Position: MPCAS Curator 

Project: Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

Reporting to: Programming Team

Hours: 15 hours per week. Occasional evening and weekend work. Flexible schedule. This is a 1 year contract position.

Remuneration: $27.00/hr

Start date: July 1, 2023

About the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen and grunt gallery:
The Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen (MPCAS) is a 7m x 4m outdoor urban screen located at the intersection of Kingsway and Broadway in Vancouver on the side of the Independant building, a mixed use commercial and residential tower. The screen is maintained and programmed by grunt gallery, and aspires to enrich and engage the public through the presentation of media art that reflects the diversity, historical richness and creative capacity of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

Through an annual submission call, commissions, co-productions and partnerships, the screen features works for and about Mount Pleasant and the people who live here alongside programming that connects these local issues to global practices, ideas and concerns. The MPCAS is a place for media and interactive content both home-grown and far-flung, presented through the distinctive lens of the neighbourhood.

grunt gallery has been a part of the Mount Pleasant community since 1984 and has seen tremendous changes over this period. During the past 40 years the area has gone from one of Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhoods to one of its richest. This transition hasn’t been easy and the social costs of thirty years of gentrification have been intensifying, particularly with the Broadway Plan and incoming skytrain stations reshaping the area. MPCAS has been born of this tension and we seek to acknowledge both the Mount Pleasant that is being forced out and the new communities coming into being.

General Description of the Position: 

The MPCAS Curator works with the grunt programming team and Program Director, as well as  community partners to develop contacts and strengthen relationships between the MPCAS and its partners in the community.

The MPCAS Curator is a planner, implementer, and relationship builder who is responsible for maintaining existing programming and developing new initiatives that reflect the multiple and diverse communities in Mount Pleasant. They will take the lead in the curatorial vision of the screen, coordinating our annual submission call while cultivating partnerships with other art organizations and local festivals year-round. We expect this to take the shape of developing new projects and applying for funding opportunities to support them and in in-kind exchanges with community partners.

We are looking for a candidate who prioritizes developing local relationships and familiarizing themselves with the neighbourhood’s history, businesses, community organizations and art communities. They will work with grunt staff to develop strategies that bring community content to the screen, promote visibility and encourage broad access.

The MPCAS Curator is expected to work independently, but will play a key role in the grunt programming team, alongside the Program Director, curatorial staff and the technical manager.

Required Competencies:

Collaborative
Reliable
Committed
Independent
Community Minded
Resourceful
Creative
Flexible
Social
Communication

General Responsibilities: 

• Work with staff and committees to develop strategies and enhance contacts within the Mount Pleasant community in conjunction with the MPCAS’s vision for programming and the neighbourhood.
• Design and implement a curatorial vision that builds strong, long-term, and loyal relationships with audience members, supporters and communities.
• Develop programming for the MPCAS engaging heritage and cultural communities as well as community groups, seniors, youth and more.
• Continue to develop relationships with partners and collaborators from the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as well as the wider Indigenous communities of Vancouver.
• Collaborate and communicate with neighbourhood organizations to develop activities that promote the MPCAS’s presence (eg. community events and festivals such as Car Free Day, and organizations such as the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House, Tonari Gumi, the Native Education College and many others). Previous partnerships have included limited run screenings with the Capture Photography Festival, VQFF, Room Magazine and other community based programming.
• Create content around programming and community engagement for the MPCAS’s social media and website. Collaborate with grunt’s Communications Manager as required.
• Update the MPCAS website and internal content management system.

Required Skills and Education: 

• Awareness of and experience working within the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
• Strong knowledge and commitment to bridge-building within diverse community frameworks.
• Strong written and oral communication skills; ability to target outreach materials to varying audiences and age groups; ability to listen, and bring strong awareness of interpersonal/ intercultural dynamics.
• Good understanding of artist-run culture.
• Ability to (or interest in developing skills to) write grants, and find alternative funding support for innovation.
• Post-secondary education or experience in community engagement, public programming, communications, activist organizing or arts-related disciplines is an asset.
• Some knowledge of media art practices and production requirements.
• Familiarity with Media and Video Arts.
• Some knowledge of public art (and public messaging in relation to art in the public realm) an asset.
• Some experience with social media content creation and CMS/Wordpress.
• Familiarity or interest in project development and management.
• Ability to perform well in a team environment and collaborate with others.
• Strong organizational skills, able to identify and prioritize tasks with minimal supervision, work independently, and take initiative.
• Resourceful, hands-on and pro-active.
• Proven ability to act in an assertive but professional manner and to represent oneself and an organization in a positive manner.
• Ability to work flexible hours.

