TEN DIFFERENT THINGS presents

Slow Dance an artwork by Instant Coffee

Sunday, May 20, 2018, 8-9pm (magic hour)

There is no denying, this work panders to an odd nostalgic reflection on the awkwardness of slow dancing. Experiences that linger in the western sentimentality of high school and community dances -- low brow, unskilled, flirting rituals that are as simple as swaying side to side while holding someone close. The slow dance is an intimate interaction performed in public, and it is this sexual tension between public and private that Instant Coffee wants to isolate and pause. For this artwork they have invited dancers to perform at several locations through out Vancouver from a deteriorating monument placed cumbersomely at the side of a busy throughway to the sandy shore of one of the city’s most popular beaches. The dancers will perform as magic hour progresses, turning slowly into silhouettes as the light dims, united into shapes, moving ever so slowly, almost still. The base action of the slow dance, while nostalgic as a demonstrative display, is unraveled and stayed into sculpture.

Various Locations: Clark Drive Plaza (2000 Block Clark Dr), Third Beach (Stanley Park), Robson Square (800 Robson Street), NO FUN RADIO (30 E Cordova St). Vancouver, BC

Playlist by Nicole Lefaivre. Tune in on NO FUN RADIO to Call Home (slow dance music hour) http://www.nofunradio.com/

Instant Coffee is a service-oriented artist and curatorial collective based in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Canada and Seoul, South Korea. Instant Coffee has an extensive art practice, spanning over fifteen years established in 2000. As an artist collective they have been invested in combining the social with the aesthetic, and as such have worked in public spaces to engage expanded audiences. They have produced many projects most notably for Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Simon Fraser University Galleries, Vancouver, Subdivision, Hamburg; International Medellin 07, Colombia, Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn, The Netherlands, the Toronto Sculpture Garden, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. And most recent worked with grunt gallery to produce Pink Noise Pop Up at One and J +1, Seoul. Instant Coffee has worked with the form of the slow dance previously, most notably working with the artist Kathleen Ritter in 2009 and 2011.

SLOW DANCE by Instant Coffee is part of Ten Different Things a series of new commissions launching Spring 2018 in Vancouver for which artists were invited to create new works in the spirit of free inquiry at the intersection of public art, community engagement, and civic process. Projects are temporary and take a variety of forms—events, installations, residencies, interventions, workshops—and provoke new visions of art and civic life. How can we create structures, processes or dynamics to produce new ways of living in, interacting with, or occupying the city? Where are the intersections in public life where artists can produce alternate outcomes?

Curated by Kate Armstrong, the series is a collaboration between CityStudio Vancouver, and Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and supported by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. Janet Moore and Duane Elverum are co-founders of CityStudio Vancouver. Full list of artists: Artists: Colleen Brown, Instant Coffee, Laiwan, Khan Lee, Holly Schmidt, Henry Tsang, Janet Wang, Casey Wei, Jen Weih, and Denise Holland and Pongsakorn Yananissorn.

Ten Different Things is produced on the traditional unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

us@instantcoffee.org • http://tendifferentthings.ecuad.ca/ • http://instantcoffee.org/