2012 an Inviting Year!

( * many of the hyperlinks lead to blogposts and photo albums of the events ( : enjoy!)

2012 began with my being invited by Director Betsy Warland, along with a handful of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University alumni from different years, to speak to the 2012 students on their orientation day. About our experience with TWS, writing careers goals and plans for the future. That was fun!

In March and June I completed my elective paper for th TWS course, by attending Betsy Warland’s SFU classes The Reluctant Memoirist and Memoir of Inquiry. Both I found very liberating, and developed a better understanding of creative-nonfiction. If you don’t know things because you weren’t there, writing from another characters point of view, were too young, or weren’t born etc, use your imagination! This led me on some wild and interesting tangents!

June also saw the launch of chapbooks by members of The Independents (The Poetry and Lyric Prose TWS alumni 2011) at a wonderful reading we had at (the alas now closed) Cafe Montmartre, with Jen Currin being a great MC! A manuscript for my poetry chapbook Transit of Venus – about love, public transit, and life transitions, was short-listed for the Doire Press prize. A good time was had by all, lots of photos here.

I participated in 6 anthology book launches and/or readings throughout the year. Including in January an Exhibition of Caregivers Creativity. Leaf Press The Wild Weathers chocolatey love poem anthology launch in February at Historic Joy Kogawa House. March the lively Enpipe Line book launch of opposition to the Endbridge oil pipeline proposal. August I was invited by Poetry is Dead to represent them at a reading for MagScence on Main on a hot summer evening. The the standing room only Queer Issue of Poetry is Dead Magazine in November with a lively interactive launch. I was invited by curator Aileen Penner to participate in The Science of Poetry Vol. 1. An amazing collaboration between 5 poets and 5 scientists, resulting in 10 new poems and beautiful limited edition chapbook. A barely standing room only reading at which my working partner and I, Adrienne Drobnies read our work to the accompaniment of an audio mashup I designed, photos from my Views from Cancer Town series, and an installation of illuminated body casts used to immobilize people during radiation ‘treatment’.

 On the audio-visual front I was invited to present my water photography based new media installations aqwai, tiarika and going coastal in the July mixed media Homecoming Exhibition at Gibsons Public Art Gallery. In August I completed the video poems Jest or Malice and Freedom, which have been languishing on my hard drive for a number of years, without music and titles, and posted them online!

September I was invited to fly to Canmore, Alberta  as one of two professional artists representing the province of BC, at the BeyondAccess2012 gathering of 14 artists from across Canada who work inside and outside disability and arts and culture. Had a great time amongst my peers, worked really hard, met great artists across disciplines. We resolved to form DACAC – Disability Arts and Culture Canada. In preparation for this event and next 2013’s Retrospective Exhibition in NZ ( see below) I created a 90 slide power point presentation tracing my development across artistic disciplines in the past 20 + years. Using the themes of my arts practice: - collaboration, cross-cultural, mentorship, and interdisciplinary. It is interesting to observe your own work in that way and see how things and people come back around in different forms years later. 

The year was completed by my graduating from SFU, along with about 10 of my fellow 2011 graduates, our certificates presented by new TWS Director Wayde Compton. I especially enjoyed the speech by writer and publisher Mary Schendlinger whose very informative SFU course Getting Published: From Manuscript to Book I recently completed. She talked about the need for both amateurs and professionals in writing, the 10, 000 hours it takes to become a good writer, the importance to language to children’s development, and some very humorous asides!

2013 is already shaping up to be a good year! I applied to and was accepted into Betsy Warlands VMI program - Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. I will be working with her in the Creative Nonfiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Mixed-genre group, (with fellow TWS Poetry and Lyric Prose alumni Yaana Dancer). Yay! On a manuscript of 33 plus auto-biographical stories in a girl called brian, (because my life is far stranger than anything I could make up!) Below an excerpt from a flash fiction opening premise. I am very much looking forward to shaping this manuscript with Betsy, especially given her current Oscar of Between project.

  “Black and White: A photo you will find when you are twenty-five years old. Two older women with babies on their knees’, everyone is laughing. It will defi(n)e everything you have been told. This is what you need to know: you will grow into something beautiful. Something in-between. When you are six your older sister will call this something, Brian. Even though your birth certificate says you are a girl.....”

I have been commissioned to complete a number of Video Poems for Stage Left’s 2013 performance festivals. I will likely work on 2-3 of my Views from Cancer Town video poems.

 The ultimate event for me in 2013, which I have been working on all this year in terms of logistics, funding, press, with curators Elizabeth Kerekere and Treason Seditio is Re-Tern: Hokinga Mahara – A Meg Torwl Retrospective. In association with the New Zealand Fringe Festival 2013 Wellington, and LAGANZ present an interdisciplinary exhibition of my video, new media, performance, photography, audio, writing. Thistle Hall Gallery March 5-10. It’s going to be a great experience, I hope to attend! I also received support with this project from the NZ Mix and Mash competition. Through which I applied for and received a Mentor for 2012, Elizabeth Vaneveld, ED of  The Big Idea, Aotearoa/NZ’s online arts community 

Let me know how your 2012 went and your plans for 2013?

