Recent Programming
NOTE: an archive of past programming can be found on the brunt magazine site.
Exhibition
ACTIVATING THE ARCHIVE – PART ONE:
Testing the water
Thu. July 8 – Sat. August 21, 2010
Opening Thursday, July 8, 8-11pm
Images, video and documents from grunt’s 26-year history of artistic activity will be on display in the grunt gallery, July and August 2010. During this exhibition, grunt’s archives will be moved into the gallery space to allow grunt staff and volunteers the space needed to enhance our cataloguing capabilities. Visitors to the gallery can work with gallery staff to dig through the archive locating the hidden gems from grunt’s past.
This project is a key step in moving towards grunt’s Media Lab renovation and development. Based on feedback from gallery visitors, a priority list will be developed for the digitization of historical materials. Help us find the videos, images, artifacts and documents that are key to illustrating the variety and scope of grunt’s activities over the past 26 years. As these materials are digitized they will become the raw material for representing grunt’s history in the forthcoming Media Lab. Plans and schematics for the upcoming Media Lab renovation will be on display.
Exhibition
Sky Dome (props, patches, rips, and tears)
Merritt Johnson
Fri, May 14 – Sat, June 26
Mid-exhibition Reception, May 28, 8-11pm
Curated by Tania Willard
“Land is home, it is evidence of not only itself, but of force- retaining and dissolving marks of everything it has housed and supported. It is also the dividing line of space- it is the plane where earth meets the sky.” Merritt Johnson
Merritt Johnson’s new work at grunt gallery investigates perceptions of division and confluence where land and sky meet. Johnson’s work both constructs and dissolves the landscape, concrete and imagined, measuring the absurdity of boundries, borders and territories. Referencing mapping, her work also surveys sky by layering, revealing and inverting ideas of earth and sky, Johnson reveals information encoded not in GPS systems but in indigenous knowledge. Marking the land Johnson traces ghosts in gouache and graphite, tracking the travel of animals, growth of plants and the flow of wind and water Johnson purposes new meridians and imaginary cartography into her drawings and paintings that suggest natural systems and rhythms. Symbolic animals depicted in the exhibition become protector, and witness to the impacts of land and resource exploitation. Revealing the broken sky Johnson’s multi-disciplinary work seeks to repair it, following instructions found in the land itself as told by the sky.
Merritt Johnson is an artist working in two and three dimensional media, performance, and video. Her work is firmly situated between Indigenous and European histories and traditions. As a person of mixed Mohawk, Blackfoot, and Non-Aboriginal heritage, the overlapping and often forceful interactions between nations and individuals are a continuous theme in her work. Merritt is a member of the Faculty of Visual Art at Emily Carr University in Vancouver where she teaches studio, and courses based in Aboriginal approaches to visual practice. Merritt earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. She has exhibited and performed in traditional and nontraditional venues throughout North America.
Exhibition
Signs of Change
Nicole Dextras
Thu, April 1 – Sat, May 8
Opening Thu. April 1, 8-11pm
In Signs of Change Nicole Dextras brings her sculptural text works from the last 5 years together along with new work created during her exhibition at grunt gallery. Signs of Change brings Dextras’ body of work in ice typography together through photographic prints and off-site installations. The photographs will depict past ice installations and the off-site component will feature ice text placed in the Vancouver land/cityscape on a weekly basis.
Dextras’ ice letters and eco-installations interrupt the expected narratives of the landscape. Using ice as a medium Dextras subverts the authority of the English language and the commerce of signage by representing them as vulnerable and shifting. Dextras originally created molds from old marquee letters, freezing them and then installing them within both urban and rural locations. Dextras' installations have varied from 8-foot high ice letters on the Yukon River to 18-inch high letters set in downtown Toronto. The ice words are left on site and begin to change state from solid to liquid. This phase of transition becomes symbolic of the interconnectedness of language and culture to landscape, as affected by time and by a constant shifting and transforming nature.
"Words made of ice absorb light, melt and eventually leave no trace. They have more in common with dreams and oral stories than linear language." Dextras' sculptures of etymology alert us to the landscape around us, and our relationship to it. As the words melt away their presence relates to the transience of our relationship to the landscape, the politics of territory, the stories of presence and the state of the environment.
