Stop by grunt gallery to refresh your spring reading!

Thursday April 24 (6-8pm) at grunt gallery

Find yourself a copy of the ‘Mamook Ipsoot (To Hide or Make Hidden)’ book and Art Cards. The book describes how the youth project approached art-making through a conceptual lens and explores the relationship between indigenous youth and Vancouver’s landscape. It includes a foreword by Glenn Alteen and an essay by community arts coordinator, Jolene Andrews.
https://grunt.ca/projects/mamook-ipsoot/

Stop by to feast your eyes on the ‘Don’t Go Hungry – Be Hungry’ booklet. This publication features a new essay by Tania Willard and includes beautiful photos from the Don’t Go Hungry exhibition by Bracken Hanuse Corlett and Csetkwe Fortier.

We’ll be offering lots of great deals on past publications, check out our online store to see what we have available:
http://gruntgallery.bigcartel.com/

grunt YouTube:

Watch Bracken Hanuse Corlett and Csetkwe Fortier talk about, “Don’t Go Hungry”.

Learn all about the “Mamook Ipsoot (To Hide or Make Hidden)” project:

Ken Gerberick, Crushed Wall (1992)

Laura Moore’s exhibition, one man’s junk, showing at grunt until March 22nd, looks at the product of consumer waste and discarded objects. In this exhibition, Moore uses limestone as a canvas to document discarded electronic objects, such as old computer monitors, that most tend to overlook. Looking through grunt’s archives, you will find that this theme of artists critiquing consumer waste features prominently in the history of the Vancouver art scene. The themes of consumption and discarded objects are particularly evident in the 1992 grunt exhibit Two Walls by Vancouver assemblage artists Ken Gerberick and Marcia Pitch. The artists’ respective pieces, Crushed Wall and Off the Wall, which filled two walls in the grunt space with found objects, expressed an overwhelming feeling that society was mired in over-consumption, consumerism and waste.

Gerberick’s industrial themed objects versus Pitch’s toy themed works created a striking juxtaposition of discarded objects, affording viewers no escape from their complicity in the issue at hand. The assemblage art aesthetic featured prominently in the grunt archives during the late 1980s and ‘90s, but this aesthetic seems to have dropped out in the mid-‘90s. Gerberick and Pitch both identify rising rent prices as one of the contributing factors to this decline, making it more difficult for artists and galleries to exhibit this type of show, and note that assemblage pieces generally are not of interest to commercial galleries.

When asked about how he responds to people questioning the validity of assemblage art, Gerberick replied that he expects it:

“I mean, it’s funny too, because anybody that figures out which end of a paintbrush to use can slop paint on canvas. Some people do it really well; an awful lot of them don’t. Assemblage art is the same way. I mean, bad assemblage makes me just want to go back to doing silverpoint illustration, which I used to do. A lot of people figure ‘ah, you find something and you glue it down and there you go.’ It’s like abstract art, and I love abstract art, and bad abstract art just sucks.”

Gerberick, coming from a punk tradition, feels that if his work does not challenge or discomfort people then it’s probably not incisive enough. He sees a connection between assemblage art, Dada (Kurt Schwitters being his hero) and punk/noise music. The central concern, of course, in these forms of media is the control over materials. It allows the artist to disassemble and reassemble things in ways the original creators did not intend.

Marcia Pitch, Off The Wall (1992)

Pitch discussed a common interest in using sound in her practice, but expressed that “it’s not sound in an electronic kind of way and the stuff that I like is sort of low brow or low tech. I like technical but the low; you know, the transistors and the wires and the grooves and nuts and the bolts and that kind of stuff.” She draws inspiration from children’s toys, particularly the older, less mass-produced toys that allow for a total transformation of the object— “you know, the plastic and all that stuff that people really hate, I love to work with.” Pitch noted that the materials found in these older, more generic toys tend to have a warmer, more human and less technical quality to them. As an artist who gathers the majority of her materials from secondhand stores, she has noticed that the increase in demand for ‘vintage’ objects is leaving her with fewer materials to work with, but what she finds most salient is what people are discarding:

“I guess the stuff that people throw away is new – like, you know, toasters. Anything that’s broken is never fixed, because it’s more expensive to fix than to replace. But I haven’t been able to use that stuff, because there’s no human element to it for me.”

