Ben Bogart’s new work, A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism, was featured on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen from December 17th—26th, 2021. This complex long-form work will be presented as an installation in our gallery from January 13th—22nd, 2022, preceded by an online artist talk on January 11th. It will also once again be available to view on the MPCAS throughout the open studio dates. If you would like to book an appointment to view this work in the gallery, please contact communications@grunt.ca

Online artist talk: January 11th, 7:30pm PST.
This event will take place on Zoom, with auto-captions by otter.ai. We will have an external chat available in Discord, however the chat function in Zoom will also be on.

Click here for exhibition map and accessibility notes (OCR compatible).

A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism
By Ben Bogart

On the wet dark dreary days, do we relish in the greens and the smell of rain, or do we retreat into imagined days of warmer pasts? The built and natural worlds around us are constantly evolving and transforming. While attending to the changes from moment to moment can we see the boundary between this moment and our past or future? Are we even in the present, or are we immersed in our predictions and simulations, always using samples of the present to validate imagined pasts and futures? These are some of the questions that are asked through this work. “A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism” is a study of time and movement at the MPCAS. Source footage was shot from the MPCAS during the long days of summer capturing the dynamism and colour of the site. The footage archives a window in time, documenting the movement of plants, clouds and animate life as humans and non-humans go along with our routines.

The structure of the work is determined by an analysis of human / non-human and natural / artificial movements, resulting in a continuum of dynamism to stillness. Areas of stillness diffuse into soft gradients of colour that undulate over time; these gradients are demarcated by the strong edges and readability of areas of stillness. Augmenting this structure are the discontinuities of the present moment that interrupt the smoothness and consistency of the composition. Through this trace of the present the viewer may pick out the shape of cars and people moving through the frame, but this subtlety is overwhelmed by drastic changes in colour. The cloud-like fields that advance and retreat from frame to frame are determined by colour values of the present where the source is almost entirely veiled in abstraction. A taxi-cab entering the frame does not appear yellow, and yet washes the image in yellow. A cloud blowing over is barely noticeable, but saturates the image in teal. Through these waves of colour and luminosity the viewer may realize this bright summer ‘present’ is in fact another moment of the past; a sample of the summer collected by a machine and reconstructed as an imagined past and present.

Ben Bogart is a non-binary agender adisciplinary artist working for two decades with generative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision and machine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences in Canada, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Canadian Embassy at Transmediale in 2017 and the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018. They have been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre (Canada), the New Forms Festival (Canada) and at Videotage (Hong Kong). Their research and practice have been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Click here to read our mini interview with Ben!

And click here to review our COVID-19 gallery protocols.

Ben Bogart’s new work, A diffraction of past/stability and present/dynamism, will be featured on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen from December 17th—26th, 2021. This beautifully complex work will screen for 7.5 hours/day, you can read more about the project here. We will also be presenting Ben’s work in our gallery, with an artist talk in January, 2022. We’re excited to share this work with you, and wanted to introduce you to Ben’s practice — read on for a mini interview with Ben Bogart!

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your creative practice!

I’m a non-binary agender adisciplinary conceptual artist and as I write this I’m constantly distracted by hummingbirds coming to visit my new feeder and delighted watching their tongues as they flick them out of their beaks after each sip of nectar. For over two decades I’ve focused on computational processes as artistic material; I think of the use of computational processes as following from the instruction works of 1960s conceptual art onward. In my artistic practice I’ve engaged with methods including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision, and machine learning. I’ve diffracted these methods through bodies of knowledge in computational creativity, cognitive neuroscience, psychology of creativity, and quantum physics, and see continuity between my artistic and scholarly practices. Through these disparate methods and disciplines, my work engages with fundamental questions regarding subjectivity, objectivity, knowledge, meaning, emergence, complexity, autonomy, creativity, and thought. In recent years I’ve been thinking through Karen Barad’s Agential Realism and the ways in which boundary-making is fundamental to natural-cultural (physical-conceptual) processes. I’ve come to realize that my professional practice has always troubled and reworked physical and conceptual boundaries.

