- April 7, 2016 to May 8, 2016
-
Análekta – meaning “to gather up; to collect” – an exhibition of new works by Merle Addison, documents his switch from analogue to digital. Reworking old images using digital overlays, the final prints owe as much to printmaking as photography. At once modern and nostalgic, the works transform the media through their highly manipulated surfaces.
By Merle Addison - Curated by Glenn Alteen
724 Programs
Programs- May 27, 2016 to June 25, 2016
-
High Kicks Into the Light Forever and Ever and Ever is a new video installation by Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth Milton. Composed of a series of immersive projections that explore performative ritual and material play, the work revolves around a procession of participants meditating under the hot glow of a spotlight. Drenched in identical heavy make-up and lacquered in artificial sweat and tears, a series of ‘women’—disembodied faces displaying exaggerated markers of high femininity—form a fevered chorus-line for the camera. Melting under the heat, the performers’ make-up is a tenuous composition, eventually smeared away in a gesture of (choreographed) self-effacement. What is constructed fades, or rather, is obliterated. The make-up, so recognizable as an overstatement of gendered subjectivity, becomes a kaleidoscopic abstraction on white linen, acting as both colour field and performance document. Alongside sequences of props, costumes, and the garish refuse of novelty-store glamour, the images disarm assumptions of a composed subject, and point to the possibility of transcendence, an ecstasy in glitter.
By Elizabeth Milton - Curated by Vanessa Kwan
High Kicks Into the Light Forever and Ever and Ever
- June 13, 1990 to June 30, 1990
-
"The title April/Paris refers to how April and Paris are the centres of time and space that have inspired the work in this exhibition. The ceramic forms of cups, teapot dresses, and sentinals are the shapes Jeannie has developed and worked with since 1982, and were made in Vancouver before she left for France in the fall of 1988."
By Jeannie Mah
April/Paris
- July 21, 2016 to August 20, 2016
-
Four Faces of the Moon is multi-media installation that provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the elaborate sets, puppets, and props created for the new stop motion animated film by the same name. The story is told in four chapters, which explore the reclamation of language and Nationhood, and peel back the layers of Canada’s colonial history. A personal story told through the eyes of director and writer Amanda Strong, as she connects the oral and written history of her family as well as the history of the Michif (Métis), Cree and Anishinaabe people and their cultural ties to the buffalo. Canada’s extermination agenda of the buffalo isn’t recorded as fervently as it was in the United States, yet the same tactics were used north of the border to control the original inhabitants of the land. This story seeks to uncover some of that history and establish the importance of cultural practice, resistance and language revival from a personal perspective. Artistic collaborators include: Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Raven John, Femke van Delft, Chloe Bluebird, Dora Cepic, Dusty Hagerud, William Weird, Daniel Guay, Lydia Brown, Terrance Azzuolo, Callum Paterson, Tim Daniel, Joce Weird, Ian Nakamoto, Lynn Dana Wilton, Zed Alexander, Danielle Wilson, Damien Buddy Eaglebear, Colour Sound Lab Studio, Boldly Creative, Outpost Media and Menalon Music, along with the support of many others.
By Amanda Strong - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Four Faces of the Moon
- July 3, 1990 to July 21, 1990
-
Linda Mennie's exhibition WHERE THE SMOKESTACKS LIVE raises questions about our environment and the role that industry plays in our lives, death, sexuality and creativity. This mixed media work is created from man-made debris, organic materials, and photographs of smokestacks; transforming these elements at the artist attempts to reconcile paradoxes and contradictions of our existence.
By Linda Mennie
Where the Smokestacks Live
- September 8, 2016 to October 15, 2016
-
Mark Hall-Patch’s series of watercolour drawings explore anarchistic art movements. But there is a psychological edge to Hall-Patch’s works which seem depictions of alienation; the figure lost in a landscape facing grave existential danger. The delicate nature of the drawing and watercolour in individual works make very stunning representations of failed utopian societies.
By Mark Hall-Patch - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Tomorrow, Tomorrow.
