611 Talks

Francisco Berlanga

Thursday, November 7, 2024 | 1PM

Francisco Berlanga is a Vancouver based textile artist whose practice reflects on his relationship to his Mexican identity as a second-generation immigrant through the lens of Craft. He attempts to understand how one can inhabit a culture while being partially absent from it. He engages in discourse with his own identity through the creation of traditional Mexican “manualidades” or crafts. His practice engages with concepts of inaccessibility attempting to bridge the gaps between his personal and cultural identities by forcing connections between them and trying to understand the limitations that these identities impose upon each other. Histories of repetition often produce apparitions of motifs that haunt his works. His previous exhibitions include a solo show at Grunt Gallery and group shows at the Morris and Helen Belkin gallery, the AHVA gallery, This gallery, and the Audain gallery. Berlanga obtained his BFA at Simon Fraser University and his MFA at the University of British Columbia.

Nya Lewis

Thursday, October 10, 2024 | 1pm

Nya Lewis’ hybrid practice is a culmination of centuries of resistance, love, questions, actions, study rooted in the theorization of the conditions of diasporic cultural production. She holds an MFA in Curatorial Practice and Museum studies, working across the disciplines of art making, curating and writing. Lewis is a freelance critic and lecturer with institutions across Canada including Polygon Gallery, Dunlop Gallery, Capture Photo Festival, Femme Art Review, Canadian Art, University of British Columbia, Royal Museum of Victoria, SFU Contemporary, Vancouver public Library, and Printed Matter.

Lewis currently serves as the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery and the Curator in residence at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Walter Scott

Thursday, September 26, 2024 | 1pm

Walter Scott (b. 1985) is an interdisciplinary artist working across comics, drawing, video, performance and sculpture. His comic series, Wendy, chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical version of the contemporary art world. Wendy has been featured in Canadian Art, Frieze, The Guardian, Art in America, and published online on the New Yorker. Recent exhibitions include Reframed Into Oblivion, Naughton Gallery, Belfast, and Open Ended, Painted Shut at the MACM, Montreal. His most recent graphic novel, The Wendy Award is now available from Drawn and Quarterly. His short film Organza’s Revenge will premiere at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez is an artist working in photography and film/video to examine the temporal ambiguity of our experience of images—still but in motion, historical yet continuously made present. He employs materials such as found photographs, magazine interviews and film/tv scripts to overlay the recent past against the present. Recent group exhibitions include the National Gallery of Canada, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, and La Capilla de Arte at Universidad de las Américas, Puebla as part of Bienal Sur. His work has been featured in Artforum, Peripheral Review, Terremoto MX, and Hyperallergic. Rodriguez received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

gonzaloreyes.info

Gabi Dao

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Gabi Dao is an artist from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations who now lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Dao’s practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations with an insistence on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. They work through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots and scraps of linguistic detritus.

www.gabidao.com

Vanessa Kwan

28 Octomber 2021

Vanessa Kwan is an artist, producer and curator with a focus on collaborative, site-specific and cross-disciplinary practices. They are Program Director at grunt gallery on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories (Vancouver, Canada) and are also curator / producer at Other Sights for Artists' Projects, an organization that produces artworks for the public realm. They regularly write, speak and publish on art and culture, and have recently produced projects at venues across the Pacific Rim (Vancouver, Seoul and Sydney) exploring artist-led creative exchange.

Faye HeavyShield

16 September 2021

Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy from the Kainai (Blood) Nation in the foothills of Southern Alberta. She is a fluent speaker of the Blackfoot language and studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta. The landscape of HeavyShield’s home community near Stand Off, Alberta is evident in her continuous use of natural materials and imagery found in her minimalist works. HeavyShield has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the Canada, including Nations in Urban Landscapes at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC, rock paper river at Gallery Connexion, Fredericton, NB, Into the Garden of Angels at The Power Plant in Toronto, ON and blood at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Her work is found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Museum, Alberta Foundation of Art and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ, MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, SK and the Kelowna Art Gallery, BC. She is the recipient of the 2021 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts, Distinguished Artist Award.

Gwaai & Jaalen Edenshaw

28 January 2020

Jaalen Edenshaw is a Haida artist most known for his monumental sculpture in red cedar.  His major works include the Cormorant Pole, the Jasper Pole and the Gwaii Haanas Legacy Pole.  Jaalen is also skilled in creating bentwood boxes, masks, copper shields, prints and dug out canoes.  He has artworks on display in many museums around the world including the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the Chicago Field Museum, the Burke Museum, Seattle, and the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria. jaalen.net

Gwaai Edenshaw is a Haida artist known primarily for his metalwork. He also works with a variety of media including bone, slate, and wood.Alongside being an illustrator, Gwaai also has a passion for story and language. As a founding member of the K’aalts’idaa K’ah Storytelling Society, he has had a role in numerous productions, including the Haidawood stop-motion animation suite, the Haida staging of Sounding Gambling Sticks, and as a consultant in Bruce Ruddell’s Beyond Eden. Along with a life of learning from his father, Guujaaw, Gwaai was also trained by Bill Reid. He continues to learn through the generosity of senior artists and collaborators. gwaai.com

Raven Chacon

21 November 2019

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Toronto, ON.

www.spiderwebsinthesky.com

Image: Raven Chacon, For Laura Ortman (from the For Zitkála-Šá series), 2019. Courtesy the artist.

James Hoff

17 October 2019

James Hoff is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, N.Y. He works in a variety of media, including painting, sound, and performance. In recent years, his work has focused on language and media systems at the intersection of developing technologies and traditional artistic genre forms. He has created paintings and music using computer viruses and developed several bodies of work that examine how the language of network communication has changed our contemporary notions of landscape and nature. Hoff is also a co-founder and editor at Primary Information, a nonprofit arts organization devoted to publishing artists’ books.

Maria Thereza Alves

16 October 2019

Since the 1980s, Maria Thereza Alves has produced a body of work that investigates the histories and circumstances of specific localities worldwide in order to give witness to silenced histories. Her research-based art develops out of interactions with the physical and social environments. Responding to local needs and proceeding through a process of dialogue facilitated by direct involvement in material, environmental and social circumstances, Alves explores spaces of agency and visibility. Alves's art work has been seen in many international exhibitions and biennials, among them Manifesta (2018, 2008), the Sharjah Art Biennial 13 (2017), the 29th São Paulo Biennale (2016, 2010), the Moscow Biennale (2015), the Berlin Biennial (2014), and dOCUMENTA13 (2012). Alves’s ongoing project Seeds of Change (1999 – ) has been awarded the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics for 2016 – 2018. The artist’s recent publication, Recipes for Survival (University of Texas Press 2018) presents a searing photo documentary of life in southern Brazil.

Khan Lee

28 February 2019

Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. He studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Through sculptural and media practices, his work attempts to exhibit results of experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. He is a founding member of the Vancouver-based artist collective Intermission and is presently a member of the Instant Coffee artist collective. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

Lee’s solo exhibition titled Wings of Desire attempts to depict the phenomenon of diverse frequencies, from radio, television, phone, and Bluetooth devices, and their impact on daily life. Wings of Desire opens on Thursday February 14 at Republic Gallery and runs through to March 23, 2019.

Amber Frid-Jimenez

24 January 2019

Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist whose work explores the role of design and technology in contemporary society. Her work investigates the aesthetics and cultural mechanics of the network through experimental platforms and visual installations. Projects include Burning Ballet Mécanique (2018), This is Not a Test (2016), Data Is Political: On Contemporary Art, Design and the Politics of Information, which explores the aesthetic and political dimensions of information and its relation to power and the production of knowledge. Frid-Jimenez is the co-author of a forthcoming book by the same title. She is the author of La Lucha Sin Fin: On Charisma and Its Persuasive Technologies, published by the Jan van Eyck (2012).