How did you become engaged with the technology used in your piece for the MPCAS?

My dad worked with computers his entire professional life, from a thesis written using punch cards, through magnetic reel-to-reel tape, to hard disks. He is also a photographer and for nearly as long as I can remember photography and digital imaging were available to me, but I’m not sure I thought of myself as an artist then. It wasn’t until moving to Toronto in 1999 that I was exposed to the “Electronic Media Art” scene that gave me a precedent for thinking about computation and technology as artistic materials. One of the first people I met outside of university was Camille Turner at the Subtle Technologies Conference in 1999 and it was her who introduced me to Jim Ruxton and InterAccess. I owe so much to artists such as David Rokeby and Norman White for expanding my boundaries of artistic practice and imagining a role for technology in it.

In 2001, I made a work using an evolutionary algorithm inspired by Karl Sims—who made a lot of formative computational art in the 1990s. My ongoing use of the Self-Organizing Map—a simple artificial neural network that rearranges pixels according to colour used in the MPCAS piece—started in 2006. My inspiration for using machine learning in art was George Legrady’s Pockets Full of Memories from 2001 which also uses the Self-Organizing Map. It’s hard to demarcate where machine learning differs from other computational methods such as feedback loops, chaos mathematics, or physical models. In all of my engagements with technology I’m looking to develop processes that have the capacity to surprise me. This surprise could be due to my misunderstanding—or the complexity—of the process. I see machine learning as just another engagement with complexity resulting from a process built up from the interactions of many simple components. From this high-level perspective, there is no difference between a physical model made up of many small mass-spring-damper components and artificial neural networks. I provide this short ~20 year personal history because while the tech industry is very good at emphasizing novelty, it is imperative for artists using tech to see their relation with—and situate their work in—the ~70 year history of artists working with electronic and computational technologies.

What interests you about the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen?

Having lived in East Van for a decade now I’ve spent a lot of time on the 10th and Ontario bike routes. Walking and cycling to go shopping at the old MEC store, or just to spend time on Main Street, I’ve seen a lot of changes in Mount Pleasant. I can hardly remember what used to be where The Independent now stands. How long will Kingsgate Mall stay around? What changes will we see in the next 10 years? My interest in public art is situated in a preoccupation with the ways an artwork can relate to its site—not only conceptually but also in terms of structure. My approach to public art involves using technologies that allow the structure of artworks to be created in dialogue with place. I see this as a natural extension of my interest in surprise and emergence where the site itself becomes a collaborator and the form of a work emerges from interactions between algorithms, the site, and my intention. Our city is changing so much and so quickly; there is so much potential for public art that literally (re)structures itself through these changes and reflects the city back to itself through an ongoing and evolving relationship. I hope there will be opportunities for even more ambitious multi-year permanent projects where artworks evolve ‘live’ as the city changes around them. Vancouver seems like an ideal place for this kind of work as we embark on large density projects to make staying here more viable.

We asked the Tidal Volume participating artists some questions to get to know them and their work, read on to learn from  Orene Askew (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) and Salia Joseph (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Snuneymuxw) about the project they are creating during this digital artist residency.

Tell us about your creative practice. What projects have you been working on recently?

OA: My creative practice is all over the map, but it has always come back to music. I’m a DJ, Teacher, Activist, Motivational Speaker, and Media/Hip Hop Artist. My piece “O Show Flow,” is being shown at The Yoko Ono Exhibit at The Vancouver Art Gallery until May 2022. I finished filming “The O Show” Documentary by Human Biography earlier this year and now the film is winning awards at flim festivals around the world. I also finished recording my first Hip-Hop Track “Status & Clarity” (Which is featured at The Yoko Ono Exhibit) and filmed the music video for the track that will be out early next year.

SJ: My creative practice is hard to define as it an underlying aspect of how I move through my passions and roles within my community. I see my Squamish commitments as how I give back and what I have to offer. Part of that is through song, through learning and carrying teachings forward. I see cultural, community and creative practice as deeply connected and non-linear.

