New Work on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen!

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.

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COVID-19 Gallery Protocols

Please be advised of our current protocols to help ensure the health and safety of all during the COVID-19 pandemic:

 

  1. Maximum 6 people in the gallery at a time (excluding staff)*
    1. For larger groups, please contact communications@grunt.ca to book an appointment in advance.
  2. Please do not enter the gallery if:
    • you have traveled outside Canada in the last 14 days
    • you have had contact with a person confirmed to have COVID-19
    • you have any symptoms such as fever, chills, coughing, loss of taste or smell
  3. Masks are mandatory while inside the gallery (if you don’t have your own, we will provide one)
  4. Use the hand sanitizer provided upon entering the gallery
  5. Please practice social distancing (minimum 2m between visitors)

*For large groups, please email communications@grunt.ca to book an appointment in advance.

Thank you!

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Cool Indians on Main Street

Cool Indians on Main Street
on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

grunt gallery and Cool Indians On Main Street have teamed up on a project for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen! Charlene Vickers and Neil Eustache, the co-founders of Cool Indians on Main Street benchin collective have invited Indigenous artists to make an open ended statement about Indigenous presence and benchin. What is benchin one may ask? Benchin is the act of gathering socially to sit on a bench to people watch, share ideas, stories, and just be together. Moving through the uncertain times of a pandemic, benchin is redefined and expressed differently. Benchin happens in individual moments, alone or within one’s  social “bubble.” Benchin is expressed via face-time chats, or by sharing benchin pics on social media, or by a regular phone call.  This summer Charlene Vickers organized a dream team of Cool Indian benchers to create a series of digital media works for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen as the next iteration of what “benchin” could become.

Cool Indians Benchin Dream Team:
Lacie Burning
Robert Chaplin
Neil Eustache
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Whess Harman
Maria Hupfield (with collaborators Ester Neff, IV Castellanos)
Janine Island
Jenny Irene Miller
Casey Koyczan
Manuel Axel Strain
The Human Nature Collective (Daina Warren, Kirstin Snowbird, Robert Snowbird, Theo Pelmus, with Kevin McKenzie)
Tania Willard
Charlene Vickers

Images, from top left: Wavers by The Human Nature Collective; Alas and Forsooth by Whess Harman; The Labour of Protecting by Manual Axel Strain; Cool Indians design by Neil Eustache; Prayers by Lucie Burning; We Practice Our Culture Because Our Parents Were Not Allowed To by Casey Koyczan; Swaying Praying by Tania Willard; Canuck the Crow by Robert Chaplin.

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These Ones

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.

As of July 2022, These Ones is thrilled to announce a new project written by Jessica and Ben Johns. Cree & D, a narrative radio play, takes you along with Aunties Vera, Darlene and Mac (voiced by Jessica, Emily Riddle and Matt Ward respectively) to solve the case of Kokum Cardinal’s stolen (very powerful and important) staff. Written in the style of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, this is a story of love, family, and of course adventure, as these aunties work to preserve the hard won and tenuous peace treaty between the six nations. Click here for details.

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

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ONLINE LAUNCH | New Documentation & Response by Tobias Ewé for Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week 


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.

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Limeflower Heterodoxy by Sharona Franklin: June 9 — July 3, 2020

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.

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grunt gallery Founder Glenn Alteen Retires as of May 29th, 2020

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.

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Merle Addison

Artist Merle Addison has been showing his own work and documenting the work of others since the early days of grunt. His sharp eye and gentle presence have witnessed some amazing moments of performance art in Vancouver over the last three decades and we can’t overstate the value of his contributions to the grunt archive. We have prepared an introduction to Addison’s practice as a research resource and tribute to his work. Thanks Merle! For research inquiries or more info about grunt’s archives please contact Dan Pon, Archives Manager, dan[at]grunt.ca

Merle Addison first came to grunt in 1985, soon after we started. He worked as a member of the volunteer collective that ran grunt at the time. He worked in administration and communication in the late 1980s. His greatest contribution was his documentation of our performance program from 1990 to 2010. From 1990 – 2005, using black and white photography, Addison would create amazing documentation in difficult settings in low light creating an amazing archive of Vancouver Performance over the period. During the LIVE Performance Biennials from 1999 – 2005 Addison documented over 150 performances.
— Glenn Alteen, grunt gallery Program Director 1984-2020

Merle Addison is a graduate of the Experimental Arts Department of the Ontario College of Art. He received his official artistic license there but has been scribbling and making things as long as he can remember. Back then he thought the best job to have would be a TV news announcer. They worked 15 minutes a day and got to keep the pencils and paper. He started working with grunt in 1988 and has been doing so ever since.

