Summer Art Festival misses the mark by hiding the art


H.G. Watson
ARTS EDITOR

n a hot Sunday morning, I’ve stopped in at the Starbucks at Ouellette and University avenues for two purposes: to grab a cold beverage, and to find out where the coffee shop’s Summer Art Festival pieces were hidden. After peering in the windows I hadn’t seen anything resembling the scope of the window installations promised by Artcite Inc., the festival’s organizers.

I made my inquiries and was shocked to discover (after much confusion amongst the staff) that the pieces were four tiny unmarked works mounted on a wall. I had assumed they were pieces of corporate art sent to Starbucks by their overlords in Seattle.

The original intention of this article was to find the best of the best of the annual Artcite Summer Art festival (formerly known as Visual Fringe). What I instead found was disorganization and a lack of imagination. Over two hours spent traversing the downtown core on Sunday morning (two days after the advertised start of the festival), it became clear that it was less a festival and more a collection of odds and ends.

Staff at Milk Coffee Bar had no idea there was even such a thing as an art festival and at Coffee Exchange, while at least they knew it was happening, they couldn’t decide which pieces of art were part of the festival and which weren’t. Some stores, advertised as participants, had yet to have installations.

There’s so much potential in a festival like this to bring art out of galleries and onto the street. But an oil painting or photo in a coffee shop is not going to knock anyone’s socks off─ yet this was much of what could be found

Not all of the Summer Art Festival is a disappointment. Broken City Lab’s Civic Space has a clever video installation in its windows, contrasting what is fast, and what is slow. Just down the street at the Windsor Worker’s Action Centre, a looping video shows two girls eating food without using their hands─ strange, yet oddly hypnotic.

The team at One Ten Park created their own ode to the earth, featuring corn repurposed into painting and sculpture and a mannequin sporting an extremely haute couture outfit made of grass and twigs.

Arturo Herrera created the corn art, which he dubs “a corn extravaganza.”
“What inspired me was to make a huge display of corn husks and make it seem as art.” It’s an earthy window that works despite being blocked by construction. Herrera and his co-artist Alanna Bartol actually integrated the construction into their piece, paining a buffalo into the partition.

I was walking down Pelissier Street towards Chatham Street when a little burst of green caught my eye. Knitted around the leg of a bench was a small, yet well crafted, yarn bomb. It wasn’t the part of the summer art festival─ at least as far as I could tell─ but of everything I had seen that day it was the most imaginative and unexpected. Street art is something that should jolt you out of your mundane rambles through the cityscape─ I wish Visual Fringe would strive to do this.