Can you tell us a bit about what ideas, forms or mediums you’re hoping to work with during this residency?

OA: Working with Salia, we had ideas flowing already in our first Zoom meeting. Our ideas were so similar and as we were talking the announcement of the children found in Tk’emlúps (Kamloops) was around that time. We both have family who had attended residential school and thought we should try to do something with sounds and media that will give back to our community, especially the survivors and the children who didn’t make it home. I don’t want to give too much away, but using sounds in our territory is going to be big part of our project.

SJ: For this residency we are looking to create a series of offerings for our community to help heal the wounds that are ever present, and currently being re-open and exposed with the findings at residential schools. While our own community undertakes their own research at former St. Paul’s residential school we wanted to create healing pieces that could be thought of as lullabies for our past, present and future ones. We are hoping to use pieces of old interview recordings, use of Squamish songs and language as well as sounds from our territory.

What excites you most about this residency? What do you foresee as the biggest challenge?

OA: What excites me about this residency is working with Salia Joseph. She is fluent in our Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Snichim (Squamish Language), has so much to offer, and I know I’m going to learn so much from her. She also has an amazing singing voice . The biggest challenge I foresee will be timing and recording equipment. I’m glad that we have support from a great Producer, Jane Aurora, and I can’t wait to get into her studio and start recording.

SJ: I’m most excited to be able to work with Orene and get to know her better as kin and as an artist. It’s been cathartic and healing for us to plan this work and I’m excited to having something to offer our community that aims to make people feel held and cared for. I’m also really exited to push myself out of my comfort zone and take on a new type of project such as this and continue to grow my creative capacities.

***

Orene Askew (she/ her), aka DJ O Show, brings energy and expertise to every event she hosts and DJs. She brings professionalism and passion and remains true to her love for hip hop and R&B, incorporating beats to ensure you never want to leave the dance floor! Coming from a diverse background, O Show is driven by her passion. She is Afro-Indigenous, two spirited, and a proud member of the Squamish Nation. Feeling as though she stood out in a unique way, she has embraced both her cultural backgrounds and incorporates the teachings she has learned into everything she does. DJ O Show has experience teaching with an inspired approach. She is an inspirational speaker, having traveled across the country to bring ambition and drive to all generations, and an elected member of Squamish Nation Council.

O Show has DJ’d the red carpet for Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week and was voted the official DJ for YES in Ottawa since 2012 and the official DJ for Gathering Our Voices for five years. She has hosted/MC’d/Played at numerous events, including Bowling for Big Brother’s Classic, Babes on Babes, Hershe and working for radio stations like Vancouver’s Virgin 94.5 and Washington’s Movin’ 92.5. She is the recipient of a 2015 BC Indigenous Business Award, 2018 Stand Out Award from the Vancouver Pride Society, and a 2021 Alumni of Excellence Award from Capilano University.

Salia Joseph, St’ax̱í7alut (she/her) is Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Snuneymuxw, British and Jewish. She is a graduate of the First Nations and Indigenous studies program at UBC and cares deeply about decolonial, and intersectional approaches to learning and caring for one another. Salia is the executive director of Kwi Awt Stelmexw, a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh non profit focused on language revitalization. She is also part owner of a business called Host Consulting inc. which is a Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh consultancy focused on public art and decolonial dialogues.

Maya Hodge is a proud Lardil & Yangkaal woman raised in Mildura, Victoria. Based on the lands of the Kulin Nation (Melbourne), Maya is an emerging artist, published poet, curator and violinist whose work explores the power of healing in the arts, through uplighting First Nations creativity and Aboriginal women’s autonomy.

Maya is a president artist in this mob collective’s art studio, based at Collingwood Yards, and a founding member of Ensemble Duatala, an all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander classical ensemble. Maya has been involved in various projects and exhibitions including dis rupt, YIRRAMBOI Festival (2019); Constant Ecology, Westspace, KINGS Artist-Run (2020); Black Wattle with this mob, ArtsHouse Refuge Program (2021). Maya is currently the Assistant Curator – Exhibitions & Programs at Blak Dot Gallery.

Jarra Karalinar Steel is a multidisciplinary artist known for her Melbourne Art Tram, powerful poster art, large-scale public installations, augmented reality, digital art, emu egg engravings, and commemorative signage. Steel explores her identity, memories, pop culture, folklore from her cultural history, and lived experiences growing up in Melbourne and living on country in culture with knowledge passed down through her family.

Steel is of Boon Wurrung, Wemba Wemba, Trawlwoolway, English and Scottish descent, and is based in Melbourne’s south on Boonwurrung country. She is a passionate advocate and consultant for self-representation of Victorian First Peoples art and culture and making sure it is kept alive and thriving. Her focus in public and community art looks at ways to insert contemporary cultural visual language into the urban and digital landscape by reclaiming space and belonging through digital storytelling.

Images: Orene Askew, photo by Belle Ancell; Salia Joseph, photo by Kaili’l Smith.

BEYOND COMPLIANCE:
Events on Community Care, Access Justice and the Histories and Futures of Disability Culture

Featuring two Events on Trauma-Informed Care by Vo Vo: September 26th & 28th, 2021

These virtual events are being hosted by organizations based on the unceded, stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people.

This month, the Open Access Foundation for Arts and Culture (OAFAC) and grunt gallery, in collaboration with Cinevolution, present two free public events with artist and radical educator Vo Vo (bio below). These events are presented as part of OAFAC’s new series, Beyond Compliance, which aims to set a new cultural standard for accessibility by centering the practices of disabled, Crip, D/deaf, Hard of Hearing, Mad, neurodivergent, sick and chronically ill artists, curators, cultural workers and their co-conspirators. Through these events, presenters who hold embodied forms of knowledge pose visions for accessibility that move beyond compliance-level commitments, towards justice.

September 26th, 3:30pm-5:30pm PDT: Public Talk On Trauma-Informed Art Practice

Through this public talk, Vo will introduce some of the fundamentals of Trauma-Informed Care through an anti-racist and disability justice lens. Participants will interact with and reflect on how these principles might be applied to their practice. Vo will outline some dynamics and questions regarding curation, social practice, and art that hopes to address racial and social justice themes. Vo will fold into examples from their own visual and social art practice.

Access offerings will include:

• Land Acknowledgement by: TwoSpirit Trickster Raven John, a mixed Stó:lō and Coast Salish multidisciplinary artist2Spirit Trickster Raven John.
• ASL-English Interpretation: Dean and Jodi of Toronto Sign Language.
• Automatic Captioning by: Otter.AI
• Graphic Recording by: Corrina Keeling.
• Visual Description of Images by: Vo Vo & Corrina Keeling.
• Discord In-Chat Facilitation by: Black-Mixed, Gender Fluid, Neurodiverse-Crip, Equity ChangeMaker, and Storyteller Siobhan Barker (Sio/They/she) & TwoSpirit Trickster Raven John, a mixed Stó:lō and Coast Salish multidisciplinary artist 2Spirit Trickster Raven John.

Ways to Participate:
1. Register for Zoom Webinar here.
We acknowledge that Google Forms is not an accessible tool for all people. Please contact OAFAC’s Accessibility Coordinator, Siobhan Barker, at access@openaccessfoundation.org for alternative ways to register.

2. Watch the livestream on YouTube and Facebook Live: Links TBA

How do the Zoom, YouTube & Facebook Live experiences differ?
Sign up for the Zoom Webinar if you would like to access the Q&A and “raise hand” features. Through YouTube and Facebook Live you will only have access to the chat area, which will periodically be reviewed for questions and comments.

3. Connect on Discord here.

Please direct any questions about this event to: access@openaccessfoundation.org

September 28th, 6pm-7:30pm PDT: Trauma-Informed Critical Reflection Session for Artists and Cultural Workers

This event is a participatory workshop that leads participants through questions and criteria for their current, or yet-to-exist work or event. Reflection questions will cover long-term impact, sustainability, equity or reparations lens, social, gender and racial justice, accessibility aspects, social impact assessment, context, community need, site-specificity, proposed futures, possible futures, and alignment with the makers.

