We’re currently in the process of archiving podcasts of programs from Power 2012 (part of Red76: THIS IS AN (A) FRONT), an internet radio station that was online in the months of October, November, and December 2012.

After sifting through countless 24-hour long “air check” mp3s that were flooded with random iTunes music, I am nearly done with trimming out all of the interviews, conversations, readings, and lectures that were scattered throughout — all of them engaging in different ways with our relationship to power. Follow the link below to listen online:

→ Power2012: Archived Programs

Image: On Economy: A Sunday Service May 5, 2013 with “Where Art Belongs” and “Small as Beautiful” 

GRAY School (1) will be hosting its second On Economy: A Sunday Service this coming Sunday – May 12, 2013 – at 11AM with artists and collaborators Zoë Kreye and Catherine Grau.

The event will provide an opportunity to engage with texts relating to issues bound within art and economies. We invite anyone to bring text-based works-in-process to UNIT/PITT Projects to facilitate a writing and editing workshop.

On Economy: A Sunday Service will then move on to a discussion surrounding topics concerning unlearning and illiteracy with our guests Zoë Kreye and Catherine Grau as they work towards their project — Unlearning Weekenders – taking place in June of this year.

Tea, coffee and readings will be provided.

Zoë Kreye‘s artwork looks to engage the public in relations beyond aesthetics, with the goal of building inclusive, bottom-up associations that have the potential to be catalysts for change within dominant social systems. Often looking outside the realm of art, her projects take the form of clubs, rituals, workshops, adventures, discussions and social sculpture. In 2009, she completed a MFA in Public Art & New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and in 2010 she cofounded the Berlin artist collective Process Institute. She produces collaborative community arts projects, independently, collectively, and within institutional structures in Berlin, Montreal, Vancouver, New York and Istanbul. Currently she teaches Studio Arts and Social Practice at Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

Catherine Grau works in the field of collaborative public art practice. She has organized and participated in a wide range of projects, including Überlebenskunst at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Soziokulturfond-funded KoCA Inn and currently the Flint Public Art Project. Her work develops within interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations that playfully and critically explore the potentials of social interaction and manifestations of reclaiming the commons. In 2010 Grau cofounded the artist collective Process Institute. She holds an MFA in Public Art & New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany and is currently based in New York and Berlin.

Updated May 1, 2013: We hope you’ll be able to make it tonight for the launch, but if you can’t, the book is now available for purchase online.

On Wednesday May 1, 2013 (International Workers’ Day) at 8pm UNIT/PITT Projects is pleased to host the publication launch for Rereading The Riot Act, And On – Vancouver 2011 by author/curator Anakana Schofield and artist Jeremy Isao Speier. (Update 24 April 2013, 7pm: congratulations to Anakana for winning the Amazon.ca First Novel Award!)

Rereading The Riot Act is an ongoing interrogation of the historical events of April 23, 1935 — when Mayor Gerry McGeer read the Riot Act to the relief camp protesters, their families and supporters gathered at Victory Square.

Rereading The Riot Act, And On — Vancouver 2011 is an artists’ book from Schofield and Isao Speier, based on source materials compiled for Schofield’s 2011 curatorial project, Rereading The Riot Act. Part scrapbook, part research diary, this new book uses the 1935 reading of the Riot Act to unemployed workers and their families as a frame to examine Vancouver’s history of public protest.

Prior to this publication two events were held in 2011 under the name Rereading The Riot Act, including: Rereading The Riot Act I: A Public Action which occurred as a protest march in and around 16 E. Hastings on April 23 in the hopes to re-inscribe Vancouver’s history of labour struggle and mass protest. The second event, Rereading The Riot Act II: Performance Cabaret, was presented at the late Waldorf Hotel on June 15, 2011 and coincidentally occurred during the same evening as the Stanley Cup Riots. The performance cabaret presented four performance and visual artists that featured expanded responses to both the events of April 23, 1935 and the reenactment event that took place in Vancouver on April 23rd 2011.

Rereading The Riot Act, And On includes images documenting some of the works and performances presented in 2011: a collage of history, drawing on pamphlets, news clippings, photographs, first-person accounts, and official correspondence to produce an unconstrained, non-linear act of re-reading.

UNIT/PITT is pleased to bring this new book to the public. Printed and bound by Publication Studio Vancouver, it will be produced on-demand in short runs. The first copies will be available at the launch event on May 1st, 2013; they will be available afterward through UNIT/PITT, online at www.unitpitt.ca, and in selected outlets where artists’ books are sold.

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. She contributes to the London Review of Books blog, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe & Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Her first novel, Malarky, was published in 2012 and has been acclaimed by critics as well as being shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award and winning the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. The winner for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award will be announced later today in Toronto, Ontario.

