- January 4, 2013 to February 9, 2013
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“Holding Our Breath” by Adrian Stimson, is a large-scale installation based on the artist’s first hand experiences and observations at a military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The work is informed by conversations Stimson had with soldiers, some of which were First Nations, and his impression with daily life occurring at the military base situated in the vast Middle Eastern landscape. The work includes the Stimson’s own personal perspective of serving in the military as well as his family’s history serving in the Canadian military as soldiers and historically as Blackfoot warriors. These experiences, in addition to Stimson’s time spent in Kandahar, allows the artist to approach these topics from a perspective that questions the essence of conflict and how this links between personal, cultural, and military identity."
By Adrian A. Stimson
medium | 55 Programs
Medium SculptureA work of art carried out (caved, cast, modeled, or otherwise) in three dimensions.
- April 5, 2013 to May 4, 2013
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The exhibition features several installations that reveal the curious fictional world that the artists refers to as, Lamb's Performing Objects. Russian lacquerware, rusty metal household objects and clockwork mechanisms perform in Bits and Tatters, the first installment of a video trilogy. Accompanying this video is a song that Lamb wrote and produced with composer and singer, Beverly Dobrinsky.
By Laura Lamb
Strange Songs of Trust and Treachery
- February 23, 2012 to March 31, 2012
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Grunt gallery is pleased to present the work of Charlene Vickers in her new installation entitled, “Ominjimendaan/ to remember”. This exhibition is comprised of a range of sculptural objects including wrapped grasses, sturdy spear forms, and stylized turtles. At the heart of this exhibition, Vickers evokes a healing space for those who have experienced loss or who are looking for someone who is missing. Within each grass stalk, spear, and turtle, memory is a source of experiential meaning both historical and personal, for maker and viewer. History, healing and growth are themes of the early wrapped grass and fabric works. By wrapping and binding grasses and hair together with cotton and linen strips, the grasses begin to resemble bone-like forms to evoke vulnerability and recovery. The most recent wrapped grasses stand facing the viewer in relation to their own body. Emphasis on how the body and experiences of the viewer are incorporated in the meaning of the work is crucial. Tall lengths of pointed, sharpened cedar stand balanced against a wall waiting for someone to employ them with purpose; a story, a history, an action. Resembling spears or tipi poles, one thinks of weaponry, hunting, or traditional shelters that provide protection and sustenance. The initial idea for the form of the work began when thinking of the porcupine quill and its elegant and efficient functionality as deterrent to predators. The clan of turtles are the searchers of things lost: people, culture, languages, and histories. The clan shuffles, floats, dreams and searches to find lost sisters and family members, then slowly re-enters the land and the rivers from where they came.
By Charlene Vickers
Ominjimendaan/ to remember
- February 20, 2014 to March 22, 2014
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one man's junk questions what happens when an object shifts from a prized possession to a nonentity, and asks you to find value amongst junk, waste and the discarded. Laura Moore hand-carves blocks of limestone into outdated electronic devices. Contradicting the indispensability that most discarded electronics face, these tributes monument how once-valuable objects become undesired commodities.
By Laura Moore
one man’s junk
- May 10, 2019 to June 22, 2019
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dot.dot.dot. brings together Seoul-based artists Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo for their first presentations in Canada. Working at the intersection of media and installation, Kim and Yeo’s practices explore the omnipresence of interactive technologies and their varying effects on human experience.
By InYoung Yeo, Sejin Kim - Curated by InYoung Yeo, Vanessa Kwan
dot.dot.dot
- September 7, 2018 to October 20, 2018
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In conjunction with the Textile Society of America conference being held this September in Vancouver, grunt gallery presents Woven Work From Near Here, curated by Emily Hermant and T’ai Smith. Inspired by traditional weaving practices—including Indigenous methods for weaving blankets and baskets alongside structures and patterns that have come from elsewhere—the exhibition presents recent experiments by artists who live and work near here. Juxtaposing materials and methods, the works in the show stretch what it means to be a woven textile. The curators understand being “near here” as a spatial and temporal condition that defines the region currently known as the Pacific Northwest—a mesh of overlapping Indigenous and Settler cultures, legal-political systems, and territories. To live, work, and weave near here is to contend daily with the legacy of colonial settlement and expropriation. Marked by the dislocation of Indigenous weaving traditions between the early decades of the 20th century and the 1980s—decades after the Potlatch ban in Canada was lifted in 1951—the region has seen the re-emergence of this conceptual, functional, aesthetic and spiritual form. At once capacious and precise, new developments in weaving signal the potential of this practice to realign protocols and values.
By Debora Sparrow, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Hank Bull, Jovencio de la Paz, Kerri Reid, Matt Browning, Melvin Williams, Merritt Johnson - Curated by Emily Hermant, T'ai Smith
Woven Work From Near Here
- November 1, 2019 to December 14, 2019
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“How do you remember the past the most?”
Equal parts family recollection, historical research and spectral diary, Coco Means Ghost forms the moving image focal point of Gabi Dao’s new installation. Rooted in Dao’s research along the Mekong Delta and her own family’s history between cultures, a sentimental dissidence employs sculpture, video and sound to put imagined contemporary and historical diasporic voices in conversation. At the centre of the exhibition is a haunting: the eponymous narrator (a ghost in the form of a coconut) resists a singular place and time, moving freely, if not lightly, through personal photographs, contemporary commentary and archival material. Other characters appear– Lan, Ong Nam, Mr.Le, Quang, An, Nguyen and Dung–and together they tell the fragmented story of Ong Dao Dua ( ‘Mr.Coconut’), a monk who founded a small, self-sustaining, anti-war community in the late 1960s-70’s on Con Phung, an island colloquially known to westerners as the “Coconut Kingdom.” Through the lens of Ong Dao Dua’s oft-mythologized character, the work becomes an avenue to explore and enmesh broader notions of memory, nationhood, belief, belonging and dreams for the future.
Dao combines the single-channel video with sonically activated sculptures that transmit her family’s narrative in another form: excerpts from “Foreign Accent Improvement” cassettes used by the artist’s parents in the 1980s. a sentimental dissidence points to texture and poetics rather than conclusive fact, and creates a landscape that at once immerses, entangles and pushes back.
1. coco means ghost: Screen & Video, 25m24s, followed by a short pause. HD video, 2.1 sound, LED lights, cans of coconut water, photograph, bench & pillows.
2. you and i, i and you: Sculptures & Audio, 6m30s, followed by a short pause. Beaded curtains, UV reducing window vinyl, transducers, tempered glass, aluminum.
Accessibility: Hearing Access: Un-captioned English audio, some subtitled Vietnamese (written in English). Sight Access: Low light conditions
By Gabi Dao - Curated by Vanessa Kwan
a sentimental dissidence
- 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