Frid-Jimenez is Canada Research Chair in art and design technology, and an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She is on leave from her position as associate professor at the Bergen National Academy of Art and Design (Norway), serves as a supervisor for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, has been a design researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands), and an affiliate artist at the M.I.T. Program for Art, Culture and Technology (Cambridge, MA). She has lectured at Brown University, Cornell University, Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Frid-Jimenez has presented her work at institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, Casco Office for Art Design and Theory (NL), Maison Europeenne de la Photographie (Paris, FR), A Foundation (Liverpool, UK), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Western Front (Vancouver), Banff New Media Institute (Alberta, CA), Media Lab Prado (Madrid, SP). Frid-Jimenez holds a Science Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. She earned her bachelor’s degree in fine art and philosophy from Wesleyan University.

www.amberfj.com

Deborah Edmeades

11 October 2018

Deborah Edmeades currently lives in Vancouver. Her work has been focused through a practice of performance that has continued at times outside of an artistic or academic context and into therapeutic and esoteric experiments. Recent interests include the histories of western mystical and esoteric practice and thought, their intertwinement with the history of the sciences and philosophical discourse and their somewhat embarrassing contemporary manifestation in the ‘New Age’. Thankfully, embarrassment for Edmeades has been a long-time indicator of productive content and is often an ingredient of the work, which ranges between performance, the lens, object-making and drawing.

Edmeades’ work has been seen internationally at places such as the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, UK; Ars Electronica, Austria; Exit Art and Participant Inc. in New York City, USA; Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax, Canada; and the The Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea. She is a Franklin Furnace grant recipient, was visiting artist and guest lecturer of performance art at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000 and completed an MFA at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in 2014.

deborahedmeades.com

taisha paggett

20 September 2018

taisha paggett is a dance artist who cultivates independent and collaborative performance works for the stage, gallery and outdoors. Her research and pedagogical engagement focuses on the relationship between geography and being, in order to navigate 21st-century Black American life. The artistic results explore how gesture and breath may help make life within uninhabitable conditions inhabitable.

paggett is based in Los Angeles and her work has been presented at LACE, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She is faculty in University of California Riverside's Department of Dance, and artistic director of WXPT dance company and the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People.

paggett is the School for the Contemporary Arts' 2018 Audain Visual Artist in Residence, which is co-presented by SFU Galleries. Her project is supported by Western Front and UBC Okanagan's Department of Creative Studies 2018 Summer Indigenous Art Intensive.

Vikram Uchida-Khanna

22 February 2018

In my practice, I am interested in moments in which counter-cultural movements and modes of protest and criticality have emerged. Previous projects have dealt with Inuit resistance and strategies of radical withdrawal as a reaction to cultural assimilation policies in the Canadian High North, and my personal experience of a family living self-sustainably on a small island on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Recently, I finished the collaborative production with Anders Smebye of Look (Further) Down (2017), an underwater installation that uses the figure of plankton to challenge human-centred perception. I am currently working on a project about the Surrealists’ fascination with indigenous art with Jaalen Edenshaw, a Haida artist based in Masset. I am also developing a cookbook that applies the methodology of looking developed in Look Down (2016-) to think through the evolution of food as matter and energy.

Vikram Uchida-Khanna studied visual art at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, Norway. He has participated in exhibitions at Gallery D.O.R. in Brussels, The Norwegian Technical Museum in Oslo and at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo. His writing has appeared in Billedkunst journal. He recently passed his driver’s license.

Patrick Cruz

11 January 2018

Driven by folk sentiment, Patrick Cruz' multi-disciplinary practice is informed by his interest in cultural hybridity, bio-politics, and the paradoxical effects of globalization. Through his exuberant maximalist oeuvre, Cruz construes the notion of ornament and excess as a strategy of re-enchantment and destabilization.

Cruz founded the Kamias Triennial in 2014 in Kamias, Quezon City, Philippines. The first iteration gathered Filipino artists whose works responded to ephemerality, impermanence, and temporality as a means of inquiry into the prevalent model of artistic production and consumption in the Philippines. The 2017 event, with the underlying strategy of exchange, culminated in an exhibition, exchange market, and event series that invited artists new to the context of the Philippines. The project continues with the goal of opening a durable pathway for sharing of the strate- gies, processes, and styles of artists in the region of Manila with counterparts from across Canada. 

Patrick Cruz is a Filipino-Canadian artist and organizer working between Vancouver, Toronto and Manila, Philippines. Cruz studied painting at the University of the Philippines Diliman and received his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA at the University of Guelph. In 2015, Cruz won the national title for the 17th annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition. 

Gabrielle Hill

23 November 2017

Gabrielle Hill makes sculptures, mostly but not entirely out of found objects. Her practice involves a method of research that combines thinking and movement: reading, archives, notes, talking to people, going on long walks, collecting and moving materials. For example, in a project that began while she was an undergraduate visual arts student at SFU, Waste Lands, Gabrielle walks through the abandoned tract of land near the CN Rail yards, learning about the way people use the site and picking up objects to bring back to the studio. Waste Lands is a continuous long-term sculptural project that just enjoyed it's third iteration at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in January, 2017.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a Metis artist and writer from Vancouver, BC, located on unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh lands. Gabrielle's sculptures and installations perform as both a material exploration of form and an inquiry into economic systems, ideas of property, and the land.

Christine Major

28 September 2017

For her 611 Talk Christine Major will discuss her site-specific painting installation project The 3915 Sainte-Catherine Est Case in the context of the symposium A Crimp in the Fabric: Situating Painting Today, where she'll be part of the panel Making a Difference: The Effective Capacity of Painting, with Charlene Vickers, Francine Savard, and moderator Nicole Ondre.

Christine Major painting practice is engaged, concerned with identity and feminist issues, and takes a critical look at the function of the image in the media and its impact on the representation of bodies. Her recent work evokes alternatively, horror films, the macabre art of the Middle Ages and gore literature. She uses fiction to play around with the disturbing figure of "the stranger" in a site-specific painting installation. In order to do this, she diverts images of female stereotypes used to exacerbate the fears and prejudices of the audience by provoking fright, and possibly disgust. She works with collages to develop an hybridization of images in the construction of her paintings. She advocates illegibility and variability in the appropriation of images and exhibition of her work. She is interested in the monstrous, where pain borders horror when faced with difference.

A representative of a new generation of Canadian painters and based in Montréal, Christine Major (professor in the painting and drawing area of the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal) has exhibited her work at numerous venues in Quebec and Canada. She is currently part of a Virtual exhibition realised by the Galerie de l'UQAM in partnership with the Virtual Museum of Canada, The painting project: A Snapshot of Painting in Canada. She was part of HER NOW, Six Painters from Quebec and Canada in 2016, a group show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. Her work is part of different public and private collections.

Hannah Rickards

02 November 2017

Rickards’ work deals with perception and its description; with how one can translate an encounter, be that with a space, image, object or sound. It examines the relationship between either temporary or permanent elements in a landscape and the perception of groups or individuals to a landscape as a whole, with the sites concerned being used as both a vantage point and a stage for examining our verbal, spatial, auditory and gestural relationship with our surroundings.

