Mail Art Olympix: An International Show of Postage Art

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Monday, November 30th, 2009
Opening Night Fri. Nov. 13th 7pm - 9pm Gallery hours are Mon-Sat 10am - 5pm

The Comox Valley Art Gallery is pleased to host the first ever Mail Art Olympix November 14th – December 31st. This exhibition is Guest curated by Ed Varney who, in 1970, was one of the first Canadian artists to participate in what became the “Mail Art Network” . Mail Art has continued to flourish as an alternative art strategy up to the present.

The Mail Art Network had it’s origins in the late sixties as artists around the world began to exchange works of art through the postal system. It was an early form of social networking between artists and the transactions took place outside the “art world” of galleries, museums, and the art market. For some artists, Mail Art was a means of meeting other artists through the medium of their work, for others it provided a network of fellow artists in other countries to visit and perhaps spend a night while travelling. For others, particularly artists living under repressive governments, Mail Art provided a window on the world and an opportunity to make their concerns known.

New York artist, Ray Johnson, is usually considered the father of “Correspondence Art”, another term for Mail Art. Mail Art had antecedents in Fluxus and, before that, Dada. In the beginning, it was a one-to-one network – each transaction or trade was with one other person and the network expanded by the exchange of personal mailing lists.

Soon artists were arranging exhibitions: sometimes in their own studios, sometimes in public galleries, and finally in museums. But even these exhibitions were essentially DIY (do it yourself) expressions of an individual effort and enthusiasm. A Mail Art etiquette emerged. There were no entry fees and nothing was for sale. Everything sent in was exhibited. Generally, the work was donated to an archive instead of being returned and documentation, mostly in the form of a catalogue, was sent to all participants. Until the advent of the web and internet publishing, these catalogues were printed and mailed but now they often appear on web sites.

Mail Art takes many forms: postcards, decorated envelopes, artist made stamps (artistamps), collages, small original paintings and drawings, and every print form imaginable. Certain genre, like artistamps, the creation and use of rubber stamps, and art money all originated first as forms of Mail Art. “Concrete” or visual poetry, another early 1970s form, was contemporaneous with the origins of Mail Art and Mail Art has been associated with Conceptual Art, the zine movement, underground literature, the explosion of comic art, and with the early networking aspirations of the Internet.

In the 21st century, the high cost of postage worldwide has changed Mail Art from a personal outsider, DIY, and democratic art form into a form which often gets financial support from galleries – at least for printing catalogues and mailing expenses. The Mail Art exhibition has become an important force in both expanding the definition of what art is and opening the door to galleries and museums for idiosyncratic, outsider, and experimental artists as well as continuing to foster international connections, understanding, and exchange.

The Mail Art Olympix is founded on the assumption that the audience has the visual discernment to determine what it likes, and the curator is an organizer, not a censor or arbiter of “quality”. And it is democratic in that participation is not restricted to those who have excelled in some qualifying event – the work of all participants will be presented.

Shown here are examples of Ed Varney, Comox Valley Art Gallery and CVAG Director Tony Martin’s participation with Mail Art and Artistamps.

The Mail Art Olympix opens at Comox Valley Art Gallery’s Public Gallery Friday November 13th . For information about CVAG’s events please check out www.comoxvalleyartgallery.com