the Mandate
The L. S. Benschop Institute supports and promotes the use of imagination and nostalgia in both professional and everyday creative work by providing opportunities and resources to creative workers and the community at large. The Institute participates in and encourages research, development, exhibition, and distribution of imagination- and nostalgia-based creative works. The Institute's opportunities for creative workers include public lectures and open discussions, open critiques, experimental social activities, and other public events. The Institute's resources include the Archive of Miscellaneous Obscurities and Anonymous Belongings and the Institute's Library, as well as the results of the Institute's research. The Institute enjoys a vibrant network of cooperating creative workers willing to share their equipment and experience to creative workers engaged with the Institute. The L. S. Benschop Institute offers a contextual framework and a supportive environment in which to honour, explore, and document for posterity the meaning, function and manifestation of imagination and nostalgia in the creative work of our everyday lives and our fine arts.
an excerpt from "The Challenge of Leisure" by Charles K. Brightbill, 1960
"If art is really an insight into reality and thus approaches the spiritual, its close relationship to leisure is established. If art is our imagination, however regulated and controlled, which emerges in an aesthetic form through the process of organic evolution, it is not only related to play, it is play. And if, finally, art is an expression of our feelings which, when released, results in beauty - as I believe it is - it chooses for its explanation the least challenged, the most sensible, and the most acceptable theory of recreative behavior - a means whereby we give vent to our need to express and create."
Sugar Shack Summer Art Salon, Calgary AB
Institute in Residence - arrival
summer residency - Creston BC summer 2008
on location, studio space in use