Through this process it examines how a landscape might be read as a score, how it might affect ones utterances, movements, perceptions of scale, distance and material, particularly instances where those measures by which we locate ourselves in space become uncertain. Hannah Rickards’ interdisciplinary practice explores the fluxive, non-linear dynamic between site, gesture, staging and recording: integrating elements of the language of performance, film, drawing and installation.

Hannah Rickards lives and works in London. She has held solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford, the Fogo Island Gallery, Newfoundland, Artspeak, The Whitechapel Gallery and The Showroom Gallery, London. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Palais de Tokyo, and Witte de With, and was included in the recent Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, ‘Listening’. She received the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2008 and in 2015 was awarded the Phillip Leverhulme Prize in Visual and Performing Arts. Rickards is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London.

hannahrickards.info

Jayce Salloum

02 February 2017

A grandson of Syrian immigrants, Salloum was raised on Sylix land in western Canada. His projects engage the personal/subjective, reconfiguring notions of identity, community, history, boundaries, exile, (trans)nationalism and resistance, taking place in in many locales including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, x-Yugoslavia, the Americas, and Polynesia. He has exhibited pervasively at the widest range of local and international venues possible, from the smallest unnamed storefronts in his dtes neighbourhood to institutions such as Musée du Louvre, MOMA, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sharjah Biennial, Biennal of Sydney and Havana Bienal. Salloum is a recipient of the 2014 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and a finalist of the 2016 ScotiaBank Photography Award.

“I tend to go only where invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, to ground my projects in an intimate engagement with place and the inhabitants of those spaces, relying on the kindness of strangers when I'm in unfamiliar territory, speak next to nothing of the language or know less than I think I do which is most of the time. I have been producing art, collecting objects, making things happen and mixing it up discursively for as long as I can remember. It was always part art and part social lubrication, or maybe that makes it all ‘art’, anyways it usually challenged whatever the dominant culture is and involved people from various parts in liaison and/or at odds with each other. My practise is consistently about mediation – the gap between the experience and the accounting/telling/receiving of it, engaging in an intimate subjectivity and discursive/ dialectical challenge while critically asserting itself in the representation and perception of social manifestations and realities. All of my work could be considered experimental, at least socially and conceptually. It incorporated 'relational' aesthetics/methodologies years before the term was invented, with emancipation, liberation, justice and complex non-essential identity construction while fluidly embracing subjective affinities.” – Jayce Salloum

Adrian Stimson

12 January 2017

Nation in southern Alberta. He is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator with a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art & Design and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan.

Stimson is also curator of UnSettled, an exhibition that will be part the Queer Arts Festival (QAF), which runs from June 17-29, 2017 in Vancouver. Resolutely contemporary, the exhibition will focus on art produced in the new millennium, bringing together Two-Spirit visual artists working in new media, video, photography, performance, painting, sculpture, and installation in Canada.

“I was in Indigenous politics for eight years. But I find the arts to be a gentler place to deal with the issues of residential schools, racism and homophobia.” He is clearly engaged in the task of creating new stories in the face of censored histories. And his work repeatedly focuses on the figure of the buffalo as a metaphor for spirituality, resistance and creativity. As he tells it, “I use the bison as a symbol representing the destruction of the Aboriginal way of life, but it also represents survival and cultural regeneration. The bison is central to Blackfoot being. And the bison as both icon and food source, as well as the whole history of its disappearance, is very much a part of my contemporary life.” In Stimson’s work, the buffalo appears in many guises: as provocative trickster in Buffalo Boy; as romantic icon in the black-and-white paintings; and as witness, mourner and survivor in two hauntingly beautiful installations, Old Sun (2005) and Sick and Tired (2004), in which Stimson bears witness to the impact of residential schools on Aboriginal lives. (From Canadian Art.)

Co-presented with the Queer Arts Festival.

The Queer Arts Festival (QAF) is an annual artist-run multidisciplinary festival at the Roundhouse. Recognized as one of the top 5 festivals of its kind worldwide (Melbourne Herald Sun), QAF harnesses the visceral power of the arts to inspire recognition, respect, and visibility of people who transgress gender and sexual norms. We celebrate the rich heritage of queer artists and art, bringing diverse communities together to incite artistic risk-taking, encourage experimentation and cultivate creative collaborations. Each year, the festival theme ties together a curated visual art exhibition, performing arts series, readings, artist talks, panels, workshops, and media art screenings. QAF has garnered wide acclaim as “easily one of the best art exhibitions of the year” (Vancouver Sun), “concise, brilliant and moving” (Georgia Straight), and “on the forefront of aesthetic and cultural dialogue today” (Xtra).

Charlene Vickers

10 November 2017

Charlene Vickers’ cross disciplinary art practice includes mixed media beer case moccasins, performance, painting and sculptural installation, video and sound events to express memory as a conceptual and political site. Her recent works become physical embodiments of memory as tangible markers of her Anishinabe territorial presence. “When walking through the core of downtown Vancouver I am expressing my embodied territory; within each step, a trace of my ancestors is present. I am thinking of my work and where I am from and how to manoeuvre through this world.”

Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, B.C. Her work spans several mediums including painting, sculpture, video and performance exploring memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. She graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994) and majored in Critical Studies at Simon Fraser University (BA,1998) where she also completed an MFA in 2013. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and the USA, and is in the permanent collection at MOA at the University of British Colum- bia . In 2016 Vickers was the inaugural Artist in Residence at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver and will exhibit in Vancouver Special Ambivalent Pleasures ( curated by Daina Augaitis and Jesse McKee) group exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Vickers has been an active member of the Board of Directors at grunt gallery since 2012.

charlenevickersvisualartist.blogspot.com

Emily Hermant

25 October 2017

“I utilize and transform a whole range of materials in my work including thread, nails, pins, plastic, and wood, to create works that relate in one way or another to the body and the body’s experience of space. I’m also really interested in how materials, taken out of their ordinary uses and translated sculpturally, express their materiality, and perform in space. The ways in which I choose materials happens in relation to a set of ideas or questions I’m interested in pursuing, and what I think would best express those ideas. Within that framework, I do a ton of experimentation with materials and processes to figure out what would work best technically and conceptually. I spend a lot of time building maquettes at various scales, making technical and material samples, sketches, and collecting images and articles, as ways of thinking through my ideas.”

Emily Hermant is an interdisciplinary artist whose large-scale sculp- tures and installations explore themes of communication, gender, labor, and the spatial experiences of the body. She received her BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montréal, in 2004 and her MFA as a Trustee Merit Scholar in Fiber & Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Her work has been exhibited widely. Hermant is currently based in Vancouver, BC, Canada where she is an Assistant Professor in the Audain Faculty of Visual Art and Material Practice at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

emilyhermant.com

Stefan Römer

27 September 2017

Stefan Römer works artistically de-conceptual with ideas and signification, he uses different media and writing. His deep interest in medial politics manifests his groundedness on the societal reality. Since he initiated the art-activist group FrischmacherInnen/Freshmakers in the early 1990s, connecting institutional critique, critical urbanism, and the change from the White cube to the Ambient as a sign of neoliberal corporatization and economization, he keeps the post-panoptical diagrammatics in focus: How does technical and social change incorporate the human body and influence the image regime?

