Artist in Residence:
Evening with Family & Friends
November was an exciting month in our little town of Bruno. The Town’s program manager for Recreation, Culture and Sport invited local artists (myself included) to take part in “An Evening with Family and Friends” visual art, music and poetry night at the community hall on November 20th. I displayed two large scale (94″x36″) digital colour prints that depict architecturally augmented stationary freight trains inhabited by a small group of horticulturists. The prints were pinned to a long wall next to table displays featuring an assortment of drawings and wood carvings by Marcel Prefontaine and pottery by Bergit Pulvermacher (I’ll add photos of the work to our flickr page soon). The $5 admission also provided family and friends with all you can eat brownies, black forest cake, muffins & cookies. Oh, and then there was the fresh stawberries and chocolate fountain! If this wasn’t enough culture and creativity for one evening, senior citizen, award winning resident cowboy poet Bernadette Gruel read from her book of poetry and was followed by the Krentz brothers guitar driven, old time country sung in sweet two part harmony. The night ended with a clean up crew pizza party and tour of Bruno’s secret bowling alley newly equipped with a multi-coloured spinning party light. Bowl’n to the indies night anyone? At the pizza party I was introduced to Ms. Janet Manderscheid a crafter/installation artist extraordinaire.
I paid a visit to Janet’s house a few days later and was given a tour of her back yard/art work in progress. Janet makes and repairs dolls among other things and has mastered the art of transforming recycled metal and wood scraps into ornamental garden sculpture. She made the roof of her gazebo out of a salvaged satellite dish no less!
On November 28th experimental electronic artists greenmist and f.ampism brought a mix of live tape delays, drones, squelches, glitches and voice effects to All Citizens. Bruno’s resident synthesizer enthusiast was one of the two audience members in attendance and treated the band to a post-show demonstration of his newly acquired Roland JX super analogue synth that just happened to be stored in my basement. Saskatoon’s Mr. Kincaid was also on the bill but caught the flu and sadly was unable to attend; here ‘s his website. November 15th was a special day for All Citizens as it was the day we hosted our first ever quadrupel bill. Our sandwich board could barely contain the nouns & adjectives needed to describe Vancouver based singer song writer Hilary Grist, the mighty talented art- folk, indie pop, rock, hip hop master minds Language Arts and Toronto’s massive electronic synth-pop, hip-hop, soul bent fuzzy logic redording artists Peter Project & Gravity Wave. Maria from fuzzy logic sent us a Peter Project MP3 soap bar that not only freshens and cleans but eventually reveals a download code! L. Arts drove about 13 hours from Golden BC to Bruno SK that day so I was a bit worried that they may resort to violence after hearing that everyone in Bruno would be eating turkey and sausages at the community hall annual church bazaar. To their credit all four acts set up and performed as if we had a full house! Check out the youtube video link, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
On November 10th self taught accordionist and multi-talented Bruno senior citizen Gilbert Ludwig opened for Toronto’s $100. He played a few “oom-pah” style polka’s and waltzes on a MIDI accordion that he used to layer accordion and synthesizer sounds. Simply, magic. Gilbert’s wife, Mayor Audrey gave the band some Bruno Cherry Festival pins and helped us present $100 with a LASER etched glass All Citizens Cross Canada Tour Award. Six members strong, $100 quickly filled up their 100 SQ FT portion of our 200 SQ FT venue. We had about twenty audience members crammed together in a space big enough for eighteen. Nobody complained, we were all happy to have the opportunity to hear one of Canada’s best country music outfits.
I’ll wrap up this extra lengthy post by inviting you to check out the music of Jean-Paul De Roover. Three children were in the audience for De Roover’s performance here on November 8th. Jean-Paul spent time after the show giving the kids a crash course in theremin operation and the art and craft of creating looping effects.
Minus 16 and snowing.
Warmest Regards, Tyler
December 4, 2009