November 13 – December 31, 2010
Media/Retail Space
This hands-on exhibition surveys Zack’s vital contributions to mail art, performance and other “open source” cultural movements of the 60s, 70s and 80s, focusing primarily on his correspondence novels and the development of the “Monty Cantsin open popstar” concept.
Art and life were permanently inseperable for David Zack. After instigating the Nut-Art movement in San Francisco in the 1960s, he moved to Calgary in the late 1970s, working as a newspaper journalist. He disappeared in 1995 after having spent five years in a Mexican jail for defrauding the US Government and is rumored to have died in San Antonio, Texas.
Exhibition curator Istvan Kantor received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2004. His 1976 meeting with David Zack in Budapest developed into a life-long collaboration that continues to fuel his own Neoist art activites today. Pushing the theatrical, opera-like quality of his performance work through the use of video has gained Kantor international recognition as a contemporary artist. He is also Monty Cantsin – and so are you!
The exhibition celebrates the recent publication Amazing Letters, The Life and Art of David Zack, edited by Istvan Kantor and published by The New Gallery, Calgary.
Organized and curated by Istvan Kantor
Programming
Publication launch with Istvan Kantor
Saturday November 13, 2 – 5 pm