- October 28, 2016 to December 10, 2016
-
CALL To support the work of Indigenous North American women and artists through local art commissions that incite dialogue and catalyze action between individuals, communities, territories, and institutions. To stand together across sovereign territories as accomplices in awakened solidarity with all our relations both human and non. RESPONSE To ground art in responsible action, value lived experience, and demonstrate ongoing commitment to accountability and community building. To respond to re/concilliation as a present day negotiation and reconstruction of communities in the aftermath of colonial trauma. callresponseart.ca
By Cheryl L'hirondelle, Christi Belcourt, Esther Neff, Isaac Murdoch, IV Castellanos, Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory, Marcia Crosby, Maria Hupfield, Tania Willard, Tanya Tagaq, Ursula Johnson - Curated by Maria Hupfield, Tania Willard, Tarah Hogue
#callresponse
- January 13, 2017 to February 18, 2017
-
Three Cities: Prayer and Protest is a shadow-based installation that investigates sites of tension, controversy, and contact within three cosmopolitan environments. Inspired by recent cities the artists have lived and worked in (including Istanbul, Montreal and Vancouver), the exhibition explores notions of prayer and protest as communal expressions of personal hope, desire, demand and outrage. Each ‘city’ becomes a palimpsest in which layers of social, cultural, economic, and political differences come into dialogue. Made from intricately cut paper sculptures, each city is presented as as “island”. These islands are explored by the viewer with the use of mobile lights created for the installation. As the viewer moves through the space, the miniature paper imagery comes alive. Large scale shadows fill the gallery walls and the viewer, who was initially towering over the fragile paper cities, is now surrounded by layers of giant shadow. The Garden of Earthly Delights: Inspired by the Hieronymus Bosch painting of the same name, this is an experience of the city as rendered in darkness. It's a ten-minute-long journey in which five viewers at a time are guided by a cued sequence of shadow projections and sound to bring a procession of paper cut-outs to life. The cityscape appears as shadows on the wall, becoming an abstraction even as its physical essence is laid bare. The artists take 16th century notions of heaven and hell and join them to a modern inquiry. This urban maze of concrete and cables: is it fantasy or nightmare? Decide for yourself as you experience the magic of light and paper. This is illusionism at its finest - refined down to a beautiful binary of black and white.
By Chris Carrière, Jaimie Robson, Maya Ersan, Mere Phantoms
Three Cities: Prayer and Protest / The Garden of Earthly Delights
- March 3, 2017 to April 15, 2017
-
Brigitta Kocsis’ paintings blend realism, illustration and expressive painterly gestures in a chaotic and visually charged landscape. Her current series, Contingent Bodies, focuses on the representation of bodies in transformation – both organic and unfamiliar. The painting’s surface is used to transform energies and refabricate the body with suggestions of contamination, connectivity and displacement, reflecting Kocsis’ cultural history as a Hungarian, Romany and Canadian. Fragmented bodies emerge in the play between abstraction and figuration, embedded in perpetual rootlessness, containing exile and otherness within themselves. These polymorphic figures confront sexual and cultural categorization, recasting the body as part imaginary and part construct. Exploring notions of the cyborg and the prosthetic, these figures exist between the human and post-human, biotechnological and sexualized bodies, and the fashion industry and anime.
By Brigitta Kocsis - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Contingent Bodies
- June 9, 2017 to July 29, 2017
-
“Ungalaq” is an Inuvialuktun word for the west wind. When the west wind comes up, tides rise and as the earth softens, things that are staked to the ground pull lose. Suddenly untethered, dogs run free and smoke houses drift up the beach. It is a period of unpredictability and, ultimately, of re-formation. Drawing from five bodies of work, this solo exhibition will be the most extensive mounting of Gruben’s work to date. Currently a Victoria based artist, Gruben has developed a strong aesthetic and practice of working with materials linked to her home in the Inuvialuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk in the North West Territories and to the Coast Salish territories of Vancouver Island. Her aesthetic practice can be seen as rippling outward from the land itself. She delves deeply into broad issues like climate change in a way that is both eloquent and pared down, pushing viewers to extend their own process of thought and interpretation, and allowing them to feel their way through each gesture of weaving, tufting, encasing, and assembling in her material process. As an Inuvialuit artist her exploration of Indigenous materials variously includes polar bear fur, seal skin and whale intestines in combination with anodized aluminum, pvc, wool and other materials associated with industry. These substances do not function in binary structure of opposing traditional and industrial materiality. Rather, Gruben’s material sense reverberates throughout her choices, conceptually linking her experiences of home to ways in which materials are reused, re-appropriated and reimagined.
By Maureen Gruben - Curated by Kyra Kordoski, Tania Willard