural 2020-2021 artist-in- residence at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and the Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto (2019-2022).

Video still from Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome)
3-channel, HD video installation with sound
16 x 9 format, 9:47
2018

The Artist would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Toronto Arts Council.