He is best known for his photographic documentation of performance art but his personal work utilizes any medium that you can use to make a scribble, from photo processes to soapstone on fine sandpaper to his favourite, a pencil on paper.

His performance art photos were taken in the kind of small spaces where the intimacy of the space allowed a close up of the artist’s piece. His drawings and abstract photo pieces are more of his own journey, that personal experience that defines us.

Merle Addison Artwork & Performance Documentation.

Image: Merle Addison, Quiddity, February 22, 2003.

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Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore

grunt gallery is proud to present the legacy publication Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore, focusing on her remarkable performance career. Wordless features full-colour photos and stills, including the new photo series nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations) and essays by Richard William Hill, Curtis Collins, Kathleen Ritter, Wanda Nanibush, Jessica Jacobson-Konefall, Glenn Alteen, Jen Budney, Dan Pon and Florene Belmore. Edited by Florene Belmore.

As a part of this project, grunt gallery commissioned a series of five new photographs based on five of Belmore’s previous performances. The new series, nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations), includes, witness, matriarch, mother, madonna and keeper.

Wordless is available for purchase via the grunt gallery online bookstore.

A member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), Rebecca Belmore is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist.

Rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, Belmore’s works make evocative connections between bodies, land and language. Solo exhibitions include: Facing the Monumental, Art Gallery of Ontario (2018); Rebecca Belmore: Kwe, Justina M.Barnicke Gallery (2014); The Named and The Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, (2002). In 1991, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother was created at the Banff Centre for the Arts with a national tour in 1992 and subsequent gatherings took place across the Canada in 1996, 2008, and 2014.

In 2017, Belmore participated in documenta 14 with Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. In 2005, at the Venice Biennale, she exhibited Fountain in the Canadian Pavilion. Other group exhibitions include: Landmarks2017 / Reperes2017, Partners in Art (2017); Land Spirit Power, National Gallery of Canada (1992); and the IV Bienal de la Habana (1991).

Belmore received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award (2004), the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award (2009), the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016). She received honourary doctorates from OCAD University (2005) and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2018).

Presented by grunt gallery and the Audain Art Museum. Published by Information Office. Wordless was funded through Canada Council for the Arts 150 Program, New Chapter and the Audain Art Museum. Wordless is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Art’s New Chapter initiative.

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Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

grunt gallery launched the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen (MPCAS) in December, 2019. The MPCAS is a 4×7 metre outdoor urban screen showing art-only content by and for the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver.

The MPCAS reflects its neighbourhood through artwork by local and commissioned artists, with a special focus on works exploring the area’s history, its current vitality and its future. This art-specific urban screen brings new digital technology to Mount Pleasant and the City of Vancouver with non-commercial programming around the theme of PLACE, presenting a diverse range of visual and media art by dozens of artists, community members, and community festivals reflecting on what it is to live in a changing Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. The MPCAS features commissioned work by Paul Wong, Amanda Strong, Kevin Lee Burton and Charlene Vickers, as well as curated content including programs by Justin Ducharme, Sebnem Ozpeta and Lianne Zannier. The screen also features original Digital Stories created by local residents specifically for MPCAS through a series of workshops led by artist Lorna Boschman. With over 6 hours of digital art, photography, video, time-based media, animation, performance, interactive art, GIFs, super 8 film, storytelling and more, learn all about the MPCAS programming at mpcas.ca.

The MPCAS is produced by grunt gallery and generously supported by the Vancouver Foundation, RIZE Corporation, Canada Council for the Arts, Creative BC, and the City of Vancouver. The MPCAS is part of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art program.

Location: Intersection of Broadway & Kingsway, Vancouver, on the east side of the Independent Building.

Visit mpcas.ca or follow the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen on Facebook and Instagram to stay in the loop!

Digital Stories on the MPCAS:
grunt gallery and EastVan Digital Stories offer free workshops to Mount Pleasant residents who wish to create short videos around the theme of PLACE. Artists Lorna Boschman and Sebnem Ozpeta host workshops every season, walking participants through the process of digital story making!

Through the digital stories group process, you will be able to create and share your own authentic story by combining digital photos and/or video. Selected videos from the workshops will be shown on grunt gallery’s Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen and on digitalstories.ca.

To sign up, email Lorna Boschman: lorna (at) digitalstories (dot) ca

In the email include your name, email address, phone/text number, and whether you live in Mount Pleasant or Vancouver. Please include one, or two, sentences about why you would like to create a short digital story. Lorna will send you a list of things to bring to the workshop including several photos (from your phone or camera) and/or video that directly relates to your story’s theme.

Workshops fill up quickly, and a maximum of four people can register per workshop!

Special thanks to the Vancouver Foundation who made this project possible.

 

Image: Amanda Strong, Ghosts (still), 6 minutes, 2018.

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