Born in Katzenelnbogen, West Germany, Stefan Römer lives in Berlin. He is Prof. h.c. of the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, received his PhD phil. from (Humboldt University, Berlin) and his MA form (Rheinische-Friedrichs-Wilhelms University, Bonn). His work has been exhibited widely internationally, including: Green Naftaly Gallery, New York; Cologne Kunstverein; The Fotobiennale Rotterdam; Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp and Herzliya Museum, Tel Aviv; MoCA Belgrad; Museum Göteborg; khoj-Emami Chisel, Kolkata; First Ural Industrial Biennial in Ekaterinburg, Russia; Daimler Art Collection, Berlin; IG Bildenden Kunst, Vienna; thereafter, New Delhi. Römer teaches art theory and art practice internationally at academies and universities; 2000 he received the Award for Art-critique by the Working Committee of German Kunstvereine (AdKV); he plays regularly with his band Stan Back & The Noise Glam.

www.conceptual-paradise.com

Ian Wallace

21 January 2016

Born in Shoreham, England in 1943. Lives and works in Vancouver. Ian Wallace is a celebrated artist and teacher, best known as a founding member of what has come to be recognized as the Vancouver school of photoconceptualism. Wallace graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1968 with a master’s in art history; from there, he began his teaching career, starting at UBC and soon moving to the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design), where he remained until his retirement in 1998 and was among the first to teach courses on recent developments in the visual arts. Wallace was a teacher and mentor to such younger artists as Jeff Wall, Ken Lum, Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham. As an artist, his work was also instructive: he set precedents by blowing up photographs to scales typically associated with history painting, and by uniting these images—documents from the news or the everyday—with minimalist, monochrome painting. Wallace won a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2004, and the Order of Canada in 2012. Also In 2012 the Vancouver Art Gallery presented a career retrospective, “Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography.”

catrionajeffries.com/artists/ian-wallace

Allison Hrabluik

15 March 2016

In her exploration of narrative construction, Allison Hrabluik's visual practice finds its focus in the voices, rhythms and methodologies of storytelling. Her work includes video, sculpture, animation, drawing, and text, often to humorous or absurdist ends, and has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Allison lives in Vancouver, where she teaches as a sessional instructor at ECUAD.  Her latest video work, The Splits, is on view at SFU Gallery, Burnaby Campus, until April 22.

Cindy Mochizuki

10 March 2016

Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, performance, animation, drawings and interdisciplinary collaborations that consider spaces that embody both the fictional and documentary. Family displacement, migration and the remembrance of historical trauma have been departure points within a body of work that explores the effects of war on family members both within Canada and Japan. She has most recently exhibited her work at Access Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, the grunt gallery and as part of two residencies in Japan, AIR 475 and Koganecho Bazaar. Cindy has received her MFA in 2006, in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Noah Simblist

13 October 2015

Noah Simblist works as an artist, curator and writer with a focus on art and politics in Israel-Palestine and has contributed to Art Journal, Modern Painters, Art Papers, Art Lies, Art21 and other publications. Curatorial projects include Yuri’s Office by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; Out of Place at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, Texas; Tamy Ben Tor at Testsite in Austin, Texas; and Queer State(s) at the Visual Arts Center at University of Texas at Austin. He was also on the curatorial team for the 2013 Texas Biennial.

Writing projects include “How Do You Pronounce The Politics Of Aesthetics” in Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, eds. James Elkins and Harper Montgomery (Penn State University Press, 2013); “Setting Sail: The Aesthetics of Politics on the Gaza Flotilla,” for ART PAPERS; “The Art of Forgetfulness, the Trauma of Memory: Yael Bartana and Artur Zmijewski” for Transmission Annual; a feature about the work of Dor Guez for ARTPULSE as well as interviews with Francis Alÿs, Khaled Hourani, AL Steiner and AK Burns, Omer Fast, Jill Magid, Walead Beshty, Yoshua Okon and Nicholas Schaffhausen.

David Zink Yi

26 November 2014

The driving force behind Zink Yi’s artistic creations – be they in the form of sculpture, film or photographs – is the all-encompassing and multi-layered inquiry into the phenomenon of identity. When contemplating his works, we believe at first to be able to recognize familiar motifs, which, however, Zink Yi then de-stabilizes by means of shifts, or by the manner of display or portrayal, so creating a new image.

David Zink Yi was born in 1973 in Lima/Peru and lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich and at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. His most recent solo exhibitions were at Hauser&Wirth, Zurich (2013), Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2013), Museo de arte de Lima (2012), NBK Berlin (2012) as well as in the Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2011), MAK, Wien (2010) or at the Kunst Halle, Sankt Gallen (2009). He took part in group exhibitions in the Tate Modern, London (2012), Museo Sala de arte, Mexico (2012) and Ludwig Forum im Aachen, Germany (2012). In 2013 David Zink Yi participated in the 55. Biennale in Venice. Works by Zink Yi are represented in numerous collections such as those of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the MUDAM, Luxemburg and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Lawrence Weschler

4 September 2014 | Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre

Lawrence Weschler’s talk, A Taxonomy of Convergences: Towards a unified field theory of cultural transmission, arises from his recent book, Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (National Book Critics Circle Award), which is the culmination of a decade of explorations into the way images (but also poems, musical themes, etc.) set a context for the reception of subsequent instances. We see by way of what we have already seen. We create by way of our entire prior sensorium.

In this talk, Weschler will consider a spectrum of such convergent effects, from apophenia (the tendency of humans to see patterns where none exist) through co-causation, fractalization, influence, homage, apprenticeship, allusion, quotation, appropriation, cryptomnesia (verbatim appropriation without realizing you're doing so), to outright plagiarism.

Weschler is the author of over fifteen books, including Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders, Vermeer in Bosnia, and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.

Anne Ramsden

24 September 2014

Anne Ramsden works with a variety of media to explore cultural and social manifestations of everyday life. She has exhibited her work in North America, Europe, Scandanavia and Asia. Recent exhibitions include Possession at the Galerie SAS, Montreal, in 2012; It takes everyone to know no one at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, in 2011;  le Mois de la photo de Montréal 2009: Les espace de l'image; Préoccupations: Photographic Explorations of the Grey Nuns Mother House, at Conrdia Universitiy's FOFA Gallery in 2009, and a solo exhibition, Anne Ramsden: La collection et le quotidien at the Musée de Rimouski in 2007 and Gallery SBC, MOntreal, in 2010. Her work is included in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, as well as in numerous private collections. She was co-founder of Artexte, a contemporary art documentation centre in Montréal, and taught at the School for the Contemporay Arts at Simon Fraser University. 

Anne Ramsden lives in Montréal and is a professor in the sculpture area of the École des arts visuelles et médiatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Cate Rimmer

14 January 2014

Cate Rimmer's current project The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea is a multi-part exhibition series that looks at our relationship to the sea through contemporary art and historical materials. Starting in January 2010 the project included six exhibitions presented over three years at the Charles H. Scott Gallery. The exhibitions explored lighthouses, ill-fated voyages, the oceans depth, the business and politics of shipping, human migration by sea, and sea lore. A wide range of local and international artists were featured in the exhibitions and related programming included film screenings, lectures, tours and collaborative programming with the Vancouver Maritime Museum. In addition to exploring the sea as a subject, the series expanded the notion of what constitutes an exhibition; its length, participants and contents.

Cate Rimmer is Curator of Gallery + Exhibitions at the Charles H. Scott Gallery where she has curated numerous group and solo exhibitions. She was the founding Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, served as Director of Truck Gallery in Calgary and was a Curator in Residence at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal. In 2010/11 she curated a year-long public art project for the City of Vancouver entitled Walk In/Here You Are.

James Welling

2013

James Welling has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work. Welling is also intensely interested in cultural and personal ideas of memory in his work. In opening up the medium of photography for experimentation, James Welling’s practice has influenced an entire generation of artists and photographers. space.

James Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951. He received his B.F.A. and M.F.A.(1974) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Welling is Area Head of Photography at UCLA and in the Fall of 2012 was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. His work is held in major museum collections around the world including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Please join James Welling at the opening of his exhibition The Mind on Fire at the Contemporary Art Gallery on Thursday, November 14, 7–10pm

Christina Nägele/Christian Teckert

2013

The White Cube and its principles meanwhile have long migrated from the museum to the urban space. In the contemporary production of space the notion of the "artistic" and the "creative" has become a crucial resource under the circumstances of a globalized economy. Has the logic of the White Cube become a constitutive element for the contemporary neoliberal “projective city“, as termed by Boltanski/Chiapello? In our lecture collage we will analyze the development, the establishment and the migration of the White Cube as a spatial and urban phenomenon. We are searching its traces in a realm located between fiction and reality in the field of urbanism, architecture, art and everyday culture.

Christina Naegele (* 1976, lives and works in Vienna) studied cultural science and aesthetics at the University of Hildesheim. She is working at the threshold of fine arts, architecture and design in the realm of curatorial practice, cultural education and communication. Her focus lies on projects with thematic approaches and interdisciplinary discourses that deal with cultural practices, spatial production and contemporary social and ecological conditions. Recent exhibition projects include: “Tools for the Design Revolution”, in collaboration with the Institute of Design Research Vienna for the designmonat Graz 2013; “Cooling Station. Worldwide Geoengineering and Local Weather Making”, in collaboration with Klaus Schafler for the contemporary art festival REGIONALE12, Styria 2012; “The World as a Backdrop”, in collaboration with Beate Ermacora and Jürgen Tabor for the Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 2011..

Christian Teckert (* 1967, lives and works in Vienna) is an architect, curator, and Professor for Spatial Strategies at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule, Kiel. He has published numerous works on art, urbanism, and theory of space. With as-if berlin- wien he was responsible for the new exhibition building of the GfZK in Leipzig (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst), which has won several awards. With the Office for Cognitive Urbanism he curated exhibitions like „Studiocity“ (Vienna 1999) „Screenclimbing“ (Kunstverein in Hamburg 2000), "ManifeSTATION“ (Manifesta7 - Rovereto 2008) and co-curated "Eastern Promises" (MAK Vienna 2013). He is co-author and editor of the publications ”Prospekt” (2003), "Last Minute" (2006), both published by Walther König, Cologne, co-editor of "Negotiating Spaces“ (2010), published by Jovis and co-editor of and "Eastern Promises" published by Hatje Cantz.

Patrick Waldburger

2013

Since 2009, Patrick Waldburger has run Galerie Waldburger for contemporary art in Brussels. The art scene in Brussels provides a very stimulating environment to present emerging art and Waldburger works with emerging artists with whom he begins cooperating with at a very early stage in their career. In recent years, Brussels has also attracted a good number of Canadian artists who currently live and work there. Patrick Waldburger also has some "older emerging" artists in his program; for these artists his is the first gallery to organize a solo exhibition or to represent them in Europe. For example, Lynn Hershman Leeson, a pioneering artist from San Francisco, who was born in 1941, did not have gallery representation in Europe until Galerie Waldburger began to work with her in 2009. Before starting the gallery, Patrick worked as an Attorney-at-Law in an international business law firm in Zurich, Switzerland, and in this function advised many international galleries, auction houses, collectors and artists in art-related legal matters. As a consequence, independent from his gallery program, Patrick still advises artists and collectors on specific questions. At the talk this coming Thursday, Patrick will focus on his work as a gallerist and provide insight in the functioning of a gallery and will particularly highlight the cooperation between artists and gallerists.

Lynne Marsh

12 September 2013

Lynne Marsh’s practice lies at the intersection of moving image, performance and installation. Marsh invests specific sites and architectures—the spaces of spectacle—through location-based filming and behind-the-scenes views. Marsh also depicts them a temporal remove—too early or too late—which casts their absent audiences as trespassers, recently dispersed or yet to come. Strategically delving into the spaces and performances on the margin of mass consumption and mass cultural expression, the works stage the network of historical, social and political forces that produce the spectacle. They explore how the camera’s performance can reconfigure social spaces and their ideological orientation, casting viewers—figures of latency—to step on stage, to seize an active role. Her works are specific evocations of the complex relationships between complicity and participation, camera and subject and the individual and the social.

Lynne Marsh’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions internationally at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Danielle Arnaud contemporary art, London, and PROGRAM, Berlin and in group exhibitions and screenings at Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany, the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Spain, Manif d’art 5, Quebec City, Oakville Galleries, Canada, 53 Art Museum, China and The National Gallery of Canada. She lives and works between Montréal, Berlin and London.

Lynne Marsh's solo exhibition, Plänterwald, which is curated by Mark Lanctôt and Jonathan Middleton, opens on Friday, September 6, 8PM, at the Or Gallery (555 Hamilton St., Vancouver).

Renske Janssen

26 March 2013

Renske Janssen is an artist-in-residence at the Banff Arts Centre from April to June 2013. She will be working on a publication on contemporary art in relation to a changing natural landscape. She draws upon the landscape that surrounds her and how it has changed in art since Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea Fog (1818). She is interested in both aesthetic and ethical approaches of several contemporary artists such as Richard T. Walker, Erica van Loon, Gert Jan Kocken, Lukas Einsele and Liz Magor. In their work the landscape, or parts of it, serves as a mirror, which is formed by historical, geographical or psychological elements. Does the landscape of today become a mirror as it evidently shows how it was dealt with it so far? Is nature the ultimate personification of who we are? Do we talk about an ethical landscape? How do we identify ourselves today with our natural surrounding? Renske Janssen also takes literature as an inspiration to her research, such as Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe in which the main character realizes by travelling through the continent, how the idea of Europe which he inherited by knowledge from his father, has changed. Multiple strands of history and geography make up a contemporary individual, a writer, an artist, a landscape.

Renske Janssen is currently working as an independent writer, researcher and art historian. She was an assistant curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Curator at Witte de With, CCA in Rotterdam (2004-2010) and realized exhibitions for Artspeak Vancouver and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande in Düsseldorf. Janssen was also guest professor of art history, theory and practice at Erasmus University Rotterdam, KASK in Gent and De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Donna Huanca

2013

Donna Huanca’s artistic practice investigates aesthetic rituals, arrangements and displays to construct hyper-real narratives. Her installations, sculptures and collages compose multiple simulacrums with discarded materials; such as, clothing, shoes, and ephemera. Although embodied in a wide variety of media, her work expresses a thorough engagement with linguistic experimentation. While delving into one of the most primordial and complex systems of communication, that of clothing, Huanca conveys distinctive and precise observations on the function of the garment, as an ever evolving manner of language production and a traditional form of cultural transmission. She is visiting Vancouver for Braids, a co-residency and collaborative installation with Aja Rose Bond at Access Gallery. The residency will be for the remainder of March, with a performance on March 28th, the installation will exhibit through the month of April.

Born in Chicago, Huanca received BFA from the University of Houston (2004). Studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany, with Tobias Rehberger (2009-10). Awards include: DeGolyer Grant (2004), Dallas Museum of Art. DAAD artist grant (2009-10) Bonn, Germany, Art Matters Grant, NYC, NY (2010) and a Fulbright Scholarship (2012) to create a new body of work in Mexico City. Residencies include: Skowhegan (2006) Maine, LMCC Workspace and SwingSpace Residency (2007-09) New York, NY, Art OMI (2008) Hudson, NY and the Headlands Center for The Arts (2008) in San Francisco, CA. Publications of her work have been featured in DazedDigital, Wire, British VOGUE, F5 Moscow, NY Arts, ARTINFO.com, Art in America, and the Younger than Jesus Artist Directory published by the New Museum, NY amongst others.