Access offerings will include:

• Auto-generated captions by Zoom
• ASL—English Interpretation
• A transcript of the workshop will be made available after the event (in English)

Register for this workshop here.

Please direct any questions about this event to: access@grunt.ca

Vo Vo is a radical educator of 11 years in over 20 countries in inclusion, racial justice, intercultural communication, trauma-informed care, de-escalation and transformative justice. Their work explores support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities. They have trained staff and board members from over 300 organizations in OR and WA since immigrating to the US in 2014. Editor of an internationally renowned publication, speaker, curator, artist and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Singapore, Croatia, Mexico, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Vietnam, Sweden, Malaysia, and the States. Local festival organizer. One of the festivals they curate is IntersectFest: A Festival For and By People Of Color – now in its sixth year. It has featured over 200 Black, Indigenous, and POC artists, including dancers, poets, filmmakers, curators, visual artists and more. It also creates space to discuss radical political approaches to community organizing and artistic practice. Their recently initiated career as a visual artist has seen them primarily work in textiles, embroidery, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, challenge histories and realities of imperialism, white supremacy and colonization. They continue to explore support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities.

River Journeys
September 25th, 2021
Online via Zoom — click here to join

What was it like to travel along the Mackenzie River a thousand years ago? Two hundred years ago? Or one hundred years ago?

For World Rivers Day, artists from Canada’s north were asked to consider this question. Their new works will be unveiled at grunt gallery on Saturday September 25th at 1:30pm PDT via Zoom.

Sculptor John Sabourin created a work based on the ancient story of the giant Yamoria, who carved out waterfalls along the Mackenzie. Performance artist Jeneen Frei Njootli was inspired by the oral history, “The First Axe,” which describes an encounter between the Dene and a white trader around 1800. Curator Sharon Snowshoe will present Chief Jim Koe’s story of the signing of Treaty 11, one hundred years ago. Finally, filmmakers Peter Mather and Arlyn Charlie will give a sneak peek of wildlife they encountered this summer while canoeing down the Peel River to the Arctic Ocean.

Join us for this unique celebration of the river known as the Dehcho, the “Big River”.

This event is hosted by Drew Ann Wake. Wake received her BA in Anthropology and an MA in Sociology from the University of British Columbia. She then went to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, attending the hearings of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry as it travelled to thirty Dene and Inuvialuit communities across the Northwest Territories. After a stint as a museum curator, she began developing educational games that have now been played by 25,000,000 students around the world.

Accessibility: ASL interpretation and auto-generated captions and transcription by otter.ai will be provided. We acknowledge that live translation means that some words may not be translated accurately to English and we welcome your feedback and questions in the comments during the presentation.

Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓?// Can you See Beaver? is a community-based research and public art project led by Gitksan Witsuwit’en artist and community organizer Jolene Andrew and produced by grunt gallery Project Curator Nellie Lamb, in collaboration with Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House.

The project is collaborative and based in community. It began with a conversation about a historical beaver dam that once blocked Brewery Creek near the spot where Main St and 14th Ave now intersect. This led us to wonder about the absence of such an important animal in an urban socio-ecological system and consider how the history of beavers in this landscape can inform our relationships to the land now and into the future. Throughout the project we will be contemplating the importance of keystone species like the beaver, whose knowledge and skills build dams that create wetlands, providing habitat for many other plants and animals. Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓? Can you see Beaver? is a reminder to take notice.  The project looks to beavers and the other animals and plants in their communities as teachers and guides. It asks questions about obstruction and flow, what has changed and what has endured, and what we can learn from these histories in the ongoing and complex contexts of urbanization, colonization, and decolonization.

