Our first exhibition at 236 East Pender, IOU, is part of a city-wide celebration of art that happens next weekend (June 6-9). Art Waste started as an offshoot of the Music Waste festival, which itself started in response to a music-industry event calling itself “Music West”. As an artist-run centre dedicated to experimentation, emerging artists, and cultural alternatives, UNIT/PITT is proud to participate in Art Waste 2013.

Make time to visit some of the other shows that are part of Art Waste, including the group show opening at Gallery Gachet on Thursday, June 6. And come by to see IOU at 236 E Pender until early July.

On May 26, 2013 at 11:00am On Economy: A Sunday Service (part of GRAY School) will provide an opportunity to engage with texts relating to issues within art and economies. We invite the public to bring written work-in-process to UNIT/PITT in order to facilitate one final writing and editing workshop.

The service will later move on to a pinch pot workshop with fresh clay alongside a reading from George Orwell’s Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. 

This will be the final On Economy: A Sunday Service at UNIT/PITT Projects’s former space at 15 E Pender Street. (We know, we said the closing party was the last event at 15 before everything moved to 236. We lied. Just this one last thing.)

Tea, coffee, clay and copies of the text will be provided.

A couple of weeks ago, when we changed the sign at 15 E Pender, like we have done for every event since April 2011, it really set in that were moving out of that small, quirky space now. The last event at 15 E Pender was a closing party for GRAY School (1) on Wednesday, May 15 at 8pm.

Now we’re at 236 East Pender, a building where we have a 15-year lease that will allow the Pitt a bit more stability, as well as a better facility. The current exhibition, I.O.U., opened here on Friday, May 17. The space is still a bit raw. Renovations are still under way, and there’s a bit of a provisional feel about things. That’s pretty appropriate for the first exhibition; the work itself was submerged in ocean waters before being reclaimed and hung here at 236, and this process, as well as the change and decay wrought by salt water and sea creatures itself exposes the sometimes-provisional nature of art creation and presentation.

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