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Touring Exhibitions

Clive Holden’s Utopia Suite, + Y.O.U. (Your Own Utopia)

Utopia Suite Disco, video still detail, 2008

March 28 to April 26, 2009 at the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, ON;
Mid-May, 2009 (details to be announced) at Media City International Festival of Film & Video Art in Windsor, ON.

Co-curators: Vicky Chainey Gagnon & Carl Lavoy

The exhibition at the Thames Art Gallery, co-presented by the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University and the Media City Festival, will include the following Utopia Suite segments: Utopia Suite Disco (featuring the Utopia Hall of Fame), Ken Dryden, MEAN, and Engines of Despair, and is introducing Y.O.U. (Your Own Utopia) for the first time. For more information please visit: utopiasuite.com.

Artist's lecture + utopian conversation March 28, 7:00 p.m., opening reception + disco party March 28, 8:00 pm., at the Thames Art Gallery.

The Utopia Hall of Fame was first created as a part of Utopia Suite Disco (presented at the Foreman Art Gallery in January 2008), which encourages you to move as part of a renewed, process-oriented utopianism (think cinema, dancing, running like a kid, or nomadic cultures). Instead of static buildings and old notions of nation-building, were shifting focus to organic and dynamic forms, modeled on the structures found in nature.

The members of our Utopia Hall of Fame were selected because they've explored or described visions of a better way of life (writers, philosophers, environmentalists, visionary politicians), or they've experimented with alternative structures (artists, anarchists, musicians). We also decided to include people that are famous in their fields, as that suited the far-flung needs of this project (they're all people you can look up). ::

U are so dynamic.
Utopia Suite Disco's dynamic media tile utopian portrait gallery and feverish movement studies surround a wooden 'light hut' that has its own dance floor. This crude cubic room pulsates to a looping 60 minute disco + world music + soundscape magnum opus by Rotterdam composer Oscar van Dillen. Visitors are invited to come visit, to walk inside the art, and then to move to break free of the chains of passive, politically inert despair.

Utopia Suites core concept is that movement (cinema) begets hope (utopianism) which begets more movement, creating positive cycles, and maybe a way forward for all of us. And a part of this movement is interactive communication, in other words visitors are invited to participate. We want to know their feelings about utopia: does the word make them think of bookish, monolithic yet timeless civic planning tomes, feverishly detailed blueprints for idyllic imaginary islands, elegantly described visionary futures that make them want to swoon... or Barack Obama?!

Clive Holden’s Utopia Suite is a 'suite' of short stories and quasi-fictional essays, short films, cinema-based art installations, visual music, photo booklets, and utopian lectures. They work together to make a new kind of 'book'. Its chapters can be read in any order. Visitors can watch Utopia Suite grow, like a plant, or a child, or the dynamic world around them.