Some of Canada’s most interesting contemporary art is happening within ARTIST COLLECTIVES across the country.

Collectives – such as the ancient sculpture workshops set up near marble quarries in Greece and Italy – have been around for many years, and are wonderful forums for cross-pollination of ideas, beliefs and experimentations. They also can be taken as a sign that artists are serious about sharing and developing their ideas further.

Some other well-known Canadian artist collectives are the GALLERY POTEMKIN/POTEMKIN TOO COLLECTIVE (Lethbridge), the media arts collective VOLATILE WORKS (Montreal) and of course, the Canadian patron saint of artist collectives, GENERAL IDEA:

General Idea. Image: aabronson.com

Probably the best-known contemporary artist collective in Canada is the ROYAL ART LODGE, whose most high profile member, MARCEL DZAMA has taken the international art world by storm. His excellent, idiosyncratic drawings – in ink and root-beer – of walking bears, Marcel-waved, fur-coat wearing ladies and trees smoking cigarettes had seemed, for a while at least, to have spawned a trend in young artists toward wishy-washy line drawings.

Marcel Dzama. Image: sobeyartaward.ca

Some of VoCA’s favorite Canadian art collectives:

THE ARBOUR LAKE SGHOOL

The Arbour Lake Sghool. Image: thearbourlakesghool.com

VoCA first encountered this Calgary-based group’s work last year at The Centre Cannot Hold, a group exhibition at the Toronto Free Gallery, curated by BRENDA GOLDSTEIN. These guys live in a suburban house. They make art in their front yard, their garden, their basement…

Image: thearbourlakesghool.com

The ALS has recreated WW2 in their yard, and on their website you can learn how to become “the best graf artist ever”, by making a stencil of Calgary mayor Dave “Bronco” Bronconnier’s signature and applying it to everything in sight.

Mountain, 2005. Image: thearbourlakesghool.com

They created Mountain in their yard in 2005 (also, we belive, known as Volcano in which a red carpet is pushed through the top.) The neighbours sent a letter of complaint to the father of the Frosst brothers , who owns the house. The ALS published the letter, which has now become part of the work. There is also a hilarious video of the letter being videoed, word by word, on a computer screen.

BGL

Bosquet d’espionnage, 2004. Image: artmur.com

BGL were shortlisted for last year’s Sobey Art Award. Part of their installation featured a small room (the door of which, when opened, triggered a large, artfully lit disco ball to roll up and down a bench, creating a stunning display of light reminiscent of Fischli & Weiss’s early video Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), from 1987:

Fischli & Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge, 1987. Image: kunsthaus.ch

We also particularly love BGL’s Bosquet d’espionnage (2004), in which wooden shrubs on wheels, painted bright green, are used as easily portable urban camouflage.

Other notable installations have included A l’abri des arbres/In the Shelter of the Trees, at the Musee d’art contemporain in Montreal in 2001 in which the viewer/participant wandered through a labyrinthine passage of cardboard boxes below a forest of cardboard trees.

In 2001, they created Sentier Battu, at the Jardins de Metis/Redford Gardens in Quebec. This was an installation of bits of green tape attached to nylon string, shimmering like healthy green plants in the sun just above a desolate, broken down garden.

Sentier Battu, 2001.

640 480

640 480 is a Toronto-based international video collective. In December 2004 their project Vs. consisted of tape exchanges between video performance artists and post-producers. The artist relinquished control of the work to the producer, who was able to edit and finish whatever the artist had begun. Pairings included these VoCA favorites:

BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY VS. COOPER BATTERSBY:

Image: 640480.com

TOM SHERMAN VS. TASMAN RICHARDSON:

Image: 640480.com

and EMILY VEY DUKE VS. DANIEL COCKBURN, among others.

Image: 640480.com

FAMEFAME

Renegade Toronto-based video collective FameFame makes agressive, intense and occasionally brilliant works whose grotesque imagery wash over the viewer thanks to the speed at which they are edited.

Jubal Brown, Screaming Head in Space, (still), 2001. Image: dumboartscenter.org/Artcore gallery

Their goal “is to promote an immediacy, that transcends the physical means of the work itself, threatening the boundaries of video, sculpture, performance and event arts, audio and music, generating new strategies for culture making.”

Tasman Richardson, Apollo Shrapnel: Part 01 (still), 2001. Image: vagueterrain.net

THE DISCRIMINATING GENTLEMEN’S CLUB

Image: dgc-cga.org

We can’t say too much about this Montreal-based interdisciplinary group, since they are a “performative and all-together private arts collective.”

But we do know that they aim to “implement full ostentation and conjure up the most gentlemanly of images.” They are constantly developing new activities such as their annual fox hunt, planting a mosaic garden or flying large black kites against the sky. The collective has shown internationally, and has a clubhouse in Verdun, Quebec which hosts two monthly window exhibitions and performances as well as two major salon-style exhibition each year.