- December 8, 2004 to December 24, 2004
-
No description available
By Osmar Yero Montero
date | 14 Programs
Dates 2004- November 14, 2004
-
No description available
By Laurie Anderson
The End of the Moon
- November 5, 2004 to November 27, 2004
-
Long-time friend of grunt, Tom Wren, presents a series of works in collaboration with a one-legged doll who he has come to know as 'Hoppy'.
By Tom Wren
Revelations
- October 22, 2004
-
"If you're lucky enough not to succumb to a childhood illness, you'll live long enough to watch your pets die." - Caitlin Cary Heartache, suicide, apocalypse...and all the big questions. Through a lens of song and story. With able assistance from Glen Watts
By Lizard Jones
A Performance in Three Parts with a Little Skill and Borrowed Talent
- October 8, 2004 to October 30, 2004
-
Skai Fowler and Jose Ramon Gonzalez both employ multiple exposures in a series of photographic self portraits. By superimposing body upon body, a dialogue iscreated between light and dark, shadow self and public persona, and the presence of the moment in an extended period of time. Voyeurism and exhibitionism join hands in this expression of human complexity as the line between subject and object is lost in layers of visual suggestion.
By Jose Ramon Gonzalez, Skai Fowler
Radiant Flesh
- September 9, 2004 to October 2, 2004
-
Using the idea of the moccasin as a starting point, Vickers creates a personal connection to these objects. Growing up without the teachings or practices of moccasin making, she has had to acquire these skills from the world in which she lives- in fact, the one into which she was born. One pair of moccasins is beaded like the identity bracelets used for newborns in hospitals. Vickers beads the letters A-N-I-S-H-A-B-E and V-I-C-K-E-R-S into the material as a reclamation to her cultural history and personal identification. For another pair, she uses denim, which signals the contemporary lives of Aboriginal artists, whose histories of change have demanded adaptation to new materials and new contexts for art making...Another aspect of commercialism that inspires her work is the way traditional Native ideas and beliefs are used to sell products. One pair of moccasins is labeled "Kokanee", a beer company that uses the image of the Sasquatch in its media advertisements...Another pair carries labels from Shaftebury, a Vancouver brewery that produces Rainforest Ale. Vickers here highlights the irony of an urban business using the rainforest - most of which has been decimated in the name of commercial enterprise - as a marketing device. Judy Chartrand, of the Cree nation, is equally willing to confront the darker issues and histories of native people. She has created cabinets similar to Victorian cabinets of curiosities in which collectors devoid of understanding would house the (looted) treasures of their travels or their pocketbooks. However Judy's 'Cabinet of Contention' contains rows of Warholian soup cans, highly recognizable as signifiers of mass culture and contemporary art practice, and relabels them with words that name the negative repercussions of colonialism. A second cabinet houses pill bottles, each labeled with soporifics or 'snake oil' medicines meant to alleviate (but not cure) the discomforts of white guilt over historical racism...In addition to the cabinets, Judy has used traditional materials and techniques to produce a series of men's thongs, complete with thick bushes of hair peeking from underneath, which she calls her "Buffalo Soldiers". Made from traditionally tanned moosehide, these unusual garments are decorated with beadwork, caribou or moosehair tufting and porcupine quillwork. Each lined in red satin material for the comfort of the wearer, these very well endowed thongs play on the tradition of the openness of sexuality in Native culture. - Daina Warren, August 2004
By Charlene Vickers, Judy Chartrand
Two/ Many Tribulations
- July 15, 2004
-
As part of their Online World Tour, the avatar performance band, The Gates, proposes to web-cast a unique large-scale avatar performance to be web-cast live (in real-time) on the large projection screen at the Grunt Gallery for one night. They will use the classic avatar chat software, Digital Space Traveler, as their performance site. Their performances are both pre-determined and improvised.The Gates can either perform as an electronic music duo or as performance artists in the style of Vito Acconci and/or Gilbert & George. In other words, The Grunt curator can have the freedom to determine what form of performance they will do. Usually, The Gates only performs for 15-45 minutes. Every performance on their World Tour is unique. No one performance is the same. In the case of the Grunt Gallery, The Gates is willing to perform a unique piece for anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours, the Grunt can choose the favoured length. - The Proposal
By Alberto Guedea, Jeremy Turner
The Gates
- June 24, 2004
-
"Although scheduled for the grunt's adjacent space, the piece began in the gallery proper, where audience members lined up to deposit identification in exchange for a seven-channel headset...After the first twenty headsets had been distributed, audience members were lead to a room where Arcan, dressed in t-shirt and jeans, paced back-and-forth within a taped-off rectangle approximately ten feet long and four feet wide. In one hand, what looked like a car reflector; in the other, a tea towel, with a calendar printed on it, which the artist carried with him at all times...he would transport the reflector from one end of the rectangle to the other, leaving it on a small (Modernist) table before retreating, then returning for it, repeating the action. He did this five or six times before the audio tracks kicked in, at which point Arcan stopped his relay. As he moved slowly around (within) the rectangle, staring out (leering?), lips quivering, I familliarized myself with the audio tracks: a cross-cultural selection of songs, guy talk, birdcalls, women's voices engaged in what sounded like sexual acts, a spiritual recitation, a father and son dialogue, what sounded like an audio palimpsest of all seven tracks at once..." - Michael Turner, Love Claims, July 2004
By Warren Arcand
Superchannel
- June 18, 2004 to July 30, 2004
-
This series of recent drawings, mostly completed within the last year, show Yuxweluptun's continuing engagement with the medium. His drawings are labour intensive, showing the extreme, rich detail achieved with a crosshatch technique. They provide an interesting counterpoint to his larger paintings and often serve as studies for later works, where the images are developed and refined. Here we see Yuxweluptun at his loosest, most playful, and most experimental. The subject matter in these drawings runs the gamut of Yuxweluptun's interests: satirical and biting but also spiritual and aesthetic.
By Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
Drawings
- May 14, 2004 to June 5, 2004
-
The installation consists of numerous porcelain castings, all stemming from the departure point of a remarkably lifelike Japanese-made baby doll. The context of this work is crucial to approaching it; the exhibition has been assembled in an urban gallery in a busy postmodern metropolis. As cars rush through this industrial area, and fast-paced city life occurs outside, the artist has composed a subtle arena for contemplation that quietly asks us to reevaluate our individual ideals and values. At first glance Buddhism seems to be the dominating discipline driving the installation, but gradually one discovers a sensibility that encompasses a range of ideas that span several religious philosophies, those diverse as Christianity, Krishna and Hinduism.
By Diana Ambida