“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.