About Last Supper Festival

About:

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 “Self-Made” 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 Sixth annual Last Supper.

Practice:

Lambastic is a creative datum line and resource organization of/for a community of multi-disciplinary artists.  A multi-sensory approach to curating allows for a more nuanced approach to storytelling, sensory aesthetics, and explorations in creative memory.  A cross section of talent from varying professional backgrounds, and emerging ideas (with an emphasis on criticism and productive dialog), our collective promotes open access to studio practice from different genres. To contextualize ones work and ideas within the local and global community is a contribution to its growth, and an engagement of social currents. A salon series of public critiques throughout the year, connector events between organizations, projects, and artists, dinner lecture series, educational programming and an annual exposition: community building is a vital function of our creative practice. The realization of collaborative endeavors with volunteerism and professional support builds momentum and strengthens responsibility for projects and their environments.

Curatorial Theme 2010: “Self-Made”

The Last Supper Salon 2010 will explore the creative individual as a self-made person and provocateur of social change.  In contrast to the male robber baron of our industrial age, the contemporary version of the ‘self-made man’ is an artist of any gender, discipline, representation; someone who is cross-cultural and cross-national, and someone tapped in to the individual as part of the border-less, collective wisdom created by open source ideas sharing.  Humanity is transforming it’s identity to fit the current needs of a new economy (ie-’green’ or ‘technology’ professions) and socio-political environment (waning natural resources, environmental disasters).  While artists have historically had the freedom to shed their outward appearance according to personal inquiry, the public now has a unique opportunity to molt old identities for new visions.  Using an experimental, multi-sensory, collaborative approach, we hope to critique the way we produce the goods and services that define our generation (as representations of ourselves), the way we consume media, products and our environment, and the way open dialog, DIY and technology promotes self-made identity prototypes.

2009 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.

2010 Catalog: