grunt gallery presents A study in restraint, nanlaban, curated by Glenn Alteen.

Anton Cu Unjieng’s intricately taped, fired, and stacked ceramics are a response to recent political actions in his homeland in the Philippines. The Duterte regime’s mass killings have been officially classified as nanlaban, Filipino for ‘fought back.’ The stack arrangements in Cu Unjieng’s work are not only a monument to the regime’s precarious strength, but also to the possibility of fighting back.

Cu Unjieng’s concerns are also formal: “The decorative is a way of thinking about objects as relational, so that a decorative effect is a kind of ecology resulting from the total relations established between objects.” These totemic forms speak to “a metaphorical similarity between arrangement – a key aspect of any decorative logic – and the mechanics of power exercised by the Philippine state over the form of the social.”

Anton Cu Unjieng is a Filipino ceramist who trained with pioneering contemporary ceramists Tessy and Jon Pettyjohn at their workshop in Laguna, Philippines. Cu Unjieng is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of British Columbia and is particularly interested in exploring the resonances between the language he uses to think about pottery and the way he understands the political realities currently developing in the Philippines.

Reading Room:
September 25th & October 2nd, 2019, 6-8PM
at grunt gallery

The Reading Room is an ongoing series of events hosted by grunt gallery and led by grunt board member, Gizem Sözen. Each Reading Room is an opportunity to discuss themes in the current exhibition through readings selected by the artist and/or curator. In this second iteration of grunt’s Reading Room we will read and discuss Alex S. Vitale’s “The Police Are Not Here to Protect You” (2018) and Alfred W. McCoy’s “Capillaries of Empire” (2009) in relation to Anton Cu Unjieng’s exhibition, “A study in restraint, nanlaban.”

To register for the Reading Room, please email nellie@grunt.ca by September 23rd. You will receive the readings upon registration.
*Light snacks and a cash bar at each event*

The texts:
1. Vitale, Alex S. “The Police Are Not Here to Protect You.” In The End of Policing, 31-54. London: Verso, 2018.
2. McCoy, Alfred W. “Capillaries of Empire.” In Policing America’s Empire: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, 15-56. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

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

(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

(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.

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

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

• Date/Time: April 5, 2018, 7– 9 PM
• Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

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

Opening Reception:
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 1, 2018, 7 – 9PM
Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

Artist Talk: Azadeh Emadi
Date/Time: Thursday, May 10, 2018, 6 – 7PM
Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

Lecture:
Dr Laura U. Marks & conversation with artist Azadeh Emadi:
“Creative Algorithms: From Islamic Art to Digital Media”
Date/Time: Wednesday, May 23, 2018, 7– 9 PM
Location: SFU Harbour Centre, Rm 7000

ARTIST: Azadeh Emadi

Biography:

Azadeh Emadi is a video maker and media artists who experiment with alternative approaches to image making process and technologies of perception. In applying and developing aspects of classical Persian-Islamic culture and concepts, her work aims to stimulate dialogue between Western and Middle Eastern cultures. Her videos and installations explore the intersection between reality, perception, technology and time, as an investigation for finding new ways of seeing that innovatively address some of the current socio-cultural and environmental issues. She is also a lecturer and researcher at the School of Culture and Creative Arts (Film and Television Studies Department), The University of Glasgow.

Link paper- Pixelated View: Investigating the Pixel in Light of Substantial Motion by Azadeh Emadi.

Link to Press Release

Link to Catalogue PDF_ Motion in Motion_Azadeh Emadi

SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE DATES:

Happening # 1: Procession through cemetery, candle lighting and Turkish tea served

• Date/Time: January 13, 2018, 2 – 5 PM
• Location: Mountain View Cemetery Celebration Hall & Courtyard

Happening #2: Turkish coffee fortune readings and traditional Turkish Tahini Helva served.

• Date/Time: January 20, 2018, 2 – 5 PM.
• Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave

Happening #3: Akay family game from their great-grandmother titled, 1001 Fortunes and traditional Noah’s Pudding served.

• Date/Time: January 27, 2018, 2 – 5 PM.
• Location: grunt gallery #116 350 – East 2nd Ave.

“Our work will allow us and others to re-experience memories/emotions with late ones and create a possibility for understanding / honouring our ancestors and alive family members. We will try to create a commemoration in act and in physicality through building a shrine and creating events. We will create a place to eat, play and pray. Where we will find ways to deal with ghosts/grief of many geographies/generations dead and alive and search ways to coexist in peace and harmony.” Derya Akay, Dilara Akay

In January of 2018, grunt gallery will produce the exhibition “Ghost Spring” a two-person show by Dilara Akay and Derya Akay looking at funeral practices within their own family in Turkey, passing down information from one generation to the next. This mother and son team re-creates the rituals around death for some lives who are not considered grievable. The artists will produce an installation and a series of activations that explore ways to deal with ghosts/griefs of many geographies/generations and experience ways to coexist— focusing especially on food that is presented to, and eaten for, the dead. The works in the gallery include garlands and flowers, texts and drawings as offerings to their ancestors.