Exhibition/Event
Altered
Jan Wade and Nhan Nguyen
February 11 – March 20, 2010
Opening Thursday, February 11 at 8:00pm
Screenings and events at Mountain View Cemetery.
Saturday, February 20, 2010, 11:00am-10:00pm
Celebration Hall, Mountain View Cemetery
Access to the site is at 39th and Fraser St.
Altered is a new grunt gallery project by Vancouver based artists Jan Wade and Nhan Nguyen focusing on altar pieces or shrines, which both artists have explored extensively within their work over the past two decades. This project, comprised of shrines installed at the grunt gallery and corresponding video screenings at the Mountain View Cemetery’s new celebration hall, looks at cultural histories around Memorial and how we remember. Video Mapping of Celebration Hall by Krista Lomax and The Media Merchants.
Jan Wade is a Vancouver-based artist originally from Hamilton, Ontario. Wade's work deploys the materials and symbols of the everyday to explore issues of post-colonial identity, ethnicity and spirituality. Drawing creative resources from her own cultural history, Wade's examination of New World black diaspora reflects upon the relations between past and present, self and collectivity, and brings voice to the staunchly political nature of those encounters. Wade’s work focuses on altars as vehicles of worship and memory, as vessels for African spirituality and to reconcile the painful past of the African Diaspora.
Based in Vancouver, Nhan Nguyen works across media finding many of his inspiration in Vietnamese stories and traditions anchored particularly, in personal narratives related to him through his mother and her friends. Nguyen recent process-based installations pursue the themes of community, national history, cultural identity and community. Born in Qui Nhon, Vietnam in 1967 he immigrated to Canada when he was 12.
Performance/Exhibition
Sean George Opening: Saturday January 9, 2010, 7-10pm
Bad Boys: Portraits of Mediated Performance
Performance at *8pm sharp!
Exhibition: Jan. 9 - Feb. 6, 2010
Robin Lawrence's Georgia Straight Review
“The end of art is to figure out the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.” Aristotle - quoted in Malraux’s Metamorphosis of the Gods 1957
The reality of my youth was lived out in a primarily matriarchal environment; book ended by two grandmothers with my mother in between.
My ‘rite of passage’ into manhood was primarily rooted in and routed through popular culture. From Bert and Ernie to The Six Million Dollar Man the fictional outnumbered the real and the real became like fictitious characters. Gandhi and Warhol were as real to me as my own father.
Here as in the past I use the gallery wall to mirror my concerns with identity. In 2004’s group exhibit Cut and Paste at the Helen Pitt Gallery my piece Theatre of Rhetoric was an attempt to process individuality, the body and sexual orientation in a speculative exploration.
In 2008’s learning to walk a mediated journey to Africa at Interurban Gallery, I gave up my shoes and discovered that my journey to Africa was not the complexion of my skin but the complexities of a continent to difficult to define; no matter what the media.
My fervent desire with this exhibit Bad Boys: Portraits of Mediated Performance is to call up the imaginary, the symbolic, the structural and the soul that is the monolithic experience of manhood. Asking is the experience of self, lost in the masquerade of masculinity? If indeed masculinity is a masquerade?
Exhibition
Oblique Drift
Nicholas Galanin
October 23, 2009 – November 28, 2009
Opening – Friday Oct. 23rd, 8pm grunt gallery
Artist talk Saturday, October 24, 2009, 2:00 - 3:30 pm,
Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art
630 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia
Alaskan artist Nicholas Galanin brings his transformative work to grunt gallery, which extends from his series, 'The Imaginary Indian' a series that juxtaposes manufactured Northwest Coast masks and French toile. Galanin explores the authentic and inauthentic and how interpretation, appropriation and "cultural drift " inform Northwest Coast art . Showcasing new works from The Curtis Legacy Galanin strips masks, bodies and meaning down to reveal that ,"The real strength in survival of indigenous knowledge and culture lies within the ability to freely and creatively represent ourselves." Shifting the colonial gaze from ethnography to pin-up The Curtis Legacy series includes nude models wearing Indonesian made Tlingit masks, referencing Edward Curtis photographs of the noble savage, these works lay bare the objectification of both the body and the sacred . Both series of works are brought together in Galnin's examination of gloablized culture(s), freedom of cultural expression and the manifestations of change in a world of shifting cultures and ancestral echoes.
