Please join us at grunt gallery for the following artist talks and panels. These events will be recorded and used for the creation of a website which will be launched in October 2013.

TUES MAY 14

Social Cartography(7pm) Am Johal & Sarah Shamash 

Am Johal works at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement in the SFU Woodward’s Cultural Unit. He has previously worked in community economic development, civil society development, journalism and politics. He is currently serving on the Vancouver City Planning Commission, the Vancity Community Foundation and on the Steering Committee for SFU’s Centre for Dialogue. He is currently a part-time doctoral student in media philosophy (European Graduate School).

Sarah Shamash is a media artist born in Vancouver, Canada, where she currently lives and works. She studied film and media arts at the University of Saint Denis, Paris 8 in France completing a Master’s degree in Film and in Media Arts.

Since the 2000’s, she began exhibiting her work in art venues and film festivals while pursuing her creative production at artist residencies, including Vancouver, Toronto, Banff, Salvador (Brazil), Sao Paulo, and Amman, Jordan. Informed by cinema, her research and interdisciplinary process based practice engages socio and psycho geographies through the exploration of specific places, people and mapping strategies that convey personal and experiential knowledge through everyday life.

SAT MAY 18

Background/Vancouver (2pm) Michael de Courcy with Glenn Lewis & Grant Arnold

Michael de Courcy was born in Montréal in 1944. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Montréal and the Vancouver School of Art. In the late 1960s, de Courcy was a core member of the Vancouver artists’ collective known as the Intermedia Society. While there, he produced an extensive Intermedia photo documentary project which he has since developed into a web installation entitled The Intermedia Catalogue.

de Courcy’s work, which mostly involves photography and printmaking, has been presented both as interventions in public spaces and in public galleries including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. He has lectured at numerous reputable institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, York University, The University of Windsor, The University of British Columbia and the Emily Carr College of Art and Design.

de Courcy characterizes himself as a multi-disciplinary artist and community activist. He considers his work to be closely related to public art. in a recent project, Dead and Buried: The Remapping of the Cemetery at Woodlands, 2010-2012, de Courcy provides a process of redress for the three thousand persons who are at present buried in unmarked graves in the former British Columbia Provincial Asylum site.
In 2012, de Courcy with Fumiko Kiyooka co-founded and now serves on the board of the Roy Kenzie Kiyooka Foundation. Current and archived projects can be found on his website. http://www.michaeldecourcy.com/

Born in 1935, Glenn Lewis graduated from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) in 1958 with honors in painting, drawing, and ceramics. He later received a teaching certificate from University of British Columbia (1959) and studied ceramics under Bernard Leach in St. Ives (Cornwall, England) in the early 1960s. He has taught a number of different art disciplines at the University of British Columbia, media workshops at the National Film Board in Vancouver and Ceramics at Alfred University, N.Y. Lewis has worked in video, performance, film, ceramics, photography, sculpture, and writing. He was an active member of Intermedia and the art scene in Vancouver during the 1960s, producing work that blurred the boundaries between media and between viewer and artist.

As one of the co-founders of the Western Front, Lewis initiated and administered a number of programs relating to Video, Media and Performance Art. He has served on countless boards including the Intermedia, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Western Front. Solo exhibitions include the Douglas Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Presentation House, Trench Gallery and the Belkin Satellite. Lewis lives and works in Vancouver.

Grant Arnold is currently Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Prior to coming to Vancouver he held positions at the Art Gallery of Windsor and the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. Over the past twenty-five years he has organized more than forty exhibitions of historical, modern and contemporary art. Recent projects have included SPIRITLANDS: (t)HERE: Marian Penner Bancroft Selected Photo Works 1975-2000; Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 (with Catherine Crowston, Barbara Fischer, Michèle Theriault and Vincent Bonin, and Jayne Wark); Ken Lum; Reece Terris: Ought Apartment; Mark Lewis: Modern Time; Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs; Real Pictures: Photographs from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft; Rodney Graham: A Little Thought (with Jessica Bradley and Connie Butler); and Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of A Greater Fragmentation.

