Deshik drew cause I asked him to.

Because I introduced him to some new materials.

He entertained my suggestions and churned out a few new drawings.

He ended up resorting back to his favorite….felt pens.

As he drew this very detailed Boa Constrictor.

Then the questions started rolling in.

Questions like, “Is the rattler hollow like a music rattler?”

Like, “What is the oldest animal alive?”  & “What is the youngest?”

We did some research online.

He was fascinated with the still living, primitive fish the STURGEON.

It was only logical, to Deshik, that he BECOMES the STURGEON.

Read more here

Deshik does not have any pets.

Yet all he talks about and draws are animals and birds.

I promised I would bring my dog (Negrita) to the gallery so Deshik could meet her.

Upon meeting the dog Deshik spent the first 20 minutes running in a circle around her.

Then he spent a full hour examining Negritas fur, teeth, nose, inside of ears, etc.

Negrita is infinitely patient and gentle.

She is so mellow that she would often lay her head down amidst poking and prodding.

When this happened Deshik would ask “Is she dead now?”

Deshik started to get objects from the materials room and test them out on Negrita.

Basically this was the art process / project of the day.

I just let it unfold.

My favorite…..a bone balanced on dogs head.

Then he wanted to feed her.

I brought him half a carton of milk.

Deshik grabbed it and poured it directly on the gallery floor.

Fascinated, Deshik watched Negrita gently lap up the spilt milk.

He observed that as she licked away the white liquid  “…….It makes a moving drawing!”

For the last hour Deshik gets to drawing directly on the wall.

He draws animals. He draws quickly and with full assurance in his sweeping lines.

The whole while he talks about Negrita and his observations.

Mostly he repeated that Negrita was “…..so unusual cause she’s got a mane like a lion and fluffer ears.”

The big empty gallery space was disturbing for Deshik.

He said he liked the Vancouver Art Gallery better because it was filled with peoples’ art.

I explained he was to be the artist who filled the gallery.

“Can I fill it with birds?” he asked.  We can try, I responded.

He felt most comfortable in the more busy and confined materials room.

With a long white piece of paper and a blue marker he asked me to name birds…any kind.

Deshik knows every kind of bird. He would draw them quickly with appropriate distinguishing features while citing facts about that specific bird.

After drawing Kiwis, Ospreys, Loons, and a random Chameleon he wanted to paint them directly on the wall.

This proved to be a difficult translation for him.  He felt frustrated.  So he attempted the familiar: ABC and 1234

Although, he distracted himself by asking me what a Phoenix was.

I said it was a a mythological bird.

He asked, “Then what is a fact?” I explained.

Then he said, “What is an opinion?” I explained.

Deshik concluded, ” Then it is just your opinion that a Phoenix is a myth. In my opinion it is a real bird.”

Deshik is 7 years old and diagnosed Autistic.

Play, Fall, Rest, Dance is an exhibition project by Valerie Salez. The artist works with children with disabilities to help them explore the creative process of installation making. The exhibition runs from June 3 to July 5, 2014. The public is welcome to visit grunt gallery to see the installations that will continuously change and evolve over the course of the project.

Read more here.

“Like A Great Black Fire”

Exhibition Title: Like a Great Black Fire

Artist: Rebecca Chaperon
Opening: Thursday, September 8, 2011, 7-11pm
Exhibition Dates: Thursday, September 8 – Saturday, October 15, 2011

grunt gallery is pleased to present Rebecca Chaperon’s latest suite of paintings, entitled Like a Great Black Fire. In this series, an elongated and detailed landscape stretches across canvases populated by foreboding, black, geometric forms and meticulously rendered figures. Her current paintings portray the narrative of a female protagonist within a surreal landscape. Chaperon’s subject matter ranges from ethereal and dream-like to darkly humorous; she often deals with the feminine perspective from an autobiographical point of view.

