By Drew Simpson
For the past 18 months, the Moon Milk series has set the scene for poetry readings in Hamilton. Featured poets, open mic readers and attentive audiences have filled intimate spaces with rhythm and clever alliterations.
With a quick Google search, you’ll discover that the Moon Milk name is also claimed by a drink influenced by Ayuverdic traditions and consists of warm milk and spices meant to help relieve stress before sleep.
There’s an interesting connection between a soothing nightly drink and a monthly poetry event. Upon meeting Moon Milk’s co-organizer, S. K. Hughes, the significance of the name was made more prevalent.
“We came up with Moon Milk as an extension of [our] Sister Moon Collective. We thought about poetry as the milk that comes from the moon. What the moon produces can be thought of as poetry, or art or other forms of beauty,” explained Hughes.
Through the Moon Milk series, poets and audiences alike can find relief in poetry. It’s both an outlet and a sense of community.
The Sister Moon Collective, which consists of Hughes and Lauren Goodman, focuses on building community through the arts, while aiming to carve out safer spaces and accessible events. Moon Milk has become the Collective’s main monthly event since its inception two years ago to fulfill the need for consistent poetry events in Hamilton.
[spacer height="20px"]“I think that community is often built on shared interests…Having a poetry-focused event has brought in some new faces and some new people who have started to attend every month. I think that’s been a community building event. We can share our enjoyment of poetry and our appreciation or the space and for connecting over the love of this art form,” explained Hughes.
Moon Milk first started at Casino Art Space. Similar to the Hamilton Audio Visual Node , the current space for the series, Casino was a shared studio and event space ran by 16 Hamilton-based artists. The series shifted to HAVN after Casino closed due to shifting priorities.
While poetry may seem to reside outside of HAVN’s mandate, the Moon Milk series was welcomed with open arms. The poetry nights fit in well within the artist-run gallery space’s other events, such as HAVN Select, which are weekly open gallery hours dedicated to showcasing their exhibits as well as tapes, zines and tees made by HAVN members and local artists.
Nights at Moon Milk start off with a featured reader, typically from Hamilton or Toronto, followed by an open mic. The routine was adopted from the Sophisticated Boom Boom events in Toronto that Hughes frequented while living there.
[spacer height="20px"]“There are lots of folks that come out regularly to the open mic…That’s [one] way we find out about people that we can have as featured readers. I’m also still quite involved in the poetry scene in Toronto…and sometimes I’ll reach out to poets I know in Hamilton [asking for’ recommendations that would be a good fit for our event,” explained Hughes.
Following the Sister Moon Collective’s focus on accessibility, Moon Milk is a pay what you can event and all monetary contributions go to the featured reader.
Moon Milk also strives to create a safe and inclusive space that fosters creativity. There are no themes to their events and everyone is welcome. People are invited to read completed works or poems in progress. They can even read other poets’ work as long as the appropriate credit is given.
Every Moon Milk is made special by the people who passionately read and intently listen. The series is fostering a community in Hamilton built around poetry, the milk from the moon.
[spacer height="20px"][thesil_related_posts_sc]Related Posts[/thesil_related_posts_sc]
Shakeel is a Toronto-based experimental musician and multimedia artist. The OCAD University student has performed solo and collaborative shows in her home-town, as well as Karachi, Pakistan and at the Torstraßen Festival, a music and arts festival in Berlin, Germany.
Sculpting Time is an exploration of the concept of time beyond our naturally linear perception of it. Unlike space, it is difficult to conceive time as a concept that can be designed and navigated. Shakeel intends to allow the audience to take time into their hands by using sandglass clocks. Sculpting Time evokes a sense of control over time as each individual interacts with the sand and subsequent sonic responses.
Jay is a Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from Concordia University, multidisciplinary artist, creative director and graphic designer. Her work revolves around questioning human behaviour and collective memory through digital and physical sculptural installations.
In Sacred Space, Jay explores belonging and the transience of home and loss of home through a multimedia installation. Physical structural bodies and floating holographic images are contained within healing structures that represent a place of a refuge. Sacred Space depicts that belonging can be found within one’s self.
Jenkins is a Hamilton-based multidisciplinary artist who is currently working at the Niagara Custom Lab, a motion picture film laboratory. He has a fond interest for handmade culture, writing, documentary practice and personal film making.
