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.


The L. S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia
Creative Production Division supported by the New School of Inquiry: Domestic Preservation and the Archive & Library Special Collections
May 2011


The Recipe, We all need a recipe. Begin with a recipe. “The Creative Production Division with support from the New School of Inquiry: Domestic Preservation and the Archive & Library Special Collections at the L.S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia” (aka Lisa Benschop) exhibits her recipe for Nostalgia in Buffet. Hand written on an index card, placed in a worn wooden recipe box from another era the solitary instructions describe a creative process. Her recipe suggests personal history, gathered with “fondness and nostalgia”, acknowledges the significance of creativity that results in originality when reverential memory triggers imagination. Thinking about some recipes for creation by artists over the years, F.T. Marinetti’s 1932 “The Futurist Cookbook” begins the recipe roster for how to venerably disseminate doctrine creatively. The 2010 “Street Art Cookbook” by Benke Carlsson and Hop Louie also comes to mind as a means to explore a creative processing. In her essay entitled An Aestheic of Nostalgia: Wallace Berman and his Proximity to the Object published in the UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History Issue 1 | 2010, Sophia Zweifel writes:

“Berman’s works not only simulated a patina of age, but were con­sciously placed within a history that Berman was constantly in the process of safe-guarding against the changeableness of society. The social, personal, and physical interactions between these pieces and their beholders, helped to construct his group’s identity, one strongly rooted in the shared sense of their own collective present. Along with that sense of a shared moment, however, came the subtle consciousness that this present was constantly being transformed into history.” ([3])


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Sugar Shack Summer Art Salon, Calgary AB

Sugar Shack Summer Art Salon, Calgary AB
Institute in Residence - arrival

summer residency - Creston BC summer 2008

summer residency - Creston BC summer 2008
on location, studio space in use