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nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations)

Exhibition Title: nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations)

Artist: Rebecca Belmore

Opening: Book Launch and Reception: July 28, 2019, 7 PM

Exhibition Dates: July 2 – August 3, 2019

grunt gallery presents an exhibition of new photographs by Rebecca Belmore: nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations), curated by Glenn Alteen, and the book launch of Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore.

Book Launch and Reception: July 28, 2019, 7 PM

Over the past two years, grunt gallery has been at work on 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.

Exhibition
July 2 – August 3, 2019

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.

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.

    

 

Image credit: Rebecca Belmore

dot.dot.dot.

Exhibition Title: dot.dot.dot.

Artist: Sejin Kim & Inyoung Yeo

Opening: May 9, 2019, 7 - 10PM

Exhibition Dates: May 10 - June 22nd, 2019

Curated by Vanessa Kwan with InYoung Yeo

dot.dot.dot. brings together Seoul-based artists Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo for their first presentations in Canada. Working at the intersection of media and installation, Kim and Yeo’s practices explore the omnipresence of interactive technologies and their varying effects on human experience.

InYoung Yeo’s Happily Ever After considers the entanglements of bodies with technology and each other; here “lust” becomes subject of the artist’s research processes. Beginning with the idea of technology as a contemporary interlocutor for human desire, Yeo approaches sex, gender and sexuality as both highly mediated by and resistant to the “compressive” nature of digital intelligences. Lust becomes an impulse that drives technological interaction at the same time as it can never be fully satisfied by it. This loop constitutes what Yeo explores as a system of repetition and deferral – a new and ongoing set of frustrated co-dependencies. Her work represents these as repeated patterns and forms, inhabiting the gallery as an edition of wallpaper and a new sculptural work. Yeo states, “Depicting the intertwined physical relationship among people to people and people to technology, the project addresses the wider scope of the cyclical and repetitive pattern of our behavior in consuming the ‘disillusionment’ of satisfaction in its manipulation and distortion.“

Sejin Kim’s two-channel video work, Mosaic Transition refers to the contentious flow of polluted air across borders and nation-states across Asia. The flow of pollution – a product of prevailing wind currents and industrial production in China and elsewhere – is a defining factor in lived experience across the Korean Peninsula; millions rely on apps and real-time data visualization software to assess the liveability of local atmospheric conditions. Mosaic Transition employs these technological advances as both revelatory and potentially fictive: Kim’s work is inspired by recent political fallout when images of C02 emissions were mobilized in Congress in South Korea – only to be debunked as fictional visualizations. The video work is created to emulate algorithmic data calculations: using open source imagery as material, Kim creates a series of images that overwrites itself in a perpetual cycle of apparent fact and its subsequent replacement. The system and its machinations – alongside glitches, effects, screen captures and overlays – are textured and fast moving, as the real world effects of environmental crisis dovetail with the tools and technologies of data collection and manipulation.

Throughout, the artists explore deep influences on human behaviour and perception; far from decrying the advance of ‘the digital’ the artists represent an embedded yet critically engaged position. They contend, as we all must, with an embodied perspective in a technological environment that, in both promise and imperfection, is intertwined with our survival.

This exhibition is part of Particles: Seoul to Vancouver, a program of exchange between artists, curators and institutions.

Artist bios
InYoung Yeo is an independent artist, curator and director based in Seoul. Her work expands from artistic materialization of drawing, painting, installation works to curatorial projects with interdisciplinary approaches in topics of Gender, A.I. and Urbanization as her main area of research. She explores various forms of manifestation in visual patterns based on logical structures of the human ‘mind’ and coincidences in the multidimensional time and space. Yeo has put together and participated in various projects, exhibitions, residencies, talks and workshops in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, US among others. Some of her major projects and exhibitions include Intersections of Common Space and Time a public art intervention project in Seoul, supported by Seoul Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut Seoul; Gender Hierarchy exhibition and related programs at Grey Projects, LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, in partnership with Geothe-Institut Singapore ; A.I.MAGINE, an art and technology collaboration project with Seoul City, Seoul National University, Seoul Digital Foundation, Seoul Data Science Lab Project at Art Center Nabi, Space One, Goethe-Institut Seoul; a three-way dialogue as a part of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017; East Asia Goethe-Institut A.I. research project A Better Version of 人. Her work has been included in group exhibitions A Free Breakfast, Multitude, Bare; and solo exhibitions a three-way dialogue, Space and Visual Interview.