Nicholas Galanin was born in Sitka, Alaska, Nicholas Galanin has struck an intriguing balance between his origins and the course of his practice. Having trained extensively in 'traditional' as well as 'contemporary' approaches to art, he pursues them both in parallel paths. His stunning bodies of work simultaneously preserve his culture and explore new perceptual territory. Galanin comes from a long line of Northwest Coast artists, starting with his great-grandfather, who sculpted in wood, down through his father, who works in both precious metal and stone. Galanin studied at the London Guildhall University, where he received a Bachelor's of Fine Arts with honors in Jewelry Design and Silversmithing. Soon after, Galanin discovered a graduate arts program at Massey University in New Zealand that meshed perfectly with his interests and concerns, and in 2004 he began earning a Master's degree there in Indigenous Visual Arts. Valuing his culture as highly as his individuality, Galanin has created an unusual path for himself. He deftly navigates "the politics of cultural representation," as he balances both ends of the aesthetic spectrum. With a fiercely independent spirit, Galanin has found the best of both worlds and has given them back to his audience in stunning form.
Performance
Wiped
Jennifer Campbell
Date: October 17, 2009
Time: 3-6pm
Location: Opus Art & Design Media - 100-207 West Hasting Street
Occurring as part of the LIVE2009 Performance Festival, Wiped is a work featuring two people being swept back and forth across the windows of a storefront, like windshield wipers. To achieve this, the artist, Jennifer Campbell, and collaborator Sven Johansson, will direct performers attached to mechanical moving booms that will form the arms of the wipers and have operators controlling the movements of the performers. The performance will provide insight into Campbell’s process and her continuing exploration of the limits and absurdity of the body.
Set-up for the performance will begin at the location starting at 10am, the actual activity of wiping the windows with the performers will occur in 5 min segments repeating every 20 minutes between 3pm and 6pm.
Jennifer Campbell has a BFA from the University of Victoria and an MFA Photography from Concordia University. She has shown in Canada, Australia and the US, taught at Concordia and The University of Ottawa, and recently completed a three-year tenure as Exhibition Coordinator at Dazibao in Montreal. She is currently the Director of Crawl Space, a non-profit art space in Seattle.
Exhibition & Web project:
Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture
Curated by Tania Willard and Skeena Reece
June 26th - August 1st 2009
www.beatnation.org
Grunt gallery is pleased to present Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture, June 26, 2009. Co-curated by Tania Willard and Skeena Reece, Beat Nation is a web-based project located at beatnation.org. Grunt gallery will be hosting an exhibition of artists' work featured on the site, and an event showcasing DJs and MCs from the web project will occur the evening of the exhibition opening.
"Native graffiti art, indigenized iPods, Inuit break dancing, indigenous-language hip hop and video, Indian bling and urban wear: the roots of hip hop culture and music have been transformed by indigenous cultures and identities into new forms of visual culture and music that echo the realities of Aboriginal people. Beat Nation is about music, it's about art and it's about the spirit of us as indigenous peoples and cultures." (Tania Willard, Co-curator)
Exhibition
Circa Indian
Nathalie Ball
May 15th - June 20th 2009
Opening Friday May 15th @ 8 pm
Natalie Ball's exhibition "Circa Indian" is specific to the place and history of her people in relation to the historical impact of visual and textual narratives. Addressing issues of authenticity, from questioning the role of blood quantum and tribal belonging to practices of ethnographic portraiture, Ball examines internal and external discourses that shape Indigenous identities. Painted textiles partnered with figurative sculpture via hand made dolls are utilized to move "Indian" outside of mainstream discourses in order to construct a new visual genealogy that questions the normalized expectations of Native American identity.
Natalie Ball is an emerging, Portland based Aboriginal artist (Modoc/Klamath). Ball is the great great granddaughter of Kintpuash (Captain Jack). Her own genealogy informs her attempts to unsettle old foundations by loosening ideological attachments belonging to race and experience by moving history outside of hegemonic discourses. Her work invites participation in a new auto-ethnographic narrative, a new history and a new manifestation for a critical way to understand America.Ball holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from the University of Oregon and a Master's in Maori and Indigenous Visual Arts from MasseyUniversity, New Zealand. She has exhibited in the US, New Zealand, and Europe.
