Close Your Eyes, Look at the Art, Dig?
Friday 26 April beginning at 7PM
At the Niagara Artists Centre
354 St. Paul Street
St. Catharines
St. Catharines-on-the-Parking-Lot – Fifty-five years ago, an Albertan had an epiphany on a bus bound for Marseilles. On Friday 26 April, artists, writers, and the open-minded will gather at the Niagara Artists Centre to share in the wonder of Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, one of the most unusual works of art ever created.
The Dreamachine is the only art work that you look at with your eyes closed. A spinning cylinder of light, it creates strobe-like flashes that induce a variety of sensory responses in the minds of those who experience it including intense floods of bright colour.
Praised by thinkers and artists as varied as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Cobain, and Kenneth Anger, the Dreamachine has recently been put into mass production for home use by Niagara Falls artist and entrepreneur John Smoke.
A happening will take place at NAC on Friday 26 April. An exhibit of working Dreamachines to be experienced along with explanations of its science and history will be presented and accompanied with poetry readings and performances. The event is free and all are welcome. For more information, contact NAC.
PLUS:
Mark Goldstein
Christine McNairAroarA There is the “industrial-goth-hobo” husband-wife power duo of Broken Social Scene guitarist and Apostle Of Hustle frontman Andrew Whiteman and Ariel Engle, formed in 2011. The two have released an EP interpreting experimental poet Alice Notley’s “In The Pines” with their own experimental somber-folk with programmed dance beats. Whiteman plays a fretless North African goatskin banjo and Engle plays a four-string cigar box guitar.
Christine McNair‘s work has appeared in sundry literary journals including CV2, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, Arc, Descant, and Poetry is Dead. She won second prize in the Atlantic Canadian Writing Competition, an honourable mention in the Eden Mills Literary Competition, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is one of the hosts of CKCU’s Literary Landscapes program and works as a book conservator in Ottawa. Conflict is her first book.
In 2010, Mark Goldstein inaugurated the Toronto New School of Writing with his 12-week seminar on Transtranslation. That same year, while lecturing at EHESS Paris, he launched Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath, a transtranslation of poet Paul Celan’s seminal work,Atemwende. BookThug published his first collection of poetry in 2008, After Rilke, a set of letters in homage to late American poet Jack Spicer and a series of homophonic translations based on Rilke’sThe Voices. From 1989 to 2000, he played drums in the indie rock band By Divine Right, whose members included Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning and Leslie Feist.