Sejin Kim received her MFA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in London and MA in Film/TV from Sogang University in Seoul. She works with a variety of media apparatuses, including documentary realism and cinematic language to explore relationships between individuals and contemporary cultural systems. Her work has been shown internationally including selected solo exhibitions: The Chronology of Chance, Media Theater, Seoul; Prizma Residency #1, Prizma Space, Istanbul, Turkey; The Proximity of Longing, Cultural Station 284, Seoul. Selected group exhibitions include The Arrival of New Women, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Galaxias Maculates, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Valdivia, Chile; Future is Now!, La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, France; The Shade of Prosperity, INIVA, London; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011, ICA Gallery, London & S1 Art Space, Sheffield, UK; Life Stage, Art Centre Nabi, Seoul; The 4th Gwangju Biennale: PAUSE. She is the recipient of the Songeun Art Prize, Bloomberg New Contemporaries), and The 4th DAUM Prize, and she has participated in artist residencies at HIAP-Helsinki international Artist Program, SeMA Nanji Art Studio, Seoul, ISCP-International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York, Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon, Seoul, Goyang National Art Studio, and Taipei Artist Village, Taiwan.

Image credit: Sejin Kim, Mosaic Transition, 2-channel video (work in progress)

An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance

Exhibition Title: An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance

Artist: Kali Spitzer

Opening: March 14, 7 PM

Exhibition Dates: March 15 - April 27, 2019

grunt gallery presents new works by Kali Spitzer, An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance,  In conjunction with Capture Photography Festival, an essay by photographer Henri Robideau will be published on Spitzer’s work.

March 15 – April 27, 2019
Curated by Glenn Alteen
Opening Reception: March 14, 7 – 9 PM, grunt gallery
Artist Talk: April 18, 12:15 PM – 1: 00 PM, Native Education College, #285 East 5th Avenue, Vancouver, BC

An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance is about identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love; these images are about resilience and resistance. In this series, artist Kali Spitzer is photographing her community of mostly Indigenous and mixed heritage people, while challenging pre-conceived notions of race, gender, and sexuality to touch on how we can become more empathic, empowered people despite the hardships that we have endured.

Spitzer uses tintype photographs to capture her subjects. Tintype or ferrotype photography was a product of the late 1800s and most popular during the US Civil War. The medium persisted into the 20th century at fairs and carnivals as tourist photography. In the 21st century, it has been revived as novelty or art photography. The tintype was the first real populist form of photography, making photographs available to working class people reaching out through popular events and gatherings.

It’s hard to look at tintypes now and not be thrust back into the colonial era so that Spitzer’s photographs look both modern and historic. Many of them look like they could have been shot at a rodeo or a powwow, retaining that populist leaning that made the medium well known at their inception. Spitzer is subversive and strategic.

“Every photograph, every person, has a story to tell, and I am telling it through their portrait. When I photograph a person, I aim to create the most honest image of them. I believe that each image I take is a collaboration between the person I am photographing and myself. I wouldn’t be able to create the images I do without trust; trust an essential element of my work. There is an urgency to my work. I am part of a generation that is hugely affected by Residential Schools and Settler Colonialism. We are in a race against time as we are losing many of our elders, along with our stories, language, and culture. It is a struggle for our generation and for those to come. We need to spend time listening to our elders and learning from them. We struggle with holding onto our identities and re-discovering ourselves in this era of Settler Colonialism.”

Kali Spitzer is Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, British Columbia) on her father’s side and Jewish from Transylvania, Romania on her mother’s side. She is from the Yukon and grew up on the West Coast of British Columbia in Canada on unceded Coast Salish Territory. She is a transdisciplinary artist who mainly works with film — 35mm, 120 and wet plate collodion process using an 8×10 camera. Her work includes portraits, figure studies, and photographs of her people, ceremonies, and culture. Her work has been exhibited and recognized internationally. Spitzer recently received a Reveal Indigenous Art Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation and was featured in the National Geographic and Photo Life in 2018.