He is currently working exhibitions of work by Myfanwy MacLeod, Gareth Moore and Jerry Pethick.

THURS MAY 23

Soundwalk (5pm)Mapping & Sound (7pm) Vincent Andrisani & Randolph Jordan*

Vincent Andrisani is a PhD Candidate and a sessional instructor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He has both written and lectured on the topics of sound, broadcast media, and the politics of audio documentation. Vincent has produced and collaborated on a range of academic and artistic projects, including the most recent iteration of The Vancouver Soundscape: a research and archival project that began at SFU in the 1970s. Currently, his work explores issues of urban space, global politics, and the practices of soundmaking and listening in the city of Havana, Cuba. The sounds of water pipes, peanut vendors, and ice cream carts form the basis of the study.

Randolph Jordan a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver where he is investigating sound aesthetics and practices of locally-based film and media through the World Soundscape Project’s forty year study of the city’s sonic environment. He draws on the intersections between film sound studies, eco-film criticism, acoustic ecology and critical geography to explore auditory connections between geography and media. He is currently preparing a book manuscript, entitled “Reflective Audioviewing: An Acoustic Ecology of the Cinema,” in which he establishes a methodology for hearing film sound through the field of acoustic ecology, revealing ecological issues in play across a diverse range of films while arguing for the value of re-thinking the work of acoustic ecology as a form of media practice.www.randolphjordan.com

*Randolph Jordan will be participating via skype.

SAT MAY 25

ThisPlace/Vancouver (2pm) Guadalupe Martinez, Emilio Rojas & Igor Santizo

Guadalupe Martinez is an Argentine-born artist based in Vancouver. She obtained her BFA at the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte and is currently pursuing an MFA at University of British Columbia. Her research combines three-dimensionality, performance, and site-specificity by creating works that mnemonically activate found materials; reanimating their meaning into new structures of signification and resistance. Martinez has attended residencies at Hammock Residency (BC), The Banff Centre for the Arts (AB), The STAG (BC), Elsewhere Collective (NC), and The Vermont Studio Center (VT). Her work has been shown in Argentina, Mexico, US and Canada. She is currently working as a Teacher Assistant at the University of British Columbia and is a member of the LIVE Biennale’s Board of Directors.

Emilio Rojas was born in Mexico City, (ca.1980s) ,he is an interdisciplinary artist, working primarily in performance, interventions, video, installation, and sculpture. His works explore the relation between the artist and his audience, interacting and exchanging roles, while involving the communities that surround the spaces he engages with. Rojas requires the participation of the viewer, in order to set in motion the metaphors that unveil the intricacy of his art. The intrinsic relation with the body has been both his subject matter and medium. Exploring the mental and physical limits of his being, Emilio re-evaluates language, gender, activism, traditions, identity, ritual, displacement, migration and sexuality. Emilio Rojas is currently living in Vancouver, Canada, where he is exploring collaboration, alternative exhibition spaces, with a focus in social practice and public interventions.

Igor Santizo is a creative free agent living and working in Vancouver. He teaches & facilitates: creative process, foundational principles, cultural literacy and more … while encouraging students with their creative potential, emerging selves and budding art practices. By way of his artwork, he has sought a complimentary dialogue between: metaphysical principles & material forms. Currently, he is exploring through drawings: variations of an abstract motif, allusion to cthonic force.

grunt gallery warmly welcomes two new staff member’s to their team. Cynthia Bronaugh as Archives Manager and Elisha Burrows as Exhibitions Manager.

Cynthia Bronaugh is a proud Mount Pleasant resident, she obtained her BFA in Art History from Concordia before studying Museology at The University of Western Ontario, and has gone on to work in gallery administration for over sixteen years (in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia).  Cynthia recently left a six year run of museum and archives work to return to the world(s) of contemporary visual arts, applying her experience to grunts’ Activating the Archives initiative.

