Reviews, Press, Publicity, Etc.
Thomas Campbell, Comics Blogger #12, Spring 2025
Goldenrod Magazine (Self-Published)
More jokes. More jokes... More jokes. These weren't too bad actually. Goldenrod Magazine has running gags through the series that have some pay off. Or at least momentum. What works here over the other reviewed comics above is timing. Even though most of these didn't invoke a chuckle, nothing overstays its welcome. All the strips are pithy and varied. Different voices and approaches are in the mix. So if one page doesn't hit, you'll read three other jokes in the next minute. It's merciful. Some of the conceits like the faux Italian speaking family of editors and jokes about goblins are hack, but the weirder stuff in here is genuinely weird. And there's some actual clever material as well. A page of "unedited" comics in number two (it's a collage of panels, faces, and word balloons) works well for instance. More importantly there's a coherence to the scattershot approach here. It's clear there was editing involved. That fat was trimmed. Across the three issues, storylines have room to breathe and develop like one following a flailing standup comedian. The stakes are raised in a way that feels organic. There's a hook to want to continue reading. This may be one for the more lighthearted out there.
“The weirder stuff in here is genuinely weird. And there's some actual clever material as well.”
Scott McGovern, EdVideo Open Circuit #26:
A super in-depth interview with Ryan Cassidy by Scott McGovern of EdVideo. Originally streamed May 21, 2020. Topics include Trinketron, trinkets, and UniCorp Industries‘ various projects and areas of interest. (1 hr 4 min.)
Dani Duesbury, Defend Forest City #2: Farhi is silencing artists an Interview with Ryan Cassidy
If you're one living in London or the surrounding area, you're probably all too familiar with Farhi signage even if you don't fully know the company and the man behind the name. To put it simply, Shmuel Farhi and his company purchase buildings across the city just to leave them empty, either waiting until the building is too far gone and demolishing it, or putting up for lease or sale at an insane price. While he continues to do this, more Londoners are forced to the streets at an all time high of homelessness in our city. Only the London Free Press and a handful of artists stand against Farhi publicly, one being Ryan Cassidy. Cassidy's "Fvck Farhi" shirts are probably one of his most notable/recognizable works in the London area, so much so it caught the attention of Farhi himself.
Cassidy moved from Guelph to London in 2021 with the goal of opening a studio. Having lived in London 20 years prior while going to Fanshawe, he assumed he would be able to find a small studio with light and a sink very easily. Despite the visible vacancies downtown, he struggled to get a space anywhere. While looking online he found places that were listed for long over a year, full commercial properties sitting completely dead on Dundas or Richmond at an obscenely high cost. Through looking into several connections in town, he was finally directed to the arts council to help him seek his space. His email was sent to several people until it came to one Kathy Navackas. At the time, the downtown BIA (Business Improvement Area) had a program called the Start-Up Accelerator that was founded with the assistance of Navackas. This program would use money funded by the Ontario government to purchase vacant lots, renovate these spaces, subsidize rent, and match up businesses with local entrepreneurs to help get them going. All of this was to stimulate and add more businesses into downtown.
Under the Start-Up accelerator program, Cassidy and his partner opened Test-Market. His goal with Test-Market was to have an open studio for creatives to do their work and have a place to sell and present it all along with hosting several workshops and exhibitions. This is how Cassidy started producing the "Fvck Farhi" shirts, to get the public in the know of the gallery while drawing attention to this massive parasite slowly killing London's downtown area. The shirts started selling like crazy, drawing more and more attention both positive and negative from people all over London. It even took a huge boom when Museum London bought some shirts and reposted them over social media. It was all going well until Cassidy was informed by Navackas that the shirts were not going over well within the city council and Farhi himself so much so there were full-length formal meetings about the shirt conducted with the downtown board. It was brought to the downtown area's BIA that Farhi was going to attempt to sue Cassidy. There was even a point when several different men under Farhi's payroll came into the gallery daily to harass and threaten Cassidy regarding the shirts. This all kept building and building until Farhi put pressure on the BIA to terminate the Start-Up accelerator program.
