CURRENT PROJECTS:
Mount Pleasant Community Arts Screen
grunt gallery’s Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen (MPCAS) is an outdoor 4×7 metre LED screen featuring art-only content by and for the Mount Pleasant community, located at Kingsway & Broadway in Vancouver on the east side of the Independent building. Visit mpcas.ca for full details!
The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency
In 2015, two celebrated Canadian artists, the late Al Neil and his partner, Carole Itter, were evicted from their studio home, a small cabin that had been sitting in a secluded cove on the Tsleil-Waututh territory foreshore near Cates Park since 1932. Over the course of 4 years, a consortium of arts organizations came together to save the cabin and transform it into The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency. The Blue Cabin floated into Vancouver’s False Creek in the summer of 2019. In fall 2019, the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency launched Skeins: Weaving on the Foreshore, the inaugural program of artist residencies, open houses, talks and workshops. Situated in the unceded lands and waters of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, the Blue Cabin is international in scope but deeply rooted in the histories and narratives of this place, offering a unique opportunity to learn, explore and engage with the foreshore.
Accessible, Exhibitions, Public Programming and Events project (AEPE)
grunt’s Accessible, Exhibitions, Public Programming and Events project (AEPE) supports a radical development prototype, exploring access and accessible planning, community care and public programming, Disability Justice and non-hierarchical approaches to knowledge sharing and decision making. The cross departmental initiative provides leadership and labour to the grunt team as we explore access, justice, and care as an artist-run centre. The AEPE project is led by grunt’s Exhibitions and Accessibility Manager, Kay Slater, and our Accessibility and Events Manager, Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, alongside the work of grunt’s accessibility committee which is composed of grunt staff across departments and is informed by the vision and priorities of the AEPE project.
Cree & D by These Ones
Cree & D is a narrative podcast that uses the format of Dungeons and Dragons gameplay but reimagined as a Cree-based and focused campaign written by siblings Jessica and Ben Johns. This campaign follows the story of three cuzzins, Auntie Vera, Auntie Darlene and Auntie Mac as they search for Kokum Cardinal’s stolen staff and work to preserve the peace in the realm of Ministik. Cree & D is produced by These Ones (formerly known as Together Apart) and supported by grunt gallery on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We record on Treaty 6 at FAVA studios. Art by Abbey Riddle. Music by Matthew Cardinal. Voices by Ben and Jessica with Emily Riddle and Matt Ward.
Digital Stories
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 host free workshops at grunt gallery that walk participants through the process of digital story making!
PAST PROJECTS:
Spark: Fireside Artist Talk Series
January 2016 – March 2022
A series of informal artist talks hosted by the Native Education College (NEC) in partnership with grunt gallery. These informal talks featured Indigenous artists whose work spans media from the two-dimensional to live performance and beyond. Their works fuse traditional cultural knowledge with contemporary art forms, pose urgent political questions, and push the boundaries of how we think about art, history and culture more broadly.
Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week
A series of free public events, panels, conversations, performances, and screenings that highlight artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver and beyond. Partners: 221a, Artspeak, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Rungh Magazine, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Western Front.
Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓?// Can you See Beaver?
Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓?// Can you See Beaver? was a community-based research and public art project led by Gitksan Witsuwit’en artist and community organizer Jolene Andrew and produced by grunt gallery Project Curator Nellie Lamb, in collaboration with Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House. Visit canyouseebeaver.ca for full details!
These Ones
These Ones (formerly Together Apart) was envisioned as a way of making and holding space for 2SQ/Indigiqueer folks to come together and to be in dialogue with one another so that we might centre the conversations we’d like to hear or that we feel have been absent in our communities. However, our intentions were also simple: to celebrate and enjoy one another’s creativity and dedication to our practices, and to recognize one another in such a way that speaks across the distances we experience in our living and movement through our worlds.
2019
Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore
A beautiful new print publication examining the performance work of Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore, that brings together documentation of Belmore’s 30-year career, as well as generating a series of new work based on her past performance. This project feeds into grunt’s long-term interest in performance art, archives and support of Rebecca Belmore’s work. This project also included an exhibition of new photographs by Belmore, nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations), and the re-deisgn of Belmore’s website. Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore is now available via our online bookstore.
Particles: Seoul to Vancouver
Particles continues grunt’s partnership with organizations and artists in Seoul, South Korea. This international program began in Seoul in 2018 with Instant Coffee’s project Pink Noise Pop Up and continues with an artist residency, an exhibition and a curatorial tour in Vancouver this May. Event information is below.