Ethics and the Workplace: 

• The MPCAS curator must be invested in open communication and collaboration.
• Acknowledging that most accepted definitions of professionalism have racist origins, the MPCAS curator will be able to be present and engage in their work in a manner that is dedicated and as consistent as possible.
• We envision this role as one best served by working artists and creatives with their own on-going practices to consider this role; we hope to develop a working relationship wherein artists can exist both as artists and arts workers, and will be in conversation with the successful applicant on what grunt can do to support their on-going career.
• As a junior position, we strongly encourage emerging artists and curators to apply.

To apply: Please send cover letter and resume to Whess Harman by email at whess@grunt.ca

Application Deadline: May 26, 2023 @ 5:00 pm PDT

 

One part fairy tale, one part cooking show and one part Cantonese school, Ho Tak Kee by Leung Yiksea 梁亦詩 and Karin Lee 李嘉慈 is an assembly of fragmented memories and imagined conversations of a local wonton house that was lost to fire one Christmas day. The Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen is located on the site of the former Ho Tak Kee Wonton House, and many elements of this project were inspired by conversations with the Ho Tak Kee family and artists in the area who frequented the eatery. This settler story is emblematic of many newcomer/family-run eateries. Click here for details about this new work on the MPCAS.

On Saturday May 28th, join us online for an artist talk with Leung Yiksea 梁亦詩 and Karin Lee 李嘉慈 in conversation with Vanessa Kwan regarding Ho Tak Kee, commissioned by grunt gallery for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen. For this presentation we will be screening the work online before the discussion, but if you have the opportunity, please go see the work on the screen at Kingsway and Broadway, as intended! Ho Tak Kee screens throughout the week—click here and scroll down for the MPCAS programming schedule—and will be screening for the full day on Saturdays and Sundays in May and every Sunday in June.

This event will be presented on Zoom, with auto-captioning and a live transcript by otter.ai.

Click here to join the event.

[Image description: a family-sized bowl of wor wontons topped with vibrant green bok choy is centred on a glass lazy susan, on a red-and-white gingham tablecloth. To the left of the bowl is a tray of condiments: soy sauce, chili oil and an diner-style ketchup bottle. To the right are four empty rice bowls and a ladle.]

We are currently accepting submissions for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen, until February 7th, 2022! We welcome contributions from artists, collectives, curators and other community members, organizations and community festivals. Generally speaking, submitted works should be 10 minutes or less and could include (but are not limited to) still images, time-based media, animations, performance works, archival video, interactive pieces, GIFs, experimental video, and curatorial/screening proposals.

The curatorial vision for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen is centralized on the broader theme of PLACE. Initially, this focused on the literal geographical perimeters on the stolen, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, as a part of one of so-called Vancouver’s earliest neighbourhoods. This theme has also evolved to encompass a continuing community and network of makers holding deep knowledge of the area’s histories, holding visions of the future, and holding ground as the landscape rapidly shifts in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. Topics have included identity, language, housing, city streets, food, neighbourhoods, landmarks, loss, memories, narratives of the past, and potential futures.

The MPCAS will continue to honour it’s initial framing of PLACE; as a community screen we are beholden to how we are on the land and how we wish to reflect the communities we envision this screen to be for. We also invite and encourage submissions which speak towards the ambiguity of place–of displacement, diaspora, digital and contested space, as well as artists whose work has been inextricably shaped by their time in the communities of this PLACE.

Click here for details and submission forms!

Ben Bogart’s new work, A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism, was featured on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen from December 17th—26th, 2021. This complex long-form work will be presented as an installation in our gallery from January 13th—22nd, 2022, preceded by an online artist talk on January 11th. It will also once again be available to view on the MPCAS throughout the open studio dates. If you would like to book an appointment to view this work in the gallery, please contact communications@grunt.ca

Online artist talk: January 11th, 7:30pm PST.
This event will take place on Zoom, with auto-captions by otter.ai. We will have an external chat available in Discord, however the chat function in Zoom will also be on.

Click here for exhibition map and accessibility notes (OCR compatible).

