Are you a closet artist confined within the boundaries of a more traditional degree? Do you consider showing up for class a significant amount of school involvement?
Well Art Matters, the award winning and student run multi-disciplinary arts festival, may just be the outlet you need.
The organizers of Art Matters are gearing up for their fourth annual festival, taking place March 5 to 19, 2004, and have placed an open call for submissions from the Concordia community.
Since 2000, Art Matters has provided opportunities for Concordia students of all disciplines to show their work in a professional atmosphere. The festival also offers assistance to artists in terms of transportation and funding for their work.
The upcoming edition of Art Matters promises to be an exciting event.
The turnout for the submission launch party, which was held in October, far exceeded the expectations the organizers.
“We were hoping for at least two hundred people, and five hundred showed up and completely filled the space,” recalls Melissa Gruber, the Art Matters internal publicity representative.
“People are really excited about the festival, so we’re hoping to get a lot more people involved this year.”
The festival is encouraging both students within and outside the fine arts faculty to submit proposals in hopes of more accurately representing the Concordia community as a whole.
“We know there are artists in all faculties. Some of them are just hiding behind their real degrees,” explains Gruber.
“You don’t have to be in fine arts to be an artist. All students can come and see the art, but we also know that all students can potentially make art.”
Art Matters will be accepting proposals until Jan. 9. For those who may want to contribute to the festival, but lack the experience of preparing a proposal, Art Matters is offering proposal-writing workshops, which clarifies the entire process from explaining your work, to filling out the forms.
Gruber encourages everyone who is interested in submitting work, but may be intimated by the proposal process, to attend.
“If you’ve never written a proposal before and even if you have and you want to pick up some more skills, the proposal workshops are a great way to start you off.”
While two of the three proposal workshops have already come and gone, you still have one last chance to take advantage of this free and useful resource.
The final workshop will be held Wednesday, Nov. 26 at 2 p.m. in VA-245.
If you would like to be involved, but don’t necessarily want to publicly display your own artistic endeavors, Art Matters is also looking for a wide range of volunteers in everything from poster design to bartending at the events.
Whether you have the artistic bug, need a little help in the process of proposals, or can mix a mean martini for a good cause, Art Matters is a great way to get involved and help show all of Montreal just how much talent there is within the Concordia community.
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For more information on volunteer positions, or to reserve a place at the final proposal writing workshop, direct yourself to the Art Matters web site at http://artmatters.concordia.ca , or contact them via e-mail at [email protected].
