Art for Art! Creating Through Conversation

Help us launch TCP into our 26-27 season all about creating art, laughter and change through conversation! Open until July 12th at 11:45pm, you'll have the chance to bid on works by wonderful BC artists, Alice Mansell and Mickey Meads in support of Tara Cheyenne Performance's 26/27 programming.

Alice Mansell has exhibited multi-media, paintings, drawings, installations, and performance works in public and private galleries across Canada, in the US, UK, Germany, Austria and China. She has collaborated with many notable choreographers and performers to create innovative costumes and set designs since1982. 

The works Alice has selected for this important fundraiser for Tara Cheyenne Performance reflect the deep influence she has experienced of how dance and theatre practices allow    our own exploration of who we are in contemporary culture. These are part of a series in which she investigates how we create our own sense of who we are and the roles we want to play in our personal and professional lives. History of art and culture along with the very physical art of costume creation informs her art practice.

These are small scale works that require close viewing/reading. Peering closely creates a stage wherein the viewer is drawn to invent their own stories of a body that might have moved/danced/lived in these depicted garments/sites. The use of thread and fabric signal the materials that might have enclosed imagined bodies, tracing the feel of texture/weave/ weight and shape left in their fibres by a body as it moves and plays.

These works are part of three long-entwined practices, as a visual artist, collaborator, and educator intensely engaged with investigating how we learn to be who we are. How we form culture and our own histories as we respond to cultures and histories we experience as audience, performer, or creator.

As a professor and executive leader, Mansell led innovations in art and design programs at universities and colleges in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia.

 
Mickey Meads studied art at the Vancouver School of Art (now ECU), the University of British Columbia, and Western University leading to degrees in Art History, Anthropology, Painting, and Printmaking.

My work demands careful attention to colour, composition, and to a disciplined series of processes that shape the result. The linear series of methodical processes enable me to concentrate on ways those very processes create a kind of aesthetic and personal distance. This set of steps provides the time, space, and distance to meticulously map the images in ways that are designed to control how those images may be perceived and interpreted.

Art for me has been an effort to explore, apprehend, and control images that often contain a ‘threat,’ provoking sense of fear and anxiety. Beauty contains this threat. My practice of picture making, my own tendency to be drawn to images that provoke uncertainty and anxiety, has resulted in a life-long exploration of a range of narratives (anthropology/archaeology, the garden, sites of human habitation, views of landscapes…) that can be staged in ways that expand, provoke and unsettle a sense of who we are and how we need and use fear to determine and control identity and territory.  This means that I need to work through a series of related themes to uncover the contradictions and tensions that are sufficient to bring the viewer ‘to’ the work.

As well as being a practicing visual artist, I have taught and developed art courses in drawing, painting, animation, and design at the college and university level. I have been involved in the administration of the Alberta College of Art and Design in various capacities from department Chair to Vice-President/Academic Dean as well as serving as the Head and President of that institute. I was the founding President of the Canadian Centre of the Arts at Owen Sound, ON.   meads.ca

Since 2007, TCP has been creating and performing kinetic theatrical expressions through exquisitely realized characters, crafted choreography, a healthy dose of comedy, and lashings of tragedy. Bridging the divide between dance and theatre, we are known for our humour, pathos, cultural relevance and have been described as “a gateway drug to dance”. TCP is a leader in community engagement, audience and artist development, offering workshops, discussions, and mentorship opportunities with each project. We have been presented in Vancouver by The Cultch, The Firehall, The Dance Centre, The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts among others, and have toured extensively throughout BC. Artistic Director Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s choreography is a staple of the Arts Club Theatre Company, Bard on the Beach, and the PuSH Festival. Tara also mentors in a variety of programs including the Riotous Youth, SFU Contemporary Dance, Modus Operandi, The Shoe Project and our own Startle Reflex residency program.