There is a unifying theme seen ion the work of Gerberick, Pitch and Moore, mainly their concern with making viewers aware of their own complicity in consumerism, consumption and waste production. The changes in the “junk” we consume and dispose of has made it more difficult for assemblage artists to remove or distort the industrial/technological stamp of the image. Moore faces a similar dilemma, and by creating these objects in limestone she is able to bring a more human element into these ubiquitous plastic machines.

Marcia Pitch’s Between Madness and Delight will be showing at the Reach Gallery Museum on September 25th, 2014.

About Audrey MacDonald:

Audrey moved moved to Vancouver after graduating from the University of Alberta with a degree in Physical Anthropology and Linguistics. She’s enrolled in the Art History Diploma program at UBC and began volunteering at grunt and the Vancouver Art Gallery shortly afterward to become more familiar with the Vancouver arts community. She is currently a docent at the VAG and continue to work on the labour of love that is the grunt archives.

This past September, Audrey started an Internship at the SFU Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology where she is working as the Curator of Archaeology, Research and Collections Care Management. She is interested in public programming and creating inclusivity within the arts.

We put computers out on the curb like junk. It’s one of those concepts that teeters on the edge of futurism; what would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, today verges on the mundane.

Technology begins to expire as soon as it is produced. When you buy a computer, speaker system, video player, or hard drive, the depreciation is immediate – the forward march of innovation means that their worth immediately begins to decay. These cast-off pieces of technology, once the very symbols of invention and ingenuity, become strange ghosts, forlorn testaments to the exponentially increasing rate of progress.

Sculptor Laura Moore’s current installation at grunt artist-run centre, one man’s junk, takes these forgotten castaways and turns them into something permanent, immemorial, timeless. Moore says that her choice of limestone for this series, as well as her interest in stone as a medium in general, has to do with its status as history-keeper for the human race. “Before cameras and electronics,” the artist says, “people told their stories in stone and sculpture…It’s a material that I think is really important historically.” As a member of an artists’ studio in Italy, Moore was inspired by the ancient sculptures and monuments there, in that country that has such a familiar relationship with the preserving of stories in stone. Although at first, she says, she was interested in carving electronics for chiefly aesthetic and geometrical reasons, she quickly became interested in the juxtaposition of a material old as the Earth itself and a subject matter that is from its start meant to break down.

As soon as Moore started experimenting with carving stone, she knew she had found her medium. She describes it as “the first thing that came really naturally.” The idea for this specific exhibit began when Moore was wandering on foot around her native Toronto. As she crossed a pedestrian overpass, she noticed an old computer monitor that had been flung to the ground below. “For me, that moment kind of marked something,” she says. Struck by inspiration, she spent the next few months biking around the city, looking for other examples of abandoned machines. When she found a suitable piece, she would photograph it, then transport the object back to her studio, where, she says, she still has dozens stockpiled. In this way, the sculptures that make up this exhibit could be described as portraits: likenesses of actual discarded objects, rather than generic outdated models.

one man’s junk represents a logical progression in Moore’s own body of work. In her initial phase of carving electronics, she was interested in the intricate, city-like shapes of circuit boards; her earlier works have included a huge limestone computer mouse and similarly scaled-up computer keys. Both were installed in outdoor settings, to catch casual passers-by off guard. Moore’s fascination with technology took a slightly different bent in Kernel Memory, an installation currently on the lawn of the Saint Catherine’s, Ontario City Hall. After becoming “very obsessed with USB memory sticks,” Moore became fascinated with the idea of where they would naturally occur in nature. “They connect to everything,” she says. “They would be…your fingernails, the stems of fruit.” She combined them with another aesthetic fascination, acorns and pinecones, to create a series of 9 nature/tech hybrids proportionally upscaled from inches to feet.

“We put computers out on the curb like junk. It’s one of those concepts that teeters on the edge of futurism; what would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, today verges on the mundane.”

Where the Sidewalk Ends, a 2007 installation that shares with one man’s junk a slightly humorous title, provides a prime example of the deceptive relationship in the artist’s work between labour and simplicity. Upon first seeing the exhibition, one could hardly imagine anything more minimal – a series of curbs, just like the ones that hold cars in place on the street, line the edges of a “white cube” gallery space. A similar simplicity informs the first impression of one man’s junk – the pieces are stacked, grouped all together on a wooden pallet. What Moore accomplishes with these installations is that artist’s trick of “making it look easy” – that is, the smooth, almost computerized looking surfaces belie the many hours of physical labour that went into revealing them from unrelenting chunks of stone. In the case of the curbs, not only did Moore carve them by hand, rather than casting them as one might guess, but she specifically re-sized them to four feet from eight, in order to hold two people, instead of two cars.

Throughout Moore’s work can be seen a carefulness, a quietness; a sense of concern and appreciation for the minutiae of everyday life. By coming upon a scaled-up computer mouse or escape key in the street, one hopes that the viewer could as well come to appreciate the beauty of these tiny forms. By giving a pallet of discarded electronics your appreciation in a gallery setting, we are redirecting our attention to these forgotten objects – elevating and exonerating that which has done the brute work of transmitting our data and preserving our stories. That which, for all its technique and innovation, inevitably becomes nothing but one man’s junk.

About Genevieve Michaels:

Genevieve is studying art history and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She has been volunteering at grunt since last October, writing and assisting with maintenance and digitization of the archives. She also writes about music and city life for local magazine Beatroute BC. Follow her on twitter: @LavenderIndigo0

Written by Luke Siemens

In Laura Moore’s work, one man’s junk, the lifespan of consumer electronics is extended beyond the cycle of planned obsolescence into a geologic time frame. A pallet of old computers, meticulously carved out of stone, stands firm against the flow of technological advancement. A 1991 Apple PowerBook sits next to a computer monitor from the late 80s, next to the printer you threw out last week. These objects should be on the scrapheap, forgotten, but Moore has pulled their forms out of the trash and placed them back in our contemporary consciousness. This change in material and form shifts the objects beyond the confines of their original chassis into the realm of the icon. They become avatars of our technological infrastructure, that aid in the contemplation of what such an infrastructure asks of us. one man’s junk forms a point of contrast to the rapid production and consumption of the digital experience.

To have owned one of the computers depicted by Moore, hundreds of thousands of units had to be produced; economies of scale making production possible. Our memory and experience of the object is therefore contingent on reproduction. Changing the way an object is (re)produced, effects our relationship to the object. By moving production from the assembly line to the studio, Moore removes demands of time, multiplicity and functionality, isolating the computer’s existence to an individual object and an individual’s labour. The viewer cannot look at the objects as “junk” even though it calls to mind the existence of electronic waste. They are computers in name and shape only. Instead we see the work. We marvel at Moore’s careful replication. The time we spend idle in front of a screen, is matched by the amount of time Moore has spent on the screen.

Replication also serves as a function; to engage with the histories attached to the objects. Through Moore’s work, we are able to glimpse the labour of the original designers. Once we thought little of the cathode ray construction of the monitor, beyond the desk space it would take up. Carved in stone, the boxy form and ventilation slats can be appreciated as an aesthetic choice.

“Replication also serves as a function; to engage with the histories attached to the objects. Through Moore’s work, we are able to glimpse the labour of the original designers. Once we thought little of the cathode ray construction of the monitor, beyond the desk space it would take up. Carved in stone, the boxy form and ventilation slats can be appreciated as an aesthetic choice.”

Replication of the mass produced object pulls the viewer’s own history into the work. Through familiarity, we connect with the form and project our own experiences onto the artwork. Memories of the novelty of the computer’s purchase, the programs run on it, the speed at which it ran are called to mind. Through this projection we start to contemplate how we thought of technology then and how that differs now. Through this process the technology, is allowed to leave the pile of obsolescence and re-enter our memory as an abstraction, an aesthetic object.

As an aesthetic object one man’s junk functions in a space similar to the surreal reproduction found in the grass and stick airplanes made by cargo cults of the Pacific. When a cargo cult copies mechanical objects in organic form, they are engaging in a ritualistic act of cultural jujitsu. Images are taken from outside the tradition of the cargo cult members and used to form a competing ideology to the dominate cultural narrative.

In Moore’s veneration of the object, there is an assertion of power over the image of the computer. For the last thirty years, the computer has represented wealth and intelligence to the collective consciousness. It is an image worth controlling. After the Snowden leaks of last year, it is apparent how much effort goes into controlling the digital experience. However by recreating the technology with her hand, in her medium, it is Moore’s vision of the digital experience that we are ultimately engaging with. In it there is a healthy scepticism of the digital experience. These are old computer, they cannot be connected to the network, they cannot be spied upon, but they are meant to be observed.

Interview article by  Gizem Sözen & Eylül İşcen

Having grown up in Istanbul, Turkey, both of us come from a region rich with historical layers and multi-sided political upheavals. As we were raised in this geography with its enigmatic qualities, we encountered the contradictions of everyday life heavily loaded with oppressive patriarchal culture and state violence. Therefore, we always struggle with/are interested in how to deal with those contradictions and be part of the political milieu, which constantly requires documentation, action, reflection—as students or scholars—in our writings or media works.

This might be one of the reasons why we feel in resonance with Rabih Mroué’s works, including those he has been presenting in Vancouver since early January: his exhibition Nothing to Lose at grunt gallery, and his lecture-performance Pixelated Revolution during the PuSh Festival. The questions we came up with after long discussions with the artist are strongly intertwined with our own feelings and thoughts. Those questions turned out to be quite personal and emotional on some levels and yielded a conversation that opens ways to question/rethink/transform our thoughts and feelings in parallel to Rabih Mroué’s works.

The Pixelated Revolution by Rabih Mroué

Gizem Sözen:

You call your work, Pixelated Revolution, a “non-academic lecture,” and lectures are not normally thought of as an art genre. There seems to be a tendency to approach the work as an intellectual argument, like an essay, like a lecture. What role does this aspect of the work play in what you are trying to achieve?

Rabih Mroué:

I studied theatre, so I do theatre mainly. For me theatre contains many layers: acting, story, lighting and sounds in addition to “this is the space” (gesturing to the space around him). A very important matter is how you treat the space, what relation there is between the stage and the place where the audience is sitting. For me this relation should be always under question. The works that I categorize as “non-academic lectures” are basically like performances. But what distinguishes the non-academic lectures from performance, in my opinion, is that it does not question the space at all, and I take the relation between the stage and the audience for granted. So from the beginning, I accept this relation and the audience accepts it as well. You know it is lecture form: there is a table, a chair, and I sit and I lecture to the audience. The audience listens to me and at the end we have a Q&A discussion. There is nothing special to the relation, so this is why I name it as non-academic lecture. It is not theatre and it is not performance, because it doesn’t contain the question of space. But also there are other aspects that make me call them non-academic lectures than the space issue like, for example, the lack of references and quotes, or mixing the personal with facts, the real with fiction, etc.

Eylül İşcen:

Your works seem to return to seemingly related issues, like memory, remembering and forgetting, especially within political realms of struggles, wars and revolutions. In your works, what is the central problem that you often return to that shapes the ways in which you deal with the materials you are working with?

Rabih Mroué:

There is no central problem. I try in my work not to generalize, not to go with big titles such as memory, forgetting, remembering… No, I prefer to start from a very specific point, a specific case, and try to work on it, to dig inside as much as I can to try to bring hidden elements out of it in order to make connections, to make them also react together to come out with alternative thoughts other than the norms, the clichés and stereotypes…. So in this sense each work has its own problems, its own questions, its own doubts, and consequently they also shape the work itself—whether it will be an installation or a performance or a non-academic lecture or a video. But I can also say that yes, there is a line that can connect all the works together, a line of thought that is connected maybe to my biography or my political background…

Eylül İşcen:

What fascinates us in your works is that you start with a very simple observation or question. It can be the last testimony of a martyr, or can be about a Syrian revolutionary who is shooting his own death, as you discuss in Pixelated Revolution. You start with these very basic incidents and work through them, unfolding significant tensions and relations between experiences. We see that you are going back to these incidents, these micro-moments, within larger societal issues. Can you elaborate on why going back to these small incidents is significant to your work?

Rabih Mroué:

I think every work deals with the past in one way or another. For me, when I deal with the past, it is not for bringing it to the present but instead in order to understand the present more. So we go to the past and put the past next to the present, and try to think about the future also. We imagine the future through the past and through the present, but I think present is always something that slips from our hands. So we always shift between imagining the future and re-thinking the past. We are never in the present time because when I start to talk about this moment, now, it is already gone – it is now in the past. Of course, when I work there should be something that intrigues me, that makes me question, that makes me uncertain. This is what makes me work. If I don’t feel there is something enigmatic or something that I want to research and discuss, to reflect and to discover, then I don’t do it. I bring these topics or cases from the past, whether it’s near past or far past, and talk about them in the present because I don’t understand them or because I want to re-think them. If I know exactly why I am bringing up those topics, then it is as if I have the answers, as if I am trying to convince others of my beliefs by bringing the past and showing it in whatever frame. So I think this is what might differentiate politics from political art, politicians from artists. Artists are, in a way, politicians but without a political message to address, while politicians have projects and political agendas and they want to convince people about their goals even if they still have some questions, or sometimes they hesitate but they want people to follow them, to vote for them, while art has no answers, it does not invite people to follow. On the contrary, it brings all the answers and thoughts we believe in under question and starts to shake them. It says “Let’s go back to the basic questions and definitions, and let’s see if we can change them; can we shake the rules? If yes, how?”