Elisha Burrows grew up in a theatre family and has lived in Vancouver, Toronto, and on Hornby Island. He has an extensive technical background in theatre, film, multi-media projects and the visual arts. Since graduating from Simon Fraser in 1997, he has worked as a theatre and film technician, DOP and director on various documentary films and as a content producer on various multimedia projects.

Join grunt on Friday, April 26th 2013 (7-8:30pm) in OTTAWA, ONTARIO
at SAW GALLERY during Northern Scene.
SAW gallery address: 67 Nicholas St, Ottawa, ON K1N 7B9

grunt gallery (Vancouver, BC) is pleased to launch their new publication BLIZZARD – Emerging Northern Artists during the National Arts Centre’s Northern Scene Festival at SAW Gallery. The 48 page colour publication has been produced by curator/designer Tania Willard from an exhibition at grunt in June of 2012. This publication features essays by Tania Willard and Candice Hopkins and artworks by Jamasie Pitseolak, Nicholas Galanin, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Geronimo Inutiq (aka MadEskimo), and director Derek Aqqiaruq.

“Northern Exposures” exhibition by curators, Candice Hopkins and Jonathan Demers will be opening at SAW that evening.

Pick up your copy of BLIZZARD: Emerging Northern Artists catalogue at the event.

Want to learn more about Northern Scene? Check out their website:

http://nac-cna.ca/en/northernscene

grunt is pleased to announce that Netherlands artist, Desiree Palmen, will be travelling to Vancouver in July to work with urban Aboriginal youth to explore their experiences and feelings in relation to Vancouver’s landscape. The artist will spend 4 weeks working with youth to paint them into a chosen place in Vancouver. These on-site painting projects will be photo-documented and these images will be publicly displayed in various locations by the fall.

Help fund this unique, collaborative project which allows Aboriginal youth to work with an experienced, international artist.
Donate here: http://www.canadahelps.org/CharityProfilePage.aspx?charityID=s33679

Help Desiree Palmen travel to Vancouver by donating your Aeroplan Miles here: http://beyondmiles.aeroplan.com/eng/charity/338

Vancouver, BC – grunt gallery is proud to announce the book launch for BLIZZARD: Emerging Northern Artists. This newly published catalogue includes essays by Candice Hopkins and Tania Willard that examine and reflect upon artwork by Jamasie Pitseolak, Nicholas Galanin, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Geronimo Inutiq (MadEskimo), and director Derek Aqqiaruq. Originally shown as an exhibition at grunt gallery in the summer of 2012, this catalogue spotlights Indigenous artists working in the North who are using their traditions to forge new ideas around contemporary art.

“BLIZZARD paints an alternate picture of the North: not a North created by paternalism, colonization and tourist board initiatives, but a distinctive place framed by compelling artists who are drawing from their experiences and influences, which include the lands and cultures of the Arctic as well as pop culture, new technology and their own interpretations of the South.” – curator, Tania Willard

Join grunt gallery and Tania Willard in celebrating the launch of this exciting new publication on Friday March 22nd, 6–8pm at grunt. Listen to the original vinyl album of famed Inuit rock band, Northern Haze, and pick up your copy of BLIZZARD.

Location:
grunt gallery, 350 E 2nd Ave – Unit 116, Vancouver, BC V5T 4R8

Learn More:
grunt gallery website: www.grunt.ca
Pre-order your copy of BLIZZARD: http://gruntgallery.bigcartel.com/product/pre-sale-blizzard-emerging-northern-artists

Special Thanks:
This publication was made possible by the generous support from the Government of BC through the Innovations program of the British Columbia Arts Council, The Government of Nunavut through the Department of Economic Development and Transportation, The Michael O’Brian Family Foundation, The McLean Foundation, Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association, Scriba International Art Society, Trench Gallery, Jasmine Redfern, all of our Indiegogo donors, the logistical support of Robert Kardosh from Marion Scott Gallery and Pascale Arpin.