With a compulsion to create unique visual stories, Rebecca Chaperon takes the imaginative subjects of her paintings and establishes an ability to engage people by speaking to the enchantment of our human experience. Her paintings act as a means of storytelling, conveying the notion of human struggle in the 21st century. Tempered by references to the synthesized, modern world she combines the classical landscape aesthetics of the past with an aspect of ambient, self-reflective self-portraiture.

Born in England in 1978, Rebecca settled in Toronto, Ontario at age 8. She attended Emily Carr University where she studied fine arts until graduation in 2002. She has exhibited her work across Canada and has been featured in several Canadian publications.

“It’s her laborious attention to detail that draws you in, like that dream you keep trying to fall asleep to catch another glimpse of. You can’t help but be drawn into her invitingly playful painting technique which quietly screams off the canvas.

Like A Great Black Fire is an exciting ten-canvas narrative that brings the viewer through a delightful romantic dream scape and I am nothing short of ecstatic that the Grunt Gallery has chosen to highlight her during this year’s Swarm.” – Sonny Assu

“Somewhere between a Happy Unbirthday and a walk through Dante’s Inferno extinguished, her imagery holds us sway, a storm-soaked storybook where even characters of seemingly incorruptible purity have daggers hiding behind their back. You wonder who these characters are, how they came to arrive and why they’ve been caught in such blighted situations. Each notion within her work asks a question, but the answer remains as to when Rebecca lets go of your hand, if you will find your way back.” – Graeme Berglund

“Certainly her most ambitious work to date, Like a Great Black Fire, is a large, acrylic polyptych panorama featuring a dark and stormy landscape sparsely populated by scurrying ferrets and her signature female protagonists. Chaperon creates powerful females in dainty bodies. The power they possess tends to be painted into their faces, in their eyes and expressions.”  – Todd Nickel, Co-Founder, Gallery Atsui

Watch the artist interview here: 

“Daughter, I made these works for you, my future ancestor. I created this document, these pieces, thisMichif self-archive for you. So you wouldn’t have to search my name, dig deep for my stories…”  

Inspired by her grandpa’s hunting shack and her daughter’s ancestral home lands, Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher reaches for the space between worlds in her solo exhibition, a memory of you: of holding, of carrying together. In this exhibition she extrapolates, expands and focuses in on beaded works and structures as a way of building forward with new archives of work, mindful of the gaps and omissions that she would like to not be repeated when passing her lineage to her own daughter. Running counter to a long history of assigned anonymity to Michif women in the archive, she is using the space of this exhibition to reclaim agency and position her beading practice as resistance to the erosion of cultural memory.

Maria-Margaretta is an interdisciplinary Red River Michif artist from Treaty Six Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She has ancestral ties to the Métis communities of St-François-Xavier, St. Boniface, Manitoba and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. She is currently making and living on the stolen territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations. Maria-Margaretta holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art+Design and an MFA from OCAD University. Her practice is an exploration of the Michif self archive, autobiographical beadwork and objects of the everyday. Using Métis identity as a place of transformation she questions how memory, personal experience, motherhood, and ancestral relations influence her understanding of self.

Photo by Dennis Ha.

Digitized Programming

Publication catalogue:

Designed by Vicky Lum and printed by Moniker Press, free, physical copies of the catalogue are available in the gallery while supplies last.

A PDF version with images is available to explore here.

An Alternative-Text version is available to explore: Plain text, Audio.

Creative Access Audio Tour:

Soundcloud: streaming audio

creative-access-audio-transcript-plainText-aMemory

Floor Plan:

A 02-memory-floorplan from the exhibition. A tactile map was created and has been archived at grunt gallery. Information about the tactile map is available within the Creative Access Audio Tour and was used as a reference tool for self-guided movement through the show. Contact archives@grunt.ca to learn more about the tactile map.

