Mark Hall-Patch’s series of watercolour drawings explore anarchistic art movements.  But there is a psychological edge to Hall-Patch’s works which seem depictions of alienation; the figure lost in a landscape facing grave existential danger.  The delicate nature of the drawing and watercolour in individual works make very stunning representations of failed utopian societies.

ARTIST BIO
Mark Hall-Patch has degrees in Design from ECUAD and Visual Art from Langara College.  He has produced solo exhibitions at the Shack Art Collective and Shudder Gallery ad has been featured in group exhibitions at the Satellite Gallery, East Van Studios, Gam Gallery, Plank Gallery, and Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland.  Hall-Patch’s exhibition will be featured in SWARM 2016.

Four Faces of the Moon is a multi-media installation that provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the elaborate sets, puppets, and props created for the new stop motion animated film by the same name. The story is told in four chapters, which explore the reclamation of language and Nationhood, and peel back the layers of Canada’s colonial history.

A personal story told through the eyes of director and writer Amanda Strong, as she connects the oral and written history of her family as well as the history of the Michif (Métis), Cree and Anishinaabe people and their cultural ties to the buffalo. Canada’s extermination agenda of the buffalo isn’t recorded as fervently as it was in the United States, yet the same tactics were used north of the border to control the original inhabitants of the land. This story seeks to uncover some of that history and establish the importance of cultural practice, resistance and language revival from a personal perspective.

Artistic collaborators include: Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Raven John, Femke van Delft, Chloe Bluebird, Dora Cepic, Dusty Hagerud, William Weird, Daniel Guay, Lydia Brown, Terrance Azzuolo, Callum Paterson, Tim Daniel, Joce Weird, Ian Nakamoto, Lynn Dana Wilton, Zed Alexander, Danielle Wilson, Damien Buddy Eaglebear, Colour Sound Lab Studio, Boldly Creative, Outpost Media and Menalon Music, along with the support of many others.

ARTIST BIO

Amanda Strong is an Indigenous filmmaker, media artist and stop motion director currently based out of the unceded Coast Salish territory also known as Vancouver. She is the owner and director of Spotted Fawn Productions, an animation and media-based studio creating short films, commercial projects and workshops. A labour of love, Amanda’s productions collaborate with a diverse and talented group of artists putting emphasis on support and training women and Indigenous artists.

Amanda’s work explores ideas of blood memory and Indigenous ideology. Her background in photography, illustration and media extend into her award-winning stop motion animations. Her films Indigo and Mia’ challenge conventional structures of storytelling in cinema and have screened internationally, most notably at Cannes, TIFF, VIFF, and Ottawa International Animation Festival. Amanda has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and the NFB. In 2013, Amanda was the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Film and Video, and most recently the recipient of the Vancouver Mayors Arts Awards for Emerging Film and Media Artist. Amanda is currently working on her latest short animation Four Faces of the Moon for CBC Short Docs. The story is told in four chapters, exploring the reclamation of language and Nationhood, while peeling back the layers of Canada’s colonial history, revealing Canada’s extermination agenda on the buffalo.

Four Faces of the Moon is made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, CBC, Telus, BC Arts Council, Creative BC, Ontario Arts Council and the NFB Filmmakers Assistance Program.

LINKS

> Purchase the exhibition catalogue online in our GIFT SHOP

> Spotted Fawn Productions

> Check out this timelapse video of the Four Faces of the Moon installation process, filmed by our wonderful volunteers Rosalina Cerritos and Jaime Torres:

***WE ARE EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE the addition of a live audio-visual performance to the Four Faces of the Moon exhibition opening night on July 21st at grunt gallery. At 8pm Mob Bounce will be performing a half-hour set and they will be joined by media artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett.

Craig Frank Eades aka the Northwest Kid and Travis Hebert aka Heebz the Earthchild formed Mob Bounce in 2010 and they have been touring the country ever since. With their conscious message, dynamic style, and powerful sound steeped in Indigenous oral tradition, they are part of a new generation of artists pushing forward while respecting their roots and culture. They recently released their EP Mob Medicine and a short documentary about them was also released under the same title.

Mob Bounce on Facebook

Mob Medicine EP review and Download

Mob Medicine Mini-Doc

High Kicks Into the Light Forever and Ever and Ever is a new video installation by Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth Milton that investigates the relationship between glamour, affect, and the longing for transcendental experience.

Composed of a series of immersive projections that explore performative ritual and material play, the work revolves around a procession of participants meditating under the hot glow of a spotlight. Drenched in identical heavy make-up and lacquered in artificial sweat and tears, a series of ‘women’—disembodied faces displaying exaggerated markers of high femininity—form a fevered chorus-line for the camera. Melting under the heat, the performers’ make-up is a tenuous composition, eventually smeared away in a gesture of (choreographed) self-effacement.

What is constructed fades, or rather, is obliterated. The make-up, so recognizable as an overstatement of gendered subjectivity, becomes a kaleidoscopic abstraction on white linen, acting as both colour field and performance document. Alongside sequences of props, costumes, and the garish refuse of novelty-store glamour, the images disarm assumptions of a composed subject, and point to the possibility of transcendence, an ecstasy in glitter.

