BLACK AND INCONGRUOUS HEADLINES
by Anna Szaflarski
Performance on the Thomas Craig Oliver Terrace at NAC
Saturday 26 September 8:30PM
Installation at NAC, The Flea Market Gallery, and the Golden Pheasant
On display until Saturday 6 December
The Niagara Artists Centre presents a reading and three newsbox installations by Niagara-born, and Berlin-based, artist and author Anna M. Szaflarski.
NAC will present a reading by Anna from her bi-weekly journal Letters to the Editors on Saturday 26 September. In addition to writing essays, short stories, and conceptual pieces, Szaflarski invites artists or writers from around the world to contribute to each issue of this journal. Eventually, all the issues of Letters to the Editors will be compiled and published in book format.
The reading will take place on the evening of Saturday 26 September on the Thomas Craig Oliver Terrace at the Niagara Artists Centre at 8:30PM. The reading will be in advance of a musical performance by N-E-O Trio accompanied with projected visuals.
As part of Anna’s return to St. Catharines, three newsbox installations will be on display from Sunday 4 October until Sunday 6 December 2015:
(1) at the Niagara Artists Centre at 354 St. Paul Street
(2) at the NAC Flea Market Gallery at 46 Turner Crescent
(3) at the Golden Pheasant at 244 Ontario Street
At each newsbox location poster editions of A Man’s Job by Anna will be available for
pick-up. The poster is comprised of a chronological collection of newspaper headlines tracking the relationship between the employees and the auto industry in Niagara that spans over sixty years (1940-2011). As Anna explains,
“I was researching in the library archives for another project, but quickly noticed the frequency of headlines pertaining to GM; unions, lay-offs, which rotated from hopeful to pessimistic with regularity like the wheels of a mill…Together the fluid back and forth begins to lose all meaning; an eventual entropic disintegration.”
The title of the poster edition is a reference taken from a newsletter by Columbus McKinnon, an industrial firm eventually taken over by General Motors. A passage of rhetoric from the same McKinnon newsletter of the 1930s is included on the poster and reflects expectations of the relationship between a man and his employer. An image from the 1980s accompanies the text and depicts laid-off workers during the first major economic recession to impact GM.
This poster edition, A Man’s Job, investigates the expectations from both sides in the disintegrating love-affair between industry and its workers.
Born and raised in St. Catharines, Ontario, Anna Szaflarski is currently based in Berlin, Germany where she works predominantly as an art writer and artist-book publisher.