Virtual Walkthrough:

This year we’re celebrating forty years of grunt! The incredible array of artists, cultural workers and community members who have shared their time and gifts with us since we opened our doors in September 1984 has made grunt what it is today: often ineffable yet steadfast in our support of diverse and unruly approaches and practices. Anchored in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood on the lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations throughout our history, we reach far beyond our gallery walls through the work of extraordinary artists and you, our delightful, generous and ever-growing community—these are the ingredients of the ‘grunt sauce’ simmering on our proverbial stove for four decades. At times sweet, at times spicy, ours is a concoction reduced and extended over the years, with a pinch or dash from too many cooks to thank, a secret recipe we’d love to share with you.

To kick off our celebrations, grunt gallery is proud to launch archives.grunt.ca, the new home for our archives online. The grunt archive, containing documentation of forty years of artist-run programming and projects, has become a cornerstone of gallery operations, a wellspring for research, programming, and other activations, and an extension of our care for artists and their work during and beyond their time in our space. While our initiatives have placed our archival content in several spaces online since 2012, we are pleased to at last offer audiences and researchers a comprehensive, centralized, technically robust, and practical platform to explore and enjoy our collections. 

archives.grunt.ca is a work in progress and we welcome feedback on the content, use, accuracy and accessibility of the site. Research inquiries are also welcome and we are happy to support and guide your searches. If you are an artist who has shown or worked with grunt over the years, we would love to be in touch about how we can best represent records of you and your work. More details on feedback and policies can be found here.  

While we celebrate in the present we also look back to acknowledge the foresight and labour of folks like Glenn Alteen, Brice Canyon, Merle Addison, Archer Pechawis, Venge Dixon, and the dozens of art workers and volunteers whose work foregrounded this project. For the full story of our collection please see its record here.   

This project, now some three years in the making, is the product of many folks’ hard work and a community of care for the story of contemporary art in Vancouver. We would like in particular to thank Susan Gibb and Anna Tidlund at Western Front, Kendra Place and Syr Reifsteck at VIVO Media Arts, and Shaunna Moore, Seth Kaufman, and Maria Passaroti at Whirl-i-Gig, as well as Casey Wei, Russell Gordon, Emily Guerrero, and Vanessa Kwan. Thanks to the team at grunt: Katrina Orlowski, Meagan Kus, Kay Slater, Whess Harman, Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, Dan Pon, Jessica Fletcher, Sebnem Ozpeta, Dustyn Krasowski-Olmstead, Kira Saragih, Linda Gorrie, and Mary Ann Anderson. Finally we give thanks to the thousands of artists, curators, photographers and videographers, and others whose work is represented in our archive. 

archives.grunt.ca is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategies Fund. 

Please stay tuned for archives features, highlights, instructional resources and much more, we are forty, sporty, and excited for what lies ahead.

Image creditsImage Credits (starting at top left, clockwise): Photos taken by Merle Addison, Rachel Topham, Merle Addison, and Henry Robideau.

Mercedes Eng is a Chinese mixee settler with familial connections to “Vancouver’s” Chinatown that are 100 years deep. She is an artist, poet, prison abolitionist, and a professor at Emily Carr University, where she organizes the On Edge reading series. Mercedes’ writing and art is shaped by lived experience, grounded in community organizing and volunteering, and in service to social and environmental justice. It has been her years-long dream to exhibit her father’s prison artwork as an act of loving care.

Digitized Programming:

Publication catalogue:

Designed by Vicky Lum and printed by Moniker Press, free, physical copies of the catalogue are available in the gallery while supplies last.

A PDF version with images is available to explore here.
An Alternative-Text version is available to explore: Plain text, Audio.

Artist Talk:

Site Map and Didactics:

A PDF containing the didactic information and layout of the salon installations of the archive images and brass works in the show. This didactic information is also contained within the audio tour and virtual walkthroughs.

Virtual Walkthrough:

Submissions due: November 30th, 2023, Midnight or 11:59 PM PDT

Accessibility information:

This information can be listened to in English. 