Jeremy Isao Speier is a Japanese-Canadian Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Emily Carr College of Art & Design in 1992. He works in film/video, kinetic sculpture and sound, and installation. He has exhibited extensively across Canada in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and recently in 2011 at Blim Arts Society and Powell Street Festival, in 2012 at the Firehall Arts Centre, and forthcoming in 2013 at Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre with an exhibition catalogue, Double Zero: The Point Between Future Past (2013). www.jeremyisaospeier.com

UNIT/PITT’s latest series of commissioned works, collectively titled What Future, is now in full swing, and will be up at 15 E Pender until early May. Three artists, and one artist collective, produced new works on the broad subject of the future:

• The first commission, which launched in late January, was Before I’m Done by the PJS Collective. Although the installation that went with this piece is now down (and the lovely #idlenomore stencil that may or may  not have been part of the piece is also gone), the video component is still screening in our front window, nightly from 8 to 10 pm. The future in this work is a product of the interactions between three men whose relationships are building a legacy of art and community.
• We shifted gears slightly with Susanna Browne’s work A Perfect Day. The work itself consists of a song being broadcast into space, using a satellite transmission facility. Susanna Browne’s rendition of this early-20th-century parlour song has now reached past the limits of our solar system, and will continue until it becomes an impossibly faint signal at some time in the distant future. However, we are also transmitting the song locally on UNIT/PITT Radio until early May, and the accompanying publication, which contains the recording, can be purchased at any time.
• Kelly Roulette’s Traditional Road Warriors consists of two paintings, portraying the persistence and strength of First Nations people. The vibrant colours of the figures — a male elder in one, and a mother and child in the other — are both a question and an answer. What is the future, a dead end, or a realization of the power of the knowledge and cultural wealth that is being passed on the future generations, even in sometimes desperate circumstances?
• Kevin Murphy has created a model of his proposal for an Atlantean Timepiece designed to tell people in the far future how much time has elapsed since Vancouver was inundated with rising ocean waters. Partly a warning of disaster to come, and filled with astute references to Vancouver developers’ predisposition toward glass towers on artificial waterfronts, the documents and mechanisms behind the plan are also shown in an artist’s book.

“The Future” is a fluid thing; it changes from moment to moment, and can appear completely different depending upon where you stand. In this series, artists took a role in our collective future by envisioning it.

GRAY School (1) proposes itself as a centre for education around creative and intellectual exchange, the contextualization of a publication as well as a referent to the formative years of pedagogy: grade school.

GRAY School (1) will be a space for an exhibition, lectures and workshops while also acting as the catalyst for GRAY Publications’ third issue. Since GRAY is a publication that documents fashion, garment and agency we will be working with artists, writers and lecturers who do not necessarily deal with fashion through form, but engage with the field through its many tensions. GRAY School (1) will include contributions from Tobin Gibson, Holly Goldsmith-Jones, KT Kilgour, Zoe Kreye, Willem Jan Smit, and Brent Wadden.

GRAY School (1) will also inaugurate a new addition to UNIT/PITT Projects’s public program – On Economy: A Sunday Service. Each Sunday, at 11:00am, this three-hour event will provide an opportunity for anyone to engage with the texts of others. Starting with a workshop of editing texts brought into the space On Economy: A Sunday Service will move on to a discussion surrounding a piece of literature selected from GRAY’s curriculum.

Each service will be held with a discussion wherein exchange or economy is implicit. GRAY will be sourcing texts around the topics of: “social spheres”, “attitudes”, “objects”, “monetary values”, “written language”, “the potluck”, “the gift” and “the sacred object” throughout its weeks of operation. On Economy: A Sunday Service will bring together guest speakers to engage with texts such as:

Education. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011

Aranda, Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle. What Is Contemporary Art? Berlin: Sternberg, 2010

Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life. London: Penguin, 2010

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells. 2012

Castellane, Victoire De and Louise Neri. Victoire De Castellane: Fleurs D’excès. Paris: Gagosian Gallery, 2011

Eisenstein, Charles. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Flood, Richard et. al. Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century

Gide, André, and Dorothy Bussy. The Immoralist. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1948

Groys, Boris. Going Public. Ed. Julieta Aranda et al. Sternberg Press. 2010

Heilbrun, Charles and Charles M. Gray. The Economics of Art and Culture. 2nd Ed

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

Kraus, Chris. Where Art Belongs. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011

Leopardi, Giacomo, and Giovanni Cecchetti. Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues. Berkeley: University of California, 1982

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Random House: New York. 1993

Orwell, George. Books v. Cigarettes. London: Penguin, 2008

Plato. The Republic. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1955

Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991

Schumacher, E.F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Scott, Walter. Wendy. Montreal, self-published, 2011

Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. In Praise of Shadows. London: Vintage, 2001

Wessels, Walter J Economics. Barron’s Business Review Books. 5th Ed

Westwood, Vivienne. 100 Days of Active Resistance Bologna: Damiani Editore, 2011

Whistler, James Abbott McNeil. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

Yayoi Kusama Paris: Louis Vuitton, 2012

May 17 to July 6, 2013

Update: open regular hours, noon – 5pm, on Good Friday and on Saturday March 30.

This is the last week to catch the Luminous Books|Owl Cave temporary bookshop at UNIT/PITT Projects!

Come by this week to check out new additions to the library from Paravion Press. Additions include: The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, On the Decay of the Art of Lying by Mark Twain and The Beauties by Anton Chekhov.

Paravion Press began out of a bookshop on the cliffs of an island in the south of Greece, Atlantis Books. Each limited edition short work is the size of a postcard and packaged with a envelope ready for the book to be mailed and shared after reading.

UNIT/PITT Projects is located at 15 East Pender and is open from 12 – 5pm, Wednesday to Saturday.