ARTIST BIO

Elizabeth Milton is a Vancouver-based performance and media artist who utilizes character-play to investigate constructions of identity and affective expression. Her work has been exhibited throughout Canada and developed through residencies at Access Gallery, Vancouver and the Banff Centre. Her recent performances and exhibitions have taken place at VIVO Media Arts Centre, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Nanaimo Art Gallery. Milton holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of British Columbia and a BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University. She instructs courses in Studio Art at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and Langara College.

Artist Talk: June 18 @ 2:00 pm

“I reuse old works, old concepts, incorporated with the new. Whatever works and I don’t stay within the lines. Nothing I make doesn’t remind me of something I’ve absorbed from the echo of the last century, the one I came of age in, and from even before. The interpretations of others and the seeing for myself.

Although generally I use photographic images and related processes as the start of the work, I don’t think of the final image as a photograph. Indeed in terms of how a photograph should look is not a concern. How the individual print looks is; the line, colour and textures of my world that I use to share my apophenia. There is an almost inherent lack of control that is integral to my work. Meaning defined and experience sensed is never the same.”

~ artist statement, Merle Addison

Análekta – meaning “to gather up; to collect” – an exhibition of new works by Merle Addison, documents his switch from analogue to digital. Reworking old images using digital overlays, the final prints owe as much to printmaking as photography. At once modern and nostalgic, the works transform the media through their highly manipulated surfaces.

Merle Addison is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art producing work in photography over 40 years. Addison has been a long time member of grunt – and has produced performance photography for the gallery – for the past 25 years. His exhibition Still curated by Archer Pechawis showed at grunt in 2000 and featured First Nations Performance Artists from across Canada.

Merle Addison’s exhibition will be featured in the photography festival Capture 2016. A monograph by Dana Claxton will accompany the exhibition.

Curated by Glenn Alteen.

> Check out Merle Addison featured in Capture Fest 2016

Weronika Stepien and Stephen Wichuk examine the operations of food production and how this activity has been represented in literature, industrial films, and popular cinema.

A selection of related movement images are disassembled and their various motivations and structural components reconstituted to produce a series of new video works.

In one instance, a set of inexpensive consumer goods haunted by physical, mimetic and mythic affinities to sausage making are summoned, to reenact a centuries old sight-gag. In another, movements captured in a tradition of scientific management are pushed through the tedious yet fantastical mill of cel animation.

The resultant images collapse historical time with the time of production, and in so doing reveal uncanny movements of capital and desire.

ARTIST BIO

Weronika Stepien is a Polish-American interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Emily Carr University’s Film and Video + Integrated Media program in 2009. In 2007 she studied audio visual art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her artwork incorporates forms of visual storytelling, psychology and experiments in shape and movement. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, Germany, Singapore, and Vancouver. She has been teaching animation to children and youth since 2008.

Stephen Wichuk is an animator and arts educator born in Edmonton, Alberta. He received a Bachelor of Media Arts at the Emily Carr Institute in 2005 and a an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2013. His works have been exhibited and screened at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2013), Little Mountain Studios (2012), Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society (2010) and VIVO Media Arts (2008). He has taught animation principles to people of all ages through Arts Umbrella, Reel2Real, VSB, Cineworks, Emily Carr, and the Purple Thistle.

*Image credit: Sausage Machine Single Channel Digital Video 2016 by Stephen Wichuk.

Curated by Tarah Hogue and Vanessa Kwan.

Remote Viewing is a performance and responsive installation presenting human and camera interactions as a site for contemplation.

We live in an era of technological vision–and technological bodies–an age where what you see is almost always strategically manipulated, massaged, commercialized, and politicized. Almost never what you get.

What we propose is a dislocation of bodies and of vision and an experiment in visual intervention. Focusing on the technology of drones as agents of remote vision and interaction, we propose a meditation—part visual, part conceptual—on the status of vision, bodies, and technology in the 21st century. Drones are as much floating heads as they are predatory machines, and to emphasize this conflation is to begin to interrogate the logic of surveillance for its relationship to an embodied ethics of virtual behavior.

ARTIST BIO

grunt gallery presents new works by Vancouver-based artist Zoe Kreye. Continuing the artist’s established practice of working through movement-based workshops and community-engagement, FutureLoss explores the gallery’s immediate surroundings: Main Street.

Space, on this strip and in this city, is currency, and Kreye’s work reaches through overarching narratives of real estate, gentrification and speculation to consider the poetics of an individual’s connection to place.

Over the course of a 12-week residency, the artist engaged directly with shopowners, organizers and residents in discussions around what it means to hold space in this neighbourhood. Together, Kreye and each participant created sculptures in plaster: shapes that addressed the connection of their bodies to specific sites in their storefronts, studios and workspaces. Central to their discussions was the question of loss: how does the body connect to place? And, further: how does the body absorb change? These works emerge as evocative portraits of the participants and the architectures they occupy.

