YouTube is chock full of spoof ads, most of them awful. This morning I watched one that was surprisingly well made, if not particularly clever. The ad was a Toronto Maple Leafs-themed spoof on another Hogtown creation, the award-winning Dove Evolution video that drew attention to the deceptive beauty of the fashion industry.

Around the same time I was catching up on the Ralph Lauren photoshop scandal — what a sick yet well-deserved mess that has become. My morning browsing eventually got me thinking: how am I lying to my audience?

Now, I don’t believe I’ve pumped plus-sized shams out of my MacBook. But let’s not deceive ourselves. Even in the nonprofit world, we are susceptible to acts of exaggeration.

So join me and take this opportunity to review your marketing materials and see what information might be a tad doctored, touched up, or based on truthiness. I hope you’re not telling any whoppers, but don’t be surprised to discover inflated statistics, overstated challenges, or a touch of hyperbole.

Even the most innocent fibs can leave you exposed and vulnerable to criticism, and may jeopardize the trust of your supporters. The work you do is impressive enough without the need to embellish, so focus on communicating with fairness and accuracy. Your audience will thank you for it.

For your entertainment, here’s the slapshot spoof of the Dove Evolution video.

And here’s the original, award-winning spot.

Here are a few photos I shot from “Lady J”, a show that first played at the Montreal Fringe Festival this past summer. Billed as “a satirical look at the breakdown between municipal authorities and the communities they represent”, the play presents the rape and murder of “Lady Justice” by a cop, a priest and a policeman. The photos had been collecting dust on my hard drive for quite some time, but my friend Koby, who wrote the script and plays Joe the cop, was looking to spice up a grant proposal for her company, Mischief Theatre, so I finally dug the files out and got editing. It was a pretty fun shoot, set in the graffiti adorned alley behind Foufounes Electriques and lit by the three halogen flood lamps they were using for stage lighting.

This was was also a good excuse to give Adobe Lightroom 1.3 for a whirl, as I had put off upgrading for a ridiculous amount of time. I’ve been using the software since early in the public beta stage, and although I’ve been happy with it since day one, the most recent upgrades have made it far more usable. The clarity feature introduced in 1.1 is definitely one of my favourites, just don’t go overboard with it.

This month’s issue of Canadian Dimension features an interview with yours truly about Art Threat, a political art magazine edited by myself and published by überculture. Writer Ed Janzen suggests that Art Threat might be the best remedy for “culturally deprived politics and political deprived culture”, a prescription that I hope can be of use to an increasingly growing chunk of web surfers.

The interview took place several months ago, shortly after CBC Radio got me into the studio for a chat about the project. Since then, we’ve decided to focus more on the website and less on the periodical, although we are planning a anthology-type publication for Fall 2008.

Download the article (PDF)

Image: Araphat by Ed Janzen. See the artist’s statement and a larger image in the Art Threat Gallery.

While I will be updating this blog from time to time, my current online focus is Art Threat, an online journal of political art. It is the online component of überculture’s latest project, which should hopefully publish a print version of our political art magazine by year’s end. Please do visit, and leave and comments or suggestions you may have.