- April 9, 2015 to May 16, 2015
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Eraser Street – Hubris, Humility and Humanity in the Making of a City! is an exhibition that mixes Robideau’s newest and oldest photographs of moments, milestones and monuments in Vancouver, tracing the character of the city and its residents during the last 40 years of non-stop growth. The work reflects upon the quality of life in Vancouver, the value of heritage, the economic engine of development, homelessness and the voice of the people. Robideau’s holographic satirical text charts history while critiquing the forces of government and commerce that have had a hand in shaping our urban environment. Handmade black and white gelatin silver photographs are juxtaposed with computer mediated digital inkjet prints, reinforcing the flux of change experienced in these images. Robideau’s narrative embraces a lament for what has been lost, a celebration for what has survived, and an admonition for the future of a city still in its infancy.
By Henri Robideau - Curated by Glenn Alteen
medium | 40 Programs
Medium Photography / Photo-based WorkWork including photographic elements either digital or analogue, not to be applied to work that has been documented photographically but is otherwise not photo-based.
- July 2, 2019 to August 3, 2019
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This photographic exhibition features five large-scale digital photographs by Belmore produced in late 2017 and early 2018. The works were commissioned by grunt gallery and include witness, matriarch, mother, madonna, and keeper.
By Rebecca Belmore - Curated by Glenn Alteen
nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations)
- 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
- March 15, 2019 to April 27, 2019
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An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance is about identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love; these images are about resilience and resistance. In this series, artist Kali Spitzer is photographing her community of mostly Indigenous and mixed heritage people, while challenging pre-conceived notions of race, gender, and sexuality to touch on how we can become more empathic, empowered people despite the hardships that we have endured. Spitzer uses tintype photographs to capture her subjects. Tintype or ferrotype photography was a product of the late 1800s and most popular during the US Civil War. The medium persisted into the 20th century at fairs and carnivals as tourist photography. In the 21st century, it has been revived as novelty or art photography. The tintype was the first real populist form of photography, making photographs available to working class people reaching out through popular events and gatherings.
By Kali Spitzer - Curated by Glenn Alteen
An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance
- January 11, 2019 to March 2, 2019
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This new series of work by Mexican Canadian artist Carlos Colín merges symbols of Latin American conceptualist art, and Latin American colonialist history, past and present, and its diaspora. Working with archives, books, footage, and audio material related to Latin American history, the artist creates a work based on photographs, text and/or audio with parallels between, arts, politics, religion, and society.
By Carlos Colín - Curated by Glenn Alteen
Strident Aesthetic. Towards a new liberation
- November 2, 2018 to November 13, 2018
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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.
By !Kona, Casey Wei, Christine D’onofrio, Cindy Mochizuki, Dr. Anne Murphy, Dr. Glenn Deer, Dr. JP Catungal, Dr. Sunera Thobani, Elisa Ferrari, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Josh Gabert-Doyon, Laiwan, Laura Cuthbert, Melanie Hardbattle, Raghavendra Rao K.V., Salia Joseph, Samantha Nock, Sid Chow Tan, Syrus Marcus Ware
Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week
- 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
- April 2, 2020 to September 1, 2020
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For grunt gallery’s curatorial contribution to Capture’s public works series, we have selected an image from Impatiently Inclined’s series, Human Nature–Last Supper. The collective, comprised of Theo Pelmus, Kris Snowbird, and Daina Warren, have been building a series of work that connects these three artists from vastly different backgrounds by finding points of commonality through process.
By Daina Warren, Impatiently Inclined, Kris Snowbird, Theo Pelmus - Curated by Whess Harman
Human Nature – Last Supper
- June 21, 2018
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The Making of an Archive (2014–ongoing) is a project initiated by Canadian artist Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn. The project composed of digitizing workshops, which aims to record the everyday life and civic engagements by immigrants and amateur photographers. The photographs are digitized and their accompanying narratives are recorded, thereby preserving records of personal histories in order to address the absent representation of multiculturalism in official archives. Focusing on digitizing printed matter, e.g. 35mm or 120mm photographs, slides or Polaroids, Nguyễn believes that immigrants who documented their daily life when they came to their new country are in danger of becoming forgotten or lost, thus losing complex and complicated histories of migration. By building this alternative structure of personal images, the artist aims to create a new archive that seeks to represent the fractured ideology of multiculturalism from the bottom up where forms of civic engagement within a structure of kinship or even in solidarity with other communities can be observed. The Making of an Archive questions existing frameworks for archival history-making, and chooses instead a trajectory of collective exploration. Drawing again from the artists’ reference to ‘space fiction’, speculation here leads to a kind of cultural star-gazing: seeing fragments of this nascent archive reminds us of vast possibilities—reflections of lives already lived, and new frameworks for a future we have yet to see. Priority is given to histories of migration from people who identify as people of color (POC).
By Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn - Curated by Dan Pon, Maiko Tanaka, Vanessa Kwan
The Making of an Archive
- June 15, 2018 to July 28, 2018
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When Jeremy Borsos and his wife, Sus, took on the remediation of the Blue Cabin, we at grunt never expected what would eventually come out of it! Using historical materials, they took the structure apart, methodically cleaned every inch, and replaced the rotted out bits. They insulated the walls and fixed the floor. Essentially, they treated it as an archaeological site, collecting its history in scraps of newspapers and mouse nests and, in an archival process, painstakingly saved what remained. The humble structure revealed itself slowly over the six-month period of the restoration and culminated – when they took up the floor – in the discovery of almost 40 posters that had been put there in 1927 to prevent the floor from squeaking. In this exhibition, the Borsos’ present a body of work that documents this journey, while providing us a history of the cabin before Al Neil and Carole Itter’s tenancy, and offering us new insights into the earlier inhabitants— squatters, and marine workers on the foreshore.
By Jeremy Borsos, Sus Borsos - Curated by Glenn Alteen