The project’s Squamish language title, Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓? asks, “Can you see the beaver?” We hope you will join us in opening our hearts and minds to beaver’s teachings. Starting in March 2021, we are hosting a series of knowledge sharing, field study, planning, and art-making events focused on the landscape, plant, and animal (including human) life in the area that is now known as Mount Pleasant and rooted in the Indigenous knowledge and art of Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) storytellers, weavers and other urban Indigenous artists. Events are led by Jolene alongside artists, historians, scientists, storytellers, and knowledge holders and are open to Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members.

Further details about this project and upcoming events can be found at: https://archives.grunt.ca/Detail/occurrences/3623 

Image: Nicole Neidhardt.

Online, FREE.

Presented by grunt gallery and Kay Slater.

The last two years of working and gathering primarily online has brought into wider view an understanding that many in the disability arts community have always understood and advocated for: we need more skilled people creating video and digital content that is accessible to non-auditory audiences.

Click here to access our pre-recorded Non-Auditory Access Workshop on Vimeo, with captions available in English, French and Simplified Chinese as well as a full transcript in English.

This series of workshops is designed to help arts organizations, artists and community creators take a tangible first step towards building accessibility into their practices. By outlining best practices (and identifying the pros and cons of available auto-generated captioning services), and inviting participants to learn the basics of captioning and transcription for live and pre-recorded material, we invest in a baseline standard for access as well as a shared and shareable knowledge base.

The series included a mentorship opportunity to learn captioning alongside experienced and practicing access professionals with an invitation to co-facilitate their own non-auditory access workshops designed specifically for their own communities.

2021 workshop offerings included half-day workshops supported by our community partners ArtStarts in Schools, DTES Small Arts Grants Program, Gallery Gachet, WePress and the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres. The full spring schedule of workshops is below.

2021 Live Workshops:

• Friday March 12th, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Google Meet (with English auto captions).
  
• Friday March 19th, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Google Meet (with English auto captions).
• Thursday, March 18th, 5:30-8:30pm: Part of the ArtStarts in Schools Spring Digital Learning Lab: Digital Transformations. Workshop aimed towards Teachers, Caregivers, and Teaching Artists.
• Tuesday March 23rd, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards creators and artists.
  *All ages / spring break special, Zoom with CART (captions) and ASL Interpretation.
• Thursday April 22nd, 5:30pm-8:00pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
  Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon).
• Friday April 23rd, 1:00pm-3:30pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
  Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon). *Cantonese/Mandarin translation will provided for online participants.
• Sunday April 25th, 1:00pm-3:30pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
  Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon).
• Friday April 30th, 11am-1pm: Captions for CanLit, specifically for literary event organizers, including publishers, bookstore staff, and magazine editors.
  This workshop will take place on Google Meet with automatic captions. Presented by Kay Slater with Leah Horlick.
• Friday May 28th, 5:30pm-8:00pm: Q&A Session – Live with Kay, ask your captioning and transcription questions! Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. Live webcast, with on-person viewing at Carnegie Community Centre available in their theatre. Mandarin and Cantonese translation available via online stream. ASL Interpretation will be available 6-8PM
• Friday September 24th, 10:00am – 1:00pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Via Google Meet (with English auto captions).
• Tuesday, November 9th, 6:30 – 9:00PM PDT:  Workshop aimed at Dancers, Performers, and Festival Events. Co-Hosted by Sparkle Plenty and Kay Slater.

Do you have any accessibility needs?

Our workshops are hosted on Google Meet (Free Service – Accessible by Browser) with Auto-Captions (English), and we will have a session with ASL Interpretation on March 23rd. Let us know if you have any access needs when you register, or write us an email at access@grunt.ca

Session Transcripts will be made available.

Check back for updates, including paid mentorship opportunities and streamable content.

