Ghost Launch: Call for Submissions

The past twenty years have seen the near-complete disappearance of feminist- and queer-oriented bookstores in Canada, echoing the broader decline of independent, brick-and-mortar booksellers across North America. Ghost Launch is an online project that seeks to remember and reanimate these once-vital nexuses of community and culture.

Produced in conjunction with MY MONUMENT, the forthcoming exhibition at The University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03 by cam bush, Steven Leyden Cochrane, Roewan Crowe, and Paul Robles, Ghost Launch is conceived of as an unstructured archive and “living monument.” The website will serve as a space to remember and reflect on vanished bookstores and as a platform for the virtual “launch” of works that continue to be made in their absence.

Ghost Launch is currently seeking submissions of personal accounts, historical ephemera, writing, and art that record, remember, or respond to feminist and queer bookstores that no longer exist.

Submissions may include (but are not restricted to) the following:

• Written and oral histories, personal recollections, and reflections

• Photographs taken at now-closed bookstores or bookstore events

• Ephemera and documents (newspaper clippings, event flyers, handbills, buttons, stickers, etc.)

• Artwork, poetry, and writing that reflects on or relates to a particular bookstore or to vanished bookstores generally

Ghost Launch welcomes submissions from those who might never have set foot in a feminist/queer bookstore (or even had the chance to). Responses to the absence of such spaces are strongly encouraged, as are fictional or fictionalized accounts and documents.

Submissions may consist of text, images, video or audio files, or links to hosted media (YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.) and can be uploaded using the online form at Ghost Launch. Submissions may also be emailed as attachments or file-sharing links to ghostlaunch@gmail.com. Please indicate if you would prefer to have your submission published anonymously. Audio files can only be accepted via email at this time. Electronic submissions only.

Throughout the year, the website will also feature a variety of projects by feminist- and queer-identified artists, writers, performers, and activists. If you have a work (a book, zine, chapbook, play, performance, visual art, etc.) to “launch,” please contact Ghost Launch.

Deadline for submissions: March 6, 2014.
The production of Ghost Launch is made possible thanks to funding from the Winnipeg Arts Council and with support from Gallery 1C03 and the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Winnipeg.

Patrick Mahon: WATER MEMORY TABLE

Patrick Mahon, Water Memory Table Study, 2013, ink on balsawood, 15" x 22".

 Gallery 1C03 at The University of Winnipeg proudly presents its next exhibition:

Patrick Mahon

WATER MEMORY TABLE
January 16 – February 15, 2014

Opening reception: Thursday, January 16, 4:00 – 6:00 p.m. at Gallery 1C03

Artist talk: Friday, January 17 at 12:30 p.m. in Room 2M70 (2^nd floor of Manitoba Hall) at The University of Winnipeg

Artist workshop “Weather Structures: Printed Sculptures, Environmental Traces”: Saturday, January 11 & Sunday, January 12, 12:00 – 5:00 p.m. at Martha Street Studio

In this solo exhibition, former Winnipegger Patrick Mahon creates printed sculptural installations that reference the human connection to shifting environmental conditions through an investigation of built structures. Forms based on images of water towers and on pictures of built supports used in invasive practices such as coal mining interplay in abstract arrangements where structures and flows comingle. A series entitled Water & Tower Allegory involves printed sculptures that extend Mahon’s longstanding commitment to intersections between art and design, decoration and expression, and the singular with the multiple. In a work made especially for Gallery 1C03, Water Memory Table, historical maps and written records that refer to the flooding of the Red River combine to produce a permeable structure that evokes a layered history of people and water in the Southern Manitoba region.

Patrick Mahon is an artist, writer, and teacher/academic; he was Chair of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario from 2000 - 2010. He has a BFA from the University of Manitoba School of Art and a MFA from the University of British Columbia. His work as a visual artist includes print-based projects that engage with historical and contemporary aspects of printmaking. It also involves responding to gallery and museum collections as well as establishing community-based art initiatives, including several regarding the environment. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. In Canada he has shown at Museum London, The Hamilton Art Gallery, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery, to name a few. Internationally his work has been presented at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China in 2005 and in Barthète (Toulouse), France in 2011. Mahon’s collaborative SSHRC project on the theme of water, Immersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds, began in 2010 and included a residency at the Banff Centre in 2013. As an individual artist he was in residence at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium and at La Maison Patrimoniale Barthète in France, both in 2011. He lives in London, Ontario.

Gallery 1C03 hours: Monday – Friday: 12:00 – 4:00 p.m., Saturday: 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Closed Sundays..

Admission is always free and everyone is welcome. Wheelchair accessible.