Below is a video of the information presented in ASL:

You can apply by email in writing, in a recording (video) or a separate text file, or by using Google Forms. Email access@grunt.ca

This program is limited to the Greater Vancouver Regional District and Lower Mainland artists. We appreciate the interest of artists living outside this area, but we still lack the funds to support artists outside our local area. If you still want to be in contact with us, feel free to email us, but only local applications will be considered.

What is the voice-off artist co-learning program?

Our co-learning program is an opportunity to support up to two guest artists, makers, explorers or knowledge keepers to continue exploring their own ongoing practices while providing a space for sharing and learning with the grunt gallery team.

The Details

This program focuses on voice-off participation. For this, we are inviting Deaf, deaf, hard of hearing or non-verbal artists to participate in our program. Any artists who apply must have ongoing creative practice and space for making, but artists may use the fee from this program to help them secure their own making space during the program if they choose.

The purpose of the voice-off co-learning program is a dynamic opportunity that provides paid time for participants to explore their own non-verbal, silent, or signed practice while also working with grunt gallery to deepen our understanding of non-verbal accessibility and Deaf culture within contemporary arts. Artists are invited to create something in response to grunt gallery.

Artists will be paid a fee to either pursue their own ongoing projects or to begin a project related to the gallery during their co-learning program. This is not an exhibition opportunity but a knowledge-sharing and supporting program where artists will receive a fee to continue their own explorations and development within an ongoing non-verbal, non-auditory, silent, or Deaf (De’VIA) practice while being in conversation with grunt gallery about what it means to produce work for a hearing and speaking world.

The co-learning program allows artists to be paid to work on a silent or signed project (either new or ongoing) and have their process documented on-site at grunt gallery or have an archivist visit their studio to document their work. Artists will be asked to consider what it would mean to have their practice in a gallery, the barriers they face as a silent, non-verbal, or Deaf artist, as well as give feedback on some of grunt’s practices to provide non-auditory and silent access in their shows.

We acknowledge that practicing silence, being non-verbal, and being Deaf are very different. This is a call to a broad range of art practices, and while there may be some overlap, we acknowledge that being deaf is not the same as being Deaf and that one can be Deaf and have a practice not connected to Deaf culture. Someone can be hearing and process audio but not being able or willing to speak. This co-learning initiative is designed to be expansive, and we hope to host it again in the future (pending funding) and continue learning from different artists over the coming years.

Artists are expected to commit to up to 8 hours of co-learning sessions with grunt staff, where they will share and chat about barriers and challenges facing non-verbal, deaf or Deaf artists and brainstorm ways to better support their practices within formal gallery spaces. An opportunity to meet with grunt gallery’s program director, curator or exhibitions manager will be made available. The artist can discuss their practice and receive feedback on how they can present their work when applying for exhibitions and other programs within contemporary gallery spaces. Artists are asked to visit at least one exhibition at grunt gallery and respond to the space in conversation or making. Any travel costs and access support for this will be paid for by grunt gallery.

The program is designed to be spacious and allow participants to shape the program. 

grunt gallery offers the non-verbal or Deaf artist co-learning program as an opportunity for their staff and our community to explore how silent media and De’VIA can exist and play out within predominantly hearing/verbal spaces where silence or signing is discouraged, forbidden, not considered or not funded. Time is built into the residency to allow artists to share and participate in grunt staff and committee meetings, and members of the AEPE department at grunt will be available to support throughout the program as needed.

We invite expressions of interest in the program from community members working on Coast Salish land within the colonially named Metro Vancouver and Lower Mainland area. This residency is limited to creative people who self-identify as non-verbal, deaf or hard of hearing artists who do not speak (but may use tools to communicate besides signing) and d/D/HOH individuals. We recognize that wellness, ability, and identity are a spectrum, and we ask you to share how you position yourself within your communities and how your practice is engaged with a non-verbal and Deaf arts discourse.

grunt gallery hosts and makes work on the unceded and stolen ancestral territories of the Hun’qumi’num (hǝn̓q̓ǝmin̓ǝm̓) and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) speaking peoples, as uninvited guests on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh lands. We will prioritize applications from Host Nation creators when reviewing with our jury. We will also encourage and prioritize experiences by Black, Indigenous, and racialized individuals. Please let us know when you apply if you are a part of one of the many Coast Salish families and nations, are an urban Indigenous guest on these lands, or identify as a racialized individual.

