Schedule
The Exhibition runs from June 2 to 19
The Fifty Fifty Percent Off Store is a subversion of the popular notion of “Victoria” as an idyllic tourist destination. Behind the superficial pantomime erected for the blocks of tourists milling up from the cruise ships, is a city out of touch with its own history and troubles. Homelessness is rampant; rental occupancy is close to zero, yet expensive mansions are selling for millions. Meanwhile, business after business is shuttering up downtown, because the rent has become so unmanageable.
“Victoria” has a difficult history. There is an acrimonious relationship between the government and the indigenous people of the area, stretching back to the first Hudson’s Bay Company fort. The city is built on unceded territories. The Garry Oak Meadows, once the foundation of local food systems, have been razed to build golf courses and strip malls. Horrifically racist incidents mar “Victoria’s” past. Yet none of these matters are openly acknowledged. The façade “Victoria” puts up as a sleepy enclave of charming old England doesn’t allow for such thorny conversations.
This store, then, presents a gift shop and tourist hub atmosphere that reflects an alternative representation of “Victoria”. Post cards and brochures offer up descriptions of “Victoria” with a counter-narrative vision. The store offers photographs on the walls using a combination of digital and analogue mediums.
Meanwhile, gift shop tee-shirts, hand stitched from vintage clothing, contain messages one certainly wouldn’t find in the popular shops along Government Street. Here, the twist on the prototypical souvenir is accentuated by the fact that the shirts are constructed out of scraps.
The store features clothing and postcard racks, as well as benches are all hand built combining old growth wood, salvaged from gentrification/renovation projects in Chinatown and Market Square, in combination with a series of racks and metal taken from dumpsters behind chain stores. The history of the city is literally becoming scrap for the dumpster.
The Fifty Fifty Percent Off Store is meant to be playful, but at the same time, it seeks to hold a troublesome mirror up to “Victoria”. The object is to record and question the massive physical and mental dispossession currently occurring here in “Victoria” as the city enters into a new phase of gentrification.
Pretty Good Not Bad is proud to open its inaugural selection of programming with an evening of experimental electronic music and immersive visual accompaniment in one of Victoria’s most esteemed venues, Alix Goolden Hall.
Making her Western Canadian debut, Laurel Halo brings her vaporous, modular electronic productions to Victoria for a live performance. Dense rhythms, lo-fi atmospheres, pop vocals and propulsive techno abstractions will marry with large scale custom visual programming from Victoria’s Comp_Zit.
Loscil will debut a brand new audio/visual performance focused on new material from his upcoming album on Kranky (due fall 2016).
Presenting their piece WAV_FORMS, Sean Evans and Chris Dammeyer are two Vancouver based multidisciplinary artists. WAV_FORMS is a collaboration between Evans’ explorations in sound design and Dammeyer’s ongoing experimentation with light, colour and texture.
earplugs will be provided free of charge
Schedule will be announced in June.
Over the past three years, Andrew Andersson has consistently curated one of the most crucial cross sections of music and art in Victoria’s experimental ecosystem.
Under numerous banners (Cavity, Copy Curse, Cabal), Andersson curates noise, darkwave, black/death metal, dark ambient and everything in between, often at the Intrepid Theatre, a staple in Victoria’ s independent music and arts community. Operating from Cavity Curiosity Shop’s HQ on Pandora St., his dedication to unearthing Vancouver Island’s experimental, avant and subversive is unparalleled within the capital city’s boundary.
Offering three evenings of free, all-ages programming, Cavity Presents will highlight local and regional artists, presenting an easy access point for anyone interested in absorbing genuine vibrations from the fringe.
Want to learn how to talk about (that weird thing you’re into) and have other people listen in? Want to co-create a podcast? Check out this hands on workshop in podcasting!
Join CFUV ARTSCAPE producers Katie and Harold to collectively co-create a multi-faceted sound collage amidst the current exhibition at theThe fifty fifty arts collective – the fifty fifty percent off store. This is a free workshop, no previous experience required!
This workshop will be hands on with a focus on recording, production and editing techniques. All ages and abilities welcome.
A note to participants: If you have any instruments, noise makers, speeches, reviews, rants, bodily sounds, dreams, critiques, philosophy, poems, spontaneous performance, voice memos, concert recordings, sound bites, or anything from your own artistic endeavors or from the#PGNB festival we encourage you to send it to artscape.podcast@gmail.com
This workshop is completely free to all participants, and is proudly supported by the BC Arts Council & CFUV 101.9fm
This workshop takes place on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen peoples so please hold that in your hearts and minds when engaging in the space!
Accessibility: This event is located on a street level space with wheelchair access.
1:00pm — NUU-CHUH-NULTH SINGERS
1:45pm — SEAN EVANS
2:30pm — T.A.C.
3:30pm — SEAN EVANS
4:15pm — Souns and Loscil
6:00pm — Liquid Transmitter
In partnership with the City of Victoria, PGNB presents the opportunity to casually wander into a permeable cloud of soundwaves; AMBIENT PICNIC, an afternoon of free ambient music in the heart of downtown Victoria is the communal centrepiece of the weekend. A selection of artists from across BC will share the stage, projecting sounds across Centennial Square, offering open exposure to new sounds. DJ sets and live performances will fill the sun-lit, open expanse of the capital city’s downtown core. Bring the kiddos. Enjoy some Eno and Stars Of The Lid outside.
Food trucks will be on site (vegetarian options will be available) as will a 19+ beverage garden serving beer and cider.
mild nudity, 19+ two pieces of ID required—liquor service available
ACcessibility is limited in studio robazzo; the venue involves stairs into the venue and stairs up to the second stage.
apologies over the confusion over the start time – official doors are 9:00pm
9:15pm – BROKEN RHYTHMS & OKPK
10:30pm – HYENAZ
11:30pm – PHèdre
PGNB is thrilled to present an evening dedicated to physical motion and its myriad, beautiful forms.
