Block Party
SPACE Gallery’s Block Party returns to the Portland Arts District, for another year of outdoor, interactive art installations, performances and fun!
SPACE Gallery, with a collaborating crew of Portland arts organizations and our numerous neighbors on Congress Street, will expand our Block party to an entire portion of the Arts District along Congress Street. This area will be transformed into a temporary zone for artistic exploration and enjoyment. SPACE Block Party 2011 will feature site-specific installations and performances by Maine artists Greta Bank, Kimberly Convery, Sean O’Brian, and Lorem Ipsum Theater Productions, ranging from a mobile theater to a scale-model Godzilla film set!
Providence, RI’s What Cheer? Brigade, a 19-piece street marching band, will ratchet up the party vibe with their irresistible New Orleans meets Samba meets Balkan Brass sound! Attendees will be able to witness the debut of Pickwick Independent Press‘ project “Analog Tweets”, observe Shoot Media Project‘s “Newscast” in production, and get in on the fun with The Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine‘s “Make Your Own Musical Instruments and Costume” station for kids. With additional performances and projects from the ICA at MECA, Portland Ovations, Portland Stage, The Telling Room, Mensk, Sylvia Kania Gallery/Dooryard Collective and more, Block Party 2011 is bound to delight and surprise!
PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS AND ARTISTS:
The What Cheer? Brigade, a 19-piece brass band from Providence, RI, mixes the sounds of Bollywood, The Balkans, New Orleans, Samba and Hip-Hop, with the intensity of a punk rock band. Since their early days circa 2005, the group has played hundreds of shows, community festivals and celebrations across the US and Europe. The group will perform a short outdoor set to give BLOCK Party goers a taste of what’s in store for their full show/after-party later that evening inside SPACE Gallery.
Kimberly Convery
Artist Kimberly Convery will fabricate an installation of 4 double-sided panels with large drawings depicting the cityscape behind them, so that they’ll be viewed next to the scene depicted. Kimberly intends for the panels to represent how the Portland cityscape changes over time, blended with “idealized” visions of what the sites could look like.
“Godzilla Attacks” is a model set of Congress Street with an accompanying performance from puppets and costumed actors. The buildings will be modeled into a 1/10th scale, setting the stage for 2 fantastic monster creatures and some smaller props performing an invasion narrative. A 3 hour performance with costumes and props during Block party will be staged as a stop animation film set. This means that viewers will watch the slow progression of the narrative through a sequence of small movements, later orchestrated into a short animated film. Besides highlighting the monster infiltration, this film will portray a unique perspective of the crowds of the Block Party event, as well as an artistic interpretation of the Arts District. Greta will be working with Scott Peterman, Kate Cox, and a team of other artists.
Lorem Ipsum Productions
Drawing inspiration from the traveling performers of theatrical antiquity and mashing that up with the flair of a 1920’s fire-and-brimstone church revival, the group will create a compact performance played out on a pageant wagon built of found/recycled materials to be rolled around the Block Party. This will be an original piece based loosely around the structure of the morality play, incorporating other traditional performances.
Sean will install multiple small structural tents that viewers will enter to find various artworks and environments that use natural phenomenons to produce light, sound and motion. These structures will combine ideas of magic and the spiritual world with the realm of high-tech materials that can create these beautiful and mystical experiences. These will be places of curiosity, first engaging people to enter the space, then revealing a phenomenon within, as if a specimen was brought from another planet, realm or dimension.
The Institute for Contemporary Art at MECA will be presenting Boyenne, a sculpture by artist Tyler McPhee. This project explores the commercialization of folktales (in this case, the regional Paul Bunyan story) as it becomes popular myth taking a small kitsch object to the monumental. Its formally qualities are all extenuated : a giant, feminized backside, clutching a huge ax, sort of Soviet style idealization of his facial combine to raise questions taste, desires, and aspirations originating from rural New England towns where this hero began.
Portland Ovations presents a performance piece of chance operations, chairs and tasks. An performance art office environment!
The membership-based collaborative print studio located on Congress Street will debut their printing project, “Analog Tweets”.
Shoot Media/Bomb Diggity Arts
The “TV SHOW News” crew (from Shoot Media Project and the Bomb Diggity Arts Program) will be reporting on the event in collaboration the Community Television Network between 5pm and 7pm. Local artists and passersby are invited to stop by the TV SHOW News desk to interact with the news crew and talk about experiences at the Block Party. There will be commercial breaks, live performances, and weather reports throughout the evening.
Shoot Media Project is a multi-media program that is part of Creative Trails. Participants in Shoot Media produce video and photography projects, some of which are included in a television show called TV SHOW. Since Shoot Media began in August 2010, participants have made costumes, silkscreens and hand drawn animations, photographed with Holga cameras and printed photographs in the black and white darkroom at the Bakery Photographic Collective. The groups have learned interview techniques and how to edit video and sound on the computer.
Create a moment to remember in the Mayo Street Arts dress up photo booth. Animals, costumes, textiles set the scene. Film from the Impossible Project. Artists Johnathan Cook, Annie Seikonia, Blainor McGough, Steven Tesh, Brian Arlet.
Portland Stage will bring Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah and humble poet of Dundee to the streets of Portland to share his poems with its gracious citizens. McGonagall has appeared, at times, as Mark Honan, a British actor living in Portland.
Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine
SPACE Gallery, together with The Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine, will have a “Make Your Own Musical Instruments and Costume” station for kids. We will provide all of the materials for musical instruments and accessories for kids to strut through the streets at 6PM for a parade. No sign up necessary, just stop by, create and celebrate!
What does Maine taste like? What does it feel like? Who, what, and where is the Maine that not everyone sees and knows? The youth writers of The Telling Room are on a mission to find out during our sixth annual year-long themed project: Searching for ME. Searching for ME was inspired by the landmark Foxfire books, which engaged Georgia students in writing about of the culture of southern Appalachia in the sixties. Our modern twist on the concept will send students out into the community to capture stories through audio recordings, film, and photography as well as writing. The project will culminate in the publication of a unique, multimedia anthology in the form of an innovative field guide to Maine that captures not only the narratives and folklore of Maine life, but our students’ lives, their inner landscapes, and their vision for the future. We’re kicking off the project at this year’s Block Party, and will engage passersby in writing their own original vignettes on frost heaves, mountaintops, sea smoke, melted butter, blueberry barrens, spring peepers, ferry boats, and further affairs of Maine living. Block Party participants will receive random prompts from an old school bubble gum machine, record their responses on magnetic paper, and then place their responses on a giant map that locates their emotions, stories, and memories in a particular Maine context. The project will live on at our Writing Center downtown and grow throughout the year.
C U L8R: An Interactive Installation About the Text Message
The members of MENSK are collaborating on an interactive installation about the limitations and homogeneity of text messaging. The public will be able to navigate through a maze with transparent walls built of binary code, the root language of texts and computers. Lost in sea of zeroes and ones, MENSK invites participants to reflect on what their thumbs are really saying.
Sylvia Kania Gallery/Dooryard Collective
Sylvia Kania Gallery in conjunction with the Dooryard Collective will present a living drawing set in front of the Sylvia Kania Gallery on Congress Street.
SPONSORSHIPS AND SUPPORT:
Support for Block Party 2011 has been generously provided by the Maine Arts Commission, Davis Family Foundation, Portland Color, the New England Foundation for the Arts, Oak Street Lofts, XPress Copy, Portland’s Downtown District and SPACE Gallery members.