Art Collectives
FRESH AIR
Fresh Air was an all-woman artist collective, established in 2001, whose mandate was international collaboration and site-specific work. The three core members of Fresh Air, Janet Bellotto (Montreal/Toronto), Isabelle Hayeur (Montreal), and Lisa Klapstock (Toronto), shared an interest in site-specificity and the everyday environment. One of their primary goals was to explore, through art making, the various thresholds that exist between private and public space.
Fresh Air endeavoured to initiate dialogue and exchange across geographic, cultural and social boundaries. By circumventing some of the barriers to art-viewing — like the traditional art gallery – Fresh Air desired to engage a wider audience, and to make the experience of art a more active, immediate and integrated one.
RAMBLE
“Ramble” was involved in creating art events taking place within a social and cultural dynamic. Its members worked in a variety of mediums which spanned from traditional art disciplines (painting, sculpture) to performance and new media. The collective articulated around a desire to interact with the public-at-large and create a context in which works of art and their producers merge in a performative space which extends beyond the gallery walls. “Ramble” brings together the juncture of object and subject. They engaged the surroundings they worked in and questioned ideas of the self, desires, place, gender roles, and the margins of popular cultural constructions. It was their aim to integrate their artworks into other communities by a manner which wanders beyond the boundaries of art practice, spilling into evocative sites/situations/communities in which people are in contact with the everyday.
SONNET PROJECTS
Sonnet Projects is a fluid organization that comes together to present contemporary works in various locations and through various means. The work of its artists spans the disciplines of sculpture, installation, drawing, photo/multimedia and performance. However the core of these works is their relationship to gesture and space. The presentation becomes a mode to interact with a diverse public while at the same time continuing critical investigations. These presentations are disseminated through exhibitions, events, publications, performances and exchanges. As an artist collective with a fluid membership, it positions itself within sites, such that the peripheries and centers merge and circulate between the movement of people and reasons for travel.
Sonnet Projects is about inclusion and the natural promotion of art and culture to various communities locally, nationally and internationally. Sonnet Projects is to turn from the action at hand to address the audience directly
YELLLOWHAT COLLECTIVE
The yellowhat collective was formed in 1996 by a group of Toronto-based artists. They worked on a series of exhibitions based thematically on Dante’s trilogies – Inferno (1996), Purgatorio (1997) and Paradiso (1997) and exhibited the members’ work in non-gallery settings.