This exhibition is part of the 2019 Capture Photography Festival Featured Exhibition Program.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Ginger Dunnill. View/download here

March 5, 1819

Exhibition Title: March 5, 1819

Artist: Rebecca Belmore

Opening: March 5, 2019, 7-10PM

Exhibition Dates: March 5, 2019 (one day only)

ONE DAY ONLY! 10AM–10PM
Opening Reception: March 5, 2019, 7PM

Over the past two years, grunt gallery has been at work on the project Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore focused on her remarkable performance career. This legacy project begins with an all-day screening of, March 5, 1819, and the launch of her new website, rebeccabelmore.com

In 2008 Rebecca Belmore produced the video installation March 5, 1819 recreating the abduction of the Beothuk woman Demasaduit and the murder of her husband Nonosabasut by colonialist settlers in Newfoundland. This video installation is not a historical reenactment, rather the actors are in modern dress and Belmore questions what has changed over the past 200 years. March 5, 1819, was commissioned by The Rooms in St John’s and has also been exhibited in Ottawa and Toronto. Set at Red Indian Lake in central Newfoundland March 5, 1819 was filmed in Vancouver at Mount Seymour.

March 5, 2019, marks the 200th anniversary of these events. It was announced earlier this year that their skulls will be returned to the Canadian Museum of History from the University of Scotland.  As we grapple with reconciliation it is fitting to remember the history that brought us to this place.

grunt will celebrate the re-launch rebeccabelmore.com, a website documenting Rebecca Belmore’s career over the past 32 years. The new site features content that spans Belmore’s career in all media, taking the user deep into the heart of her practice.

From July 2 – August 3, 2019, grunt gallery will also present a photographic exhibition of five new performance photographs, and a book launch of Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore, in collaboration with the Audain Art Museum and Information Office.

Funded through a New Chapter grant, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Audain Art Museum, this project celebrates the important career of one of Canada’s most iconic artists.


Wordless – The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

Strident aesthetic. Towards a new liberation.

Exhibition Title: Strident aesthetic. Towards a new liberation.

Artist: Carlos Colín

Opening: January 10, 7 - 10 pm

Exhibition Dates: January 11 – March 2, 2019

(Image: Contras from La otra Escuela (Fan College Apparel), T-shirts, 2018, courtesy of the artist)

This new series of work by Mexican Canadian artist Carlos Colín merges symbols of Latin American conceptualist art, and Latin American colonialist history, past and present, and its diaspora. Working with archives, books, footage, and audio material related to Latin American history, the artist creates a work based on photographs, text and/or audio with parallels between, arts, politics, religion, and society.

Carlos Colín was born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1980 and grew up in Mexico City. His practice explores how art can create links between Latin American societies and its diasporas by looking at how artists use local knowledge, realities, and histories in social resistance as new expressions of social and cultural progress. Colín holds a Master’s of Fine Arts degree from the National School of Fine Art in Mexico City, and a second MFA from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program at UBC where his research explores the manifestations of baroque as a colonial legacy in Latin America and its diasporas. Colín was awarded the 2016 Emerging Artist Mayor’s Arts Awards for the City of Vancouver in Visual Arts; the 2017 Artist Studio Award Program; and the Canada Council grant to the Research and Create component in 2018. His work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Gallery 1515, Vancouver; and La Boligoma Art Gallery, Mexico City.

grunt’s new Reading Room:

The Reading Room is an opportunity to discuss themes in Carlos Colín’s exhibition, Strident aesthetic. Towards a new liberation, through short theoretical, historical, or literary texts selected by Carlos Colín and Glenn Alteen. The Reading Room will take place over three Wednesday evenings: February 13, 20, and 27, 5:30PM to 7:30PM, at grunt gallery. The artist will be in attendance! Please email Nellie, nellie@grunt.ca, to register or for more information. Readings will be emailed to you in early January 2019.

Opening Reception January 10, 7 – 10 pm

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Dana Claxton. View/download here

2068: Touch Change

Exhibition Title: 2068: Touch Change

Artist: Syrus Marcus Ware

Opening: November 1, 7 - 10 pm

Exhibition Dates: November 2 - December 15, 2018

(Image: Activist Portrait Series: Portrait of Queen Tite Opaleke, Graphite on Paper, 6 ft x 12 ft, 2015, provided by artist)

2068: Touch Change

ARTIST: Syrus Marcus Ware

CURATED BY: Vanessa Kwan

EXHIBITION: November 2 – December 15, 2018

OPENING:  November 1, 7 – 10 pm

DISCUSSION EVENT: November 2, 2018 / 7pm / grunt gallery 116-350 E. 2nd Ave

Touch Change: A conversation between Syrus Marcus Ware and !Kona

2068: Touch Change is both an archive and a speculation. Beginning 50 years in the future, this new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Syrus Marcus Ware proposes an archive whose ‘holdings’ act as a meeting ground for artists and activists across time and space.