Questions?
Contact Karlene Harvey, Communications Director
Karlene@grunt.ca
605-875-9516

Position Title: Exhibitions Manager

Location: grunt gallery
Reporting to: Programming Director
Hours: 40 hours per month (weekly schedule dependent on current projects); some evening and weekend work; flexible schedule

Start date: April 2, 2013
Deadline for applications: Friday, March 1, 2013 at 5:00pm

General Description of the Position:

The Exhibitions Manager is responsible for all details around the shipping, installing and de-installing of exhibits, as well as logistics management for other projects in the gallery, Media Lab (gruntKitchen) and offsite. The Exhibitions Manager reports directly to the Programming Director and is responsible for basic installation tasks such as storing, packaging, crating, shipping, hanging and lighting of exhibits, as well as exhibition maintenance. The Exhibitions Manager will also oversee logistics for any touring exhibitions. The Exhibitions Manager is also responsible for management of the exhibitions budget, contracting, negotiating with the artists over project details, and maintaining the quality and installation standards of the exhibition. This ten (10) hour a week job requires flexibility around the schedule and self-management.

Required Competencies:

– Budget Management
– Collaboration
– Commitment
– Communication
– Computer Skills
– Creativity
– Flexibility
– Installation Skills
– Reliability
– Communication Skills
– Resourcefulness
– Tolerance

General Responsibilities:

– Coordinating installations and supporting the artist with his/her vision;
– Arranging details with the artist including contracts, travel and shipping;
– Maintaining the gallery and the Media Lab;
– Participation on various committees and project groups as required;
– Working with the Program Director to obtain a good understanding of program requirements and ensuring the support of the artist;
– Managing program budgets;
– Liaising with and hiring skilled contractors to provide assistance with the installation/de-installation process;
– Other duties as required.

Required Skills and Education:

– Excellent understanding of artist-run centres
– Past experience with exhibit installation;
– Post-secondary education in an arts related program is an asset;
– Previous experience (work or volunteer) with arts organizations;
– Working knowledge of MS Office, Word, Excel, databases, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, video editing, projection, and other technical skills;
– Strong/expert communication (written and spoken) and time management skills
– Resourceful, hands-on and pro-active;
– Must be highly organized, detail oriented, committed to quality and able to work independently with minimal supervision;
– Ability to work flexible hours.

About grunt

Formed in 1984, grunt gallery has built a reputation on innovation and cutting edge program exhibitions, performances, artist talks, publications and special projects that showcase current and past work by contemporary Canadian and International artists.  We focus on work that would otherwise not be seen in Vancouver, and are proud of our ability to act as an intersection between various cultural groups based on aesthetics, medium or identity.  We consider our programming as a work in program that is always changing and is always interesting.

How to apply: All applications must be received by Friday, March 1, 2013 at 5:00pm

 If you believe that you are a good fit for us, and we’re a good fit for you, please mail or email your resume and cover letter in confidence to:

grunt gallery
116 – 350 East 2^nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC
V5T 4R8

email:  meagan@grunt.ca

grunt is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes all applicants.

Take advantage of these great deals and remember to pre-order your copy of the BLIZZARD catalogue!

Choose from the following:

BLIZZARD: Emerging Northern Artists

$16 + shipping
This catalogue looks at indigenous artists (Jamasie Pitseolak, Nicholas Galanin, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Geronimo Inutiq, and Derek Aqqiaruq) working in the North who are using their traditions to forge new ideas around contemporary art. This catalogue includes an essay by Candice Hopkins and Tania Willard. BLIZZARD looks at a younger generation of Northern Artists schooled in the traditions of their artists families, but breaking barriers by questioning relationships that tie North and South. Images and gallery documentation by Henri Robideau.

