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An unusual exchange: Visual artists & experimental post-punk mash up

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Intro
YYZ and Dunlop Art Gallery team up with Unusual Music Exchange, a magazine and platform led by Canadian UK-based visual artist, writer, and musician Josh Thorpe. Together UME, YYZ, DAG, and other institutions and artists will embark on a series of events and publications that bring together contemporary visual practice with unusual music.

The project begins with a mutual interest in vinyl records as a medium, and continues to find other networks of collaboration and distribution. The project spans two albums and three years of Thorpe's work as an entry point to diverse conversations in art and music, art as music, music as art. We aim to rekindle ties between visual art practices and independent music that were more apparent from the 1960s to the 1990s.

This is also a response to evolving video and audio technology. In the 1970s the video camera became affordable, making video experimentation accessible for a generation of artists. Today again we have a revolution of image, moving-image, and sound production and distribution technology. This affords again the opportunity to experiment relatively cheaply with interdisciplinary and international collaboration in these media.


Timing
The project timeline will centre around the release of album Love & Weather, published by Thorpe's online collective UnusualMusicExchange.com, and will include:
  • Nov. 27, 2020: digital release of single "Manhattan," featuring video by Thorpe and Devon Knowles
  • Jan. 22, 2021: digital release of "Down to the Ground" and video by Vancouver-born, Paris-based artist Mathew McWilliams (son of Al McWilliams). Video shows a sweet and humourous side of life in the streets of Paris covid lockdown.
  • Feb. 5, 2021: digital release of full album, accompanied by:
    • launch of video by Ashes Withyman (formerly known as Gareth Moore)
    • series of programing and virtual events, possibly including
      • artist talk and listening party
      • instagram takeover
      • previous audio works by Thorpe in YYZ archive
  • March / April 2021
    • Launch of 12" vinyl pressing of both Love & Weather and Scrappy Art Rock You Can Dance To (2018), cover art by Paris-based Australian artist Angelica Mesiti
    • various opportunities to collaborate further (e.g. artist multiple distributed alongside album etc.)
    • series of events ad hoc exhibitions (digital or live) with collaborating artists, for example...
      • Hanne Darboven's little known symphonies with Martin Arnold & Christopher Butterfield
      • Song in sculpture with Marla Hlady
      • Hanging out with experimental musicians with Sandra Meigs
      • Micah Lexier on the mix tape
      • Sue Tomkins on voice performance and experimental music
      • Renée Lear: video as music
      • Ian Wallace's jam band and life at the studios at 188 West 3rd, Vancouver
      • Rodney Graham, Kathy Slade, and Anthony Kiendl on the vinyl record

Other possibilities, possibly for other institutions:
  • ways to collaborate with unusualmusicexchange.com as a music magazine, podcast, and label
  • other Scottish institutions that may be interested, including Clyde Built Radio independent broadcaster and Centre for Contemporary Art, both of which have expressed interest
  • A work of fiction to be published by Thorpe Food: a novella -- a story about a man and woman who change what they eat and see what happens
  • New album Cloud Study later in 2021, in discussion with London UK's Neolithic Records.

More on Thorpe's music and collaborations with artists
Thorpe's songs respond to the historical moment. The music in some ways pays tribute to an exploding world, a time of ecstatic strangeness. Long forms, dissonant sounds, and non-linear lyrics describing  entangled forces in a complex universe reflect this. These songs push against mainstream song forms, which are designed for short attention span, and rely often on Hollywood tropes of narrative and the triumph of the individual. Visual artists have contributed in whatever way they wish, offering free-form images and video that follows their own interests and intuitions rather than the logic of the song or the need to perform a marketing role.


Scrappy Art Rock You Can Dance To (2018) was meant to be both brash and sweet / aggressive and nurturing, to bring together two crucial human moods in a series of songs and videos. It involved collaborations with with senior and emerging artists Ian Wallace, Geoffrey Farmer, Sandra Meigs, Trevor Shimizu, Renée Lear, and Lily Ross-Millard.

Love & Weather (2021) refers obliquely to the need for compassion in the face of various world crises, but also to affect in the mundane rituals of weather, intimacy, and the social. It brings together cover art by Australian Angelica Mesiti and music videos by Ashes Withyman (formerly known as Gareth Moore), Mathew McWilliams, and footage by Devon Knowles, all with Vancouver roots of some kind.

and...

Cloud Study (2021) will feature collaborations with Kristine Mifsud (Toronto), Carolyn Lambert and David Court (Tennessee), M.E. Smit-Dicks (Glasgow).

Bio:
Thorpe is a Canadian artist based in the UK. He has shown at David Roberts Art Foundation, London; 3A Gallery, New York; Power Plant, Toronto; CSA Space, Vancouver; Museo Napoleonico, Rome; and Open City, Lublin, Poland. He has recently completed a large-scale public work for the City of Toronto, has been a Sobey long-lister and finalist for the TFVA Artist Award, and has published with Art Metropole, Canadian Art, and Momus.

Scrappy Art Rock You Can Dance To

Videos