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Hunting Wabbits in the Byward Market

Written

apartment613

on Thursday, September 2, 2010

Photo courtesy of Jessy Borutski

Post By Andrea Grant

I always sleep through Saturday morning cartoons. In fact, I haven’t seen a good one since the Ottawa Animation Festival last year. Damn adulthood, damn late night parties, damn breakfast smoothies and wheat germ and all that replaced Fruit Loops… zzzzzzz…..

WAKE UP OTTAWA!!! This Saturday September 4, our favourite obscure contemporary art gallery in the Market will be hosting an authentic Saturday morning cartoon experience… at BEDTIME. Backwards but beautiful, La Petite Mort Gallery will host the premiere of Jessica Borutski’s second short animated film entitled “The Good Little Bunny with The Big Bad Teeth.”

I’m sure many of you may have heard about the controversy surrounding Borutski’s work for Warner Bros. An Ottawa animation celebrity of sorts, Borutski has re-invented our beloved Looney Tunes characters – dearest Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Tweety Bird, and the Road Runner to name a few – for “The New Looney Tunes Show,” set to premiere on the Cartoon Network this Fall. Changes include less violence overall (for today’s more PC audiences) and a purple Bugs Bunny.

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Weekend roundup: Events and things to do in Ottawa!

Written

Karen

on Thursday, September 2, 2010

Photo courtesy InOttawa.ca on Flickr.

Alrighty, folks - for those of you lucky enough to stick around town for the long weekend, you’re in for a few treats.

Yes, the Bytowne Burlesque Revue is happening - and, if you’re in the market for your own burlesque name, check out the ingenious suggestions from fellow readers. If you’re hoping to fit in a last summer festival or two, be sure to schedule in the Serbian Festival happening down on Albion Road. For another festival, all you’ve got to do is look up - waaaaaay up - as the hot air balloons from the Festival de montgolfières de Gatineau float by overhead all weekend long.

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“You are invited to see the Earth turn” - Discovering Foucault’s Pendulum

Written

Francois

on Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Foucault's Pendulum at Carleton.

Post by Mokum

The other night I strolled over to the Herzberg Laboratories at Carleton University to spend a few minutes with the Foucault Pendulum. I was looking for a metaphor. If you haven’t seen the Foucault Pendulum at Carleton, it really is that: a five-storey replica of the famous pendulum first conceived of by the 19th century French physicist Léon Foucault. In designing his pendulum, Foucault set out to demonstrate in an easy-to-see experiment that the Earth rotates; in this he succeeded.

How does it work? Like many groundbreaking discoveries, Foucault’s proof was quite simple. All he did was suspend a large pendulum from the ceiling to show that the plane of its motion, with respect to the Earth, rotated slowly clockwise. What does this clockwise motion mean? The simplest – and correct – answer is that it means that the Earth turns.

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Better know a neighbourhood: Beechwood/New Edinburgh

Written

apartment613

on Tuesday, August 31, 2010

All photos courtesy of fieldtripp on Flickr.

Better know a Neighborhood is Apartment613’s knockoff homage to Stephen Colbert’s famed Better Know a District. Our goal is simple: find and write about interesting parts of the city. For the first part of this not-so-innovative series, we headed to West Wellington Village (or Hintonburg, we’re never quite sure). For our encore we went to the oasis of hipness nestled on the border of deepest, darkest Vanier.

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Release your inner firefly at Lumière

Written

apartment613

on Monday, August 30, 2010

Photo courtesy the Lumière Festival website.

Post by Ashley.

The glory days of summer are winding down. Sweaters, back-to-school signage and cooler evenings abound. So before it disappears completely, be sure to make time for one last summer festival. Easily my favourite event of the summer, I vote you go to the Lumière Festival.

Hosted annually by the Crichton Cultural Community Centre, Lumière is a celebration of both visual and performance art. The shining star of the event will be “The Evening of Light” on September 4th, when New Edinburgh Park will be set alight by displays from visual artists. While you tip-toe through the lanterns, various performance artists (fire spinners! stilt walkers! theatre groups! bands!) will be both stationed in and wandering through the park.

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Guys in Caves: The art of defence at the Diefenbunker

Written

diane

on Sunday, August 29, 2010

Inferno. Courtesy of the artist.

I’m sitting in the studio of multi-media artist Edwin Janzen in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa. Currently completing a Master’s in Fine Arts degree, Janzen has invited me into his workspace to talk about his thesis exhibition, Guys in Caves, currently on view at the Diefenbunker.

Surrounded by piles of video and audio equipment (and resisting the urge to play with the remote-control helicopter sitting in the corner), we spend some time talking about the Diefenbunker as an exhibition space and the militarization of art, language, and culture - from the Cold War to present day.

D: Thanks for having me here, Edwin. First off, I’d love to know how you landed the Diefenbunker as a site for your show, Guys in Caves. How did that come about?

E: It was a fortuitous string of events. I was TAing for a museum studies course where the professor invited local curators and directors of various institutions to come and give talks to the students. One of the speakers was Alexandra Badzak, who used to be the director at the Diefenbunker and now she’s director of the Ottawa Art Gallery. I asked her whether the Diefenbunker might be available to have an art show and she came for a studio visit, was intrigued by the work, and agreed to hold it there. The work has since changed a lot since what I had initially showed her, but many of the themes are still the same.

