ASHITA: Artists for Japan

If you are in the Toronto area, please come and support this Tuesday at the Great Hall. I am donating a work, the only small thing I can do to help a horrible situation. Here is the press release, bless:

Tuesday March 29, 2011 7:00pm - Wednesday at 2:00am
The Great Hall
1087 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON
Cover: minimum donation $10 (students $5 with ID)

All funds raised through admission fee and sale of donated artworks
will go to Red Cross through The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre's
Disaster Relief Fund
Tax receipts available for over $50 donations and art purchases

Our heart and minds are with the Japanese people and now its time for action!
The Toronto arts community felt the shock much like everyone else when images first started to appear on the news and stories through friends started to come in

Many of the artists have traveled to Japan as visiting artists or to study its rich culture and its embrace with nature and nurture. We have made many friends and built bridges through collaborations and deep friendship

Curator Rafi Ghanaghounian and Artist Daisuke Takeya are organizing a fundraiser event that will bring the arts community of Toronto together to support our friends in Japan both mentally and financially. All artists and performers will give their time and efforts for this very cause

This night will include musicians, artists, poets from both Canada and Japan. As well galleries have donated books and other items available for purchase

Thank you for your support!

Participating groups, sponsors and partners:
The Great Hall, GUU restaurant, K6cards, Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, Japanese Visitors Association (JAVA), Nihongo Art Contest 2011, Toronto Artists Fund Raising, Orange LLP, Healing Japan, Hardboiledinc for doing our shirts!!

Special Thanks to: Kateryna Topol, Christine Seki

Participating galleries (more coming!):
OBorn Contemporary, Le Gallery, Show and Tell Gallery, Art Metropole, Koyama Press, Narwhal/Magic Pony, OUCHI Gallery NYC, Orbital arts

Participating artists (more coming!):
Howard Podeswa, Laura Horne, Fiona Smyth, Yuriko Kubota, Tomori Nagamoto, Winnie Truong, Nicholas Di Genova, Shigeko Okada, Keiko Tokushima, Ayako Bando, Sonomi, Kobayashi, Bernice Lum, Ron Loranger, Pierre Julien, Richelle Forsey, Jae-hong Ahn, Juno Youn, Miki Shinozaki, Keita Morimoto, Shinobu Akimoto, Yumi Onose, Shinya Kumazawa, Martin de la Rue, Joshua Choi, James Fowler, Martin Ouellette, Patrick DeCoste, Daisuke Takeya, Matt Evans, Martin Reis, Aisha Simpson, Harvey Chan, Peter Chan, Shary Boyle, Akira Yoshikawa, Rie Aikawa, Bud Fujikawa, Laura Adams,Tanya Reed, Dasar, REN, Amy Wong, Risa Kusumoto, Chrisopher Hayes, Takashi Iwasaki, Seth Scriver

Participating performers:

Your MC's for the evening:
Rafi Ghanaghounian and Nana Akimoto

music:
Clara Venice and Ken Ogawa
Nobu Adilman: Choir!Choir!Choir!
Rambunctious featuring Michael Louis Johnson
Ashely Ingram
Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy)

performance:
Visual Assault
Yakudo: traditional Japanese drumming
AKA Dance (Keiko Ninomiya, Amy Hampton, Mike Dell)
Natasha Bailey, Nayeon Kim, Adam Herst, Yumi Onose
VPV (Daisuke Takeya, Ayumi Sawada, Tatsu)

tea ceremony:
Tomori Nagamoto and Mika Sato

poetry by:
Ewan Whyte, Bonnie Bowman

DJ
Luis Jacob
Derek Mainella

It’s been long overdue! Sophisticated Boom Boom

One of my bestest friends, the wonderful Jen storey, is my heroine and my wife. She graciously put up with me since our class together, painting 101 at Concordia University 11 years ago. God…

Her and I, back in the old days of Montreal loft parties used to go where she calls ‘The other side’, meaning that we would get so drunk that all inhibition was lost, then we would take over dance floors by holding hands and spinning around until we flew apart, with everyone around us hating our guts. Human Bowling! The Big Lebowski, or rather, the Dude, would have been proud.

This is also so Jen: I always distinctly remember once how she was solicited in the red light district when she came to visit me in Amsterdam. She caught up with us after some polite chitchat and she asked me innocently what the word ‘sexytime’ meant in Dutch? I look over and crack up at this scrawny old dude hustling her with the pitch, ‘Cocaine? Ecstasy? Sexytime?’

She is one of my biggest inspirations and she never gives herself enough credit. Her first oil painting was a naïve still life with a large knife sitting in a cup of water, pinks and peachy colours with rainy days wallpaper, all something around slightly sinister. Also, in her bathroom of her old apartment I remember she used to have next to the toilet a rectangular painting of a pack of birth control pills in acrylics. Aqua’s, peachys, our favourite colours are the mint blues greens, pastels from the 50s. Sooo feminist Pop Montreal baby!

She has also been a strong and true supporter of my work, like good friends are. This gal is like a sister to me, so it’s hard to find things to say without sounding like a boner. What I am trying to say is in general, she is the sweetest good-hearted person I know, a lovely artist, and the only person I know in the whole world who doesn’t act out of self-benefit. Ever. There was one time I visited her at her job at the Westmount diner, she was being so genuinely nice to all these grumpy assholes that it gave me a flash of Bjork in Dancer in the Dark (not Bjork the woman, I love her too but she’s clearly a hard bitch in real life).

Jen both talk about having to soup up ourselves on the internets, I hope she puts up those paintings I was talking about. We also talk about chips n hash, nirvana, nine inch nails, twin peaks, hockey. We have also been talking about a reunion period where I go back to Montreal and sublet a studio with her for a time. I know it’s gonna happen someday. Anyway here’s her site, buy her prints!

http://jen.theypf.com/'http://jen.theypf.com/index.php?\'/about-this-site/\\'