What makes the termination. of this program more appalling is the fact that Farhi does not give money into the downtown BIA. In theory, every business that operates in the downtown core or in a majority Ward 13 pays the BIA to maintain beautification, events, etc, Instead, management of these areas is placed onto the tenants to uphold and the independent business owners have to pay the BIA. Since Farhi is considered a property owner and does not run an "independent business" he doesn't pay a cent into maintaining downtown, yet he retains this sort of unspoken authority due to his monopoly within all levels of city government.
With the program axed, Cassidy struggled to pay the full fees of rent downtown with the government subsidies and grants being taken away, Test-Market's storefront and studio shut down in January 2023, only three months into its operation. Now, eight months after, no other business or tenant has moved into the Test Market building leaving it completely vacant, with it likely staying that way for many more months or even years to come. This hasn't stopped Cassidy from continuing his art and even occasionally running Test Market pop-up shops along with an online shop.
This issue, while being exploited by Farhi and countless other holding companies in the city, is not the root cause of the problem. The cause comes from our very own municipal government. These vacant properties, without a government mandated vacancy tax, earn the property owners more money rather than maintaining or renting the property. What our city needs to do is to either set a vacancy tax or to expropriate some of these properties, maybe a mix of both, Otherwise the downtown core will slowly die out without businesses flowing, impacting not only our city economically but also on a societal level. Even today we are starting to see this happen with more and more local businesses boarding up. It's up to us to act now and hold our government accountable, and to hold these corporations accountable.
Dana Bellamy, The Ontarion, April 7, 2016: Making art more accessible through humour and crap
In 2014, the multinational corporation known as Unicorp commissioned local artist and inventor, Ryan Cassidy, to build the Trinketron, an artificially intelligent machine that creates custom objects using highly sophisticated interfaces and algorithms. Or at least that’s how the story is told. In an interview with The Ontarion, Cassidy reveals the truth: “It’s really just me, sitting inside of a box, making things for people.” The concept sounds so simple, but under the guise of complex machinery, the Trinketron 6750 is an imaginative performance piece geared toward making art interactive and accessible to everyone. Essentially, the Trinketron 6750 is a “vending machine that supplies people with what they want most in a small object,” explains Cassidy. Each item sits at a cost of five dollars, but the customer is able to select what they want based on a series of options, from funny to scary and useful to useless. Based on the number of these selections, one might end up with a fashionable pizza brooch or a questionable souvenir of gum once chewed by James Franco. Each object is a one-of-a-kind, handmade treasure aimed to put a smile on your face.
Originally presented as the Trinketron 5000 at Kazoo! Fest in 2014, the new and improved model will be returning to the festival’s visual art program this year with the help of Ed Video Media Arts Centre backing the project. The original model was made from cardboard and required Cassidy to create each unique object in real time. “[Each item] took like twenty minutes,” Cassidy explains, “I had two ovens in there, and I’m making things out of clay and baking them, and trying to control the lights and the sound […] and that was crazy.” Cassidy was able to learn from the first installment that there are only so many options that people are likely to choose. “Ninety-nine per cent of people all want the same things,” says Cassidy, noting that, this time around, many of the items can be made in advance based on six common product types. “And that one per cent, you know, the fly in the ointment […] they get a custom object.” These evolutionary findings will help the Trinketron’s transactions run smoother and quicker this year, allowing the artist to focus more on the machine’s theatrics and, more importantly, the engagement with his “human customers.”
The Trinketron 6750 is by no means a high-brow piece of art in the traditional sense. It is meant to be a little goofy, a little quirky, and a whole lot of fun for everyone involved. However, despite Cassidy’s aversion to the perceived “chin-scratching” nature of art academia, there is a deeper level of meaning behind the piece. “There is a sort of subtext or undercurrent of seriousness to it,” he confesses, “like a lot of these goofy products are sort of lighthearted, satirical statements about just the nature of crap-culture in general.” Cassidy offers his own love-hate relationship with the dollar store as an example of this fascination: “It’s so organized and everything smells like plastic—it’s great. But, I mean, it’s a huge evil […] It’s just terrible stuff.”
