puntos suspensivos, digital image, 2023. Courtesy the artist.
Book Launch: who claims abstraction (with a difference)?
THU, JUL 20 / 6 – 8PM
Teck Gallery
Join artist Francisco-Fernando Granados, SFU Galleries Curator Kristy Trinier, and Director Kimberly Phillips, to celebrate the launch of the publication who claims abstraction (with a difference), accompanying Granados’ current solo exhibition who claims abstraction? at Teck Gallery. Granados will read from the publication and engage in conversation with Trinier and Phillips about his material- and collections-based research to arrive at his exhibition work, as well as his deep connections to Vancouver and Harbour Centre. The publication includes contributions by Christian Camacho-Light, Margaret Dragu, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Kristina Lee Podesva, Kristy Trinier, and Jonathan VanDyke.
who claims abstraction (with a difference)? extends from Francisco-Fernando Granados’ exhibition who claims abstraction? at Teck Gallery, on view from January 20 to December 16, 2023. Compiled alongside a series of studies for the mural’s complex compositions of curvilinear forms and colours that signify an embodied connection to landscape and abstraction, this artist book is a compendium that shares the research, conversation, and inquiry that supported the formation of his large public artwork. The essential framing of his question is invitational, a means to generate connections that amplify the potential that drove modernist impulses in limitless contemporaneous directions: queering, blurring, opening possibilities of abstraction within a collective futurity.
who claims abstraction (with a difference)? is an SFU Galleries and Publication Studio co-production edited by Kristy Trinier, Kimberly Phillips, and Francisco-Fernando Granados. The book includes contributions by Kristina Lee Podesva, Margaret Dragu, an interview with Jonathan VanDyke and Francisco-Fernando Granados, Christian Camacho-Light and artwork images by Granados.
Francisco-Fernando Granados (he/him) was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat Peoples. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from Convention Refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally, to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training at Langara College, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities in Vancouver, New Westminster, and Surrey on unceded Coast Salish territories. This layering of experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions.
Recent projects include who claims abstraction? at SFU Galleries (2023); foreward (2021-23), a solo exhibition consisting of site specific installations in dialogue with the permanent collection at The MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie; refugee reconnaissance (2021), a bilingual compilation of performance scores spanning 2005-2013 published by AXENÉO7; duet (2019-20) a traveling two-person exhibition alongside Canadian modernist painter Jack Bush in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Peterborough and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery; and co-respond-dance Version II (2020), an artist book published in collaboration with Centre des arts actuels Skol in Montreal. Other exhibition highlights include a performance installation in partnership with Third Space Gallery and the YMCA Newcomer Connections Centre in St. John New Brunswick, public art installations for Mercer Union and Nuit Blanche in Toronto, and participation in international group shows on contemporary queer aesthetics at the Hessel Museum and Ramapo College in the United States and Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden.
Co-published by SFU Galleries and Publication Studio