Drawing the Canada-Wide Science Fair

This May 13 – 17, fifteen artists and I will get together to Draw the Canada-Wide Science Fair with the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. We’ll draw right there in the middle of the Science Fair, then blog, tweet, and project the finished drawings. Here is the query letter I sent to the artists. In future posts, I’ll blog about each of them, their approach, their work, and their funny answers to the questions I sent.

The Canada-Wide Science Fair is May 13-17 in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Dear Christine, Cindy, Corinne, Dave, Denton, Glen, Kelaine, Leanne, Leila, Mary-Anne, Mandy, Megan, Petra, Rod and Shanell,

As you probably know, the Canada Wide Science Fair is coming to Lethbridge this May. 1100 projects from across Canada, and 330 judges will come together to… actually… well…I don’t really know. This science fair thing is a total mystery, why they are doing this, what is going to happen, how many volcanoes there will be. All I know is, it is going to be awesome!

As a result, I am working with the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery to organize a brigade of artists to Draw the Canada Wide Science Fair. The idea is to approach the spectacle of a National Science Fair from an artist’s perspective. My thinking is to expand the notion of drawing en plein air to include the possibilities of cross-disciplinary work, collaborative drawing, multi-perspectival drawing, non-precious drawing, interactions with people, live tweeting and 5-second-delay blogging of the drawings.

I’d be honoured if you would join me in this brigade.

The dates are:
9-Noon Monday May 13th
9-Noon Thursday May 16th
9-Noon Friday May 17th

Ideally we’d have four artists working each of these days. You can attend more than one day if you want. I’ll be there on all the days. You might want to collaborate with some of the kid-scientists. (Hope so.) You might want to collaborate with each other. It’s not really about preciousness, more about the drawing moment, and joy, and ‘the funny edge of the world’ as Rod calls it. Artists will be provided with clipboards and paper, and there will be some kid-level drawing materials. You might want to bring your own. You can do it however you want! Chad is going to be set up at a table on the track with a scanner, scanning drawings all day long. They’ll be projected onto the Art Gallery’s wall on the 6th floor, and online. If we get something good out of this, maybe we can look into making it into a book.

On the Thursday afternoon the 16th, we’ll have a reception at Andy’s Place terrace, I hope you can all attend. We can show the drawings-in-progress in or on the tiny house.