Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

grunt gallery Accessibility Committee

The above video is an ASL translation of the text below.

Over time, grunt gallery has explored and supported a wide range of practices including exhibitions, performances, online projects, public art, residencies, media- and time-based works, talks and symposia, publications and community-engaged practices. Our wide range of programming has always included the creation and dissemination of audio/ visual materials and online experiences. With a mandate to support artists and inspire public dialogues, we are committed to doing the work to create an environment that allows for accessible conversation. This aim informs how we develop and build our archive, engage with audiences and look to the future of our organization.

In Spring 2020, we created an Accessibility Committee composed of grunt staff and contractors and chaired by our Exhibitions Manager (and Accessibility consultant) Kay Slater. This committee gathers to audit and review systems, procedures, and policies of grunt gallery to identify, think through, improve, and share the way we show up in our public programming, exhibitions, and for our community. Over the past year, we have drafted guidelines for hosting online and hybrid events, video captioning and transcription, and have begun re-drafting contracts. In Spring 2021, we launched a series of captioning, transcription and non-auditory access workshops offered to our communities for free. This ongoing series includes a mentorship opportunity to learn captioning alongside experienced and practicing access professionals with an invitation for mentees to co-facilitate their own non-auditory access workshops designed specifically for their own communities.

We are informed by anti-oppression practices, a commitment to learning and sharing our findings, and a belief in social justice through the arts. We understand these processes take time, resources and long-term commitment.

If you have questions regarding this work, or suggestions for how we can do it better, please contact us at access@grunt.ca

 

Comments Off on grunt gallery Accessibility Committee

An Image On An Image: A conversation with Marcus Bowcott [ATA article]

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

Leave a comment

grunt Study Guides

Vancouver’s grunt gallery is marking the end of its year-long “Activating the Archive” project with the launch of six educational guides for secondary school instructors and students, centered around projects initiated or supported by the artist-run centre since its establishment in 1984.

Each educational guide provides a lesson plan for one of the following senior-level courses: BC First Nations, Communications, English, English First Peoples, Media Arts, and Studio Arts. The lesson plans offer instructors guidelines by which to introduce students to a variety of topics, including colonialism, stereotypes, social responsibility, national languages, and local activist, artistic, and new media practices. Provided resources include texts (articles, essays, and short stories), images, worksheets, essay and discussion questions, and outlines for group activities. The guides are available for download for free in PDF format:

 

Activating the Archive Study Guides
1. BC First Nations 12
2. Communications 11 & 12
3. English 12
4. English First Peoples 12
5. Media Arts 11 & 12
6. Visual Arts 11 & 12
 

Grunt’s educational guides combine the BC Ministry of Education curriculum with content from grunt’s archive that was recently made available to the public as a result of the “Activating the Archive” project. “Activating the Archive” resulted in a searchable online database and six curated websites that focus respectively on text-based artworks; sculpture; queer performance practices; socially-engaged art practices; the work of Cree/French Métis artist Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew; and “INDIANacts: Aboriginal Performance Art,” a conference presented by grunt gallery in 2002.

Leave a comment

Skip to toolbar