All Citizens
Former Vancouver residents, artist/musicians and collaborative team, Tyler Brett & Serena McCarroll founded All Citizens in April 2007. All Citizens currently exists as a consignment shop, music venue, exhibition and community market space in the town of Bruno Saskatchewan (population 600). The name “All Citizens” is a play on the name of the building next door, Senior Citizens, and is a proclamation signifying the shop’s function as an all-inclusive art work in progress. All Citizens is a space for artistmade zines, books, music, videos, films, prints, buttons and more sent in from all across Canada, and is a home base for tatting, embroidery, cowboy poetry, pottery and wood carvings made locally in Bruno. All Citizens embraces the unexpected, uncanny and surprising possibilities inherent in juxtaposing the contemporary with the traditional and the periphery with the centre.
All Citizens is one of Canada’s smallest music venues with room for about 18 audience members. To date they have hosted concerts by Bob Wiseman, Geoff Berner, Miles Howe and Maxim, The Phonemes, Laura Barrett, Calvin McElroy, Doug Hoyer, Charlotte Cornfield, The Keys, Sara Ciantar, Miss Emily Brown, James Lamb & Richard St. Ongl, Julie Doiron, The Darcys, Pat Lepoidevin, Sean Ashby, Scott Cook, The Gruff, Racoon Suit, Flora, Great Bloomers, Paschel and Dahl, The Dana Wylie Band, John Wort Hannam, Feral Children, Gobble Gobble, Octoberman and The Abramson Singers. Each and every group or soloist performing at All Citizens has been awarded a much-deserved cross Canada tour award. All Citizens has worked in collaboration with artist Biliana Velkova and the Mayor of Bruno to award Bob Wiseman and Geoff Berner with the key to the town and to have June 7th declared Julie Doiron Day.
In March 2009, 21 photographs representing a cross section of items on the shelves at All Citizens were shown at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba as part of the exhibit “In Essence” curated by Amber Andersen. In the exhibition catalogue, Andersen describes how the work in the show was derived from site-specific practices based in Saskatchewan and how, when removed from their context, the “works could easily represent ‘small town, anywhere’ in what is traditionally considered the Canadian prairie.”
Serena McCarroll received a BFA degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art in 2002 and is currently an MFA candidate at Ryerson University. She has shown her work in galleries across Canada and beyond, including Paved Arts (Saskatoon), The Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary), Antisocial Gallery (Vancouver), Trianon Gallery (Lethbridge), Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax) and TCB Gallery (Melbourne, Australia).
Tyler Brett received a BFA degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001 and an MFA degree from the University of Saskatchewan in 2009. He has produced art and music independently and in collaboration with Tony Romano as T&T at galleries such as the Oakville Galleries, the Or Gallery, Museum London, Ottawa Art Gallery and Clint Roensich Gallery (Canada), NEON Gallery, Stockholm’s Kulturhuset (Sweden) and VTO Gallery (England).
Throughout the winter, Brett and McCarroll will blog about this community, creativity and culture as Broken Pencil’s indie artists in residence.