The E6 Process commemorates the chromogenic process for developing color reversal film through audio recordings. On the brink of extinction of color reversal motion picture stock, the E6 Process is a unique way of keeping the story of a precarious ritual and all its hidden labour alive.
Baptista is a Toronto-based creative developer, multimedia and interaction artist. Baptista’s artwork focuses on incorporating physical and digital realms. He is passionate about interactive sound and is currently challenging the ways mediums are used to interact with sound.
His installation is an experiment that explore the impact of dampening and absorption of a material on a sonic waveform. Participants will be able to make sounds with water, as the water controls an analog synthesizer capable of producing sounds electronically.
Eccinaccea is a Montreal-based artist. They produce multimedia installations, music, poetry and collages. Their work focuses on embracing the poetic and sensual potential of technology, such as the C# programming language and modal synthesis units, by transforming and incorporating them into audio and visual installations.
Beachballcoral@clone.zone (two of three from Incubation Cove series) is an ambient installation that incorporates Eccinaccea’s video and audio work. The installation is experienced in a virtual space through a Virtual Reality headset. Through the installation, Eccinaccea aims to explore and question the future of technologies like artificial intelligence, and how it interacts with the world if it becomes sentient and self-reproducing.
Basanta is a Montreal-based sound artist who aims to draw awareness to the undiscovered and overlooked aspects of the listening experience. His work utilizes a diverse range of media to create three-dimensional simulations to explore conceptual, sensorial, psychological, bodily and mechanical dimensions of the listening experience.
A Line Listening to Itself is a sound sculpture consisting of a single microphone tilted towards an extended line of seven reclaimed speaker cones. Basanta incorporated computer-controlled feedback networks, which allow the microphone to pick up its own amplification from each speaker, generating a seven note rhythm of sonic ebb and flow.
For a full schedule of events and gallery hours click here.
By: Vanessa Polojac
Peterbrough punk rock trio, and rock camp alumni Lonely Parade brought their hard-hitting vocals and grunge guitar to Barton Street’s HAVN as part of their 2017 Canadian tour.
Lonely Parade is a composed of childhood friends Augusta Veno (guitar/vocals), Charlotte Dempsey (bass/vocals) and Anwyn Climenhage (drums).
The trio were initially inspired to pursue music after joining Rock Camp for Girls! a children’s camp based in Peterborough, ON that gives a performance platform to female, non-binary and trans children and allows them to experiment within the genre of rock music.
“I played a guitar for the first time at rock camp. The ideology [at] the camp is to give opportunity to those who don’t normally get microphones put in front of them,” explained Veno.
Veno, Demspsey and Climenhage all attended the summer camp during separate moments in their lives and were highly influenced by the guidance they were given during their time there.
The band members discovered many successful women in music such as traditional rock n roll acts like Joni Mitchell and American pop-punk bands like the Care Bears on Fire. Growing up together music had a large influence on the friendship between the three of them.
During their time spent at the camp they individualized their style and eventually pursued musical projects of their own. They would often jam together at their parents’ parties before deciding to come together as Lonely Parade in 2011.
“We came to the realization that we wanted to start Lonely Parade when both of our little brothers had formed bands of their own,” said Veno.
“All three of us had an mutual understanding that we were going to pursue a musical journey together.”
Since then, Lonely Parade has released two studio albums: Sheer Luxury (2014) and No Shade (2016), numerous EPs including Splenda Thief (2015) and She Can Wait (2014) and had songs like “Girl” performed on Exclaim! TV.
“I think the listener can hear an evolution within our band. When we started out we were just a bunch of punk teens now we’ve grown into being young adults,” said Dempsey.
Although the band identify themselves as feminists, they would like to distance themselves from the notion of just being a female rock band. As a non-binary person Climenhage is conflicted with the ideologies that come along with being in a perceived all-girl rock band.
“All three of us had a mutual understanding that we were going to pursue a musical journey together.”
Agusta Veno
Guitarist/vocalist
Lonely Parade
“We think our music speaks separately to our political views. Many people assume or project a certain image or label on us that we personally do not agree with,” said Climenhage.
The past five years Lonely Parade has been touring throughout southern Ontario, unfortunately receiving unwelcomed remarks about their gender identities along the way.