The exhibition has 3 main components: a series of large-scale graphite portraits drawn on paper and directly on the walls, a speculative text and a disseminated printed work that documents materials gathered and accessed in the artists’ research process. The portraits – in many ways the centrepiece of the exhibition – are created through a complex process of visiting and revisiting images and interviews with historic and present-day BIPOC (Black, Indigenous or People of Colour) activist communities. Ware’s investment in the archive is overlaid with a parallel interest in forms of speculative fiction (see his recent piece in C Magazine or his essay on Octavia E. Butler published by Canadian Art last year) and he speaks eloquently about how he envisions his research and installations as ways of creating a space where activists and artists of different generations are brought together:

I have been creating very large-scale portraits of activists/revolutionaries/community mobilizers as a way of celebrating activists’ culture, activists’ lives and as a way of understanding the many daily choices that we all have to get involved in big and little ways to make the world a place where we all get to have self-determination and where we all get to be free. These portraits are an act of reverence, a celebration of life and of choice and of action(s).

For my project with grunt, I explored the Trans Archives at the University of Victoria and historic archives on Salt Spring Island, digging for and finding black history in the pages and fields. In this exhibition, activists from the past present and future will meet for the first time… as I merge my archival research with interviews and portrait sittings that I did with black British Columbians while doing my residency in Victoria and Vancouver.

Ware’s work invokes the philosophy of Octavia E. Butler’s now-famous Earthseed movement from her (unfinished) Parables trilogy: “All that you touch/ you Change. All that you change/ Changes you” resonates throughout the artists work, as a reference to empathic human connection as the fuel for sustained and sustaining social justice movements. Ware, like Butler,  invites us to consider change as a constant, and hope as an ever-expanding network of relations.

A conversation with local artist and activist !Kona will take place on Friday, November 2nd at grunt gallery. This program is co-presented with Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week.

Curated by Vanessa Kwan

The exhibition is accompanied by a broadsheet featuring text by Syrus Marcus Ware. View/download here

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 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery,  Art Gallery of York University and The Gladstone Hotel. His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015).  He is part of the PDA (Performance Disability Art) Collective and co-programmed Crip Your World: An Intergalactic Queer/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza as part of Mayworks 2014. He is also a part of the Black Triangle Arts Collective (BTAC), a visual arts collective dedicated to exploring disability, racial and economic justice. He is a facilitator/designer at The Banff Centre, and for 12 years was the Coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario Youth Program. Syrus is the inaugural Daniel’s Spectrum Artist-in-Residence (2016/17) and a core team member of Black Lives Matter-Toronto. Syrus is also part of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama. He is working on a PhD at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.

For more information visit Syrus’ personal website.

 

!Kona is a Vancouver-based artist, writer and activist. Her creative and social justice-oriented work has spanned arts/ cultural, queer, feminist and Black communities for over 20 years.

About Recollective Vancouver Independent Archives Week

Vancouver Independent Archives Week is a free public programming series initiated in 2015 by grunt gallery, the Western Front, and VIVO Media Arts that highlights artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practice and in/formal sites of community memory. Joined by our partners The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 221A, Artspeak, and Rungh Magazine, we have re-imagined the series as Recollective: Artists, Communities, Independent Archives, a robust expansion that examines the tensions and possibilities of the archive in narratives of social movements, activist communities, and marginalized voices.

Woven Work From Near Here

Exhibition Title: Woven Work From Near Here

Artist: Curator: Emily Hermant and T'ai Smith

Opening: September 6, 2018, 7 - 10 PM Curators Tour: September 29, 2 PM

Exhibition Dates: September 7 - October 20, 2018

Included in the show are works by artists Debra Sparrow (θəliχʷəlʷət), Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Hank Bull, Jovencio de la Paz, Kerri Reid, Matt Browning, Melvin Williams, and Merritt Johnson. 

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David Khang – March of the Monarch

Exhibition Title: David Khang – March of the Monarch

Artist: David Khang

Opening: One Performance Only

Exhibition Dates: August 30, 2018

Participatory Public Performance: Bring your bicycles & your wildest butterfly costumes! Children welcome!