Exhibition
...as if a forest
Dmitry Strakovsky
April 3 to May 9, 2009
Opening Friday, April 3 @ 8pm
Artist Talk, Saturday, April 4 @ 2pm
Dmitry Strakovsky' s installation, ...as if a forest, will begin with a performance: the artist will read an IKEA-like ten step assembly set of instructions for generation of an aural experience of a forest. Each step is "performed" and sampled via custom multi-channel software. Remixed and looped, the sounds will play through speakers hung on vine-like chords throughout the exhibition space. Video of the performance will be added to complete the experience for the duration of the exhibition.
Strakovsky's installation will highlight the illusionistic nature of processes involved in "experience delivery", the fluidity of the audience members' perceptions and choices, and the simultaneous construction/deconstruction of the sound experience begun during the performance phase.
Dmitry Strakovsky has a BFA and MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. He has shown extensively in the US, Japan, South Korea, China, Estonia, and at the New Forms Festival in Vancouver. He was nominated for the "Sony's Heart" Sony Europe Award in 2000, and received the Residency Award at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 2004.
Exhibition
Andrea Cooper
Fickle as Poison
February 20th - March 28th 2009
Opening Friday, February 20th @ 8pm
Andrea Cooper's single-channel video installation, Fickle As Poison, uses non-conventional narrative combined with complementary photographs and text to retell a family story of desire and death. Through the re-arrangement of key elements, Cooper explores the limits of visual and oral language, female sexuality and its relationship to the psyche, the convergence of place and identity, and the "dream-logic beneath the surface of things".
Andrea Cooper, originally from Newfoundland, has been an art educator, guest lecturer, conference panelist and curator. Her work has been shown in Canada, the US and in Germany at the Berlin International Film Festival. She holds a BFA (Honors with Distinction) from Concordia University and a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
Exhibition
Photo by Paul Litherland
Claude Perreault
Elizabeth
January 9 - February 14, 2009
Opening Friday, January 9th @ 8pm
Claude Perreault's upcoming exhibition, Elizabeth, explores the artist's long-standing fascination with glamour, while playfully subverting idealized representations within celebrity culture. Elizabeth enacts a complex train of mediated signification. Perreault has chosen to revisit Queen Elizabeth I through cinema and television portrayals by celebrity actors (such as Judi Dench in Shakespeare In Love or Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth).
At first glance, Perreault's portraits might appear to be expertly crafted oil paintings, but closer inspection reveals each picture plane to be entirely comprised of collaged erotic images from gay magazines. Displaying an inspiring sense of humor and incredible technical precision, Perreault provokes reconsiderations of the construction and functions of desire within contemporary society.
Claude Perreault returns to the pre-digital material processes and subversive potentials within avant-garde collage practices of the twentieth century. Drawing primarily from gay print erotica, he selects, cuts, archives and sometimes destroys pre-existing documents, rather than replicating them electronically. Pop-culture icons are often portrayed within works that are consistently camp, queer and kitsch-like. Perreault currently lives and works in the city of Montreal.
Exhibition
Wally Dion
Red Worker
October 25th - November 29, 2008
Opening Friday, October 24th, 8-11pm
Artist Talk, Saturday, October 25th, 3pm
Wally Dion is a member of the Yellow Quill First Nation (Salteaux) who probes issues of First Nations identity. His art has typically consisted of large-scale painted portraiture, often addressing First Nations class struggles in modern Canadian life, particularly in his home province of Saskatchewan.
The large-scale panel paintings that comprise this grunt exhibition adopt social realist aesthetic tropes, directly referencing the propaganda posters of the Chinese Revolution and the iconography of the Soviet Proletariat. Through this knowing appropriation of form, the artist is able to speak to the effacement of First Nations contributions to the building and definition of Canada and Canadian cultural identity.
Utilizing a collapsed stylistic paradigm within global capitalism, the Red Worker series dynamically explores the contentious arenas of institutional history, memory, racism, class struggle, pride and identity. In doing so, these works are able to reveal and question how representational practices can both open and close such complex and ongoing social dialogues.