A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism
By Ben Bogart

On the wet dark dreary days, do we relish in the greens and the smell of rain, or do we retreat into imagined days of warmer pasts? The built and natural worlds around us are constantly evolving and transforming. While attending to the changes from moment to moment can we see the boundary between this moment and our past or future? Are we even in the present, or are we immersed in our predictions and simulations, always using samples of the present to validate imagined pasts and futures? These are some of the questions that are asked through this work. “A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism” is a study of time and movement at the MPCAS. Source footage was shot from the MPCAS during the long days of summer capturing the dynamism and colour of the site. The footage archives a window in time, documenting the movement of plants, clouds and animate life as humans and non-humans go along with our routines.

The structure of the work is determined by an analysis of human / non-human and natural / artificial movements, resulting in a continuum of dynamism to stillness. Areas of stillness diffuse into soft gradients of colour that undulate over time; these gradients are demarcated by the strong edges and readability of areas of stillness. Augmenting this structure are the discontinuities of the present moment that interrupt the smoothness and consistency of the composition. Through this trace of the present the viewer may pick out the shape of cars and people moving through the frame, but this subtlety is overwhelmed by drastic changes in colour. The cloud-like fields that advance and retreat from frame to frame are determined by colour values of the present where the source is almost entirely veiled in abstraction. A taxi-cab entering the frame does not appear yellow, and yet washes the image in yellow. A cloud blowing over is barely noticeable, but saturates the image in teal. Through these waves of colour and luminosity the viewer may realize this bright summer ‘present’ is in fact another moment of the past; a sample of the summer collected by a machine and reconstructed as an imagined past and present.

Ben Bogart is a non-binary agender adisciplinary artist working for two decades with generative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision and machine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences in Canada, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Canadian Embassy at Transmediale in 2017 and the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018. They have been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre (Canada), the New Forms Festival (Canada) and at Videotage (Hong Kong). Their research and practice have been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Click here to read our mini interview with Ben!

And click here to review our COVID-19 gallery protocols.

Ben Bogart’s new work, A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism, will be featured on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen from December 17th—26th, 2021. This beautifully complex work will screen for 7.5 hours/day, you can read more about the project here. We will also be presenting Ben’s work in our gallery, with an artist talk in January, 2022. We’re excited to share this work with you, and wanted to introduce you to Ben’s practice — read on for a mini interview with Ben Bogart!

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your creative practice!

I’m a non-binary agender adisciplinary conceptual artist and as I write this I’m constantly distracted by hummingbirds coming to visit my new feeder and delighted watching their tongues as they flick them out of their beaks after each sip of nectar. For over two decades I’ve focused on computational processes as artistic material; I think of the use of computational processes as following from the instruction works of 1960s conceptual art onward. In my artistic practice I’ve engaged with methods including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision, and machine learning. I’ve diffracted these methods through bodies of knowledge in computational creativity, cognitive neuroscience, psychology of creativity, and quantum physics, and see continuity between my artistic and scholarly practices. Through these disparate methods and disciplines, my work engages with fundamental questions regarding subjectivity, objectivity, knowledge, meaning, emergence, complexity, autonomy, creativity, and thought. In recent years I’ve been thinking through Karen Barad’s Agential Realism and the ways in which boundary-making is fundamental to natural-cultural (physical-conceptual) processes. I’ve come to realize that my professional practice has always troubled and reworked physical and conceptual boundaries.

How did you become engaged with the technology used in your piece for the MPCAS?

My dad worked with computers his entire professional life, from a thesis written using punch cards, through magnetic reel-to-reel tape, to hard disks. He is also a photographer and for nearly as long as I can remember photography and digital imaging were available to me, but I’m not sure I thought of myself as an artist then. It wasn’t until moving to Toronto in 1999 that I was exposed to the “Electronic Media Art” scene that gave me a precedent for thinking about computation and technology as artistic materials. One of the first people I met outside of university was Camille Turner at the Subtle Technologies Conference in 1999 and it was her who introduced me to Jim Ruxton and InterAccess. I owe so much to artists such as David Rokeby and Norman White for expanding my boundaries of artistic practice and imagining a role for technology in it.