As the idea evolves, Cassidy hopes to make the Trinketron into more of a permanent structure that he is able to take around to different venues and events, sharing his work with as many people as possible, and breaking down the barrier between art and crap.
Why Ryan Cassidy Rules by Terri, Ryan’s Mom (2016)
Ryan Cassidy rules because he has no limits.
His imagination is taller than the highest mountain and wider than the biggest ocean. It’s a conglomeration of all these things that keeps the little boy alive and well inside a grown up body. He’s never wrong but being right all the time isn’t satisfying to him either. He has to question and try out all the whys and what ifs before he can truly commit. He is exhausting to me but he never gives up. He can see a million miles further than me – and i wear glasses! He has a big head… to store all his memory banks of bits and pieces that no one saw or remembered except for Ryan. He must be an elephant…he never forgot anything. My first recollection of his artistic talent was a mural he drew behind the couch on the wall of a rented apartment. I probably should have bought him some sketch paper instead of having to repaint the living room before we moved from there.
His kindergarten teacher called me at work one day to tell me that Ryan had painted the walls and floor of the coat room and kids lunch cubbies at the back of the class. I asked her where she was when he did this and she told me she was with another student. She should have known Ryan was a full time job himself. It was her fault for not watching him, not my fault for giving birth to him.
Ryan’s teenage years were challenging to say the least. It was then that i realized that along with his artistic ability he was also a great story teller. He had the best excuses for being out all night that included a trip to Toronto to see Marilyn Manson at 14 years old. After hours of worry and some police intervention, Ryan sheepishly showed up and explained that he figured it was better to ask for my forgiveness for going than to ask permission to go in the first place. Made perfect sense to me. That’s just how he rolled back then. Now that he is a young man, I still try to supervise his activities and keep him in line. Its a little more difficult since he lives in the big city now. Recently, he spent some time at my house working on his TrinkeTron trinkets. He didn’t allow me to help him, but I did supervise and pour his wine. He rules, but I rock. We are a great team.
Terri McDonald is Ryan Cassidy’s mom.
Daniel Sylvester, Exclaim Magazine Mar 22, 2007:
In 2006, the Acorn resolutely supplanted themselves as one of Ottawa’s brightest bands; receiving a great deal of love from the local media, a record deal with Paper Bag Records and flattering reviews for their December released EP, Tin Fist. It seems fitting that the band would decide to kick off an ambitious cross-Canada tour with a scaled-up home show, serving as a benefit for University of Ottawa station CHUO 89.1 FM (which employs vocalist/guitarist Rolf Klausener) and as a thank you to the city that has supported them. Montreal two-piece Missing Children provided the opening entertainment, displaying an aptitude to intermingle British dream pop and American freak-folk with a style that can only be described as "timid-core". Playing only their second show, the duo contemplatively delivered the manifesto of a promising group supplemented by resourceful songwriting and instrumentation. The uneasiness of Missing Children’s performance greatly contrasted that of the Acorn’s, which would prove to be a lesson in on-stage confidence and charm. Paul Kearns and Jake Bryce joined the nominal five-piece on dual percussion (the latter of local heroes Fiftymen and regular Acorn contributor) giving those very familiar with the Acorn’s music an inimitable new sound. Klausener provided the breadth of the night’s entertainment with a sample of his increasingly crafted songwriting mostly noticeable on songs written for their upcoming LP with witty in-between song banter as well. The light atmosphere of the night was supported by keyboardist Keiko Devaux’s humorous coaching of Kearns, who had not heard most of the band’s songs before the performance. Guitarist Howie Tsui’s guitar often outpaced Klausener and Jeff Debutte’s folk-based style, and their overtly comfortable stance trumped the music’s natural propinquity. For those who were in attendance though, there was a feeling that we were experiencing a band destined to become Ottawa’s finest export.