Spotlight on Niagara

By Cheryl Clock

The St. Catharines Standard
Tuesday April 6 2010

He's stood in the same spot for eight hours in the name of art. He's melted and moulded records into stealth bombers for an exhibit at Rodman Hall. And he's explored the interactiveness of performance art by staging an event in the downtown in which he taught himself how to tightrope walk on a rope he tied between two trees.

In a couple weeks, 24-year-old artist Ryan Rivando will again push his own boundaries by bringing his video art to the wall of the old Russell Hotel in downtown St. Catharines.

It's all part of the second annual In the Soil, a festival that celebrates and showcases the wide array of homegrown artists who have sunk roots into Niagara.

The festival will feature a medley of art forms -- music, video, media, theatre, dance and performance -- from more than 70 artists, over 10 days, from April 15 to 24.

All but one of the 11 venues are downtown. On Friday, April 23, the second to last day of the festival, Tony Dekker, Great Lake Swimmers frontman and Wainfleet native, will bring his band to the Sean O'Sullivan Theatre at Brock University.

The idea for such a festival sprouted from the ground up. Annie Wilson, program assistant at the Niagara Artists Centre and one of the festival's founders, says it not only gives Niagara artists a canvas to show off their talents, but helps to cultivate a wider audience appreciation for previously unknown artists and art forms. The juried festival welcomes all artists, emerging to established.

"I want people to be excited about what's happening here," she says. "And be excited about art created in our own backyard."

Among the new features this year:

A three-day theatre showcase called Crop Rotation, from April 16-18, featuring three local, full-length productions at the Sullivan Mahoney Courthouse Theatre.

A variety night on April 15 including burlesque, spoken word, comedy and sound making at the Courthouse Theatre.

Street-level installations by media artists.

Every night, from about 9 p.m. to midnight, people can gather by the vacant lot at the corner of St. Paul and James streets to watch the work of four video artists projected onto the only remaining wall of the former Russell Hotel. Think of their work as active paintings, says Stephen Remus, NAC director.

And on April 17, the wall will feature screenings of short films. Everything from a work involving snails to one that tells the story about the travels of a nickel, says Remus.

In the meantime, a portion of the wall will get a new paint job to cover over an existing mural.

And Rivando, who works at Strega Cafe, will bring the Russell back into the public consciousness with his video art, which will incorporate projections of the hotel itself.

The Russell, which in its later years housed an alternative/punk bar called Jerry's Alley, was demolished in 1996.

The creative process behind all this involves building a model of the hotel, filming it, adding some other videos and editing it all together so that the end product requires just one projector, set up across the street inside the Scotiabank building. The images will appear about one storey tall.

Rivando enjoys exploring the side of art less travelled.

When the St. Catharines artist was a visual arts student at Brock University, he became intrigued by the concept of performance art and decided to explore it further by standing on the sidewalk corner of St. Paul and Ontario streets for eight hours. No food or drink. One quick bathroom break.

"You intervene in everyday life and bring something abnormal to it," he says.

He repeated the artistic experiment during one James Street Night of Art, hiring a friend to stand in the middle of James Street (it was closed to traffic) and videotaping how people interacted with him.

On other occasions, he set out to explore people's reaction as they observed him trying to learn circus skills. His exhibits included standing by the St. Catharines bus station while trying to juggle, attempting to ride a unicycle in front of the Centennial library, and tying a rope between two trees near the James Street entrance to the library and trying to walk across it while holding out his arms for balance.

"It makes people feel awkward when they see something that's not the usual occurrence," he says.

These days, he's working on compiling different elements for a childhood dreams project.

As a kid growing up in Fort Erie, he thinks he remembers watching a stealth bomber fly over his house. He's actually not sure if it's a real memory or one he imagined.

But regardless of its authenticity, the flashback to childhood awakened his artistic interest in exploring memories.

To that end, he filmed himself flying around with a stealth bomber he'd made from a melted LP. (It was from a collection he'd created and exhibited at NAC and Rodman Hall.)

And more recently, he dressed up in Chicago Blackhawks garb and skated around the ice at the four pad, taking shots at the net and performing other hockey feats as if he was a draft pick, all the while filming himself.

He hopes to assemble other memory components to complete the overall work.

Sure, he could paint. Or draw. But he's more interested in exploring the unconventional, he says.

"I try to find new art forms that fit my interests better."

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