Date/Time: August 30, 2018

Meeting Location:  Science World at TELUS World of Science, 1455 Quebec St, Vancouver, BC V6A 3Z7
Departure: 6:15 PM from Science World
Bike Route: We will ride together at a leisurely pace along the False Creek Bike Path, with stops along the way.
Destination Point: ETA 7 PM Chain And Forge Granville Island, 1402 Anderson St, Vancouver, BC V6H 4E5 (under Granville Bridge)
Performance: ETA 7:15 – 8:30pm
*Please note that all times are estimated, and subject to variances. The total length of the bike ride is approximately 5.6 KM (30 minutes).

ARTIST: David Khang

A public performance with
 OPEN INVITATION FOR PUBLIC PARTICIPATION.
 Bring your bicycles & your wildest butterfly costumes! 
Children welcome!

How does art transform cities? How can artists activate public spaces?

How can visual imagery invigorate the public’s creativity and imagination?

For March of the Monarch, David Khang creates a new public performance from recurring tropes in his art – monarch butterflies that camouflage a military soldier and his bicycle-powered tank. The public will be invited to form a “migration” of cyclists, and participate in a butterfly-themed bicycle ride through the city, accompanying the tank along False Creek, to Granville Island. Accompanied by the Korean music troupe Tazza, and with projected visual imagery as a backdrop, the audience will be invited to help release live butterflies. This multimedia project looks to engage the audience towards a social metamorphosis as part of Khang’s ongoing work of being open to change.

The project is the last of a series of site-specific and site-responsive works produced by Khang over the past ten years as the Wrong Places Project and The Tank, The Poem and the Uniform. This multimedia project invites the audience to engage in social metamorphosis, by participating in Khang’s ongoing work of opening up to change.

Biography:

David Khang is a visual, performance, and biological artist whose practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively embeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages that materialize in visual, textual, and spoken forms. In performing, Khang often embodies these languages to interrogate social constructions – of gender, race, and interspecies relations – that are present within dominant historic narratives in contemporary culture. By strategically employing non-native languages and code-switching, Khang produces divergent, dissonant, and often hyperbolic and humorous readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political.

Khang received his BSc (Psychology) and DDS (Dentistry) from the University of Toronto, BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, and MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he was the recipient of the University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship. Khang concurrently completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis, for which he worked with Jacques Derrida, Etienne Balibar, Fred Moten, and Laura Kang. In 2004, Khang’s thesis was chosen to represent UC Irvine at the Distinguished Master’s Thesis Writing Competition (USA). Khang was a 2006–07 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award (Brooklyn, NY), and in 2010, an artist– in–residence at SymbioticA Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts (Perth, Australia). Khang was born in Seoul, grew up in Toronto, and currently resides in Vancouver, where he has been dividing his time between art practice, part-time dentistry, and part-time teaching at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Khang is currently a JD candidate at Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia (2016–).

This project is made possible through Granville Island’s
Activation Grants and Initiatives.

 

Jeremy & Sus Borsos – The Blue Cabin Exhibition

Exhibition Title: Jeremy & Sus Borsos – The Blue Cabin Exhibition

Artist: Jeremy and Sus Borsos; Curated by Glenn Alteen

Opening: June 14, 7 -9 PM

Exhibition Dates: June 15 to July 28, 2018

Jeremy and Sus Borsos – The Blue Cabin Exhibition

ARTISTS: Jeremy and Sus Borsos

CURATOR: Glenn Alteen

OPENING RECEPTION: June 14, 7 – 9 PM

EXHIBITION DATES: June 15 to July 28, 2018

THE BLUE CABIN SPEAKER SERIES:

Wednesday, June 20 at 7:00 p.m.
Artist talk with Jeremy Borsos
Artist Jeremy Borsos will give a talk describing the restoration of the small 1920’s building known as the Blue Cabin. The talk will focus on possible translations of the cabin’s history.

Thursday, June 28 at 7:00 p.m.
Daniel Francis | Squat City: A Brief History of Squatting Around Burrard Inlet
Author and historian Daniel Francis will speak about the history of squatter villages on the region’s foreshore.

Saturday, July 7 at 2:00 p.m.
Carole Itter in conversation with Krista Lomax
Artist Carole Itter will present an informal talk about her artwork and writings during her 35 year-long residency at the Blue Cabin. She will be joined by artist and editor Krista Lomax.

Thursday, July 12 at 7:00 p.m.
Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, The Foreshore
Artist Jen Weih and curator and artist Vanessa Kwan will speak about The Foreshore, a project produced by Other Sights, in collaboration with Access Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery.

