Seven years ago, Chloe Chafe and Andrew Eastman co-founded Synonym Art Consultation to make art more accessible and to break down the barriers of what art institutions could be.
Originally curating exhibits in restaurants and hair salons, they graduated to less restricting spaces. Moving onto the streets welcomed the creation of the Wall-to-Wall Mural & Culture Festival. At the same time, the two were producing live music events.
Now, the co-founders and co-creative directors will be officially combining the two mediums together by launching the Synonym Sound division of their company, bringing together local and Canadian music and visual artists.
“We’ve been kind of always thinking of different ways to employ artists and have artists working together with the public to create truly collaborative and authentic work,” Chafe said.
“Synonym Sound is a new specific division of Synonym Art Consultation. It’s really aimed at providing live music events, digital media strategies and music videos for musicians.
“So the whole concept is to really create a strong relationship between the visual arts community and the music community — to really work all together for one great purpose.”
Officially launching March 6, Chafe considers both the March 6 and 7 events as a “mini festival.”
“We’re kind of looking at the whole weekend as the launch because they’re kind of different styles of shows,” she said.
The start of the launch begins on Friday at the Synonym Art gallery, with a collaboration of visual and musical shows.
“We actually have a Vancouver-based electronic artist, Shamik, coming in, and so we’re going to have him in our gallery space, which is a really intimate space, with amazing acoustics,” Chafe said.
“It’s a chance to really have an intimate experience with electronic music and all of its intricacies […] so what we wanted to do was have him in our gallery in kind of a more fine arts space to really give that sort of new element to his work.”
While Shamik is performing, visual artists will be painting in the gallery.
“At the same time we’ll actually be having some mural painters in the back of our space. So, you can kind of watch that process happen at the same time,” Chafe said.
As for the Saturday show on March 7, The Tallest Poppy will be the venue. Anthony Oks will be debuting his new EP Take Time and will be joined by DJ Kilusan, Nestor Wynrush and DJ Zuki.
“We’ve been working with Anthony […] for many years,” Chafe said. “And so to have him work with us at The Tallest Poppy — he’s been our resident DJ there before and does lots of different events there — so that’s going to be a really nice chance to have a really cozy, warm — really personal experience with his record.”
“We’d love to see everyone come out. It’s going to be […] a really, really fun weekend and a chance to, kind of, break out of the winter vortex.”
Tickets for the March 6 show are $5, while tickets for the March 7 show are $10. For more information about Synonym Sound and Synonym Art Consultation, go to synonymartconsultation.com.