Gaye Chan

07 February 2013

Gaye Chan is a conceptual artist who engages in solo and collaborative activities that take place on the web, in publications, streets as well as galleries. Chan co-founded Eating in Public in 2003, an organization that implements interventions in public and private space to make trouble and fun of capitalism and the State, and to rekindle the desire for the commons. In Chan’s own words, “And we want to prove, not to them, but ourselves, that it is possible to take care of ourselves while we take care of each other.”
EIP’s motto:

TAKE = act without shame
LEAVE = share without condition
WHATEVAS = trust without apology

Since 2003 the organization has initiated projects at nearly 1,000 sites that facilitate autonomous exchanges and collective anti-capitalist actions in the forms of guerrilla gardens, free stores, seed-sharing stations, recycling bins, bag dispensers, etc. The great majority of the projects take place on Oahu but EIP’s impact has also been felt nationally (i.e. California, Oregon, New York) and internationally (i.e. Australia, Canada).

Chan has reported on EIP's activities at venues such as Creative Time (New York City), Flux Factory (Queens), Southern Exposure (San Francisco) and Transart Institute (Berlin).

Gaye Chan was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States in 1969. She received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and is currently a professor and the Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai'i.

Tamara Henderson

31 January 2013

Tamara Henderson's practice involves sculpture, furniture, 16mm film and writing. Henderson works like a half asleep secretary-treasurer taking minutes from dreams, altered states and hypnogogia, decoding cipher from  sloppy and on occasion, illegible, nocturnal journalism. Her writing becomes the foundation of cinematic storyboards which are worked out through sculpture and cinematography, materializing as oneiric puzzles. With spectral qualities, object/characters in the films work on behalf of the artist, and the scenes appear to have been orchestrated by a crew of phantoms.

Some of her books include: Livet På En Pinne, Tower on Old Fashioned, Apres Le Pamplemousse, The Spirit of Garfield (in spite of NH) with Andrew Frosst, Voices on Vacation, with Erik Lavesson, and Treaty of Slippage.

Tamara Henderson is from Sackville New Brunswick, she studied at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax Nova Scotia, Stadelschule, Frankfurt am Main and and holds a Masters Degree from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm Sweden. Henderson has participated in The Paul Klee Center: Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming, Banff Center for the Art: Life is Beautiful.... , and CCA Kitakyushu. She has exhibited at Documenta 13, Western Front, Frankfurt Kunstverein, and upcoming shows include Kunstverein Nürnberg and Walter Philips Gallery.

HyungMin Yoon

2012

“Through my art practice, I seek to develop the potential for art to reveal the ambiguities and contradictions that lie hidden in what is taken for granted in the everyday experience. Having recently immigrated to Vancouver, my focus has shifted to the specific challenges faced by global nomadic citizens who encounter new languages, customs and tacit social agreements. Translation Services was developed as a part of Curatorial Residencies program with 221A. The project presented three international artists’ practices, a workshop with ESL children and a publication in order to explore translation in a new way; rather than as the process of representing an essential origin, as a beguiling, contentious space for abstraction and emergent cultural production.”

HyungMin Yoon received her BFA from the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul and her MFA from Chelsea College, University of the Arts London. Her first work produced in Vancouver was Heaven and Earth, a floating public pond art project at Dr Sun-Yat Sen Chinese Garden in 2011. Yoon’s works have been exhibited internationally in Korea, Switzerland and the UK. Yoon was a 2011/12 curatorial resident at 221A in Vancouver.

Cathy Busby

2012

“My installations and printed matter address both the physical and discursive space of a project. For example, I work with collections ranging from artworks to advertising slogans (Atrium, Halifax 2010; About Face, New York 2012; Totalled, Ottawa 2004; Inspiring, Halifax 2010). I commemorate little-remembered events (We Are Sorry, Melbourne 2009 / Winnipeg 2010; In Conversation with “They Chose China,” Beijing 2010; Harriet Nahanee, Vancouver 2010). I often use un- or underused spaces (24/7, Aberdeen 2008; Move In Now, Halifax 2010). I begin by re-framing, re-locating, re-organizing and re-purposing what is already there in order to heighten political awareness of taken-for-granted conditions. One of my best-known works, We Are Sorry (Melbourne 2009 / Winnipeg 2010), commemorated public apologies by Canadian and Australian heads of state to the Indian Residential School survivors in Canada and the Stolen Generations in Australia. While these landmark apologies had been relatively fleeting media moments when they were first delivered, my work prolonged their public presence. In Melbourne, We Are Sorry took place outdoors as part of the Laneway Commissons and the following year it was presented in Eckhardt Hall at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in conjunction with the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2010).”

Cathy Busby is Canadian artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has a PhD in Communication (Concordia University, Montreal) and was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University. She has an MA in Media Studies (Concordia University) and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She has been exhibiting her work internationally over the past 20 years. Currently she is the artist in residence at Emily Carr University.

Manuel Piña

2012

Earlier projects are mainly concerned with space. Current works incorporate time as a formal element in an attempt to articulate a discourse about contemporary human experience. My urban landscapes can be seen as a collection of signs and evidences gathered to create narratives about power, history and social relations.

Manuel Piña graduated as mechanical engineer in Vladimir, Russia in 1983. In the early 1990's, he started artistic practice. His photographs and video pieces often depict urban spaces as a departure point for narratives concerning social issues. He is interested in the relationships between power, utopias, history, and the city as both site and embodiment of these relationships. Manuel's work has been exhibited in the Americas and Europe including the Havana Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, Kunsthalle Vienna, Grey Gallery, N.Y., LACMA, U.S.A., DAROS Museum, Zurich. He currently teaches in the Department of Fine Arts at UBC, Vancouver, and divides his time between Vancouver and Havana.

Aurélien Froment

2012

As a multidisciplinary visual artist, the works of Aurelien Froment take the form of video, performance, installation, photography, and publication. He has worked with mnemonics, puzzles, gesture, semantics, word play, and tricks to explore issues of memory, interpretation, perspective, and the relationship between images and words. In recent work, he has focused on the nature of presentation and audience expectation to create a new dialogue between people, places, and objects.

Aurélien Froment was born in Angers in 1976. Between 1995 and 2000,  he studied at ERBA in Nantes, while applying for a professional projectionist certificate. Training at both places gave him the chance to explore the components and peripheral elements of the cinematographic experience, and thus, to imagine a practice that follows its contours. His work has since developed through exhibitions, films, publications and performances. Solo presentations were realised with several organisations in recent years, including Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Project Arts Centre, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Palais de Tokyo, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Gasworks, Wattis, Stuk, Centre Culturel Français de Milan, Le Credac, Musée d’art contemporain de Rochechouart and Pavilion. His work has been presented in group exhibitions including Tate Britain, Nam June Paik Centre, Basel Kunsthalle, Mudam, Centre Pompidou, Gwangju Biennale Sculpture Centre and Lyon Biennale.

This talk is realized with the support of the Contemporary Art Gallery and Consulate general of France in Vancouver.

Kota Ezawa

2012

Artist Kota Ezawa’s diverse projects take the form of digital animations, slide projections, lightboxes, paper cut-outs, intaglio etchings, ink drawings and wood sculptures. Using well-known images from the history of photography, film and the popular media, Ezawa’s pared down renderings speak to the iconic status of photography; despite the elimination of much information, the source is often still recognizable. Through this elaborate transformation of existing images, Ezawa’s work comments on the role of photography in shaping our perception of reality, the spectacular nature of the media and the limits of memory.

