Talk: Otoniya J. Okot Bitek in conversation with Lyse Lemieux and Kimberly Phillips
Sunday, October 23 / 2pm
Audain Gallery
149 West Hastings Street
Please join poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, visual artist Lyse Lemieux, and SFU Galleries' Director Kimberly Phillips for a reading and conversation around Otoniya's text artwork and installation, Made Nude, and its connections to archival records in the exhibition, It's About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now, curated by Seika Boye.
Otoniya J. Okot Bitek is a poet. Her 100 Days (University of Alberta 2016) a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. A is for Acholi (Wolsak and Wynn 2022), a new collection of poetry, is her most recent publication. Otoniya is an assistant professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Lyse Lemieux’s interdisciplinary practice has focused strongly on drawing, and includes sculpture, painting, and installation. Most recently her work includes numerous public art projects, reflecting an implicit tension between the support and dominance that built spaces offer. Through considerations of process and materiality her work explores the space between abstraction and representation, while maintaining an interest in the human figure. Originally from Ottawa, Lemieux attended the University of Ottawa and graduated with a BFA from the University of British Columbia. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Canadian Cultural Centre (Rome); the Vancouver Art Gallery; Oakville Galleries (Toronto); Richmond Art Gallery; The Charles H. Scott Gallery (Vancouver); Trépanier-Baer Gallery (Calgary); Katzman Contemporary (Toronto); WAAP (Vancouver); SFU Gallery (Burnaby); and the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). Lemieux was the 2017 recipient of the VIVA Award, granted annually by the Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts. Based in Vancouver, two of Lemieux’s large-scale public art projects were installed in Vancouver in October 2020 and September 2021, and she was recently awarded a public art project scheduled to be completed in Burnaby in 2024.