The Last Supper Festival: Call to Creators

Greetings Creators,

It's officially Last Supper season! Incubate, Roast, and Ready your creative juices for 5th annual Last Supper Festival. This year's salon of ideas will bigger and better than ever, with an excellent cast of projects/planners/curators, pre-Season events (upcoming fundraiser, symposium), and more community interaction. Spark conversation, engage in critical analysis, gain exposure to a diverse audience, and enjoy your work in the context of other media by submitting your emerging projects to the 2009 call.
Submission Deadline: August 21, 2009
Submission forms available for download at: http://www.lambastic.com/about.html
For more information: http://lastsuppersalon.blogspot.com/

The Last Supper is a multimedia, project-based collaborative festival that addresses the act of consumption. Viewing the creative process as a cyclical, communally interactive conversation between media, it is a non-profit benefit event for the Food Bank of New York City. The Last Supper is an indoor-outdoor salon of ideas occurring in NYC during the crux of seasonal change at the end of September. As a feast for the senses and a symposium of genres, the gathering kindles the creative miasma infused by the city’s autumnal shift, harvesting the cornucopia of media in our own backyard and sparking an atmosphere for open dialog and collaboration. Short films and works from emerging directors and artists, edible installations from creative culinarians, performance, design projects, writing and music from several local bands and DJ’s will grace the dinner table. Each year, the show sparks dialog about consumption by curating projects based on a theme of global and local import. This year, more than 50 creators and volunteers will discuss ideas about “Means” with an audience of peers to evaluate our state of consumption. The decay of Summer and the emergence of Winter will be celebrated at the Fifth annual Last Supper.

Curatorial Theme: Means
In an atmosphere of political and economic crisis, along with dwindling resources, our precarious societal climate demands a review of the way we consume locally and globally. An artist’s resource, whether medium, message, or muse, is the voice of its cultural language. Creating is making something from nothing. Consuming, like all laws of matter, transforms the states of products. As creators, we must cherish this cyclical process and consider its affect. Repurposing traditional practice to our contemporary needs and desires has become vital to both aesthetic and functional life. Whether in the form of urban victory gardens, reclaimed handmade objects as art and design, DIY techniques, prevailing independent films and bands, the self-sustaining artist is a simultaneously complex, imperfect, and idyllic model for contemporary life. The Last Supper’s 2009 salon is the creative dialog about consumption where Means as motive, economy of Means, ways and Means, and Means of production are all tools for storytelling.

History
What began four years ago as an intimate word-of-mouth dinner party in a small backyard has evolved organically into what is known today as The Last Supper Festival. The event, which falls in late September--thus symbolically marking a change of seasons--is a multimedia experience that challenges the traditional methods of exhibiting and viewing artwork. Instead of singular artistic moments, the festival presents, in concert--just as it unknowingly did at the original backyard dinner party--a range of artistic mediums from local emerging talent including visual art, culinary art, film, performance and music--ie: a stimulation of all five senses. This unique approach to curation blurs the defined creative boundaries, thereby facilitating an exchange and connection between various artists, communities and audiences.

"..a feast for all five senses that will likely leave you with an unbuttoned fly." -Village Voice
"Will edible art give ‘artsy fartsy’ a new meaning?" -NY Magazine