Art in Public: Guelph at Twilight with Mark Clintberg (The Secret Ingredient – 10/12/14)

The Secret Ingredient

What are the risks in cracking open binaries? Is community engagement akin to using a copper wedge tool, simultaneously changing the pryer, the pryee, and what is being used to pry? Delve into boundaries, thresholds, doorways, and outskirts with Montreal-based artist, curator, art historian, and critic Mark Clintberg as he encounters Guelph’s post-industrial terrain with a flâneur-type strategy to urban space. His tailored workshop with the Boarding House Arts Incubator Residents, Public Scenes at Twilight: Shadow Economies, explores the city at a time of transition and ambiguous onset, of change in atmosphere, and shifting uses of space in the search for forgotten sites and anti-monuments. Consider the importance of embodied engagement with the place of art, consciously avoiding “parachute” curation, and sitting down to tea as the ultimate way to get to know ya. “There is no one ingredient, there has to be two: risk and hope. Without risk or challenge, there is nothing worthwhile in it. And potentially that risk can turn into disappointment that the project didn’t go as I wanted it to. I’ve been thinking a lot about disappointment and looking at it as a positive value. If you have disappointment, then it means that you are striving for something that is even better. Hope is important too, for what the next project will be. I need to be able to be able to imagine my way into a second, third, or fourth work. I want to see each work as a window into the next work, the opening tool into the next work.” - Mark Clintberg