The grunt gallery 2023 voice-off program will involve a selection process following an application. The selection will be made by the current grunt gallery AEPE department, grunt accessibility committee, and 1-2 community assessors. 

Fee: 

Selected artists will receive a fee of $2000, with an expectation of about 10-15hrs/week of artistic labour over six weeks (including the initial discovery phase and project introduction—2 hours maximum), with any hiring of interveners/interpreters/translators, time spent in additional meetings, and any workshop, community gathering, and research costs covered by grunt. Artists will work offsite, although space may be available at grunt gallery depending on the artist’s practice. Most of the artist’s work is expected to be done offsite (or in their home spaces). Selected artists will coordinate with the Exhibitions and Accessibility Manager, Kay Slater, and, on occasion, the Accessibility and Events Manager, Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa. Invitations to additional staff and committee meetings are optional and up to the artist to decide their capacity.

Schedule:

Call for artists: October 2023. 

Deadline for submissions: November 30th, 2023

Jury/Assessment Panel: Week of December 11th, 2023

Notice of selections: December 18th, 2023

Successful applications will begin the program in January 2024.

Submissions can be submitted in text or ASL. When submitting computer voice recordings, please indicate the language used in the recording. ASL questions are available in our Google Drive.

If Google Forms are not accessible, these questions are available in Word Doc, Google Doc, and Plain Text and can be copied from here into an email.

If a Google Form format works for you, please visit the Google Form with the following questions:

1. Name:
2. Email or Phone:
3. This residency is limited to artists, makers, and knowledge keepers who are non-verbal, are deaf or hard of hearing, have a non-verbal or silent practice, or are Deaf or Hard of Hearing with a non-verbal practice. Tell us how you self-identify.
4. Are you a member of MST (Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil Waututh) host nations and families?
5. Are you a person of racialized experience?
6. Do you identify as Trans, Queer, Deaf/deaf/hard of hearing, neurodiverse, mad, or otherwise excellent? Tell us about your intersectional identity (if you want)!
7. Which city or territory do you live in within the colonially defined province of BC?
8. Tell us about yourself. (250 word limit)
9. How does non-verbal communication, De’VIA, or silence show up in your practice and work? Why do you explore silence, non-verbal communication or De’VIA? (250 word limit)
10. What would you like to explore in the residency if you were to participate? (250 word limit)
11. Please attach your CV (1 page )
12. Please attach support materials (maximum of 10 images, 5 minutes of video or audio, and seven pages of written materials at 14 pt or higher). If support materials are supplied in languages besides English, please indicate the language in the file name or your application comments.

Accessibility:

grunt has wide automated double entrances and an automated door for their washroom. Here is a video walkthrough of the space, which includes a visual description. For full access details or to discuss needs and inclusion, please email access@grunt.ca

If you would like to have a meeting to discuss your application or for any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us.

Please let us know if you require a translator, intervenor, or other access support. Service dogs with certification are welcome in the space. Please note that non-certified support animals cannot be supported in the space for staff and visitors and their access needs. Please contact us with any questions.

How can I support this initiative?

If you are not eligible for this residency but still wish to support it, we ask that you share this with your networks, directly invite people that you think would be interested, and if possible, donate to grunt gallery to help us sustain these programs.

Share our invitation on social media, and be sure to write image descriptions in your media captions should they be erased when shared.

Written support can also be sent to access@grunt.ca for us to use in grants and to help us better our programming and calls for submissions in the future.