Kota Ezawa is a kind of video, film and photography archeologist,  making animations, still images and objects out of found archival footage. Ezawa’s projects have taken the form of digital animations, slide projections, lightboxes, paper cutouts, intaglio etchings, ink drawings and wood sculptures. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London; St. Louis Art Museum; Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; Artpace, San Antonio; and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He has participated in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; Art Institute of Chicago; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; as well as the 5th Seoul International Biennale of Media Art and the 2004 Shanghai Biennale. Kota Ezawa lives in San Francisco and Berlin.

Raymond Boisjoly

2012

Raymond Boisjoly is an Indigenous artist and citizen of the Haida Nation, based in Vancouver. His work is derived from his training in photography. He uses screens, scanners, photocopiers, and inkjet printers to capture technological processes together with subject matter centered on cultural propriety, humour, and poetic-prophetic texts of mysterious origins.

Boisjoly received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and a MFA from the University of British Columbia (2008). He was a recipient of the VIVA Award (2016), presented by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, Vancouver. He has had solo exhibitions at VOX, Montreal (2016); Carleton University (2015); Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg (2014); Simon Fraser University Gallery (2013). He has been featured internationally in exhibitions including SITElines Santa Fe (2014); and in exhibitions at Triangle France, Marseille; Camera Austria, Vienna (2014) as well as L’avenir (looking forward), Biennale de Montréal (2014); The Power Plant, Toronto (2012); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016 and 2012-14).

Gareth James

2011

James’s work is constituted through his abiding interest in histories of iconoclasm in which the social divisions and inequities that mark and delimit artistic practice are registered most emphatically. In James’ practice as an artist and as a writer, conventional aesthetic discourse is lost and rediscovered in neighboring fields such as topology or psychoanalysis; capitalist property relations are seen to exert as much determinative force on the visual field as phenomenological bodies; and theoretical materials are indistinct from physical ones in an incipient philosophy of materials. In his teaching, James incorporates a wide base of theoretical paradigms and experimental methodologies in order to examine the fullest extension of the field of art.

James was a founding member of Orchard, a cooperatively organized gallery in New York's Lower East side from 2005-2008, and is a founding editor, along with fellow artists Sam Lewitt and Cheyney Thompson, of Scorched Earth, a forthcoming journal devoted to questions concerning drawing. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including Portikus (Frankfurt), Kunstwerke (Berlin), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), PS1 Center for Contemporary Art and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). He has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln; Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Torino; and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York.

His writing has been published in journals such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Afterall, and Made in USA, and he has curated several exhibitions, including a traveling retrospective of the television and video works of Jean-Luc Godard. James' publications include "I said I love. That is the promise." (published by b-books (Berlin) and Oejiblikket (Copenhagen) 2003; and "... Ical Krbbr Prodly Prsnts Gart Jas, Jon Klsy, Josf Stra," published by Walther König (Köln) 2006.

Mungo Thomson

2011

Mungo Thomson’s work pairs a West Coast conceptual sensibility with an interest in culture, cosmology and reception. In Thomson’s diverse art—films, sound work, sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and publications—simple processes of inversion and transformation are joined with an expansive sense of space and context.

Thomson attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the UCLA MFA program. He has had solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008); the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2007); and Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy (2006). He participated in the Istanbul Biennial (2011), the Whitney Biennial (2008), and the Performa Biennial of Visual Art Performance (2005). His book Font Study (TIME) was published by Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011) and Negative Space was published by Christoph Keller Editions and JRP|Ringier (2006).

Janice Kerbel

2011

Kerbel’s work is often produced in relation to existing logic systems, re-con_guring organising structures to better de_ne the relationship between reality, imagination and illusion. Her works range from installations to book projects, prints and audio works. In 2006, Kerbel wrote Nick Silver Can’t Sleep, a radio play for insomniacs produced by Artangel and broadcast on Radio 3. Most recently, Kerbel completed Kill the Workers (2011), which takes its cue from dramatic narrative but is executed solely by theatrical lighting.

Janice Kerbel is a Canadian artist who has been living and working in London since 1995. Recent solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsrhue Germany; Art Now, Tate Britain;  Greengrassi, London; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She has taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles and Goldsmiths College. She is currently artist in residence at Emily Carr, and working toward a solo exhibition at Presentation House later this year.

Renato Rodrigues da Silva

2011

The title of Renato Rodrigues da Silva's talk is: "Hélio Oiticica's Parangolé or the Art of Transgression", and is based on an article published in Third Text. Please notice that it is very important that the students read the text beforehand, since the talk will introduce the parameters of analysis. This article focuses on Hélio Oiticica's most important proposal, the Parangolés, which were realized from 1964/5 until the end of his life, in 1980. It shows that this proposal was presented in various forms and objects, and that it multiplied its meanings according to the context, being understood through Jacques Lacan's theory of the gaze and psychological individuality. In a series of analyses of Oiticica's performances at Favela da Mangueira, which is a slum in Rio de Janeiro, and at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, the article demonstrates that the artist has developed an early form of institutional critique.

Renato Rodrigues da Silva is Adjunct Faculty a the Latin American Studies Program, Simon Fraser University, holding a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. He published the book Modern Photography in Brazil (which is now in its second edition), besides articles in Leonardo Journal, Third Text, Fillip and BorderCrossings, among other magazines. His current research focuses on Brazilian Neoconcretism, and he is writing a book on its interdisciplinary proposals.

Neil Campbell

2011

Painting directly on to the wall, Neil Campbell transforms the gallery's interior with his geometric shapes and patterning. The artist intervenes in the architecture, toying with the experience of the space and addressing questions of viewer perception. Letting intuition guide the process, the artist divines 'sweet spots' within the exhibition space, scaling his shapes and situating them in the locales he deems most harmonic. A massive inverted triangle dominates the main gallery, while fields of small circles pulsate in the front gallery.

Despite the flatness of the painted form, the scale of the triangle coupled with its impenetrable blackness produces an overwhelming, almost vertiginous effect. The matte planes seem only to highlight and heighten the vibration felt from the looming shape. Campbell's varying circles oscillate between evoking a sensation of drawing energy away from the viewer and projecting a kinetic force outward. The negative space between the dots in turn retains its own knot of energy. Inspired initially by how various cultures privileged a specific center along the vertical axis of the human figure, the artist explains that his work addresses "the electric field of the body."

Neil Campbell was born in Saskatchewan and currently lives and works in Vancouver. His work has appeared in galleries and institutions in Canada, the United States and abroad, including the Vancouver Art Gallery (for which, in 2005/2006, he produced the remarkable BASE/MACHINE, a light installation in the gallery façade); Centre d'art Contemporain, Montreal; The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Art and Public, Geneva. He recently had a solo exhibition at Galeria Franco Noero in Turin, Italy.

Holly Ward

2011

The Pavilion was a year-long project completed as the Langara College 2009-2010 Artist In residence. During this time, Ward constructed a 22’ diameter geodesic dome intended to serve as a catalyst for speculative thinking and artistic experimentation. Once the construction of The Pavilion was complete, Ward curated a series of exhibitions, readings and performances in order to generate contemporary engagements with utopian thinking, experimentation and dialogue.