The objects will be on view in grunt’s exhibition space, and are accompanied by a publication featuring commissioned texts by Neil Eustache, Kimberly Phillips and Donato Mancini, with contributions from participating community members, and the artist.

ARTIST BIO

Zoe Kreye creates interdisciplinary art projects that explore transformation, collective experience and negotiations of public space. Her work looks to engage the public in relations and aesthetics, with the goal of building inclusive, bottom-up associations that have the potential to be small catalysts for change within dominant social systems. Often looking outside the realm of art, her projects take the form of clubs, workshops, rituals, dialogues and journeys. Her focus is to encourage people towards self-reflection and a deeper engagement with themselves and society. She completed a Masters in Public Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and co-founded the Berlin artist collective Process Institute. She currently teaches Social Practice at Emily Carr University, Vancouver.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges Arts-Based Community Development assistance from the BC Arts Council.

Artist Statement
www.futureloss.ca
www.zoekreye.com

Artist Sayeh Sarfarez translates political movements and uprising occurring in Iran into a drawing series in which childlike, almost naive forms and innocent aesthetics are juxtaposed with threatening motifs.

Figures within these pictures are abstracted into flat-coloured shapes; crowded scenes appear simplistic and innocent in nature until a violent narrative appears. The basis of Sarfaraz’ drawings and compositions are rooted in Persian miniature paintings which she expresses in a contemporary format with modern references.

Initially ambiguous, the shapes within the series indicate situations regarding power, control and weapons of war. These depicted instances become a social composition that deals with repression, violent struggles and censorship. Between the childlike quality and the brutality of current events, the images challenge us to fight against our docile loss of critical perspective.

Join us for the opening reception of Génération Sacrifiée on Thursday October 22 (7 – 10pm) at grunt gallery. The artist will be in attendance at the opening. This exhibition occurs from Oct 22 – Nov 28, 2015.

Read a brief interview with the artist here.

Bio:

Sayeh Sarfaraz was born in Shiraz, Iran and later attended l’École Supérieure Des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg France. She is currently based in Montreal, Quebec.

Remediating Mama Pina’s Cookbook is a three channel video piece that approaches the artist’s great grandmother’s cookbook, as an archival technology that speaks to the generational transmission of gender roles, social status, and cultural memory. Through her attempts to recreate the various handwriting styles, instructions, and recipes from the cookbook, the artist reactivates the archive and raises questions about the nature of what can constitute an archive, the relationship of archival content and form, and the divisions between performed and recorded knowledge.

Bio: Dr. Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda is a cultural historian and interdisciplinary media artist working at the intersections of video and performance with a research focus on feminist media and Latin American visual culture.

Related: Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda will be speaking on the panel Artists in the Archive, Thursday November 26, 7pm at the Western Front.

Her work is also featured in Ethnographic Terminalia’s e-zine Terminus: Archives, Ephemera, and Electronic Art launching Wednesday November 26, 6pm at grunt gallery.

Both events are a part of Vancouver Independent Archives Week 2015.

Vancouver-based artist Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo explores issues around collective memory, historical trauma, and cultural identity in relation to the violence that occurred against civilians during the 12-year Civil War in El Salvador.

A series of mixed media drawings depict surreal and vibrant scenes filled with creatures in uniform; fragmented bodies tense with sinew and muscle; and carefully drawn figures with faces partially obscured or obliterated. Iconography sourced from North American vernacular culture, Pre-Columbian mythology, and Salvadoran popular folklore is amalgamated to explore the role of non-linear storytelling expressed in mythic form.

grunt gallery’s Media Lab shows a stop-motion animation that recalls individual identities of lost civilians juxtaposed against Super 8mm film footage of a road leading to the village of EL Mozote, where a massacre of nearly 1000 civilians took place in 1981 by the Salvadoran state army during the armed conflict.

This exhibition also includes a site-specific work of a colourful sawdust carpet, on the floor of the gallery. This work is based out of a Latin American traditional custom of creating large tapestry-like designs on the ground in public spaces during religious festivities.

Castillo’s work refers to a cultural past and contemporary present, fusing a hybridized aesthetic to engage issues about migration, historical trauma, identity, and memory. His narratives express a multifaceted, interlocking and non-linear approach. Consequently, the body of work revises and casts new personal interpretations on memory-building as a form of resistance, political commentary and healing.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday September 10 (7–10pm); this reception coincides with SWARM, an annual artist-run centre festival in Vancouver, BC.  An essay written by Alexis Hranchuk will be available at the opening. The exhibition runs from September 11–October 10, 2015.

 Essay by Alexis Hranchuk | Download
Essay by Laura Bucci | Laura Bucci Essay

Artist Bio:

Born in El Salvador, Castillo immigrated to Canada in 1989 at the age of 11. He attended the Ontario College of Art and Design (Toronto 1998-2001) and received an MFA from Concordia University (2004-2007). A previous resident of Montreal, Castillo relocated to Vancouver in 2013.