Swarm 11, 2010

September 9: Mount Pleasant and Granville Island
September 10: Gastown and Downtown
7PM – late
Various venues – visit www.paarc.ca/swarm for the growing list!

The Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres (PAARC) is pleased to present Swarm: A festival of artist-run culture, that will span September 9 and 10 and offer a wide and compelling array of contemporary art exhibitions and projects.
Swarm began in 1999 as an event to mark the launch of Vancouver’s artist-run centre programming season, bringing together some of the city’s most vital and innovative contemporary art spaces to open their doors on a single frenetic evening. Swarm soon grew to a multi-night event, incorporating more and more of the city’s ephemeral artist-run initiatives: small DIY spaces, studios-turned-galleries, roaming public projects, artist collectives, hybrid projects,
and more. These initiatives join PAARC member centres to present a diverse spectrum of artistrun culture — the integral and innovative core of the city’s vibrant art community.
Embracing the festival’s viral nature, Swarm 11 will make innovative use of sites like Twitter and Google Maps to dynamically generate this year’s online festival guide. Venue participants are invited to ‘tag’ their events in their Twitter feeds to identify them as part of the Swarm. The Swarm website (www.paarc.ca/swarm) will then pull these feeds into the list of events, automatically generating venue maps. Similarly, gallery-goers will be able to offer comments on the Swarm festival by marking their Twitter posts with a #SWARM11 tag.
Artist-run Centres (ARCs) are non-profit organizations, run by and for artists that support new and innovative practices in the arts. With a rich history that spans over thirty-five years, ARCs locally and nationally have had an impact on Canada’s contemporary art that cannot be underestimated. Generally, these centres exhibit contemporary art which parallels the larger public institutions and private commercial galleries – offering an alternative to artists in
determining how to represent their work. Most of Canada’s best known and internationally recognized contemporary artists, curators and cultural practitioners have come out of the artistrun centre movement.
PAARC’s members include:
Access Artist Run Centre (Vancouver) www.vaarc.ca
Alternator Gallery (Kelowna) www.alternatorgallery.com
Arnica Open Studio & Gallery (Kamloops) www.tru.ca/news/06websitesdec/arnica/
Artspeak Gallery (Vancouver) www.artspeak.ca
Cineworks (Vancouver) www.cineworks.ca
Dynamo Arts Association (Vancouver)
Gallery Gachet (Vancouver) www.gachet.org
grunt gallery (Vancouver) www.grunt.bc.ca
Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver) www.helenpittgallery.org
Intermission Artists’ Society (Vancouver) www.inter-mission.org
Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver) www.kswnet.org
Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver) www.malaspinaprintmakers.com
Ministry of Casual Living (Victoria) www.ministryofcasualliving.ca
New Forms Media Society (Vancouver) www.newformsfestival.com
Open Space (Victoria) www.openspace.ca
Or Gallery (Vancouver) www.orgallery.org
Oxygen Art Centre (Nelson) www.oxygenartcentre.org
Projectile Publishing Society / Fillip Review (Vancouver) www.fillip.ca
VIVO Media Arts Centre(Vancouver) www.vivomediaarts.com
W2 Community Media Arts (Vancouver) www.creativetechnology.org
Western Front (Vancouver) www.front.bc.ca
Xchanges Artists’ Gallery & Studios (Victoria)

Swarm is encouraging local galleries to “be a part of the problem.” By registering a twitter account, and following Swarm’s simple guidelines, galleries can post their Friday or Saturday events directly to the Swarm site simply by tweeting. A link to each gallery website will appear, along with their brief tweet and a link to Google Maps, allowing you and me to easily keep track of our favorite upcoming events. As of this writing, exhibits by Grunt Gallery, JewellerBau, Malaspina Printmakers, Cineworks, Fillip, Gallery Gachet, Shudder Gallery and the Or Gallery make up a growing Vancouver lineup.

But like many viruses, containment can be an issue – so for those of you in Kelowna who want to go to Swarm, you can check out Pascal Dufaux and Scott Rogers at the Alternator Centre. It’s an interesting little development (Alternator’s presence on Swarm, given that Swarm is historically a Vancouver event), but an illuminating one: a growing social/viral web brings into question notions of location and stability. So where exactly is Swarm? Well, it‚Äôs on twitter, it’s at www.paarc.ca/swarm. Alternator certainly doesn’t mind – 3 of the 5 displayed tweet comments are theirs.

Check out Swarm today and follow the tweets. Or “be a part of the problem” by tweeting your gallery, your comments, and by swarming at one of the events on September 10th and 11th.

For more information on Swarm, and to see the Swarm guide, please visit:

http://www.paarc.ca/swarm

Media Contact:
Keith Higgins
President
604-836-0865
info@helenpittgallery.org