Kay Slater (project lead/ workshop facilitator) is a multidisciplinary artist, accessibility consultant and arts worker.  As a consultant, they work directly with artists and organizations to build accessibility in at the planning stage, and to incorporate sustainable, grass roots strategies that support evolution in artistic presentation. Their work is rooted in anti-oppression practices, and they employ open source and community-engaged approaches to support ongoing knowledge transfer  with makers and creators at all stages of their careers. They are a member of the Open Access Mapping project’s Advisory Committee, are a proud volunteer and social coordinator at Queer ASL, have completed the Rick Hansen Foundation’s Accessibility Certification program and are working towards CSA Accessibility certification later this year. Kay is passionate about sharing knowledge with the wider arts community.  Kay is queer and hard of hearing. They use They/Their/Theirs pronouns exclusively online.

Mentees:

Leah Horlick is a writer and poet who grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Cree Territory & the homelands of the Métis in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her long-awaited third collection of poems, Moldovan Hotel, is available now from Brick Books. Her first book, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012), was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her second collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), was named a 2016 Stonewall Honour Book by the American Library Association. She is also the author of wreckoning, a chapbook produced with Alison Roth Cooley and JackPine Press. She lived on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver for nearly ten years, during which time she and her dear friend Estlin McPhee ran REVERB, a queer and anti-oppressive reading series. In 2016, Leah was awarded the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers. In 2018, her piece “You Are My Hiding Place” was named Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. She lives on Treaty Seven Territory & Region 3 of the Métis Nation in Calgary.

Jocelyn Statia has over 5 years of experience in the arts and culture sector; and many years of customer service experience. She has a BFA in Visual Arts and a Library & Information Technology Diploma. Her professional experiences involve research and production of ideas, culture or objects from the past and present. This informs her understanding about how work is produced, preserved, presented and the social and public implications for the understanding of art, culture, identity and access to information.

Sparkle Plenty (she/her) is Cree with mixed heritage who lives and works on the stolen territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Wahtuth people known as ‘Vancouver’. She has worked in many arts organizations as a communications professional, programmer, facilitator, and performance artist. She is a convening member of the Virago Nation Indigenous Arts Society, where she produces and performs in shows and workshops with the mission to reclaim Indigenous sexuality from the toxic effects of colonization. She has been invited to perform and share her decolonial point of view for arts events including the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival, Talking Stick Festival, TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival as well as numerous other arts festivals.

This program is produced by grunt gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Disability Alliance BC and Sarah Wang.

We’ve got a slew of exciting new works on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen! As of April 15th, 2022, this new selection of work exploring the theme of PLACE can be viewed daily on the MPCAS at Kingsway and Broadway. We also have some special weekend screenings, including Wake Up! by Jessie Ray Short, curated by Jocelyne Junker and presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival, showing every Saturday and Sunday through April.

To read more about the new programming and find the full list of works on the MPCAS, click here.

For scheduling info, you can access the MPCAS calendar for screening times from your desktop or phone via the programming page. Timing is not exact as the screen may experience some loading delays throughout the day and we suggest arriving 5-10 minutes early to ensure that you can catch the program you’re interested in viewing.

With two annual juries in winter and summer, we welcome submissions to the MPCAS on a rolling basis. Please click here for submission details.

Spring / Summer Hours (01 April to 30 September)
Sunday to Thursday: 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM
Friday & Saturday:  9:00 AM to 11:00 PM

The MPCAS is produced by grunt gallery and generously supported by the Vancouver Foundation, RIZE corporation, Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Vancouver and Creative BC.

Images (clockwise from top left): Sydney Frances Pickering, distance, video (still), 2022; Erika Wilk and Moniker Press, How to Zine, video (still), 2021; Eli Hirtle, ᒥᑭᓯᑲᐦᑕ // mikisikahta // bead it, film (still), 2021; Keely O’Brien, Any Day Now, photograph, 2020-21.

