Zack Williams purchases a $10 token from the cash at The Red Door Store at Haliburton School of Art + Design. He walks to a 1970s era cigarette vending machine, drops the token in a slot, and pulls a knob. And out drops – not cigarettes – but a cigarette packsized box containing a miniature piece of art.
Meet The Great Canadian Art Machine at Fleming College in Haliburton.
Partners, John Ducker, a shop tech at the school, and full-time artist Lori-Anne Crittenden, came up with the local concept.
“A friend saw a very similar idea on vacation and sent me a video and John and I, in separate parts of the house, started looking for machines online,” Crittenden says. “John found some in the United States, got a trailer and his kid and they ventured off to pick them up.”
John picks up the story, saying “this machine came out of Walt’s Inn in Baltimore, Maryland; literally right out of the bar. We had to pick it up on a certain date or they were going to have to pay next year’s cigarette tax on it.”
He said it still had cigarette packages inside. Crittenden, a lapsed smoker, joked, “it had menthols – we haven’t been able to buy in Canada for years. So that struck me as funny.”
That was February 2020. COVID. The couple had a hard time getting parts. Nor could they meet face-to-face with artists they wanted to create the miniatures to put in the boxes in the machine.
“The brake went on hard,” Crittenden said. “We were sitting with a few thousand dollars’ worth of boxes.”
The machine needed cleaning.
They had to adapt it to take tokens, rather than coins. They had to have custom-made tokens. They even required a robotics expert. “As simple a system as it is, it’s rather complicated when you get into the guts,” Ducker said. “He (the robotics expert) was the second largest investment next to boxes, so it wasn’t without stress, but the machine itself, they’re just a lot of fun”
All up, the couple have three machines; one at HSAD, one in Beaverton and one roams for Christmas shows. The Xmas model had its maiden voyage last November at a craft shop. The one at the college is “very popular,” says dean Xavier Massé.
Ducker said it “is really to promote the work of the artists.” And Crittenden said many of those artists are from the HSAD family, either students or past students, or teachers. Scott Walling did the logo.
The machine can hold 800 boxes when fully loaded, and weigh 600-700 pounds.
“It’s funny because everybody wants to be so gentle with it, and I’ve told people ‘you’ve got to pull on the knobs; this thing has been in more bar fights than you can ever imagine. It’s been pounded upon’,” Ducker said.
Crittendon shows some examples of the works. The medium is eclectic, from fused glass to acrylic original paintings and digital work in between. There is fibre and blacksmithing.
It’s a challenge, she said. “Artists, blacksmiths in particular, who are so used to thinking big, shrunk their brains to create ornaments that fit in these boxes.”
Monika Boyd is the community outreach & recruitment officer for HSAD.
She said a lot of people walk the sculpture forest, then pop into the college and its shop, “and this really catches their attention. It’s a great word of mouth thing, but it’s a great way for us to showcase local talent, local artistry, and bring more people in. It’s been a great draw for us.”
The Red Door Store is open Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. You can find the Great Canadian Art Machine on Facebook and Instagram.
