Artist's Statement
smART is an arts collective consisting of Catherine McIntosh Jeffery, Molly Moldovan and Judith Myers, three Kawartha area artists who make and exhibit art individually as well as collaboratively. Our collaborative exhibitions focus on the socio-political issues that are important to us as individuals of conscience and as citizens of the world.

Our first collaborative exhibition, The Democracy Project, was a response to John Ralston Saul's Unconscious Civilization and was mounted at the Art Gallery of Peterborough in 2004. It dealt with aspects of globalisation, democracy, global investments, officialdom's language of deceit and, the environment.

Our current collaboration, IMPACT AIDS: 10 Years of Broken Promises, is in response to Stephen Lewis' Race Against Time, the 2005 Massey Lecture series on the topic of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa.

The artistic discourse will explore links between the vulnerability of entire populations to the HIV/AIDS pandemic resulting from conditionality of the Millennium Development Goals and other policies inflicted on African nations by groups such as the G8, World Bank, IMF, African Development Bank and other "members" of IFIS. Some of the art will depict the breakdown and devastation of the social and cultural fabric of Africa, as virtually an entire generation of young adults succumb to the pandemic, followed shortly afterward by their orphaned children.

A 12' high collaborative installation piece, Bottleneck, will be installed outside the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. It deals with the inaccessibility of anti-retroviral drugs both due to the refusal of "Big Pharma" to release the patents for inexpensive, generic production until after it was too late for millions of Africans, as well as the difficulty in distributing, within Africa, the drugs that are available.

IMPACT AIDS: is included in the cultural activities programme of the international AIDS conference which will take place in Toronto beginning August 13. A portion of any sale realised from this exhibition will be donated to the Stephen Lewis Foundation. We thank Kerry Fitzmaurice/Rebecca Gallery for enthusiastically embracing this project and providing a venue for our effort.

Price Range
Prices are still to be determined