Biographies

Dilara Akay

Born in (’63) Adana,Turkey lives and works in Göcek, Turkey. Graduated Bosphorus University (’85). Founder of artist platform HAYAKA ARTI (‘05) and alternative gallery project interfacegallery.com (‘09). Recent exhibitions include “Water is Life”, Santa Fe Art Institute (‘16); “Deaf and Mute”, Kuad Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey (‘16); Mardin Biennial, Turkey (‘15). Akay is an ambassador for Terzo Paradiso, a project of Michelangelo Pistoletto & Cittadellarte.
www.dilaraakay.com

Derya Akay (b, 1988, Turkey) is an artist living in Vancouver.  He received the 2016 Portfolio Prize Emerging Artist Award in Vancouver. He has an upcoming two-person project with Dilara Akay at Grunt Gallery, Vancouver in January 2018 titled Ghost Spring and solo exhibition at Unit 17, Vancouver in May 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include with bread, Campbell River Art Gallery, 2017; Pumice, Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles, California, 2017; Painting with Light, Kunstverein Toronto, 2015; Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner & Supper, Centre A, Vancouver, 2014. Recent group shows include The Lulennial II: A Low-Hanging Fruit, Lulu, Mexico City, 2018; Nature’s Way, Cooper Cole, Toronto, 2017; Here, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, 2017; Ambivalent Pleasures, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016. He recently completed his project Mantı, Börek, Baklava at the Burrard Marina Field House Residency program hosted by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. For this project, Akay worked with elder women with immigrant backgrounds to host a series of cooking workshops and lunches open to the public.

www.deryaakay.com

Curated by Glenn Alteen

Links:

Glenn Alteen essay on Ghost Spring [pdf]

Derya’s website here

Dilara’s website here

imagineNATIVE, in partnership with TIFF, Pinnguaq and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF), present 2167, an innovative virtual reality and immersive media project. Four Indigenous filmmakers and artists have been commissioned to create four VR works in 2017, with each artist asked to set their work 150 years in the future.

The idea for this project was born out of a love of science fiction and alternate realities. Often Indigenous people are seen as stuck in the past; the 2167 project takes a very deliberate leap forward in time and we get to see artistic visions about Indigenous place in the future. In a year that in many ways commemorates a very complex history for Indigenous people, this project celebrates the decades to come and our role in shaping a new future for Canada.

Award-winning filmmaker Danis Goulet, Indigenous Canadian artists Kent Monkman and Scott Benesiinaabandan and the interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity bring their own vision of the future in two- to six-minute virtual reality experiences.

Three works premiered at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in June 2017, and the two remaining during imagineNATIVE in October 2017 (also at TIFF Bell Lightbox), as part of TIFF’s sesquicentennial initiative called Canada on Screen. The 2167 project in partnership with TIFF and with support of Ontario 150 and Heritage Canada will reach audiences across the country with a travelling tour until the end of 2017.

POSTCOMMODITY

Imagining northern New Mexico 150 years in the future, where American Indian and Xicano pueblos work collaboratively to exercise communal and regional self-determination, Each Branch Determined echoes sci-fi conventions of an apocalyptic future that gradually reveal themselves to be a series of managed processes intended to restore and manage the land and its resources, as well as community ceremonies seeking to culturally and socially actuate past, present and future. 6 min.

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective based in the Southwestern United States and comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. The collective operates through a shared Indigenous lens that engages the assaultive manifestations of the global market. Through Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination, Postcommodity braces against the ever-increasing velocities and complex forms of violence that have colonized the 21st century.

SCOTT BENESIINAABANDAN

Bringing to life a prophetic Anishinabe legend about a young boy who travels through a wormhole back to his people’s place of origin, Blueberry Pie Under the Martian Sky also addresses concerns about the revitalization, growth and evolution of the Anishinabe language. 5 min.

Scott Benesiinaabandan is an Anishinabe intermedia artist that works primarily in photography, video, audio and printmaking. He has completed international residencies at Parramatta Artist Studios in Australia, Context Gallery in Derry, North of Ireland, and University Lethbridge/Royal Institute of Technology iAIR residency, along with international collaborative projects in both the United Kingdom and Ireland. Scott is currently based in Montreal.

DANIS GOULET

The Hunt imagines a postwar North America in 2167 that lies in ruin, where the law is enforced by a fleet of automated orbs that patrol the skies. When an orb interferes with a man and his son on a goose hunt on sovereign Mohawk territory, it forces an altercation. 6 min.

Danis Goulet is an award-winning filmmaker whose short films have screened at festivals around the world, including the Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance, Aspen Shortsfest, imagineNATIVE and Berlin International Film Festival. In 2013, her film Barefoot was recognized with a Special Mention from the Berlin International Film Festival Generation 14plus international jury and her film Wakening screened before the Opening Night Gala at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. She is an alumnus of the National Screen Institute’s Drama Prize Program and TIFF Talent Lab.

KENT MONKMAN

Honour Dance is a virtual reality experience based on a 2008 five-channel video installation by Kent Monkman, Dance to the Berdashe. Set in a verdant meadow at magic hour, Honour Dance offers a contemporary re-interpretation of a traditional Indigenous ritual featuring the “Berdashe”, a gender-bending figure whose behaviour and very existence astonished and appalled European explorers of North America.

Virile Dandies from the four directions invigorate the Berdashe with the vitality of their honour dance. Through this reciprocal and performative rite, the Dandies and Berdashe renew each other’s spirits, thereby refuting their obfuscation by colonial forces and Primitivism’s reductive pillaging of Indigenous cultures. 5 min.

Kent Monkman is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry who is well known for his provocative reinterpretations of romantic North American landscapes. Themes of colonization, sexuality, loss and resilience – the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experience – are explored in a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance and installation.

Please visit the 2167 page for information about the projects on tour.

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