D: For someone who hasn’t seen your work how would you describe it?

E: In terms of the media that I’m using - it’s all over the place. There are video and audio components, an olfactory component, neon signage and plastic signage (door-name plates). There are four installations in this exhibition that cross over these different media.

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Local kayakers take adventures to the web

Written

apartment613

on Saturday, August 28, 2010

http://www.vimeo.com/12622767

By Aneka Rao

Last November, Mike McKay and Mike Kobzik decided to throw a party. Both avid paddlers, they’d recently started filming their kayaking trips and wanted to share the videos with friends and family. But as they started to plan the party, word spread through the Ottawa white water community. More and more people wanted to come, local companies called wanting to be sponsors and people started donating door prizes. Eventually, the small get-together turned into a movie-screening and fundraising event for the Ottawa Riverkeeper. Says McKay, “It ended up being a lot bigger than we thought. We held it at the Corner Bar down in the Glebe and it was probably the busiest night they’d ever had. It was jammed, people couldn’t move. It was crazy.”

Inspired by this success, McKay and Kobzik formed Five 2 Nine Productions and, from their already shot footage, created a whitewater-kayaking documentary called Just Like You Imagined. They realized that film was a great way to take their love of paddling to another level: to showcase the sport, get others excited about kayaking and educate a broader audience about water issues in Ottawa and around the world.

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Weekend roundup: Events and things to do in Ottawa!

Written

Karen

on Thursday, August 26, 2010

Photo courtesy -Marlith- on Flickr.

It’s about time we had a sunny, sunny weekend - good thing there are plenty of outdoor activities to keep us all occupied in the great outdoors for the duration of this one!

First off, it’s the grand old WakeFest all weekend long - and this festival isn’t like the other summer celebrations. Rather than focusing on just one specialty, they’ve got it all: music, film, visual arts, theatre and literature. The best part? Many of these events will take place on their infamous covered bridge - including the Great Granny Concert and Fundraiser.

The Market will also see a few good festivals happening: the i(heart)music festival will be hosted at Mavericks, while the Lowertown Summer Festival kicks off its inaugural street party this Saturday. The sunshine will especially bode well for Capital Pride Week, as they’ve got tons of events scheduled:

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Lowertown Summer Festival: Bringing the community together since 2010

Written

Francois

on Thursday, August 26, 2010

Photo courtesy of fieldtripp on Flickr.

Jan-François Grabowiecki is one of those Ottawans that left town to go to school but eventually came back. He’s been living in Lowertown for the last couple of years and has seen the place neighborhood go through some interesting changes. “The area between St. Patrick and St. Andrew’s has been gentrifying - with both good and negative consequences, that’s true - but I really love that many cool businesses have settled here, things with style and culture, and thought we should celebrate our neighborhood.”

And thus, he began a quest to put together the first Lowertown Summer Festival. His goal at first was to organize a street sale that would involve closing down part of Dalhousie St. While the local businesses and the Lowertown Community Association were supportive of the project, bigger businesses in the Market weren’t so keen on the idea of having one of the major arteries blocked off for a day. In addition, the construction on Sussex Drive made the city’s Transportation and Safety Committee cautious about the project and eventually suggested to start with something smaller.

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A funny thing happened on the way to the Hintonburg Arts Festival

Written

apartment613

on Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Photo courtesy srboisvert on flickr.

Post by Apt613 contributor Mokum.

A couple weeks ago, I asked my editor at Apt613 if she could get me on the guest list for the recent Hintonburg Arts Festival, a sort of 100-mile diet of Ottawa dance, film, poetry, music, and so on. I’ll admit I wasn’t enthusiastic about paying the $20 cover charge (even though the price was reasonable enough, considering the promise of an open bar), but that wasn’t the whole story behind my request. It’s important to remember that being on the guest list is essential to providing proper coverage of this type of thing. If Hintonburg is serious about turning itself into some kind of Soho north, we critics and associated hangers-on have to do our part as well. Thus, I resolved to attend only if I could get in and drink for free.

In the event, I ended up not attending, not because I couldn’t get in for free, but rather because the festival ran into complications with the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, resulting in the following email being sent out the evening prior to the event:

Important change to the Saturday night portion of the Festival

Last-minute difficulties with LCBO regulations mean we cannot serve or sell alcohol at the Saturday night portion of the Festival.

All programming will go forward as planned, however the entry fee has been reduced to $5 and the event is now non-alcoholic. We apologize for this change but are confident that we can still have a great night! Feel free to arrive at the event tipsy…

Pity, that. Not only had the cache of being on the guest list plunged dramatically with the cover charge, but now the beer taps would be turned off, too. Even if one was to bring their own provisions or continuously run back and forth to the Carleton Tavern all night for booze, the party seemed at risk of running in reverse, with the crowd arriving tipsy only to become progressively more sober as the night wore on. Apart from the art stuff, it was pretty much the opposite of what I had in mind.

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