Opening the evening is a special performance from Victoria modern dance company Broken Rhythms and local electronic experimenter okpk. Framed around okpk’s compositions that balance abstract ambience and emotive club music structures, Broken Rhythms will perform choreography that is inspired and informed by okpk’s set of sonics.
Act two presents Berlin duo Hyenaz, who combine theatrical performance with original electronic music production and visceral, interactive dance. Light, sound, bodies and movement all intersect as Tusk and Mad Kate explore themes of animal-human metamorphosis, oppression, gender-fluidity, scavenging, the struggle for survival, interpersonal relations and sex.
Closing out the evening, Toronto duo Phèdre will unfurl their psychedelic melted-pop, offering their deep rhythms and a performance that epitomizes the word “community.” Don’t be surprised if you end up on stage with April and Daniel.
earplugs will be provided free of charge
Over the past three years, Andrew Andersson has consistently curated one of the most crucial cross sections of music and art in Victoria’s experimental ecosystem.
Under numerous banners (Cavity, Copy Curse, Cabal), Andersson curates noise, darkwave, black/death metal, dark ambient and everything in between, often at the Intrepid Theatre, a staple in Victoria’ s independent music and arts community. Operating from Cavity Curiosity Shop’s HQ on Pandora St., his dedication to unearthing Vancouver Island’s experimental, avant and subversive is unparalleled within the capital city’s boundary.
Offering three evenings of free, all-ages programming, Cavity Presents will highlight local and regional artists, presenting an easy access point for anyone interested in absorbing genuine vibrations from the fringe.
19+ beverage area will be available
NOTE: VENue will be a dark environment with large scale lighting projections
standing room will be available, as will the space to sit or lie down. attendees are encouraged to bring pillows.
Pretty Good Not Bad is proud to present an immersive audio/visual experience in a truly unique venue. A recent addition to Victoria’s downtown core, Crag X Climbing Centre is home to one of North America’s most contemporary gymnasium designs, with gigantic vertical walls covered in modular triangles. Exploring this geometric expanse, the evening’s artists will transform the space through immersive ambient music and large scale visual creative mapped to the wall’s triangular frames.
Manipulating their own original visuals and supplemental content supplied by the musicians, EMP Interactions has planned an array of visual stimuli that will explore strabismus (eye crossing) and pupillary response, with the large dark cavern of the gym offering participant comfort. The four-storey climbing walls will be mapped with audio-reactive projections, created specifically for the venue.
Vancouver artist Michael Red will bring the ambient sonics of his Souns project to the Crag X space, performing a live set of immersive scapes inspired by the natural world, outer space, and transcendence. Opening the evening will be Josh Stevenson aka Magneticring, delivering a live set of analog drones and psychedelic new age sound sculptures.
19+, two pieces of ID required
The second of two closing events of the inaugural edition of Pretty Good Not Bad offers the programming up to the fine folks at Weird Canada. Dedicated to documenting and promoting Canada’s collective underground, their presence and perspective is vital and we’re thrilled to have them on board supporting the festival, winding the weekend down at Victoria’s communal home of all things weird, the Copper Owl.
Two of Victoria’s post-punk staples, Freak Heat Waves and Fountain, will lead the proceedings. Opening racket from Lt. Frank Dickens from Vancouver and Winnipeg’s Conduct.
19+ beverage service will be available
Set times:
9:30PM – southwoods
10:15PM – iceberg ferg
11:00PM – Jean-michel blais
Inhabiting the towering wood and glass frame of one of downtown Victoria’s crucial social spaces, The Atrium, the closing Pretty Good Not Bad showcase offers a delicate environment filled with music that balances dark and light, force and fragility.
Jean-Michel Blais animates the piano with familiar methods. The 31 year old Montreal native composes enchanting pieces that echo the plaintive ambiance of Erik Satie, the technical figures of Philip Glass and the masterful moods of Chilly Gonzales. His debut il expresses a stunning range of compositional depth, grounded in emotional resonance and powerful melodic movements. Blais’ performance at PGNB will be his Western Canadian debut.
Iceberg Ferg is a Victoria staple that has developed his own brand of stripped down folk that recalls the finest Appalachian blues and fragile vocal stylings of Karen Dalton. In The Valley Of The Purple Prince is already one of 2016’s finest records and as so many already know, any Ferg performance will offer an opportunity to connect with one of Canada’s purest musical talents.
Southwoods is a project focused on the development of new instruments and performance techniques. Duncan MacConnell and Shawn Trail design unique, low-cost digital performance systems to expand on traditional instrument capability by incorporating custom signal processing and machine learning techniques. Their performances are aimed at exploring the new interactions these techniques provide.
earplugs will be provided free of charge
Over the past three years, Andrew Andersson has consistently curated one of the most crucial cross sections of music and art in Victoria’s experimental ecosystem.
Under numerous banners (Cavity, Copy Curse, Cabal), Andersson curates noise, darkwave, black/death metal, dark ambient and everything in between, often at the Intrepid Theatre, a staple in Victoria’ s independent music and arts community. Operating from Cavity Curiosity Shop’s HQ on Pandora St., his dedication to unearthing Vancouver Island’s experimental, avant and subversive is unparalleled within the capital city’s boundary.
Offering three evenings of free, all-ages programming, Cavity Presents will highlight local and regional artists, presenting an easy access point for anyone interested in absorbing genuine vibrations from the fringe.