Aisle 4 is a curatorial collective based in Tkaronto/Toronto working in social practice and public art. Learn more about us; view our complete list of collaborators; and explore our current & past projects, including exhibitions, public programming, research, and advocacy. Aisle 4 is a curatorial collective based in Tkaronto/Toronto working in social practice and public art. Learn more about us; view our complete list of collaborators; and explore our current & past projects, including exhibitions, public programming, research, and advocacy. Speed Acquainting
May 7, 2015
Art Gallery of Ontario
Toronto
First Thursdays: Close Encounters
Alvis Choi a.k.a. Alvis Parsley
Speed Acquainting was a public program that responded to the event theme “Close Encounters” and involved a series of fast-paced, real life, face-to-face interactions facilitated by artists that playfully attempted to break the social barriers between different groups and turn attendees into lifelong acquaintances. Riffing on the popular singles’ activity, speed dating, but removing its normally romantic objective, the program encouraged participants to meet, mix, and mingle with each other regardless of age, gender, profession, or marital status.
Aisle 4 invited Toronto artists to participate in a variety of ways: Cameron Lee hosted and emceed the event, guiding participants through 3-minute timed interactions; Alvis Choi aka Alvis Parsley, Manolo Lugo, and Jon Sasaki created custom ice-breaking exercises for each pair to engage in; and a dozen other Toronto artists and collectives attended as ‘acquaintancing’ participants, orchestrating interactions between the art world and the general public. The program drew individuals away from the comforts of the digital realm, asking them to embrace the awkwardness and vulnerabilities of face-to-face interactions with strangers in hopes of establishing meaningful connections.
Press
Uniting strangers through art, Katrina Clark, Toronto Star, 2015
Acknowledgements
Speed Acquainting was made possible through support from AGO’s First Thursdays programming team, Bojana Stancic and Sean O’Neill. Special thanks to the artist participants: Kendra Ainsworth, Brette Gabel, Jane Hutchison, Jessica Karuhanga, Michael Madjus, Humboldt Magnussen, Morgan Mavis, Rebecca Noone, Daniella Sanader, Erin Stump, and VSVSVS.
About the works
Alvis Choi a.k.a. Alvis Parsley
Alvis Choi, aka Alvis Parsley, prompted participants to open up and share a level of quiet intimacy with each other through a set of four actions. Instructions ranged from responding to a variety of random but revealing questions, to drawing a portrait of their partner and gifting it to them, to reading the poem A Woman Speaks by Audre Lorde slowly together.
Manolo Lugo
Manolo Lugo’s exercise employed psychodynamics, a psychological word exercise that loosens up the unconscious, as a means to connect strangers. Transcribing words from titles of each fragment of Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse onto individual cards that could be selected at random, Lugo invited participants to respond to each, taking turns and responding back and forth for the 3 minute duration.
Jon SasakiJon Sasaki embraced failure, humour and absurdity in his attempts at breaking down social barriers. His ice-breaker exercise involved a game activity where participants could draw from a pile of random components from a variety of different board games. In the three minutes allotted, partners were instructed to select pieces, invent a game, negotiate the rules as they went along, and declare a winner (or two).
We acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty and are grateful to live and work on the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat Peoples.
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