HOMECOMING EXHIBITION GIBSONS, BC

You can find my work back on the Sunshine Coast again this summer!

My water photography based meditative installations, Aqwai, Tiarika, and Going Coastal will be in the invitational HOMECOMING EXHIBITION

Gibsons Public Art Gallery

July 19 to August 20 2012

This public art gallery is located in Historic Gibsons Landing, BC

201 – 287 Gower Point Road or from Molly’s Lane up the stairs.

HOURS: Thursday to Monday 11 am – 4 pm

RECEPTION:  July the 21st 2 pm

Seven artists who have been influenced by their life on the Coast share their vision. Photography, oil, watercolour, video, animation, glass, inkjet prints with collage and acrylic combine to form a rich and complex image of where we live and what it has added to our lives.

BRUCE EDWARDS.   CLAIRE FEARNLEY.      ELIZABETH HAINES.     ROSEMARY HANNA

 SARAH LIPI.       AGNETE NEWMAN   and MEG TORWL

You can check out photos of the HOMECOMING EXHIBITION on Integrial Media Facebook

2011 A Great CREATIVE Year!

Meg Torwl reading July 2011 at the SFU Writing and Publishing Graduation with Trish Webb, Karen Lee

2011 was a good year for me creatively! I got to work or exhibit in several disciplines - writing, performance, audio, video, new media and curate.

I wrote an audio Podplay in a workshop with Jan Derbyshire with Neworld Theatre. About dealing with cancer while going to university. How depression holds hands with illness behind your back and tries to convince you every day is the same. Meanwhile your creativity tries to see the sun and remember everyday is new and full of possibility - even as Fukushima burns.

Two of my films screened. Act Your Age!? with the Generations Project Local Docs Series. Where have all the lesbians gone? with an Out On Screen Retrospective Vancouver Visionaries screening.

I curated and exhibited a new media exhibition in Sechelt for  a month - PORTAL/PORTAGE. A wonderful collaboration with meditations on nature with three other women artists whose work I admire very much, Claudia Medina-Culos, Lilianna Kleiner and Diane Tanchak. With the Sunshine Coast Arts Council.

I completed The Writers Studio 2011 at Simon Fraser University, with the wonderful Poetry and Lyric Prose mentor Jen Currin. Such a great group of fellow students too! My work grew and expanded so much in the fecund environment! I submitted 60+ pages for work-shopping and polished  and shaped my final manuscript of 25 pages for deadline, with the help of Betsy Warland’s excellent Minding Your Manuscript class. My final poetry manuscript is a narrative arc through an intimate relationship, illness, to life transitions of all types. There are three inter-related sections 1. The Synesthete and the Kinesthete (intimate relationships, aging, illness). 2. The Autistic Rheumatologist (disability, illness) 3. Transit of Venus (things thought while traveling – family, disability, spirituality, bliss, happiness, mortality).

I took a fabulous elective paper at SFU - The Poems Story and Silence – with Betsy Warland, the out-going Program Director of the Writers Studio. I wanted to write about a magical childhood encounter with a flock of moths, and ended up writing a new suite of 13 poems on the joys and tensions of the great NZ extended family summer holiday! The diversity and talent of the other women in the class was inspiring when we all gave a 10 minute presentation at the last class, each of us with visual elements to our work. It is always wondrous as a mentor what Betsy is able to draw out of us.

I read my poetry at 5 public reading events, and had 9 poems accepted for publication. With Emerge, The Writers Caravan, Enpipe and The Wild Weathers.

I am looking forward to what 2012 brings, so far in the works seeking a publisher for a poetry book, a collaborative performance commission from Calgary, a Mentorship from NZ, and possibly a retrospective exhibition.

Namaste and gratitude.

August 3 to 28 PORTAL/PORTAGE in Sechelt

PORTAL/PORTAGE meditative nature installations in Sechelt, Sunshine Coast BC, new work by Meg Torwl, Claudia Medina-Culos, Liliana Kleiner, Diane Tanchak

August 3 - 28, 2011, with the Sunshine Coast Arts Council,

Doris Crowston Gallery, 5714 Medusa St, Sechelt, BC, Canada.

Reception August 3 2011, 7pm to 9pm.

Hours: Wednesday - Saturday 11:00 am - 4:00 pm

Sunday 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Wheelchair accessible.

PORTAL/PORTAGE is a collaboration between four artists who are each currently exploring in our work, humans as part of nature. PORTAL/PORTAGE combines Meg Torwl’s work in photo based video installations; Claudia Medina-Culos video installations and sound-scapes; Liliana Kleiner video work drawing on her photography, painting, and mixed media work; and Diane Tanchak abstract-realist style paintings. Each artist explores the nuance of location and the universality of story, cycles of growth and decay while negotiating our bi-national, or tri-national cultural identities and/or art practices, in places we each understand as home. These are the stories we collect, create, and carry from LAN (Local Area Network – an internet term) to LAND, to LANGUAGE; or images as a language bypassing spoken language all together. The exhibition is designed to be experienced as a rest, an emptying of the mind, a walk in the woods, a swim in the ocean.

