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Ted Farrell (1950-2015)

Ted Farrell, longtime NAC member and past board director and Treasurer, passed away last week. Ted was involved in NAC from its early days. While he hadn’t actively pursued a career as an artist for many years, Ted became involved with our organization as a gifted young studio potter. During the 2000s, when he returned to help support the centre as our Treasurer (he’d sign anything), Ted created a pair of masterfully crafted models for the fortieth anniversary incarnation of the Johnny Canuck Miniature Show, what we called The Niagara Ego Exhibition. Both works were painstakingly created from scratch. The first was a desk from an artist’s studio complete with a tiny journal, pencils, and brushes, (and for some reason, a photograph of Bubbles, Ricky, and Julian from the Trailer Park Boys). The second was a delicately carved violin that was all of an inch and half in length with strings and a bow. It was the world’s tiniest violin, Ted’s visualization of the punch-line of a joke; brilliant stuff.

I have a cherished memory of Ted recruited as our driver for a NAC field trip to attend the opening reception of founding member Alice Crawley’s retrospective exhibition at the Durham Art Gallery. Ted, who worked for St. Catharines Transit as a bus driver for many years, wore his uniform and tie as well as his driver’s cap, an item long dropped from obligatory driver’s attire. Arriving in our rented bus with a chauffeur so well decked out was the kind of absurdist wink to the arts and its confused relationship to class that has helped define NAC for over four decades. Ted also helped shape NAC’s character and knit our group together through his quiet support of Thomas Craig Oliver’s (Ted’s identical-twin-cousin) annual Toasted Tomato Wine and Ch’i Party, a tradition that NAC continues.

Our condolences go out to his family and all who were close to him.

Ted’s obituary from the St. Catharines Standard can be found here

Photo from the NAC Archives


JUST LIKE A BUGGY WHIP
Kevin “Attic Daddy” Richardson
Dennis Tourbin Members Gallery at NAC
On display Saturday 5 September – Friday 18 September
Reception Saturday 12 September at 7PM
Live Music by Attic Daddy

***

Where I once walked the beat,
It is not the Main Street,
But I won’t let the beat
Become obsolete
Just Like the Buggy Whip
– Lyrics from Attic Daddy’s latest

New Paintings by Kevin Richardson
the latest thing in obsolescence


 

BORDER BLUR READING SERIES presents
Natalee Caple / Kaie Kellough / Andrew McEwan / Jacqueline Valencia
Thursday 17 September 2015 at 7PM at NAC

Natalee Caple
Natalee Caple is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction and the co-author of several incarnations of a full-length play titled irobot (based on jason Christie’s work of poetry) with theSwallow-a-Bicycle Theatre Collective. Her most recent novel, In Calamity’s Wake was publihed to international acclaim in Canada and the US in 2013. Her collection of poetry, A More Tender Ocean, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Natalee teaches literature and creative writing at Brock University.

Andrew McEwan
Andrew McEwan is from Bright’s Grove, Ontario, and studies at the University of Toronto. His work has appeared in Dandelion, Misunderstandings Magazine, Fact-Simile, Monkey Puzzle, and Gulch, an anthology published by Tightrope Books. His first chapbook is due in February 2010 from Cactus Press.

Kaie Kellough
kaie kellough is a word-sound systemizer. his systems originate in the inchoate swirl of vowels, consonants, misspellings, shapes, stammerings, and emerge as audio recordings, books, visual entities, volumes of letters, and performances that verse and reverse utterance.
kaie’s work fuses formal experiment and social engagement. kaie is the author of 2 books of poetry and 2 sound recordings. he has performed and published internationally. kaie lives in montréal, where he works on new and old ideas. http://www.kaie.ca/

Jacqueline Valencia
Toronto-based poet, writer, and film/music/literary critic Jacqueline Valencia earned her Honours BA in English at the University of Toronto. Jacqueline is currently a freelancer, senior literary editor at The Rusty Toque, critic at Broken Pencil Magazine, founding editor of These Girls On Film, and a film journalist and senior staff film critic at Next Projection. http://jacquelinevalencia.com/