Financial support can be provided by donating or by contacting communications@grunt.ca to become a funding partner for our Accessible Exhibitions, Public Programming and Events initiatives.

Submissions due: October 31st, 2023, Midnight or 11:59 PM PDT

Accessibility information: This information can be listened to in English by visiting soundcloud or downloading an MP3 from our Google Drive. 

ASL questions are available in our google drive.

You can apply by email in writing or in a recording (video or audio) or in a separate text file, or by using Google Forms. Email access@grunt.ca

This program is limited to artists living in the Greater Vancouver Regional District and Lower Mainland. We appreciate the interest of artists living outside of this area, but we still lack the funds to support artists outside of our local area. If you still want to be in contact with us, feel free to email us, but only local applications will be considered.

What is the tactile artist co-learning program?

Our co-learning program is an opportunity to support up to two guest artists, makers, explorers or knowledge keepers to continue within their own on-going practices exploring, while also providing a space for sharing and learning together with the grunt gallery team.

The Details

This is our second year working on our tactile learning program. It was previously called the Tactile Residency, but have shifted away from that language because we do not provide dedicated working space for artists with our current set up and wanted to be clear about that! Artists must have an ongoing tactile practice and space for making, but artists may use the fee from this program to help them secure their own making space during the program if they choose.

The purpose of the tactile co-learning program is a dynamic opportunity that provides paid time for participants to explore their own tactile practice while also working with grunt gallery to deepen our understanding of non-visual and touch interactivity within contemporary arts. Artist are invited to create something in response to grunt gallery for our archives.

In the past, artist editions produced have included a glossary of tactile marks by a Blind illustrator, and an improvised drum performance in the empty gallery.

Artists will be paid a fee to either pursue their own ongoing projects, or to begin a project related to the gallery during their co-learning program. This is not an exhibition opportunity but a knowledge sharing and supporting program where artists will receive a fee to continue their own explorations and development within an on-going tactile practice, while being in conversation with grunt gallery about what it means to have tactile work and to navigate non-visually in a primarily visual space.

The co-learning program offers the opportunity for artists to be paid to work on a tactile project (either new or on-going) and either have their process documented on-site at grunt gallery or have an archivist visit their studio to document their work. Artists will be asked to consider what it would mean to have their practice in a gallery, the barriers they face as a tactile artist, as well as give feedback on some of grunt’s practices to provide tactile participation in their shows.

Artists are expected to commit to up to 8 hours of co-learning sessions with grunt staff where they will share and chat about barriers and challenges facing tactile and non-visual artists, and brainstorm ways to better support their practices within formal gallery spaces. An opportunity to meet with grunt gallery’s program director, curator and/or exhibition manager will be made available where the artist can discuss their practice, and receive feedback on how they can present their work when applying for exhibitions and other programs within contemporary gallery spaces. Artists are asked to visit at least one exhibition at grunt gallery, and respond to the space either in conversation or in making. Any travel costs and access supports for this will be paid for by grunt gallery.

The program is designed to be spacious and allow participants to shape the program. 

grunt gallery offers the tactile artist co-learning program as an opportunity for their staff and our community to explore how tactility can exist and play-out within predominantly visual spaces where touching and interacting with work is discouraged, forbidden, or not considered. Time is built into the residency to allow for artists to share and participate in grunt staff and committee meetings, and members of the AEPE department at grunt will be available to support throughout the program as needed.

In our second year of this program, we are hoping to invite expressions of interest in the program from community members working on Coast Salish land, within the colonially named Metro Vancouver and Lower Mainland area. This residency is limited to creative people who self-identify as Non-Visual, Blind, DeafBlind, Partially Sighted or Low Vision individuals. We recognize that wellness, ability, and identity is a spectrum, and we ask you to share how you position yourself within your communities, and how your practice is engaged with a non-visual, and tactile discourse.

grunt gallery hosts and makes work on the unceded and stolen ancestral territories of the Hun’qumi’num (hǝn̓q̓ǝmin̓ǝm̓) and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) speaking peoples, as uninvited guests on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh lands. We will prioritize applications from Host Nation creators when reviewing with our jury. We will also encourage and prioritize experiences by Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or racialized individuals. Please let us know when you apply if you are a part of MST families and nations, or if you identify as a racialized individual!

