- December 3, 2015 to December 19, 2015
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grunt gallery presents new works by Vancouver-based artist Zoe Kreye. Continuing the artist’s established practice of working through movement-based workshops and community-engagement, FutureLoss explores the gallery’s immediate surroundings: Main Street. Space, on this strip and in this city, is currency, and Kreye’s work reaches through overarching narratives of real estate, gentrification and speculation to consider the poetics of an individual’s connection to place. Over the course of a 12-week residency, the artist engaged directly with shopowners, organizers and residents in discussions around what it means to hold space in this neighbourhood. Together, Kreye and each participant created sculptures in plaster: shapes that addressed the connection of their bodies to specific sites in their storefronts, studios and workspaces. Central to their discussions was the question of loss: how does the body connect to place? And, further: how does the body absorb change? These works emerge as evocative portraits of the participants and the architectures they occupy. The objects will be on view in grunt’s exhibition space, and are accompanied by a publication featuring commissioned texts by Neil Eustache, Kimberly Phillips and Donato Mancini, with contributions from participating community members, and the artist.
By Zoe Kreye - Curated by Vanessa Kwan
Category | 313 Programs
Exhibition- March 6, 2020 to April 11, 2020
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For her first solo exhibition in Vancouver, Meagan Musseau presents a body of work from her ongoing research responding to Beothuk and Mi’kmaq visual culture. Musseau uses a multi-disciplinary practice that involves archival research, land-based action, video, drawing, and sculpture to explore land, language, and design. By telling stories about cultural belongings from the perspective of a contemporary L’nu woman living on Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), Musseau’s work transfers knowledge from archived collections into contemporary visual consciousness. A braided sculpture made during a land-based action in Musseau’s home region of Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands, NL) forms the physical and conceptual center of the exhibition. While the act of endurance required to create the 22 foot braid connects to stories and nomadic histories of the Mi’kmaq, the object itself carries the history of the land in its creation. A series of tall sculptures rendered in engraved plexiglass reference Beothuk caribou bone pendants that Musseau visited during museum research. Evoking the artist’s experience of visiting cultural belongings through plexiglass cases, the sculptures re/awaken their designs by enlarging them to a human scale and presence. A site specific wall installation integrates the material qualities of the braid with graphic elements from the pendant designs. These textures surround an image of Musseau beside one of Santu Toney, a woman living in the early 1900s with mixed Mi’kmaw and Beothuk ancestry. Musseau’s work seeks to honour Santu by highlighting the transmission of knowledge that exists between past, present, and future generations. pi’tawkewaq | our people up river presents contemporary cultural belongings that index and render tangible Musseau’s active practice of building and maintaining her relationships to land and ancestor artists. She uses her perspective to overturn colonial narratives of disappearance and instead addresses the role of interterritorial relationships between the two nations as a guiding methodology.
By Meagan Musseau - Curated by Laurie White
pi’tawkewaq | our people up river
- September 8, 2016 to October 15, 2016
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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.
- May 27, 2016 to June 25, 2016
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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
- April 7, 2016 to May 8, 2016
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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
análekta
- February 25, 2016 to April 2, 2016
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Sausage Factory examines the operations of food production and how this activity has been represented in literature, industrial films, and popular cinema. A selection of related movement images are disassembled and their various motivations and structural components reconstituted to produce a series of new video works. In one instance, a set of inexpensive consumer goods haunted by physical, mimetic and mythic affinities to sausage making are summoned, to reenact a centuries old sight-gag. In another, movements captured in a tradition of scientific management are pushed through the tedious yet fantastical mill of cel animation. The resultant images collapse historical time with the time of production, and in doing so reveal uncanny movements of capital and desire.
By Stephen Wichuk, Weronika Stepien - Curated by Tarah Hogue, Vanessa Kwan
Sausage Factory
- January 8, 2016 to February 13, 2016
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Remote Viewing is a performance and responsive installation presenting human and camera interactions as a site for contemplation. We live in an era of technological vision - and technological bodies. In contemporary forms of representation, what we "see" has often been subject to complex forms of mediation. Noxious Sector proposes a dislocation of bodies and of vision and an experiment in visual intervention. Focusing on the technology of drones as agents of remote vision and interaction, Remote Viewing is a meditation - part visual, part conceptual - on the status of vision, bodies, and technology in the 21st century. Drones are as much floating heads as they are predatory machines, and to emphasize this conflation is to begin to interrogate the logic of surveillance for its relationship to an embodied ethics of virtual behaviour.
By Doug Jarvis, Jackson 2Bears, Noxious Sector, Ted Hiebert - Curated by Vanessa Kwan
Remote Viewing
- July 21, 2016 to August 20, 2016
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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
- November 23, 2015 to November 28, 2015
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Remediating Mama Pina’s Cookbook is a three channel video piece that approaches the artist’s great grandmother’s cookbook, as an archival technology that speaks to the generational transmission of gender roles, social status, and cultural memory. Through her attempts to recreate the various handwriting styles, instructions, and recipes from the cookbook, the artist reactivates the archive and raises questions about the nature of what can constitute an archive, the relationship of archival content and form, and the divisions between performed and recorded knowledge.
By Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda