OPEN STUDIO: Morgan Switzer-Rodney
July 16th – 30th, 2021

Hours: Wednesday to Saturday 3pm—7pm, or by appointment
 

Since last Fall, emerging artist, activist and podcast producer Morgan Switzer-Rodney has been working with mentor Syrus Marcus Ware to develop work around her family histories, Black futurisms and embodied, relational portraiture. As part of her mentorship, Morgan spent 4 weeks using our gallery space as a studio. Morgan will be hosting open studio visits for two weeks!

Please note adjusted visiting hours, or email communications@grunt.ca to book an appointment.

Morgan Switzer-Rodney is a young Black, kinky, queer femme, full-time activist and part-time artist residing on the stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, S’ólh Téméxw, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ peoples. She has been co-curator of a salon series called Black Chat for the last 4 years, making space for Black folks to simply exist and be Black while being fed both food & knowledge. Running this space out-of-pocket and her home space with her Aunt is a foundational act to counter the constant policing of Black lives, and shine a light on the importance of intergenerational organizing. This project has since blossomed into 3 streams of programming including the original gatherings, arts and cultural communal field trips and a podcast. Morgan’s art practice is rooted in conversation, communal care and being a part of the experience. She’s inspired by her ancestry, the beloveds around her, the world as she sees it and beyond how she can imagine it. She is a healer through practices of body painting, curation, and interviews. The inspirations in her work include storytelling, science fiction, intergenerational sharing, and what happens after the revolution(s). She believes in ancestral memory and abolition, and encourages everyone to explore the complexity of the messiness that is the human experience.

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including in a solo show at grunt gallery, Vancouver (2068:Touch Change) and new work commissioned for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)) and in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Windsor and as part of the curated content at Nuit Blanche 2017 (The Stolen People; Won’t Back Down). His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016, 2019), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015). Syrus holds a doctorate from York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Accessibility Information:


grunt gallery is accessed from the sidewalk via a 106” long, 64” wide concrete ramp that rises 12”. The slope is 1 : 8.75. There are no rails on the ramp. The front entrance is a manually operated outward-swinging double door with a total width of 64”. Entry to the Media Lab behind the gallery space is via a 42” wide passage and entry to the neighbouring amenity space is through a manually operated outward swinging double door with a total width of 70”. No stairs, inclines, or elevators are necessary to access the public areas once inside the gallery.

grunt gallery has a single gender neutral washroom that is accessed via a 31” wide doorway with a sliding pocket door with a door handle that is 40” high. The toilet has a 10” clearance on the left side and a 21” clearance in front, with a support bar on the left side. Please email access@grunt.ca if you have any questions.

Image: Morgan Switzer-Rodney, research materials. Photo by Vanessa Kwan.

Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓?// Can you See Beaver? is 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.

The project is collaborative and based in community. It began with a conversation about a historical beaver dam that once blocked Brewery Creek near the spot where Main St and 14th Ave now intersect. This led us to wonder about the absence of such an important animal in an urban socio-ecological system and consider how the history of beavers in this landscape can inform our relationships to the land now and into the future. Throughout the project we will be contemplating the importance of keystone species like the beaver, whose knowledge and skills build dams that create wetlands, providing habitat for many other plants and animals. Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓? Can you see Beaver? is a reminder to take notice.  The project looks to beavers and the other animals and plants in their communities as teachers and guides. It asks questions about obstruction and flow, what has changed and what has endured, and what we can learn from these histories in the ongoing and complex contexts of urbanization, colonization, and decolonization.

The project’s Squamish language title, Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓? asks, “Can you see the beaver?” We hope you will join us in opening our hearts and minds to beaver’s teachings. Starting in March 2021, we are hosting a series of knowledge sharing, field study, planning, and art-making events focused on the landscape, plant, and animal (including human) life in the area that is now known as Mount Pleasant and rooted in the Indigenous knowledge and art of Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) storytellers, weavers and other urban Indigenous artists. Events are led by Jolene alongside artists, historians, scientists, storytellers, and knowledge holders and are open to Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members.

Further details about this project and upcoming events can be found at: https://archives.grunt.ca/Detail/occurrences/3623 

Image: Nicole Neidhardt.

Online, FREE.

Presented by grunt gallery and Kay Slater.

The last two years of working and gathering primarily online has brought into wider view an understanding that many in the disability arts community have always understood and advocated for: we need more skilled people creating video and digital content that is accessible to non-auditory audiences.

Click here to access our pre-recorded Non-Auditory Access Workshop on Vimeo, with captions available in English, French and Simplified Chinese as well as a full transcript in English.

This series of workshops is designed to help arts organizations, artists and community creators take a tangible first step towards building accessibility into their practices. By outlining best practices (and identifying the pros and cons of available auto-generated captioning services), and inviting participants to learn the basics of captioning and transcription for live and pre-recorded material, we invest in a baseline standard for access as well as a shared and shareable knowledge base.

The series included a mentorship opportunity to learn captioning alongside experienced and practicing access professionals with an invitation to co-facilitate their own non-auditory access workshops designed specifically for their own communities.

2021 workshop offerings included half-day workshops supported by our community partners ArtStarts in Schools, DTES Small Arts Grants Program, Gallery Gachet, WePress and the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres. The full spring schedule of workshops is below.

2021 Live Workshops:

• Friday March 12th, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Google Meet (with English auto captions).
  
• Friday March 19th, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Google Meet (with English auto captions).
• Thursday, March 18th, 5:30-8:30pm: Part of the ArtStarts in Schools Spring Digital Learning Lab: Digital Transformations. Workshop aimed towards Teachers, Caregivers, and Teaching Artists.
• Tuesday March 23rd, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards creators and artists.
  *All ages / spring break special, Zoom with CART (captions) and ASL Interpretation.
• Thursday April 22nd, 5:30pm-8:00pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
  Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon).
• Friday April 23rd, 1:00pm-3:30pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
  Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon). *Cantonese/Mandarin translation will provided for online participants.
• Sunday April 25th, 1:00pm-3:30pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
  Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon).
• Friday April 30th, 11am-1pm: Captions for CanLit, specifically for literary event organizers, including publishers, bookstore staff, and magazine editors.
  This workshop will take place on Google Meet with automatic captions. Presented by Kay Slater with Leah Horlick.
• Friday May 28th, 5:30pm-8:00pm: Q&A Session – Live with Kay, ask your captioning and transcription questions! Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. Live webcast, with on-person viewing at Carnegie Community Centre available in their theatre. Mandarin and Cantonese translation available via online stream. ASL Interpretation will be available 6-8PM
• Friday September 24th, 10:00am – 1:00pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Via Google Meet (with English auto captions).
• Tuesday, November 9th, 6:30 – 9:00PM PDT:  Workshop aimed at Dancers, Performers, and Festival Events. Co-Hosted by Sparkle Plenty and Kay Slater.

Do you have any accessibility needs?

Our workshops are hosted on Google Meet (Free Service – Accessible by Browser) with Auto-Captions (English), and we will have a session with ASL Interpretation on March 23rd. Let us know if you have any access needs when you register, or write us an email at access@grunt.ca

Session Transcripts will be made available.

Check back for updates, including paid mentorship opportunities and streamable content.

Kay Slater (project lead/ workshop facilitator) is a multidisciplinary artist, accessibility consultant and arts worker.  As a consultant, they work directly with artists and organizations to build accessibility in at the planning stage, and to incorporate sustainable, grass roots strategies that support evolution in artistic presentation. Their work is rooted in anti-oppression practices, and they employ open source and community-engaged approaches to support ongoing knowledge transfer  with makers and creators at all stages of their careers. They are a member of the Open Access Mapping project’s Advisory Committee, are a proud volunteer and social coordinator at Queer ASL, have completed the Rick Hansen Foundation’s Accessibility Certification program and are working towards CSA Accessibility certification later this year. Kay is passionate about sharing knowledge with the wider arts community.  Kay is queer and hard of hearing. They use They/Their/Theirs pronouns exclusively online.

Mentees:

Leah Horlick is a writer and poet who grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Cree Territory & the homelands of the Métis in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her long-awaited third collection of poems, Moldovan Hotel, is available now from Brick Books. Her first book, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012), was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her second collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), was named a 2016 Stonewall Honour Book by the American Library Association. She is also the author of wreckoning, a chapbook produced with Alison Roth Cooley and JackPine Press. She lived on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver for nearly ten years, during which time she and her dear friend Estlin McPhee ran REVERB, a queer and anti-oppressive reading series. In 2016, Leah was awarded the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers. In 2018, her piece “You Are My Hiding Place” was named Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. She lives on Treaty Seven Territory & Region 3 of the Métis Nation in Calgary.

Jocelyn Statia has over 5 years of experience in the arts and culture sector; and many years of customer service experience. She has a BFA in Visual Arts and a Library & Information Technology Diploma. Her professional experiences involve research and production of ideas, culture or objects from the past and present. This informs her understanding about how work is produced, preserved, presented and the social and public implications for the understanding of art, culture, identity and access to information.

Sparkle Plenty (she/her) is Cree with mixed heritage who lives and works on the stolen territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Wahtuth people known as ‘Vancouver’. She has worked in many arts organizations as a communications professional, programmer, facilitator, and performance artist. She is a convening member of the Virago Nation Indigenous Arts Society, where she produces and performs in shows and workshops with the mission to reclaim Indigenous sexuality from the toxic effects of colonization. She has been invited to perform and share her decolonial point of view for arts events including the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival, Talking Stick Festival, TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival as well as numerous other arts festivals.

This program is produced by grunt gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Disability Alliance BC and Sarah Wang.

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.

These Ones (formerly Together Apart) is a loosely formed collective of 2S/Indigiqueer artists, writers and performers that followed out of the Spring 2019 Together Apart, Queer Indigeneities 2S/Indigiqueer Symposium, inspired by the Two-Spirit Cabarets held at grunt during the early 90s. With a flexible format of membership, These Ones uses itself as a mobilizing point to pool skills and resources that can be adaptive to ideas, projects and partnerships as they come. By operating through grunt gallery with Curator Whess Harman (Carrier Wit’at), the collective is able to anchor itself and its projects within a stable and intuitive organizing body while retaining agency over programming decisions and outcomes. The project reflects the widely interdisciplinary nature that inherently follows organizing around the identities that fall within the cross-section of both queer and Indigenous. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the moniker of “Together Apart” has taken on a very different meaning and indeed has been taken up by other groups and projects. With that, our Together Apart collective will now go forward as “These Ones.” “These Ones” is a phrase often affectionately used in Indigenous communities to refer to groups of usually-but-not-always young folks who are very close with one another and tend to move as a unit.

Projects for These Ones are both on-going and forth-coming, and open to 2S/Indigiqueer community members for assistance in the conception and organization of  projects. Following the original symposium event, the Together Apart Zine, initially a publication made to go alongside the event, has extended now into a nine issue run gathering work from artists and writers from across Turtle Island. Adapted into a two-term peer mentorship model, the Together Apart Zine has been edited both by writer Brandi Bird (Cree, Saulteaux and Metis) and following with Kaya Joan (Jamaican/ Vincentian, Kanien’kehá:ka). Through the course of the nine issues, over 30 queer, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous creators have contributed to either the zine or its accompanying launch events and partnerships.

Going forward, Together Apart is seeking avenues of digital projects both in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also in efforts to be accessible to queer Indigenous folks beyond urban spaces. These projects are grounded in an ethos of for us/by us as a way of better expressing queer Indigenous identities in all its multiplicity while prioritizing solidifying platforms in which queer and Indigenous creators have opportunities to build their practices with and alongside one another.

Images: Untitled by Kaya Joan; Issue 5 cover by Lacie Burning; Issue 4 interior art by Jaime Blankinship.

Photo: Quivering by Hong-Kai Wang

“When an earthquake’s sonic event oscillates through the air – rolling over the earth – it absorbs all objects in its wake. The sonic outline of every object in the path of the sound wave is inscribed into its signature. An earthquake produces rumbling imperceptible infrasounds that alter the geological make-up, as well as deep bass frequencies that offer up new modes of understanding the malleability of geological strata. Movements are world-makers. As sound moves, worlds are created. As the earth quakes across its surface, new lines are drawn up.”   – Tobias Ewé

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week announces the web-launch of “On Hong-Kai Wang’s Quivering,” a newly commissioned text by Tobias Ewé in response to This is no country music, a performative lecture hosted at Artspeak on November 1, 2019, and Wang’s exhibition Quivering which was on view at Artspeak from October 26–December 7, 2019.

Read Tobias Ewé’s response and view the event and exhibition documentation on the Recollective website.

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week is a series of free public events that highlight artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver and beyond. Recollective commissions original response works to our programming from a variety of artists, writers, and activists. Stay tuned for more Recollective responses and programming at archivesweek.ca!

BIOS
Tobias Ewé is a Danish experimental theorist currently based in Vancouver, BC. He is writing a PhD on inhuman psychoacoustics in the Department of Art History at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the epistemology of listening in modernity, and its symptoms in the sonic arts at the nexus between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Holger Schulze, ed (2019), Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, London: Bloomsbury; and Laboria Cuboniks (2018[2015]), Xenofeminisme: En politik for fremmedgørelse, trans. Tobias Ewé, Copenhagen: Passive/Aggressive. Tobias has exhibited/performed diagrams and sonic fictions in Germany, Canada, Denmark, Italy and online.

Based in Taipei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang’s research-based practice confronts the politics of knowledge lost in colonial and diasporic encounters. Through experimental modes of sonic sociality, her multidisciplinary work seeks to conceive of other time-spaces at the intersection of lived experience, power and ‘listening.’ Wang’s work critically interweaves the production of desire, histories of labor and economies of cohabitation. She has presented projects at Asia Art Biennial 2019; Theater Commons Tokyo 2019; Sculpture Center New York; documenta 14; Taipei Biennial 2016; Liquid Architecture; and the Museum of Modern Art.

Limeflower Heterodoxy
Sharona Franklin
June 9 — July 3, 2020
Window viewing hours at grunt gallery: Tuesday – Saturday 12pm – 5pm

Limeflower Heterodoxy is a new exhibition by artist Sharona Franklin featuring the slow decomposition of one of her signature gelatin sculptures. With this work, Franklin takes the viewer into an exploration of healing methodologies, contrasting the different approaches of psychedelic and plant based medicine intertwined within the pharmaco-industrial complex. The installation centers the experiences of childhood rural illness, contrasted with the alien and often dehumanizing experiences of cytotoxic and pharmaceutical systems. Referred to by the artist as bioshrines, the sculptures embody tensions and contradictions held for those whose treatments include both natural medicine and—sometimes ethically controversial—biopharmaceutical care.

Decomposition is an integral part of Franklin’s process, as she invites visitors to come back and revisit her sculptures over the course of an exhibition, witnessing their transformation in space, as time and organic matter collide. For the first time, a livestream video will grant the viewer real time access to the transformation at any moment of the day or night. The artist will also record the decomposition of her work, creating two time lapse videos over the period of a month.

The livestream and videos are available through Printed Matter, more information can be found here. The work comes at three different tiers: an unlimited livestream access, a 30min time lapse video filmed on Hi8, and a high resolution 60min video with textile edition. 100% of the profits of Limeflower Heterodoxy II, a Hi8 timelapse video, will be donated to COVID Bail Out NYC.

This installation is organized by Printed Matter (NYC), hosted at grunt gallery and produced with the support of VIVO Media Arts Centre.

Downloadable PDFs:
Limeflower Heterodoxy Recipe
Let’s Talk About Disability

Sharona Franklin b. 1987 is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, writer and advocate.