These Ones (formerly Together Apart) is a loosely formed collective of 2S/Indigiqueer artists, writers and performers that followed out of the Spring 2019 Together Apart, Queer Indigeneities 2S/Indigiqueer Symposium, inspired by the Two-Spirit Cabarets held at grunt during the early 90s. With a flexible format of membership, These Ones uses itself as a mobilizing point to pool skills and resources that can be adaptive to ideas, projects and partnerships as they come. By operating through grunt gallery with Curator Whess Harman (Carrier Wit’at), the collective is able to anchor itself and its projects within a stable and intuitive organizing body while retaining agency over programming decisions and outcomes. The project reflects the widely interdisciplinary nature that inherently follows organizing around the identities that fall within the cross-section of both queer and Indigenous. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the moniker of “Together Apart” has taken on a very different meaning and indeed has been taken up by other groups and projects. With that, our Together Apart collective will now go forward as “These Ones.” “These Ones” is a phrase often affectionately used in Indigenous communities to refer to groups of usually-but-not-always young folks who are very close with one another and tend to move as a unit.

Projects for These Ones are both on-going and forth-coming, and open to 2S/Indigiqueer community members for assistance in the conception and organization of  projects. Following the original symposium event, the Together Apart Zine, initially a publication made to go alongside the event, has extended now into a nine issue run gathering work from artists and writers from across Turtle Island. Adapted into a two-term peer mentorship model, the Together Apart Zine has been edited both by writer Brandi Bird (Cree, Saulteaux and Metis) and following with Kaya Joan (Jamaican/ Vincentian, Kanien’kehá:ka). Through the course of the nine issues, over 30 queer, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous creators have contributed to either the zine or its accompanying launch events and partnerships.

Going forward, Together Apart is seeking avenues of digital projects both in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also in efforts to be accessible to queer Indigenous folks beyond urban spaces. These projects are grounded in an ethos of for us/by us as a way of better expressing queer Indigenous identities in all its multiplicity while prioritizing solidifying platforms in which queer and Indigenous creators have opportunities to build their practices with and alongside one another.

Images: Untitled by Kaya Joan; Issue 5 cover by Lacie Burning; Issue 4 interior art by Jaime Blankinship.

Photo: Quivering by Hong-Kai Wang

“When an earthquake’s sonic event oscillates through the air – rolling over the earth – it absorbs all objects in its wake. The sonic outline of every object in the path of the sound wave is inscribed into its signature. An earthquake produces rumbling imperceptible infrasounds that alter the geological make-up, as well as deep bass frequencies that offer up new modes of understanding the malleability of geological strata. Movements are world-makers. As sound moves, worlds are created. As the earth quakes across its surface, new lines are drawn up.”   – Tobias Ewé

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week announces the web-launch of “On Hong-Kai Wang’s Quivering,” a newly commissioned text by Tobias Ewé in response to This is no country music, a performative lecture hosted at Artspeak on November 1, 2019, and Wang’s exhibition Quivering which was on view at Artspeak from October 26–December 7, 2019.

Read Tobias Ewé’s response and view the event and exhibition documentation on the Recollective website.

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week is a series of free public events that highlight artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver and beyond. Recollective commissions original response works to our programming from a variety of artists, writers, and activists. Stay tuned for more Recollective responses and programming at archivesweek.ca!

BIOS
Tobias Ewé is a Danish experimental theorist currently based in Vancouver, BC. He is writing a PhD on inhuman psychoacoustics in the Department of Art History at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the epistemology of listening in modernity, and its symptoms in the sonic arts at the nexus between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Holger Schulze, ed (2019), Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, London: Bloomsbury; and Laboria Cuboniks (2018[2015]), Xenofeminisme: En politik for fremmedgørelse, trans. Tobias Ewé, Copenhagen: Passive/Aggressive. Tobias has exhibited/performed diagrams and sonic fictions in Germany, Canada, Denmark, Italy and online.

Based in Taipei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang’s research-based practice confronts the politics of knowledge lost in colonial and diasporic encounters. Through experimental modes of sonic sociality, her multidisciplinary work seeks to conceive of other time-spaces at the intersection of lived experience, power and ‘listening.’ Wang’s work critically interweaves the production of desire, histories of labor and economies of cohabitation. She has presented projects at Asia Art Biennial 2019; Theater Commons Tokyo 2019; Sculpture Center New York; documenta 14; Taipei Biennial 2016; Liquid Architecture; and the Museum of Modern Art.