Wally Dion was born in 1976 and graduated in 2004 from the University of Saskatchewan's BFA program. As a commissioned portrait artist, he received Grants from the Saskatchewan Arts Board and has also been awarded Canada Council support. He has been in numerous group exhibitions and had his first solo show this past summer at the Mackenize Art Gallery in Regina. His work is also part of public collections including those of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canada Council Art Bank and the MacKenzie Art Gallery.
Performance/Installation
Kevin MacKenzie
SCREEN
November 8 - November 29, 2008
Opening: November 8 at 8 pm
This performance work consists of the artist building a wall that will serve as a screen for a video documenting the building of the wall. The conceptual piece speaks to construction and fa�ades in the period leading up to the 2010 Olympic Games. McKenzie works as a plasterer in the construction industry and this piece addresses the massive build-up of new construction in the city. The wall is both a sample of current construction and a fa�ade. Its role as a screen questions what it reveals and what it hides.
Kevin McKenzie is Métis Cree from Regina who currently works in Vancouver. He has studied at the University of Regina as well as OCA and ECIAD. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Richmond Art Gallery, the Indian and Inuit Art Gallery, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum and the MacKenzie Art Gallery. He has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions and attended several artist residency programs.
Exhibition
Jake Hill
New Work
September 4th - October 11th 2008.
Opening Thursday Sept 4 @ 8pm.
Jake Hill is a young emerging artist who has shown in local Vancouver artist-run centres. His work is rooted in sculpture and this new work is significantly different from this previous work for its minimal mass and implied rather than real form.
Jake comments on his new work, "The installation continues research into achieving scale and form through the use of materials that are absent, vacant or almost nothing. The work is inspired by drawings that depict making things - like shop sketches or illustrated recipes. Such devices lie or at least they cannot tell the whole truth. They need faith or willful misreading to believe that something could exist as a result of them."
Hill's exhibit, comprised of installation and drawing, uses the cast shadow of a ping pong ball against a wall to create an instance of "artificial logic." The exhibit provides an opportunity for the viewer's "willful misreading of rational evidence" to produce an imaginary space informed by a "new physics" of presence. Jake Hill is a sculptor whose work investigates the construction of artificial relationalities.
Jake Hill is a graduate from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and has a Masters Degree in Architecture from UBC. He received the Helen Pitt and the Alvin Balkind Prizes at ECIAD and the Kenny Charow Prize at UBC.
Hill's practice is informed by considerations of the body and culture and interests itself, particularly, in questions of scale.
Performance/New Media:
Vision Division
Workshops: Sept 15 - 17, noon to 6 pm each day
Performance: Thursday, Sept 18, noon to midnight
At Open Studios - 252 East 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC
Vision Division is the inaugural event of the Vancouver chapter of SHARE, a global organization dedicated to supporting collaboration and knowledge exchange in new media communities. Twelve participants will be invited to collectively create a networked, collaborative, and peer-led new media installation over the course of four days, culminating in a final public performance. Vision Division will focus specifically upon video environments, methodologies, and technologies, while networked SHARE chapters from around the globe will provide sonic material.
Co-presented by SHARE VAN, NFF, and grunt gallery Curator: Jesse Scott in conjunction with the New Forms Festival
Performance:
Laurie Anderson
Homeland
October 18, 2008 at 8 pm
At the Centre For Performing Arts, Vancouver
Laurie Anderson's Homeland is a series of songs and stories whose interconnections construct a political poetics of contemporary American culture. A sustained musical piece, Homeland explores the issues associated with panic culture, including our growing preoccupations with information and security. A groove electronics composition, Homeland showcases Anderson's new-form violin arrangements, her developments with electronic systems and her interest in Tuvan throat singers. Working with a group of experienced improvisational musicians, each performance of Homeland will be unique.
Based in New York, Laurie Anderson is an internationally recognized multimedia artist whose work has ranged from visual art and musical composition to filmmaking and electronics. Anderson's career, spanning over three decades, has been centrally preoccupied with the relational effects of technology on human interaction and communication. In 2002, Anderson was appointed NASA's first artist-in-residence, culminating in the solo performance production "The End of the Moon," which premiered in 2004 and toured internationally throughout 2006.
Presented in conjunction with
International Arts Initiatives.