Each artist has based part of their work on the Sunshine Coast or Gulf Islands of BC. Meg Torwl’s works Going Coastal (7mins, 2010), TIARIKA (11 mins, 2008), and AQWAI (14 mins, 2006) cover Roberts Creek to Rarotonga. Alongside work by Liliana Kleiner, her LUMINOZA INANNA (5 mins, 2010) draws from Galiano Island to the Gulf of Mexico. Claudia Medina-Culos’ Powell River based work, On the Trail (33 mins, 2010) and Heron Study (3 mins, 2010) was completed as part of a Masters in Media from Barcelona. Diane Tanchak's paintings A Dream of Trees (3mins, 2011) range from the Okeover Inlet to New York.

Audiences can negotiate the exhibition by way of 4 TV/DVD stations, each screening a different artists work, and listen to the soundtrack music or audio through headphones. Alternately the complete 90 minutes of work is projected into the gallery with audio coming through gallery speakers.

For more information about PORTAL/PORTAGE, artist bios, photos and videos.

Great article about PORTAL/PORTAGE in the Sunshine Coast Reporter by arts reporter Jan DeGrass. 

PS: Read about the Opening or check out photos of the exhibition opening.

For Technical Support thanks to VIVO Media Arts Centre, Paul Clancy, EnMedia Productions. 

Creative Momentum Interview Online Sept 2009

Meg Torwl will be CREATIVE MOMENTUM'S FEATURED CREATIVE for the month of September 2009 with a 2 part audio interview about her artistic practice in media – film, radio, new media. Visuals accompanying the audio interview include stills from the making of the film “Towards the day…we are all free” - with refugee and Aboriginal women. Photos from her meditative underwater and color based computer installations – AQWAI, TIARIKA, SINGING BOWLS; and video footage from an experimental film in development, “9 Lives 6 months” – about disability, art, poverty, dreams, craziness and wonder, in the lives of 4 women.

NZ based "Creative Momentum is a virtual movement around creative diversity. Through this international website and local events we aim to create awareness of creativity and diversity through dialogue and exploration. We want to know what creative diversity means to diverse creatives. Comedian, consultant and entrepreneur Philip Patston describes diversity as the synergy of similarity and difference. Here at Creative Momentum, we think of creative diversity as the ultimate expression of human uniqueness."

Meg Torwl's New Media Work

NEW MEDIA MEDITATIVE INSTALLATIONS

Matching ambient music - featuring the sounds of water, chimes, and Tibetan singing bowls; with mind relaxing visuals – colors, water, fish, flowers; Meg Torwl's computer installations offer a quiet journey, to rest the mind, emotions, body and soul.

Tiarika: 5 minutes looped. 2008.
Submerge yourself in an underwater journey, close up with rainbow parrot fish (ika), pink sea urchins, blue lipped clams, and purple star fish, emerging into violet lotus flowers (tiare), yellow frangipani, red hibiscus blossoms, green taro leaves and blue skies, of Rarotonga. Music: Spacious by Tony Riparetti and Micheal Gibian, water and chimes.

AQWAI: 11.5 minutes looped. 2006
AQUA - WATER - WAI - WATER - AWA - RIVER. AQWAI opens in Vancouver’s Fall with abstract images of rain, reflecting on leaf-filled puddles, winter Sunshine Coast beaches, lakes, and snow. To spring at the seas edge on Ayhus Island, light playing on the ocean floor, sea grass and shellfish beds, taking us underwater to Hawaiian coral and fish. Drawing to a close in summer, with the pebbled alpine streams, of Manning Park BC; Tongariro National Park, and Te Waipounamu - Aotearoa. Music: Spacious by Tony Riparetti and Micheal Gibian; water and chimes.

Singing Bowls: 40 minutes looped. 2004
Singing Bowls is a new media computer meditation installation utilizing the programs MaxMSP and Jitter to create a liquid music effect. The on screen colors pulse through a range of tones for each color of the rainbow, in time with the music - which is creating the color – as pitch, rhythm, and volume, are attached to red, green or blue. Creatively it is structured around chakra, (energy centers on the body) comprising 7 pieces of music - each 5 minutes long - one for each chakra. Each piece of music is composed for, and uses a Tibetan singing bowl for each chakra. The colors which appear on screen correspond to the color for each chakra, beginning with red and moving through the rainbow to violet. Singing bowls begins and ends with a 3 minute piece of music for all chakra, which creates all the colors of rainbow. Music: Tibetan Chakra Meditations by Ben Scott & Christa Michell, singing bowls, flute, triangle.