Lonsdale Gallery is proud to support the Rudele Artist Residency Fundraiser, which will take place on the upper level of Lonsdale Gallery on Saturday, April 9 from 7-10pm. The Fundraiser will take the form of a silent auction art sale. Artists will be donating artworks to benefit the next iteration of the Rudele Artists Residency, coordinated by Srdjan Segan.
Please see below for a description of the program.
A place acquires its meaning by being inhabited, related to, dwelled within. A house: having enveloped childhood games and mosquito swatters, 30s green cupboards and a forgotten Smurf sticker, experiences in sharing and solitude, the aroma of its garden and sounds of animals through half-open windows, gestures performed in tenderness and in the everyday – all this had been commonplace until ruptured by the devastation of civil war.
There is a stone house in the village of Rudele, Croatia, a hundred years old. It had been burnt, lost its roof, its windows metling into crumpled sheets. A charred bicycle once stood within one of its exposed rooms. It had withstood ten years of rain.
On his return after the war, artist Srdjan Segan, who had spent stretches of his childhood in this house, dreamt he could reinvigorate this space that was once his home by reinventing it as a gathering place. Every other summer, artists would be invited and welcomed to the house, to be provided with space to engage in conversation, studios to make projects, home cooked meals, and bicycles to explore the town nearby.
In 2008, the wait for reparation funds was finally over and the house was rebuilt. In 2009, the Rudele Artist Residency housed its first guest artists. In the summer of 2011, the courtyard at Rudele will reconvene for the second time with invited artists.