The grunt gallery 2023 tactile program will involve a selection process following an application. The selection will be made from the current grunt gallery AEPE department, grunt accessibility committee, and 1-2 community assessors. 

Fee: 

Selected artists will receive a fee of $2000, with an expectation of about 10-15hrs/week of artistic labour over 6 weeks (including initial discovery phase and project introduction — 2 hours maximum), with any hiring of interveners/interpreters/translators, time spent in additional meetings, and any workshop, community gathering, and research costs covered by grunt. Artists will work offsite although space may be available at grunt gallery depending on the artist’s practice. It is expected that most of the artist work will be done offsite (or in their home spaces). Selected artists will coordinate with grunt’s Events and Accessibility Manager, Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, and on occasion grunt’s Accessibility and Exhibitions Manager, Kay Slater. Invitations to additional staff and committee meetings are optional and up to the artist to decide their capacity.

Schedule:

Call Opens for artists: September 11th 2023

Deadline for submissions October 31st, 2023

Jury/Assessment Panel: Week of November 7th, 2023

Notice of selections: November 16th, 2023

Submissions can be submitted in text, voice, or ASL. When submitting voice recordings, please indicate the language used in the recording. ASL questions are available in our google drive.

If a google form format works for you, please click here to visit the google form with the following questions:

1. Name:
2. Email or Phone:
3. This residency is limited to artists, makers, and knowledge keepers who are Non-Visual, Blind, DeafBlind, Partially Sighted, Low Vision or otherwise on a non-visual spectrum. Tell us how you self-identify.
4. Are you a member of MST (Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil Waututh) host nations and families?
5. Are you a person of racialized experience?
6. Do you identify as Trans, Queer, Deaf/deaf/hard of hearing, neurodiverse, mad, or otherwise excellent? Tell us about your intersectional identity (if you want)!
7. Which city or territory do you live in within the colonially defined province of BC?
8. Tell us about yourself. (250 word limit)
9. How does tactility and non-visual interaction show up in your practice and work? Why do you explore tactility and non-visual interactivity? (250 word limit)
10. What would you like to explore in the residency if you were to participate? (250 word limit)
11. Please attach your CV (1 page )
12. Please attach support materials (maximum of 10 images, 5 minutes of video or audio, and 7 pages of written materials at 14 pt or higher). If support materials are supplied in languages besides English, please indicate the language in the file name or in your application comments.

If Google Forms are not accessible, these questions are available in plain text file, Word Doc, OCR PDF, and can be copied from here into an email.

Accessibility:

grunt has wide double-entrances (now with a power door) and a wheelchair accessible washroom. Please note, the washroom door on site is very heavy . Here is a video walkthrough of the space which includes visual description. For full access details or to discuss needs and inclusion, please email: access@grunt.ca

If you would like to have a meeting to discuss your application or for any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us.

If you require a translator, intervenor, or other access support, please let us know. Service dogs with certification are welcome in the space. Please note that non-certified support animals are not able to be supported in the space for the sake of staff and visitors and their access needs. Please contact us with any questions.

How can I support this initiative?

If you are not eligible for this residency but still wish to support it, we ask that you share this with your networks, directly invite people that you think would be interested, and if possible, donate to grunt gallery to help us sustain these programs.

Share our invitation on social media, and be sure to write image descriptions in your media captions should they be erased when shared.

Written support can also be sent to access@grunt.ca for us to use in grants, and to help us better our programming and calls for submissions in the future.

Financial support can be provided by donating, or by contacting communications@grunt.ca to become a funding partner for our Accessible Exhibitions, Public Programming and Events initiatives.