LIDS in the Calgary Biennial: Atlas Sighed

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As part of the 2015 Calgary Biennial, LIDS has slacked off once again by creating a custom risographed letterhead for official correspondence with festival organisers. Watch for other lazy contributions to the event, coming soon. Like in March, maybe.

From the Calgary Biennial website:

Atlas Sighed: The 2014–15 Calgary Biennial is a guerrilla exhibition of contemporary art. Comprising numerous infiltrations into public space, this endeavour appropriates commercial vernaculars of the urban landscape in order to challenge conservative status quos.

Working monumentally and secretly, the following artists will be taking over billboards, bus shelters, telephone poles, newspapers, alleyways, administrative offices, cellphones, and the sky itself to realize this project: Dick Averns, Brittney Bear Hat, Steven Beckly, Victoria Braun, Bogdan Cheta, Alannah Clamp, CONSULTANCY GROUP, the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society, Natalie Lauchlan, Yvonne Mullock and Mia Rushton, Sans façon, Dan Zimmerman, and others.

The Biennial will be dispersed throughout Calgary and its suburbs from December 1, 2014 through to March 31, 2015 with support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Pattison Outdoor, and anonymous sponsors. A number of conversations and public events will be held as part of this exhibition. Additional details will be released throughout the next few months.

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LIDS Featured in Public

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Public Issue 50: The Retreat, edited by Sarah Blacker, Imre Szeman, and Heather Zwicker has just come out and includes the text “Retreating in/from Art Institutions” by curator Heather Anderson, which discusses several LIDS projects. More info here: http://www.publicjournal.ca/50-the-retreat/ From the intro:

 

The question of why the practice of retreat is important, of why it is different from forms of self-alienation, and of why (what might seem like) passivity could be a positive form of agency, remains open. However, the notion and the act of retreat, withdrawal or exodus could be a necessary ground for politics and the politics of aesthetics today, since the productive process of cooperative constitution at the core of the social also owes its potential and validity to the act of spontaneous refusal. Politics and art are projects of infinite creative production triggered by a force that always starts from choice—choosing to do or not to do—and propelled forward by local affections and joyful passions. In retreat, consciousness produces itself by stating the full presence of the present-being without witness and without stage, sensing a homo- or homeo- (‘similar’ or ‘common’ or ‘shared’ in Greek, belonging to humus or the ‘earth’, rather than to homo-, ‘human’, as in Latin) enriched by the love of a collective intelligence yet to be regained. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes states, “there is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.” This issue of PUBLIC generates new ways of retreating ahead of the limits, aporias, problems, and crises of a century caught between imaginative and conceptual fertility and sterility—not to effect some questionable escape, but to allow for the generation of new spaces of openness, freedom, and possibility.

LIDS poster in FUSE Magazine

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LIDS’ DO MORE WITH MORE/DO LESS WITH LESS poster is featured on the cover and as a pull-out poster in Issue 37-1 of Fuse Magazine. The Ladies’ Invitational Deadbeat Society’s limited edition DO LESS WITH LESS / DO MORE WITH MORE cross-stitch-pattern poster was printed at the Alberta Printmakers’ Society in June 2012. The slogan on the posters was inspired by a discussion that took place as part of Artivistic’s Promiscuous Infrastructures project at Centre des arts actuels Skol in Montreal, about how artists and non-profit arts organizations negotiate the constant pressure to do more with less. With this poster reissue for FUSE, LIDS proposes that we resist the capitalist logic of constant acceleration, productivity and austerity budgets by reasserting a realistic level of production within our means. Use LIDS’s handy pullout pattern to stitch a banner for your own office and hang in the orientation of your choice!

Photo credit: Olya Zarapina

New publication: Incredisensual Panty Raid Laff Along

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BOOK LAUNCH NEWS, MAY 2013
LIDS and friends will be converging in Toronto at the end of May for a performance by Wednesday AND an official BBQ book launch with our feminist pals! Join us on Sunday May 26th at 3pm at the Feminist Art Gallery for the launch of our new publication.

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BOOK ALERT! MARCH 2013

Our new publication documenting the Incredisensual Panty Raid Laff Along is now available through local LIDS distributors near you! This handy volume gathers together materials produced during the residency: photographs, texts, recollections, and ephemera. Designed by Olya Zarapina, this publication also features 3 new texts by feminist scholars Jennifer Kennedy, Mireille Perron, and Amy Fung.

Sixty of the books are covered in limited edition dust jackets/posters that we printed at the Alberta Printmakers’ Society in June 2012. The slogan on the posters: “Do More With More, Do Less With Less,” was inspired by a discussion about how non-profit arts organizations negotiate the increasing pressure to participate in business-based models and the “cultural industry.” A PDF excerpt of the publication, with an edited transcript of one of our Sunday Tea n’ Chats discussions, The Value Of Our (Collective) Work is available as a free sneak preview. For details about how to purchase, please contact your local LIDS rep (Calgary/London/Toronto/Montreal), or send us a message at invitationalsociety(at)gmail(dot)com.

A copy of the publication has also made its way into Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden’s Book Swap… project, currently on display as part of the exhibition Brother, Can You Spare a Stack at the Center for Book Arts in New York.