Gizem Sözen:

This is a difficult question because you know about the recent Gezi Parkı uprising in Istanbul. I was there, Eylül was here. Being here and not there was difficult for her, and there was a sense of guilt. In your work I, the Undersigned, you make an apology, stating that “I apologize that during the war I incurred no physical wounds, that I wasn’t kidnapped, that no one attempted to assassinate me, and that I received no personal threat.” Why an apology? This part of your work really affected us since we could relate it to a feeling of guilt we suffered from during Gezi Parkı demonstrations when we were watching protestors on internet live-streaming as they were recording the state violence targeting them and getting detained by police. Many times we felt guilty for not being injured, not being detained. But at the same time we feel uncomfortable with this sense of guilt because we feel that no one should be ready to position their body as a target to such violence for any cause. How do you approach that difficult issue of guilt?

Rabih Mroué:

What you are trying to evoke is a very important issue because when I put the statement that “I apologize for not being kidnapped, not being injured, not being a target for assassination or I, the undersigned,threatened by anybody,” I was trying to play with it. Because I noticed that some citizens who stayed the whole period of the civil war in Lebanon were aggressive towards other citizens who did not stay in Lebanon or who left the country during the war and by consequence were not allowed to talk about “our war” since they did not experience it or since they fled the city etc. It is as if, if you stay in the country, live the war and suffer it with your body, then you gain a kind of passport that gives you the right to talk about it and to stop any “other” person who would like to talk about it. As if you gain a “truth” that allows you to be the presenter and representer of the period. Actually, I went too into this trap, but in fact it does not need much to discover that this is a naïve, childish attitude because there are a lot of valuable studies and excellent reflections that have been done by writers or artists or philosophers who did not live a war or the specific event that they are dealing with. Anyone has the right to talk on any subject she or he wants to…and one can make serious work by studying and working and also by researching and asking about this subject, by really trying to understand… Of course it would not be the same result as someone who lived the events, but this also does not mean that the latter would talk about it in a good way or even in an interesting way… If we did not live the danger, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the right to talk about the issue.

Gizem Sözen:

Our last question is about your approach to the binary of fictive and real. There seems to be a common obsession to question the truth behind an image; many are concerned with fictiveness and constructedness of an image, and hesitate to believe in it. How do you deal with this binary of fictive and real?

Rabih Mroué:

It is something that I worked on for long time with my partner, Lina Saneh. We don’t believe that there is an absolute truth. There are always different points of view and different angles to look into the same thing. No one can pretend to have all the versions that talk about a specific event. There could be some versions missed, some angles that haven’t been seen, and we shouldn’t blame ourselves that we couldn’t cover all the angles, because it is an impossible task. In this sense, there is always a part that is missing and a part that is bit fictive and maybe relates to the subjective. So subjectivity and objectivity are two things that work together. They are not separated from each other; at least we don’t separate them. We try to take cases and put inside them some fictive elements, but not in order to cheat the audience; on the contrary, it is in order to tell them and tell ourselves that in every narrative there is a part of fiction and part of real, and the issue is that we cannot distinguish the real from the fiction and the fiction from the real. If we are trying to do that, then we will be falling into the dichotomy trap, a binary discourse between fiction and reality, lie and truth, good and evil. For Lina and I, we try to accept any version, even if we notice that this version is completely fabricated; we accept it as the reality of the side that is telling this version and we study it as it is. We take it and study it as if it is true and start to deconstruct this version and to ask questions about it and try to understand what it shows and what it hides, but without accusing, without saying that they are lying, they are manipulating the truth. We just try to understand the political and social discourse behind this version. There are always some people who come to me and ask if “this was a fiction or real?” I always say that it doesn’t matter. I am proposing this work to you, so just take it as it is and think about its meaning. I am not aiming to change the world; my work is only about raising some questions and some thoughts — some doubts to make us think together.

grunt gallery is happy to announce Vanessa Kwan as our new curator of community engagement. Kwan’s professional and creative practice bring an integral arts-based approach to community engagement that will strengthen relationships with our surrounding community and beyond.

