What Are Our Supports?
BOOK LAUNCH
SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 2023 | 2:00 PM | FREE
DJAVAD MOWAFAGHIAN WORLD ART CENTRE (2ND FLOOR)
SFU GOLDCORP CENTRE FOR THE ARTS
149 WEST HASTINGS STREET, VANCOUVER
Please join us to celebrate the launch of What Are Our Supports?, an anthology with over 20 local and international contributors. Co-edited by Joni Low and Jeff O’Brien, the book is based on a series of artist group’s projects in Vancouver’s Cathedral Square Park curated by Low in 2018. Featuring artist reflections, commissioned poems and essays, reprinted texts, and additional artworks, the anthology highlights the need to reinvigorate sustainable, alternative support networks for artists and communities during uncertain times, now intensified by our global pandemic and human-induced climate crisis. How do artists make perceptible the underrecognized and foundational supports that will continue to guide us through precarity? What can we learn through the practice of being human, and through the quests of art?
The launch will feature contributor presentations and a discussion, followed by a catered reception and books for purchase.
What Are Our Supports? is designed by Information Office, and co-published by Information Office, Doryphore Independent Curators Society, Richmond Art Gallery and Art Metropole.
We gratefully acknowledge that this book was created on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories.
CONTRIBUTORS
Germaine Koh, Aron Louis Cohen and Russell Gordon; T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Emily Neufeld; S F Ho and Elisa Ferrari; DRIL Art Collective, John Brennan, Justin Patterson, and Michele Helen Mackenzie; Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Khan Lee and Francis Cruz; Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Charlene Vickers, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Alexa Solveig Mardon, Jeff Derksen, Paula Booker, Jeff O’Brien and Joni Low. With additional artworks by Debra Sparrow, Chantal Gibson and Bitek, and Ron Terada.
BIOGRAPHIES
Joni Low is an independent curator and writer whose practice explores interconnection, intercultural conversations, collaboration, and sensory experience. A SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, her research explores artists who are sensing otherwise towards different ways of knowing, and synaesthetic resonances across art, neuroscience, somatic therapies, and healing. Her writing is published in catalogues and publications such as Artforum, Canadian Art, and ESPACE Art Actuel, and Yishu: Journal for Contemporary Chinese Art. She has guest-curated exhibitions across Canada featuring artists including Germaine Koh, Charles Campbell, Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau, Hank Bull, and Laiwan.
Jeff O’Brien is an art historian. His research explores the political and visual representation of displaced and disappeared populations in Lebanon and Palestine. From 2018 to 2019 he was a fellow in residence of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art at Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan. In addition to publishing widely, he has presented his work and given lectures in Jordan, Palestine, the United States and Canada. He holds a PhD in art history and works at the University of California, Santa Barbara.