In 2001, I made a work using an evolutionary algorithm inspired by Karl Sims—who made a lot of formative computational art in the 1990s. My ongoing use of the Self-Organizing Map—a simple artificial neural network that rearranges pixels according to colour used in the MPCAS piece—started in 2006. My inspiration for using machine learning in art was George Legrady’s Pockets Full of Memories from 2001 which also uses the Self-Organizing Map. It’s hard to demarcate where machine learning differs from other computational methods such as feedback loops, chaos mathematics, or physical models. In all of my engagements with technology I’m looking to develop processes that have the capacity to surprise me. This surprise could be due to my misunderstanding—or the complexity—of the process. I see machine learning as just another engagement with complexity resulting from a process built up from the interactions of many simple components. From this high-level perspective, there is no difference between a physical model made up of many small mass-spring-damper components and artificial neural networks. I provide this short ~20 year personal history because while the tech industry is very good at emphasizing novelty, it is imperative for artists using tech to see their relation with—and situate their work in—the ~70 year history of artists working with electronic and computational technologies.

What interests you about the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen?

Having lived in East Van for a decade now I’ve spent a lot of time on the 10th and Ontario bike routes. Walking and cycling to go shopping at the old MEC store, or just to spend time on Main Street, I’ve seen a lot of changes in Mount Pleasant. I can hardly remember what used to be where The Independent now stands. How long will Kingsgate Mall stay around? What changes will we see in the next 10 years? My interest in public art is situated in a preoccupation with the ways an artwork can relate to its site—not only conceptually but also in terms of structure. My approach to public art involves using technologies that allow the structure of artworks to be created in dialogue with place. I see this as a natural extension of my interest in surprise and emergence where the site itself becomes a collaborator and the form of a work emerges from interactions between algorithms, the site, and my intention. Our city is changing so much and so quickly; there is so much potential for public art that literally (re)structures itself through these changes and reflects the city back to itself through an ongoing and evolving relationship. I hope there will be opportunities for even more ambitious multi-year permanent projects where artworks evolve ‘live’ as the city changes around them. Vancouver seems like an ideal place for this kind of work as we embark on large density projects to make staying here more viable.

We’ve got a slew of exciting new works on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen! As of April 15th, 2022, this new selection of work exploring the theme of PLACE can be viewed daily on the MPCAS at Kingsway and Broadway. We also have some special weekend screenings, including Wake Up! by Jessie Ray Short, curated by Jocelyne Junker and presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival, showing every Saturday and Sunday through April.

To read more about the new programming and find the full list of works on the MPCAS, click here.

For scheduling info, you can access the MPCAS calendar for screening times from your desktop or phone via the programming page. Timing is not exact as the screen may experience some loading delays throughout the day and we suggest arriving 5-10 minutes early to ensure that you can catch the program you’re interested in viewing.

With two annual juries in winter and summer, we welcome submissions to the MPCAS on a rolling basis. Please click here for submission details.

Spring / Summer Hours (01 April to 30 September)
Sunday to Thursday: 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM
Friday & Saturday:  9:00 AM to 11:00 PM

The MPCAS is produced by grunt gallery and generously supported by the Vancouver Foundation, RIZE corporation, Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Vancouver and Creative BC.

 

Images (clockwise from top left): Sydney Frances Pickering, distance, video (still), 2022; Erika Wilk and Moniker Press, How to Zine, video (still), 2021; Eli Hirtle, ᒥᑭᓯᑲᐦᑕ // mikisikahta // bead it, film (still), 2021; Keely O’Brien, Any Day Now, photograph, 2020-21.

MPCAS CALL for SUBMISSIONS

We accept submissions on an ongoing basis.
To be considered for the Fall/ Winter 2020 program, submissions must be received by July 31st, 2020 at 4pm.
Submissions received after this date will be considered at a later time.

Background:
The MPCAS is a 7×4 metre outdoor community and media arts LED screen, located on unceded Coast Salish territories at Kingsway and Broadway in Mount Pleasant. Broadcasting from 9am to 10pm most days, it is programmed by grunt gallery, an artist-run centre that has been in the neighbourhood since 1984. For more information please visit mpcas.ca

*please note the screen does not have audio capabilities, therefore all submitted content is currently limited to image and captioning only.

PLACE:
The current programming theme of the MPCAS is PLACE, which looks at a changing Mount Pleasant and Vancouver through works by artists, curators, and residents who live here or are connected to the area, exploring its past, current, and future vitality.

Mount Pleasant was one of Vancouver’s earliest neighborhoods, built along a large salmon and trout creek that ran from the swampy higher grounds down to the ocean — the same path as what is now Main Street. The area became a focus of colonial settlement in the mid-19th century and local Indigenous communities were forced out to make way for businesses that grew into a bustling destination neighbourhood. By 1910, business moved west with Shaughnessy becoming the preferred neighbourhood, and Mount Pleasant fell into economic decline for almost 100 years. With working-class roots, abundant rental housing, and transient tenants, it was the poorest neighbourhood outside of the Downtown Eastside. A community of immigrants, urban poor, and artists created the conditions from which much of Vancouver’s early modern cultural life grew.

