The Apostoleas Arts Collective explores the captivating bond between the audio, visual, and tactile; and the creative bond it has with our community members. We explore the interaction between sound, objects, and humans, and how that interplay can further allow for new art to be created by any member of our community. As a collective, we capture this, and record the creation of the original piece, performed and created by our visual and sound artists on the opening nights of our exhibitions to leave as documentation that can be uploaded to our social media sites, and as film that can be presented at galleries and through like-minded organizations, to preserve the timelessness of the original piece and inspire other artists and community members to create art.
Through our work, Apostoleas explores this relationship: between the traditional creation of a painted canvas and the creation of a musical score and how the two inspire each other simultaneously. Working with various venues in Hamilton, Apostoleas hosts exhibitions, in which our local visual artist, Tania LaCaria, paints live, and Danielle Donville, our pianist, composes an original score, along with sound artists Steve Deeps, Ryan Barwin and Jeff Heisholt, of The Trews, creating digitized musical sounds—the purpose being to understand how the music and sounds influence the painting strokes, and how the painting strokes conversely influence what Danielle plays on the piano and the synthesized sounds that are created by Ryan and Jeff. This juxtaposition demonstrates how sound and visual representations interplay with each other and challenges the notions of how our minds have been trained to interact with what we see and hear, and how we interact with the stimuli that is around us.
Keeping accessibility at the forefront of our work, ensuring that everyone in our community has access to the arts (persons with mobility issues, physical disabilities, those that are deaf or blind, persons with lived experience of mental health, and of course those that are not quite ready to believe we are in a post-COVID world), our teams technology experts, Jim Ruxton and Steve Deeps, live-streams the original collaborative piece to dedicated project website pages, our YouTube page, and our Facebook page.
Additionally, Jim and Deeps wire brushes and headsets using movement sensors, LED lighting, and personal controllers that allow individuals at the exhibition to physically interact with the piece; for example, as a viewer picks up and approaches a section of the painting it will trigger an audio response from the original musical score; as the brush interacts with another area of the work, different music from the score will play. Additionally, the soundboard and digital equipment used to create the original score is made accessible to viewers allowing them to digitalize their own personal score and pair it with the painting. This allows for our deaf and blind communities to engage with the piece and additionally makes the work more engaging to youth, encouraging a lifelong appreciation of the arts. This likewise provides every person that visits one of our exhibitions to have their own unique personal experience as they engage with the work created by the Apostoleas Arts Collective.
As we also want to encourage young people living in Hamilton to engage with, and participate in the arts, our new Project Manager, Becca Dowden, is forming partnerships with both the Hamilton Wentworth District and Hamilton Wentworth Catholic District school boards, and Big Brothers Big Sisters Hamilton to ensure that youth in our city have the opportunity to interact with, and be inspired by new artistic practices presented in Hamilton.
Our goal as a Collective is to present new and innovative arts practices that inspire, engage, and mesmerize everyone in our Hamilton community.