2018
Pink Noise Pop Up
March – April 2018
A series of events that expands the relationship between the arts communities in Vancouver and Seoul, Pink Noise Pop Up seeks to highlight the ways that art interacts with the often complex social and economic conditions of the city. Based in the work of Canadian arts collective Instant Coffee, this exhibition includes installations, artist editions, performances and other collaborations that will take place in South Korea.
The Making of An Archive
Summer 2017 – Spring 2018
Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s project, The Making of an Archive, seeks to collect images of everyday life photographed by Canadian immigrants, in a direct, collective and exploratory approach.
2017
Journey to Kaho’olawe
May 25 – 30, 2017
Journey to Kaho’olawe is an artist publication by Hans Winkler and T’uy’t-tanat Cease Wyss. The book is the result of a four year process centred on the Hawaiian Island of Kaho’olawe, a sacred site to the Hawaiians in recovery after being occupied as a practice range by the American military. Returned to the Hawaiians in the 1990s, the island is being remediated and returned to its natural state. In conjunction with the launch of the publication grunt gallery and the artists present a week long series of events celebrating Kaho’olawe and the Kanaka presence in BC.
Spring Fever: Vancouver Independent Archives 2017
March 18 – April 8, 2017
This spring season, Vancouver Independent Archives will offer a series of free public talks, screenings and community workshops that foreground local art and art history by drawing on the archives of Vancouver’s independent arts community. Building on the success of Vancouver Independent Archives Week 2015, Spring Fever invites new partner artists, scholars, and organizations to share their approach toward and practice within the archive.
Intertextual
What’s At Stake? Intertextual Indigenous Knowledges is an afternoon of talks, panels and a spoken word performance which examines knowledge, power, authority, and sovereignty in the construction of artistic practices. The event follows from Intertextual: Art in Dialogue, a roving reading group that was held at participating galleries over the last year.
2016
Shako Club
A series of workshops in the Tonari Gumi kitchen and studio space around concepts of wellness, care and food where culinary “sculptures” were constructed, incorporating aspects of stories, ideas and wellness philosophies. By artist Cindy Mochizuki and members from Tonari Gumi.
Past and Presence: NEC Mural Project
The Native Education College and grunt gallery are partnering with Vancouver-based First Nations artists Corey Bulpitt, Sharifah Marsden and Jerry Whitehead to create a mural celebrating NEC’s 30 years in Mount Pleasant.
Cutting Copper: Indigenous Resurgent Practice
A collaborative project between grunt gallery and the Belkin Art Gallery, aiming to bring together a cross-disciplinary group of artists, curators, writers, educators, scholars, students, and activists to explore the embodied theory of Indigenous resurgence and cultural representation – both from the perspectives of their own disciplines and one another’s.
2015
Terminus: Archives, Ephemera, and Electronic Art
This workshop was a part of the 2015 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). Organized by the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective in collaboration with Tarah Hogue and Glenn Alteen.
FutureLoss
Space, on Main Street and in Vancouver, is currency, and artist Zoe Kreye’s practice reaches through the overarching narratives of real estate, gentrification and speculation to consider the poetics of an individual’s connection to place.
2014
MAINSTREETERS: Taking Advantage, 1972–1982
The history of a gang of Vancouver artists who lived and worked together in drama, excess, friendship and grief.
30th Anniversary
Thirty years is a long time. A retrospective of all that is (and was) grunt gallery.
Play, Fall, Rest, Dance
The artist works with children with disabilities to emphasize the state of making and being, the pursuit of uninhibited creative exploration that is void of rules, structures and concepts of ‘right or wrong’ and ‘perfection vs. mistakes’. Children are enabled with artistic autonomy and the artist thoughtfully guides them to explore their creative processes. By artist Valerie Salez.
gruntCraft
A youth engagement pilot program developed to bridge the creative work being done by youth in the popular online video game Minecraft and artistic inquiry at grunt gallery.
2013
ThisPlace Vancouver
Rethinking ideas about Vancouver’s identity and history, this project attempted to compile a collaborative archive in order to expand the collective awareness of the city’s narratives.
2009
Vancouver Art in the Sixties: Ruins in Process
A digital archive of artwork, ephemera, and film.
2008
Nikamon Ohci Askiy (songs because of the land)
In December 2008, artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle made daily journeys throughout Vancouver and “sung” the landscape she encountered.
Beat Nation
Hip Hop as Indigenous culture.
The Medicine Project
Aboriginal notions of medicine and how they influence the lives of First Nations people and artists today.
2006
First Vision
Two worlds – curated by Tania Willard.
2005 – 2009
Brunt Magazine
Showcasing the artists exhibited at grunt gallery, brunt magazine is a complement to the exhibitions and a closer look at the artists, their processes, and the ideas that inspire their work.