Vanessa Kwan is a Vancouver-based artist, programmer and curator. She has worked for a number of arts and cultural organizations in recent years, including the Powell Street Festival, Access Artist Run Centre, The Vancouver Queer Film Festival and the Vancouver Art Gallery (where she currently holds a part-time position of Public Programs Coordinator). She has been a guest curator of exhibitions/ events at 221A Artist Run Centre (with Kimberly Phillips), The Richmond Art Gallery, the Powell Street Festival and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

Much of her work as an artist has involved the production of work in public space; recent projects include a public artwork called Geyser for Hillcrest Park (with Erica Stocking), Sad Sack, a series of collaborations on the subject of melancholy, and Everything Between Open and Closed, a study of signs. She serves as an active member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects curatorial collective, and is a founding member of the performance collective Norma, who were honoured with a Mayor’s Arts Award for Public Art in 2011.

Kwan officially starts this role at grunt gallery in February 2014. grunt gallery would like to thank the BC Arts Council, Capacity and Sustainability program, for making this position possible.

A raw steak must be among the least likely of things you’d expect to find in a cardboard box of papers. But that’s exactly what myself and another volunteer found, to our surprise, during an afternoon of work on grunt’s archive a couple of weeks ago. We discovered that the uncannily realistic-looking steak had formed part of a mid-nineties grunt exhibition called Palimpsest, and when the artist behind it, Marcus Bowcott, happened to stop in a few days later, it seemed only natural to catch up with him to discuss his art, personal philosophy, and what he’s doing now.

I took a rainy-day journey out to visit the artist in his studio in peaceful North Vancouver – a town that Bowcott’s long-time partner, Helene, describes as a “bedroom community, separated from agriculture, industry, entertainment”– an exemplification of the separation in the modern world of the facets of our lives, the way in which we work, eat, play and sleep in locations far removed from one another.

The modernization of the human experience is clearly something of combined terror and fascination to Bowcott. As we sipped on tea provided by Helene, who Bowcott describes as “a partner, in so many ways, in developing my work,” the artist described to me a recent trip down to Seattle, during which he was struck by “just the number of cars on the highway… The automobile is gobbling up energy.”

The automobile, in its used-up state as compacted refuse, has been a recurring theme in Bowcott’s work for some time. The painting exhibited at Bowcott’s grad show from London’s Royal College of Art featured wrecked and compacted cars, and since then, he’s explored the theme in sculpture, notably in a piece, 25 Standard Stoppages, currently being featured at Seattle’s Punch Gallery as part of a show, curated by Rock Hushka, titled Whither the American Dream?. He’s also developing a massively scaled-up version of the sculpture for Vancouver’s upcoming Sculpture Biennale, although, as he wryly comments, “people don’t want to show wrecked cars.”

“The bull doesn’t look that big here [in the photo] but he was 1200 pounds, and the whole gallery became like a manger… There were tons of people packed in there, but all of a sudden you’re honoring this animal, something that is often considered to be below us.”

The wrecked cars in question provide Bowcott with a vehicle to examine modern industry and its often unexamined aftermath. He titled a handful of these sculptures Das Kapital, which he explains as “a reference to our surplus capital, our surplus value/goods…which I’m presenting here as wrecked cars”, a leftover of the industrial process upon which most of us will never lay our eyes.

Another, perhaps more tragic, forgotten leftover of the industrial process was featured in Bowcott’s Palimpsest, the show that, years later, would inspire this article. Something amazing was accomplished in addition to the hyper-realistic steak sculptures and paintings of packaged steaks: for one night, the gallery was emptied of breakable artworks, and a live bull was brought in to inhabit the space. Marcus and Helene evocatively described what it was like to experience such a surreal coming-together of incongruities –

“The bull doesn’t look that big here [in the photo] but he was 1200 pounds, and the whole gallery became like a manger… There were tons of people packed in there, but all of a sudden you’re honoring this animal, something that is often considered to be below us. The cave painting [which was projected onto the bull’s body as part of the show] had much to do with feeding people. They were honoring the animal…and today we just shop for meat. We all had to be really quiet to keep it calm; that kind of hush was a really interesting addition to the installation and performance.”