“I don’t think about my gender when I go out in public so when people constantly comment about me being a woman in rock music I find it unnecessary,” explained Dempsey.
Style is an aspect of the band that Lonely Parade take seriously and gives them a platform to express their individuality in spite of attempts to collectivize the group with inappropriate labels.
“I think the way we portray ourselves shows our individuality. Like for instance I take inspiration and go for an androgynous style like Jayden and Willow Smith,” said Climenhage.
Lonely Parade is currently working on a third studio album and will be touring across Canada for the rest of 2017, with plans to return to Hamilton as soon as possible.
[thesil_related_posts_sc]Related Posts[/thesil_related_posts_sc]
The first time Hamilton saw HAVN (Hamilton Audio Visual Node) was at June’s art crawl, but the collaboration began many months before that, even before the founders moved into the studio/gallery space at 26 Barton St E. The members of HAVN – Aaron Hutchinson, Amy MacIntosh, Andrew O’Connor, Ariel Bader-Shamai, Chris Ferguson, Connor Bennett and Kearon Roy Taylor — came from diverse backgrounds at McMaster, with interests in new media, music and fine art. Despite these differences, they founded HAVN with the goal of creating a sustainable collaborative space with events involving interactive installation art and performance pieces.
People often come to Hamilton only for university and leave after graduating, but four of the seven HAVN members are Mac grads that have decided to stay. They’re all energized by Hamilton’s up-and-coming art scene.
“I just noticed there was this incredible rate of change taking place in the downtown community, and it was just a really inviting and supportive place to start out as a young artist,” said Taylor.
He emphasized the broader context for art in Hamilton and pointed to the city’s industrial past and more recent industrial decline.
“For this art scene to kind of come out as a really sincere cultural revival of the city, I think that there’s this general attitude of people downtown that this is something really special that has to be fostered and encouraged,” said Taylor.
Ferguson continued this idea, and said that Hamilton is “a good community because it’s supportive without being insular,” and that the way to help a community develop is not by being competitive or exclusive.
The members of HAVN readily made comparisons to Toronto, whose reputation as a cultural hub often overshadows Hamilton. Hutchinson agreed that entering the Toronto scene “seems super daunting,” and that in Hamilton “as long as you are saying something honest, people will dig it.” Bader-Shamai added, “It’s not competitive here like in Toronto.” Bennett nodded and continued, “It’s way harder to do what we’re doing in a more saturated environment like Toronto. I think that’s a really unique thing about the Hamilton art scene.”
Though James Street North is lined with galleries, getting to HAVN, which is located just off the street, is a bit like looking for a diamond in the rough. “Barton Street has this notion of being, like, the bad side of the tracks in Hamilton… It gives us some grittiness,” said MacIntosh.
All founders of HAVN feel that they are part of a big change downtown. “We’ve been here for four months and a print business across the street is opening and a ceramic studio is opening right beside us,” said MacIntosh. “I hear people talking about Barton Street like it’s like Parkdale, like it’s going to be the next hip place,” said Bader-Shamai. “So, maybe we’re just ahead of everybody else?” she added. “I kind of like that idea of being a pivotal space in Hamilon, like in terms of being at this crossing point… you’re starting to see spread off James Street North,” said Taylor.
Being so close to James Street has certainly provided opportunities for HAVN, with art crawls and Supercrawl attracting crowds. But the HAVN crew avoided the idea of being an art crawl-oriented space, and had lots of their own ideas for the future. “A community-based meditative painting practice that could happen any weeknight,” said Bennett. “Maybe lectures, maybe movie screenings,” he added.
HAVN is also going to be the new practice location for the Cybernetic Orchestra, who use live computer coding to make music. “[We’re going to] open it to the community… for participation as opposed to just being affiliated with McMaster,” MacIntosh explained.
But the biggest step for HAVN is their call for submissions, an open invitation to anyone who wants to do a project there.
“They can essentially have free reign as long as they don’t destroy it,” said Taylor. It all seems very fitting with the intended meaning of the word “node” in HAVN’s name. “It’s supposed to be like the intersection of a lot of different mediums, the intersection of ideas and art forms,” said Ferguson. The lines all come together but at the other ends they’re also going off in their own directions.”
If you are interested in checking out their work or submitting a project idea, go to havnode.com.
Isabelle Dobronyi