Her work explores radical therapies, cybernetic craft, ecological systems, bio-ritualism, pharmacological and social inter-dependency disseminating mythologies of class and biocitizenship within disability.  Franklin’s visual media practice can be viewed through social media platforms @paid.technologies, @star_seeded and @hot.crip. Through ontological study and utilizing natural, salvaged, biodegradable, edible, print media and digital mediums, her psychedelic works invite the viewer into facets of biopharmaceutical investigations and educational community practice.

Recent exhibitions include Kings Leap, NYC, Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada, G44 Center for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, Canada, New Image Art Gallery Los Angeles, CA, and Flux Factory, New York, NY. Recent publications include Injustice in Biopharm, 2019, Cassandra Press and Rental Bod, 2016, Peace Library Publications.

As of  Friday May 29th 2020, grunt gallery’s founder Glenn Alteen, who served as the gallery’s Program Director for 37 years, has retired. The staff and board of grunt are incredibly grateful for the energy, ingenuity and spirit Alteen has given grunt since the very beginning; he has fostered an extraordinary community of artists, curators, and cultural workers that extends from Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood across Canada and internationally.

Since grunt’s inception in 1984, Alteen has recognized the value in platforming diverse voices and supporting artists through their creative processes, and has been committed to providing resources for artists to exhibit work that might otherwise go unrecognized. His boundless generosity and bold approach has been instrumental in building the vitality of the gallery and relationships with many exceptional artists and curators, including Rebecca Belmore, Dana Claxton, Margaret Dragu, Aiyyana Maracle, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Carole Itter, Adrian Stimson, Tania Willard, and Tarah Hogue. Throughout his career, Alteen has pushed boundaries with projects such as Queer City (1993), An Indian Act: Shooting the Indian Act (1997) by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and the co-founding of LIVE Biennial of Performance Art in 1999. Showing no signs of slowing down, in 2019 Alteen and grunt launched three of their most ambitious projects to date: Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore, the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency, and the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen.

His connections to artists is truly unique, and his commitment to long-term creative relationships has built a community around grunt that spans generations, cultural communities and disciplinary boundaries. Dana Claxton recalls:

“I think I first met Glenn at the Pitt Gallery on Water Street in the late 1980s. Early on in the realm of programming NDN’ art work, he was committed, supportive, made enormous space and provided guidance in a way, he may not even be aware of the guidance he gave. Our early morning talks for many years, as he would dream up projects…he makes ideas become concrete. And it was never about him, but always what can happen for other people.”

Alteen has championed intuitive, organic and artist-driven creation, while simultaneously ensuring the continued growth and stability of grunt itself. By developing grunt’s programming archive, securing a permanent space for the gallery and the creation of an endowment fund, Alteen has cemented the longevity of grunt and contributed to the sustainability of artist-driven culture in Vancouver. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2018 for his decades of exceptional contributions to the arts in Canada. Glenn Alteen has been a visionary for grunt gallery and Vancouver’s visual arts communities, and has left an enduring mark on the ways we work through, with and around art.

His unique perspective will carry forward into grunt’s future, and will continue to shape the organization. Incoming Program Director Vanessa Kwan, who has shared the role with him since last June, says:

“In so many ways, Glenn embodies what we hope for in a more compassionate art community. His leadership has taught so many of us about the importance of both resistance and care. His work proposes something no less than a revolution in how we understand a successful (dare I say legendary?) career in the arts: that ambition can be expressed as generosity, and that capital–cultural, financial and otherwise–is best shared widely rather than being kept to oneself.”

As grunt honours Alteen’s remarkable career and contributions to the art community, we are also proud to announce the re-naming of our endowment to the Glenn Alteen Legacy Fund, and we invite you to contribute to the future of the organization, and the furthering of its unique vision. More information can be found here.

Thank you so much, Glenn, for your audacity, persistence, disgruntlement and care.

Photo: Portrait of Glenn Alteen by Henri Robideau, Jaunary 1987.