*Please note: This book is currently being printed and will be ready for mail-out by mid-March.

Purchase it here.

Vancouver Arts 3-Book Combo

$30 + shipping (reg. price $55).
This combo features Altered (2010), Access (2008), and LIVE (2000).

Read more about the Vancouver Arts Book Combo here.

Contemporary Indigenous Artists 3-Book Combo

$45 + shipping (reg. price $61).
This combo features the newly printed BLIZZARD: Emerging Northern Artists (2013), Beat Nation Catalogue (printed in Nov. 2012), and a hard-cover version of Old Growth: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (printed 2011).

*Please note: This book combo includes BLIZZARD which is currently being printed and will be ready for mail-out by mid-March.

Read more about the Contemporary Indigenous Artists Combo here.

Andante (a walking pace) at Richmond Art Gallery has an opening reception on Feb 2nd, 2013 (3-5pm).

The group show includes work by Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Mike Andrew McLean, Haruko Okano, Ruth Scheuing, and UWHAH (Until We Have a Helicopter). Adante (a walking pace) features a work by Cheryl L’Hirondelle that was originally commissioned by grunt gallery.

“Integral and common to the artworks in this group exhibition is the seemingly ordinary activity of walking. The title, Andante, draws from this tempo marking to mean – “at a walking pace” – a moderately slow pace that enables us to be attentive to our surroundings, literally and imaginatively. The works comprising Andante (a walking pace) are conceived as a conceptual practice, a process from which emerge diverse narratives reflecting artists’ responses to the various urban and rural landscapes they move in and consider.

The history of walking is an intriguing one with the capacity for narratives that hold cultural, political, social and spiritual meanings. From aboriginal rituals, religious and political pilgrimages, to intrepid explorers, artists, writers, and folk simply moving from one place to another, walking has inspired, challenged and been the subject of artistic investigation.

The artists presented in this exhibition explore the theme of walking to examine our surroundings, literally and imaginatively, in a range of media including photography, woven textiles, audio-visual media, sculpture, and installation.”

Visit the website for more information.

Hybrid identities in archived art

ART / (queer) intersections remembers pivotal 1990s performances

Monday, December 10, 2012
Written by Erin Flegg

Vancouver has a reputation (at least among those of us not born here) for playing hard to get. A diverse range of political and artistic communities has long thrived here, but they aren’t always easy to find.

A new series of online exhibits called Activating the Archive, from the grunt gallery, aims to draw out the vibrant histories of often marginalized groups and reacquaint Vancouver with its often radical past.

Interdisciplinary artist and scholar Christine Stoddard curated one of the exhibits, titled (queer)intersections.

The exhibit, made up of essays, video and photos, focuses on queer identity politics expressed through performance art in the 1990s.

“The ’90s for me was really when that notion of queer started to emerge as a political and identity category,” she says. “It’s taking the lesbian/gay movement and way of thinking about your sexuality and identity, and kind of opening it up to a less rigid category.”

Stoddard came to Vancouver toward the end of the 1990s, moving here with her first girlfriend to do a master’s of fine arts at Simon Fraser University. She got a job at the lesbian bar Charlie’s (“Oh god, I was a terrible server!”) and started to meet women who were also interested in exploring queer feminisms and with whom she would perform.

“That was the first time I really felt like I belonged here. It sounds sort of cheesy, but it’s true, I did.”

The grunt’s Halfbred cabaret series, featuring Oliv (above), marked an important moment in Vancouver’s queer art history, says Christine Stoddard.(grunt archives)At the time, she says, she didn’t consider herself a very radical queer. She grew up in the relatively small city of Halifax and says she was just looking for some kind of reflection of herself.

When she came out to her parents as bisexual, they had a hard time understanding, she says. They probably would have had an easier time had she used the word gay or lesbian, she reflects.

“It does confuse people when you don’t fit into a nice delineated box.”

CLICK HERE to read the entire article at Xtra West…