Drawing | Medium | The Activation Map

Medium Drawing

Description

A picture or image made with a pen, pencil, crayon, or similar media rather than with paint.

Kitchen

November 1, 2014 to December 19, 2014
Exhibition, Performance, Reading, Workshop
grunt gallery kicks off our 30th anniversary programming with a residency and exhibition with Vancouver-based artist Julia Feyrer entitled, Kitchen. Taking the form of an evolving installation in the main gallery space, Feyrer’s work engages with materials and documentation from the grunt archives in the production of a new, site-specific environment.

June 2, 2014 to July 5, 2014
Uncategorized, Workshop
Play, Fall, Rest, Dance, is an installation that continuously changes based on the creative output by children with disabilities. Valerie Salez creates an environment that encourages artistic freedom, exploration and installation-making over the course of several weeks.

October 22, 2015 to November 28, 2015
Artist Sayah Sarfarez translates political movements and uprising occurring in Iran into a drawing series in a drawing series in which childlike, almost naive forms and innocent aesthetics are juxtaposed with threatening motifs. Figures within these pictures are abstracted into flat-coloured shapes; crowded scenes appear simplistic and innocent in nature until a violent narrative appears. The basis of Sarfaraz' drawings and compositions are rooted in Persian miniature paintings which she expresses in a contemporary format with modern references.

January 1, 1994 to January 6, 2016
Uncategorized
The Al Neil Collection includes materials on artist, musician, and writer Al Neil whose long and storied career has included grunt's Al Neil Project (see 2005.1015ALN) as a part of the LIVE Biennale of Performance Art 2005, features in brunt Magazine and the web project Ruins In Process: Vancouver Art in the 60s, and continues with grunt's involvement with the relocation, preservation, and reactivation of Al Neil and Carole Itter's cabin from the Dollarton shore. The Al Neil Collection includes physical copies of Neil's music recordings, photocopied and original articles on Neil, and various ephemera related to Neil's life and work.

September 7, 2017 to October 14, 2017
Exhibition
Technical Problem is an exhibition of mixed media drawings by Vancouver-based, Iranian-born artist Aileen Bahmanipour that explores cyclical political power and cultural identity. Bahmanipour’s work draws from Iran’s mythic history such as the story of King Zahak contained in the national epic poem Shahnameh written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE. Zahak was cursed by the kiss of the devil with two snakes that grew out of his shoulders. According to the legend, he began beheading the youth of Iran to feed their brains to his snakes. Fearful of being bitten by the snakes, Zahak sacrificed the future intellectual life of an entire nation. The works in the exhibition reference Persian miniature painting, creating an allegorical language that shifts between the political reality of Bahmanipour’s home country, narrative construction, and personal symbolism. She elicits the contradictions between Iran’s mythic past and relationship to modernity as a utopic ideal in contrast with the state’s ongoing repressive control of its people. Medical illustrations and cross sections of limbs combined with animal and abstract forms mimic the border between the interior and exterior, and dissect the past as a reflection of the present. Bahmanipour’s work is both fantastical and meticulous, expressing a process of transformation unfolding and in tension.

September 8, 2016 to October 15, 2016
Exhibition
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.

November 2, 2018 to December 15, 2018
Archival, Exhibition
2068: Touch Change is both an archive and a speculation. Beginning 50 years in the future, this new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Syrus Marcus Ware proposes an archive whose ‘holdings’ act as a meeting ground for artists and activists across time and space. The exhibition has 3 main components: a series of large-scale graphite portraits drawn on paper and directly on the walls, a speculative text and a disseminated printed work that documents materials gathered and accessed in the artists’ research process. The portraits – in many ways the centrepiece of the exhibition – are created through a complex process of visiting and revisiting images and interviews with historic and present-day BIPOC (Black, Indigenous or People of Colour) activist communities. Ware’s investment in the archive is overlaid with a parallel interest in forms of speculative fiction (see his recent piece in C Magazine or his essay on Octavia E. Butler published by Canadian Art last year) and he speaks eloquently about how he envisions his research and installations as ways of creating a space where activists and artists of different generations are brought together.

November 2, 2018 to November 13, 2018
Archival, Discursive Event, Exhibition, Performance, Reading, Screening, Workshop
Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week 2018 takes place from November 2 – 13, 2018 as a series of free public events, panels, conversations, and screenings that highlight artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver. The program significantly expands on the work begun through previous archival projects: Activating the Archive and Vancouver Independent Archives Week. Taking the focus and format of these events as a starting point, Recollective broadens the context, understanding, and awareness of independent archives by exploring what is at stake when artists and arts organizations confront the tasks of arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to material history. In 2018, Recollective features perspectives and approaches to archival practice through grassroots strategies, collective organizing, hybrid models, DIY spaces, open source solutions, and counter- archives that facilitate ownership of community memory by and for community. This series of events will emphasize the reciprocal influence between contemporary culture and social movements by drawing attention to shared experiences and struggles across diverse communities.