Beginning in the 1990s, Mount Pleasant’s gentrification started to take hold, initially through the live/work studio condos that gradually began to appear in the area. In 2010, with the development in the Olympic Village area, aggressive upzoning began, and many residents were evicted from their long-held homes as rents doubled and tripled within a few years. Mount Pleasant’s gritty characteristics suddenly became its new selling points. Developer marketing highlighted its arts community and heritage buildings—although ironically both became early targets in the gentrification process. Mount Pleasant quickly transformed from one of Vancouver’s cheapest neighbourhoods to one of its most expensive, ground zero for the increasing unaffordability of the city.

The MPCAS engages with this complex and, at times, tense history of displacement, creativity, expansion and grit.

Participate:
Our vision is to provide an urban screen with content received from and responsive to its viewers, in contrast to the advertising/consumer paradigm that is the rule with most highly visible screens in a public space.

As we build a program that reflects, engages with and enriches the complex cultural history of Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, our call for submissions welcomes contributions from artists, collectives, curators and other community members, organizations and community festivals. Topics could include (but are not limited to) identity, language, housing, city streets, food, neighbourhoods, landmarks, loss, memories, narratives of the past, and potential futures.

The racialized, immigrant and working class communities that have been the backbone of Mount Pleasant have also been disproportionately impacted by the economic swings and recent gentrification of the area. Without a doubt, the history of this unique neighbourhood is entwined with colonial legacies and systemic inequities, and we invite submissions that explore the idea of place from the angle of disPLACEment, too.

Generally speaking, submitted works should be ten minutes or less in length and could include (but are not limited to) still images, time-based media, animations, performance works, archival video, interactive pieces, GIFs, experimental video, event proposals, and curatorial/screening proposals.

How To Submit Your Work:
Please include the following information in your proposal :

• Maximum one-page proposal describing your project, and how it relates to PLACE.
• Supporting Documentation: Video submissions should be sent as a link to a host site (Youtube, Vimeo, etc). You may also send preview files via WeTransfer, Dropbox, or similar services if you prefer, please keep files to a maximum of 500MB.
• Photography and image based submissions: 10-12 images. Image files should be no more than 1200 pixels wide.
• Creator CV and a short biography.
• Artist / Curator Statement (optional).

Please email proposals to submissions[at]grunt[dot]ca by July 31st at 4pm to be considered for Fall/Winter 2020 programming.

MPCAS Content and Technical Guidelines are available as a downloadable PDF

**Due to COVID-19, we will only be accepting digital submissions until further notice.

Become A Part of the MPCAS through our Digital Stories Workshops!
grunt gallery and EastVan Digital Stories join forces with Mount Pleasant and Vancouver residents who wish to create short videos around the theme of PLACE. Artists Lorna Boschman and Sebnem Ozpeta will host a series of free workshops that walk participants through the process of digital story making. Selected videos from the workshops will be shown on the MPCAS. For more information on EastVan Digital Stories please email lorna[at]digitalstories[dot]ca

Details on MPCAS programming and submissions can be found on our website mpcas.ca

Follow @gruntgallery and @MPCAS.Vancouver on Facebook for announcements and registration info for upcoming Fall and Winter workshops.

Image: Tomas Jirku, Unseen Urban Energy, still,  2019.

grunt gallery remains closed until further notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen is still glowing bright at Kingsway and Broadway. Through partnerships, commissions, and open calls, there is an exciting and diverse range of new work on the screen exploring our current moment of isolation through moving and still images, texts, poems, drawings and more. Our new programming includes open link in new tab, a showcase of work by ten Indigenous women, Two Spirit, and Indigiqueer artists curated by Jessica Johns; Kevin House’s Isolation Boy project; and submissions from members of the Mount Pleasant community and local elementary school students to our ongoing open calls for creative engagement.

It’s our hope that the MPCAS can continue to connect our community and help us be together while apart in this era of social distancing and self-isolation. You can read more about the MPCAS programming here; and you can see the work in person on the screen on the side of The Independent building on Kingsway.

 

Photo: Bush Business, Jade Baxter.