“We live atomized lives,” Helene continues. “With technology, people become more and more isolated from each other. The same thing happens with food production. In many different aspects of our life…we are becoming more and more specialized.”

A critique or exploration of that atomization could be seen to run through Bowcott’s work as a unifying thread, perhaps in a sense of superimposition, of “stacking, or layering,” Helene tells me. “Even Palimpsest, the word, has to do with layering… An image on an image,” she says. A cave painting projected on the side of a bull. Crushed cars on top of cars on top of cars.

Visit Marcus Bowcott’s website.

About Genevieve Michaels:

Genevieve is studying art history and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She has been volunteering at grunt since last October, writing and assisting with maintenance and digitization of the archives. She also writes about music and city life for local magazine Beatroute BC. Follow her on twitter: @LavenderIndigo0

Read an essay by Gizem Sözen on Skeena Reece’s Raven: On the Colonial Fleet (2010).

About Gizem:

Gizem Sözen began volunteering at grunt gallery in September 2013. With a master’s degree in Social and Political Thought from York University, she is currently pursuing a diploma in Art History at the University of British Columbia. She has been researching the grunt archives for political art and is interested in contemporary Indigenous art and politics.

Early Career Development Program

The BC Arts Council is pleased to announce the launch of a new pilot program to support the development of artists and arts administrators across the province.

The BC Arts Council’s Early Career Development Program will help bridge the gap for emerging artists and practitioners, supporting their ability to work as artists and cultural workers, while building their body of work, portfolio, professional exposure and/or career experience through residency, internship and mentorship opportunities. This program is accessible to both individual artists and organizations.  Individuals can apply for the residencies or mentorship components.

The program will support the career development of B.C.-based early career and emerging practitioners through three components:

Component I: Internships
Component II: Residencies
Component III: Mentorships

For the purposes of this program, early career and emerging artists and arts practitioners are defined as artists and practitioners who either:

o Are under the age of 30; or

o Have less than five years professional experience since the completion of basic training in their discipline.

This pilot program is being launched through the BC Creative Futures strategy.  Announced last January, BC Creative Futures supports opportunities for youth in communities throughout British Columbia to engage in the arts and creative thinking and encourages young people to pursue creative careers.

The application deadline is January 20, 2014.  For more information, including program guidelines, application forms and FAQs, please visit the BC Arts Council website at:  http://www.bcartscouncil.ca/guidelines/artists/youth/early_career_development.html

If you have any clarifying questions please feel free to contact either of Council’s Arts Development Officers: Sheryl Jones (Studio Arts) sheryl.jones@gov.bc.ca  T 250-356-1722 or Lori Dunn (Performing Arts)lori.dunn@gov.bc.ca  T 250-387-1538.

Youth Engagement Pilot Program

The BC Arts Council is pleased to announce the launch of a new pilot program to support opportunities for youth engagement in the arts across the province.

The BC Arts Council’s Youth Engagement Pilot Program provides support to eligible organizations taking innovative and inspiring approaches to engaging British Columbia’s young people with professional artists and arts experiences, as participants in the artistic process or as the primary audiences for works of art. Funding assistance through this program will support exemplary approaches to youth engagement and the development of programming at various stages of implementation, including both new projects and the enhancement or expansion of existing programming initiatives.

The Youth Engagement Pilot Program builds on existing expertise in the creative sector by supporting programs delivered by organizations that demonstrate success in artistic achievement, community engagement and organizational capacity.

The Youth Engagement Pilot Program is a component of Creative Youth Initiatives, a suite of programs developed and delivered by the BC Arts Council and its long-standing partners, the BC Touring Council and the First Peoples’ Cultural Council.  Please visit the BC Touring Council [http://bctouring.org/resources/cpye] and the First Peoples’ Cultural Council http://fpcc.ca/about-us/news-room/latest-stories.aspxwebsites for more information on the new program initiatives from these partners.

This pilot program is being launched through the BC Creative Futures strategy.  Announced last January, BC Creative Futures supports opportunities for youth in communities throughout British Columbia to engage in the arts and creative thinking and encourages young people to pursue creative careers.

The application deadline is January 8, 2014.  For more information, including program guidelines, application forms and FAQs, please visit the BC Arts Council website at:

http://www.bcartscouncil.ca/guidelines/artists/youth/youth_engagement.html

If you have any questions about this program, please contact the BC Arts Council at 250-356-1718 or BCArtsCouncil@gov.bc.ca.