Thursday, July 19 at 7:00 p.m.
The Blue Cabin Project
Blue Cabin founding partners Glenn Alteen, Esther Rausenberg, and Barbara Cole will discuss the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency project.

*To keep up to date with The Blue Cabin, please sign up for a separate newsletter online here.


When Jeremy Borsos and his wife, Sus, took on the remediation of the Blue Cabin, we at grunt never expected what would eventually come out of it! Using historical materials, they took the structure apart, methodically cleaned every inch, and replaced the rotted out bits. They insulated the walls and fixed the floor. Essentially, they treated it as an archaeological site, collecting its history in scraps of newspapers and mouse nests and, in an archival process, painstakingly saved what remained. The humble structure revealed itself slowly over the six-month period of the restoration and culminated – when they took up the floor – in the discovery of almost 40 posters that had been put there in 1927 to prevent the floor from squeaking.

In this exhibition, the Borsos’ present a body of work that documents this journey, while providing us a history of the cabin before Al Neil and Carole Itter’s tenancy, and offering us new insights into the earlier inhabitants— squatters, and marine workers on the foreshore.

Jeremy Borsos attended Emily Carr School of Art and the Art Students League in New York. His practice is multidisciplinary and includes writing, photography, installation, painting, and video. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Together with his partner, Sus, the Borsos have developed a meta-historical use of salvaged architecture, constructing multiple dwellings and ancillary structures.

Sus Borsos was born in Denmark and studied statistics and computer sciences at Copenhagen University before managing Scandinavian Stage Design, where she oversaw the creation of stages for major events in Europe. After relocating to Canada in 1992, she worked with her husband, Jeremy Borsos, on constructing their Mayne Island home created from salvaged architectural fragments. Sus has also worked in digital film editing and design, and image output for reproduction.

Together, Sus and Jeremy have constructed a number of buildings using period architectural salvage. They have most recently completed a full remediation of the Blue Cabin, the studio component of a soon to be launched floating artist residency in Vancouver, Canada. Among Jeremy and Sus’s current creative projects is the redesigning and rebuilding of a studio and living space in Athens, Greece. They live and work on Mayne Island, British Columbia, and in Athens, Greece.

The Blue Cabin project is led by grunt gallery, along with Other Sights for Artists Projects, and Creative Cultural Collaborations (C3). This program has been supported by the Hamber Foundation.

Download the PDF of the catalogue and essay by Scott Watson

 

Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa – Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers

Exhibition Title: Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa – Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers

Artist: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Opening:

Exhibition Dates: February 22 – April 21, 2018

Exhibition: Closes April 21, 2o18, 5 PM

Reception & Book Launch with Susan Gibb, Curator & Frédérique Bergholtz, Director- If I Can’t Dance Amsterdam and artist, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

ARTIST: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

CURATOR: Susan Gibb

FACILITATED BY: Glenn Alteen

Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers is a series of six documented video performances by Guatemalan artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. This series of six videos on interrelated performances and were produced for the camera.

Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers was commissioned by Corpus Network and headed by, If I Can’t Dance Amsterdam, the series features the artist working solo or with an ensemble in an ethereal series of performances. These works will be featured at grunt for Capture Photography Festival and this exhibition will allow Vancouver Audiences to see the newest work by this always enthralling artist.

Artist Biography: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa lives and works in Berlin and Guatemala City. He was born in Guatemala City in 1978 and immigrated to Vancouver in the early 1980’s. In 2006 he received a BFA in Media Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and, in 2008, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was also a postgraduate researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2013. He has had recent solo exhibitions at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; DAAD Galerie, Berlin (2017); and Gasworks, London (2015). Group exhibitions include São Paulo Biennial, Venice Biennale; LACMA, Los Angeles (2017); Lyon Biennial; and EFA Project Space, New York (2015). He has participated in performance series at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); and Tate Modern, London (2015). In recognition of his achievement, Ramírez-Figueroa was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Award (2017); and a DAAD fellowship (2015-16).

This work was commissioned and produced as part of Corpus Network for performance practice. Corpus is comprised of: Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao; CAC, Vilnius; KW, Berlin; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; Playground, STUK and M – Museum Leuven; and Tate Modern, London. Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Curator Susan Gibb talks with Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s website

If I Can’t Dance Amsterdam website 

PDF of the catalogue for Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers

 

 

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