OBORO’s 25th Anniversary

Closing Ceremony
Saturday, May 2, 2009 at 3 pm
at La Fontaine Park (corner of Rachel and Parc-La Fontaine)

25th Anniversary Honorary Board
Stéphane Aquin, Geneviève Cadieux, Marie Chouinard, François Girard, Serge Ménard and Shirley Thomson

To celebrate the creative energy that has been flowing through OBORO over the past 25 years and, most of all, to express our deep gratitude to our community, artists and partners, we are organizing a great party with an opening banquet, performances, a garden-exhibition, a day for children, an art auction, an outdoor ceremony and many more surprises. Let the festivities begin… and continue!

Exhibition 
The gallery will be transformed into a luxuriant garden, populated with oboros grown from the imagination of more than a hundred artists. While meandering through the exhibition, visitors will discover surprising and engaging works of every stripe and be offered a flavourful cup of hot tea served by no less than the world-famous Trolley Bus, master of ceremonies of the World Tea Party. And somewhere in the middle of the garden safari, the small exhibition room will await inspired visitors who wish to create their own oboro.

Artists who have created an oboro
Lorella Abenavoli, ÆLab (Stéphane Claude et Gisèle Trudel), Gisele Amantea, Raymonde April, Anne Ashton, ATSA, Ingrid Bachmann, Irit Batsry, Pierre Beaudoin, Catherine Béchard, Sylvain Bouthillette, Claude-Marie Caron, J. R. Carpenter, Dana Claxton, collectif VIA (Corine Lemieux, Sylvie Cotton et Massimo Guerrera), Linda Covit, Gennaro De Pasquale, Nathalie Derome, Robert Deschênes, Roberto Di Giacomantonio et jenna d. maclellan, Daniel Dion, Pierre Dorion, Pascal Dufaux, Denis Farley, Scott Ferry, Nikki Forrest, Marc Fournel, Karilee Fuglem, Stéphane Gilot, Cynthia Girard, Kakim Goh, Anne Golden, Adad Hannah, Livienne Hélène César Grenier et Annie Zielinsk, Charles Guilbert, Steve Heimbecker, Nelson Henricks, Claudine Hubert, Lynn Hughes, Juan Diaz Infante, Istvan Kantor, Shié Kasai, Kevin Kelly, Corinne Kennedy, Éric Ladouceur, Laiwan, Valérie Lamontagne, Paul Landon, Diane Landry, Stephen Lawson, Gerard Leckey, Chloé Lefebvre et Jean Dubois, Glenn Lewis, Katherine Liberovskaya, Paul Litherland, Chris Lloyd, Caroline Loncol Daigneault et François Turcot, Annie Martin, David McFarlane, Yong Soon Min, Bryan Mulvihill, Serge Murphy, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Chantal Neveu, Diane Obomsawin, Rickie Lea Owens, Alain Paiement, Jonathan Plante, Ed Pien, Richard Purdy, Alexandre Quessy, Ramona Ramlochand et Diana Shearwood, Jocelyn Robert, Clive Robertson, Cheryl Sim, suschnee, Barbara Steinman, Sarah Stevenson, Angèle Verret, Vivan Sundaram, Nancy Tobin et Robert, Barbara Todd, Brad Todd, Martha Townsend, Maxine Thrasher, Karen Trask, Annie Tremblay, Sheila Urbanovski, Stéphane Vermette, Valerie D. Walker, Kathryn Walter, Peter White, Irene F. Whittome, Mary Wong, Paul Wong, Florian Wüst

Banquet and Gallery Opening 
Spring winds have breezed into our preparations: on the night of April 18^th, OBORO completes its transformation into a lush and cheerful garden. Multicoloured platters will carry succulent fragrances and exquisite morsels as an offering to guests and friends. Throughout the evening, bustling performances, sparks of music and magical winks will flutter by, and each visitor will receive a special edition work created for the occasion. Masters of Ceremony: Pierre Beaudoin and Claudine Hubert. Opening banquet performers: Yves Alavo, Mehdi Benboubakeur, Chœur Maha, Raf Katigbak, Cheryl Sim, Roger Sinha and Ziya Tabassian.

OBORO’s Art Auction 
The works created for the exhibition will be on auction from 5 pm to 11 pm on Saturday, April 18. Proceeds of all sales will go towards OBORO’s endowment fund, created so that OBORO can continue its significant support of artists and the art community over the years to come.

Children’s Day 
On Saturday, April 25, from 2 pm to 4 pm, parents and children are invited to drop by the workshop and create an oboro in the company of a facilitator. In order to rejuvenate creative perspectives and quicken critical eyes, the children, following their whims, will offer guided tours of the exhibit to the adults.

Performance by Claude-Marie Caron
Inspired by Lautréamont’s famous words “beautiful as the fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table”, Beau comme is constructed as an allegorical self-portrait of Claude-Marie Caron as he celebrates 25 years of OBORO. Inventor of the name and member of OBORO’s first Board of Directors, Claude-Marie Caron is a multidisciplinary artist, a performer, a tailor and a master-teacher of Tai-Chi. Saturday, April 25 at 4 pm.

Closing Ceremony 
Saturday, May 2 at 3pm, OBORO’s garden relocates to Parc La Fontaine for the Closing Ceremony, where everyone is invited to join for an outdoor picnic and to attend a planting of a tree in the parc. As an inspiration to future decades and an offering to the community, this tree encompasses OBORO’s mission: to contribute to our collective heritage and to a culture of peace.

Art Edition
Twenty-five times, spring, summer, fall, winter… A series of postcards created especially for this anniversary by artist suschnee, OBORO’s co-founder. These four original works, collected into a box set, celebrate the creative energy that circulates at OBORO from one season to the next. Available from April 18.

Manifestoboro
For the 25^th Anniversary, artists and close collaborators of OBORO have banded together to create the Manifestoboro, a collaborative nursery-rhyme/drawing/poem/manifesto for your pleasure and inspiration.