Holly Ward is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, multimedia installation, architecture and drawing as a means to examine representations of social progress and the utopian imaginary. She received her BFA (interdisciplinary) from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1999 and her MFA (studio) from the University of Guelph in 2006. Ward has exhibited in solo shows across Canada at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, the Or Gallery in Vancouver, and YYZ Gallery, Toronto amongst others. She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, England, Mexico, the US, Norway and South Korea. She is currently represented by Republic Gallery, Vancouver where she had a solo exhibition in 2009. For her 2009-2010 Langara College Artist in Residence project in Vancouver, Ward constructed a 22’ diameter geodesic dome to act as host to a series of exhibitions, readings, workshops and experimental performances.

Terence Gower

2011

Terence Gower’s Ciudad Moderna (2004) explores the city as a built environment by using clips from the source film Despedida de Casada (Dir. Juan de Orduna): through a process of re-editing, Gower isolates the architecture by transforming scenes into perspective renderings that highlight the modernist architecture of Mexico, such as the Museum of Anthropology and the Hotel Presidente in Acapulco.

Ciudad Moderna is part of the exhibition The Long Take: Videos on Architecture and Social Space at the Audain Gallery. The group exhibition gathers national and international artists whose work seek to represent the scales, angles and details of architecture and the urban territory as well as the more hidden relations of the city, such as gender and space and the effects of socio economic processes. The large-scale projections of these works will transform the space of the Audain Gallery and the show opens up a discussion of urban imagibility and artistic strategies of representation.

Terence Gower is a Canadian artist based in New York City. He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums in the US (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; ICA, Boston; UCLA Hammer Museum, LA; Queens Museum, New York ), Mexico City (La Colección Jumex; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil; Museo del Chopo; Galería Arte Mexicano; Laboratorio Arte Alameda), Canada (The Power Plant, Toronto; Gallery 101, Ottawa; Artspeak, Vancouver), Germany (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin; Kunsthistorisches Institut, Bonn, Kunstverein, Göttingen), France (Galerie Yvon Lambert, and Centre Culturel du Mexique, Paris), and Latin America (XIII Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; XI Mostra da Gravura, Curitiba, Brazil; and Centro Recoleta, Buenos Aires).  His videos have been screened at Yvon Lambert, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; iMage Architecture and Media Festival, Florence, Italy; Instituto Cervantes, New York; Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain, and LOOP Video Fair, Barcelona.

Gower has curated exhibitions for several museums and art centres such as Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Prácticas públicas/Vidas privadas), El Museo del Barrio, New York (The Conceptual Trend), Museo de la Ciudad de México (Pasaje Iturbide), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (The Counterfeit Subject), and the San Francisco Art Institute (Tendencies). He has published seven editions and multiples (most recently, Kitchen I&II) and has created public projects for Cologne, Germany, Mexico City, and New York City.

Terence Gower is represented by Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin and Düsseldorf.

Amie Siegel

2010

Amie Siegel works variously in 16mm and 35mm film, video, sound and writing. Siegel uses the cinematic image as material means to a conceptual end. Her work mines the voyeuristic gaze, direct address and interview to consider how these repetitions shape cultural memory. In multi-channel video and film installations, Siegel reformulates cinematic enterprises—including the establishing shot, the remake and the tracking shot—as uncanny reflections on absence, historical disorientation and nostalgia. Longer videos and feature films move between spontaneous and scripted spaces, truth and fiction, shifting performance from identification to parody and estrangement.

Born 1974 in Chicago, Illinois, Amie Siegel lives and works in Berlin, New York and Cambridge, MA. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from Bard College. Exhibitions and screenings include The Russian Linesman, The Hayward, London; 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; Forum Expanded, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Austrian Film Museum, Berlin International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Andy Warhol Museum, BFI Southbank, Frankfurt Film Museum and Film Forum in New York. Her first book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA) was published in 1999. Siegel teaches in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She has been a guest of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.

www.amiesiegel.net

DDR/DDR by Amie Siegel will be presented by DIM Cinema at the Pacific Cinémathèque on Monday November 15 at 7:30pm. $10 + $3 membership. 1131 Howe St. www.dimcinema.ca for details. Thanks to Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk

Susanne Kriemann

2010

Born 1972, in Erlangen, Germany, Susanne Kriemann explores the representation of historical events through photography, text, and installation.
Kriemann takes a research-oriented approach, often integrating her own photographs with archival materials and found digital images. Recognizing that much of 20th century history is understood through collections of images and documents she explores not only the narrative potential of photographs in human imagination and interpretation of the past, but their constructed nature. Kriemann is interested in changing perspectives on already established images through the juxtaposition fact and fiction. By combining images from various sources, seemingly neutral images reveal themselves as being charged with meaning.

Kriemann studied at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, and currently resides in Rotterdam and Berlin. Recently she has had solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, in the Galerie Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam and at Uqbar Berlin (all 2009). Her work was also included in group exhibitions at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung in Kraichtal, “Berlin89/09? at the Berlinische Galerie, at the Fotomuseum Rotterdam, and she participated in the 5th Berlin Biennial. In 2009, a monograph “One Time One Million” was published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam. Kriemann is in Vancouver to participate in group show Following A Line at the Contemporary Art Gallery.

Marjetica Potrč

2010

Marjetica Potrč is the first artist to be hosted by the Audain Visual Artists in Residence Program and will begin her residency in October 2010. The Audain Artist-in-Residence will work closely with visual-art students within the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU Woodward’s and the community in Vancouver.

Marjetica Potrč's work has been featured in exhibitions throughout Europe and the Americas, including the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1996 and 2006) and the Venice Biennial (1993, 2003, and 2009); and she has had solo shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2001); the Max Protetch Gallery in New York (2002, 2005, 2008 and 2010); the Nordenhake Gallery in Berlin/Stockholm (2003, 2007 and 2010). Potrč has taught at numerous institutions in Europe and North America, including MIT (2005). In 2000 she received the prestigious Hugo Boss prize, and was awarded a fellowship at the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at The New School in New York (2007).

Ruben Ortiz-Torres

2010

"Over the last few years, I have been working with hydraulic mechanics and different customizing techniques to alter objects and adapt them to particular and specific cultural, political and aesthetic needs. These objects and paintings refer to high modernism but also subvert it and play with it thereby establishing a dialogue with specific cultural and subcultural practices and social interaction. More recently, I have been exploring different materials that have the capacity to change, such as chromaluscent paints that change color when the angle of reflection of the light changes and heat sensitive paints that change color when touched. These materials when applied to paintings and objects result in artworks that mutate, transform and adapt their own identities. My “monochrome” paintings are a good example of this. I have been experimenting with chromaluscent painting that changes color as the spectator moves when its pigment refracts light from different angles. I experimented this time with chromaluscent chrome and flake called Prizmacoat. I have been working with a company in Los Angeles that develops these materials for car customizers.

The most ambitious piece of the series is a museum bench that is also a sculptural object. It is painted with thermosensitive painting that reacts to changes in temperature. Its color varies when touched from a purple to a brighter pink. Therefore its design varies and it is made when people use it, seat on it or touch it leaving their mark. It resembles formally a minimalist sculpture but it requires social participation and interaction to exist. Unlike some other purist modernist art it is playful and sensual. Now I am producing a couple of new benches for an exhibition of Los Angeles artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

These pieces are in constant flux changing in response to light, temperature and participation. These seductive materials relate to certain art practices common to California such as the “Fetish Finish” school of minimalism and are usually used in car customizing. I have used and learned about these materials working with low riders in Southern California. However the artwork also relates to another art tradition that I would like to emphasize. Latin America created its own modernisms, often addressing social, emotional or spiritual concerns.

My goal is not to create art for art sake or pure seductive spectacle. Abstraction in this case is not meant to be a homogenizing universalistic absence of language but on the contrary. I want to use color and surface as part of a liberating lexicon with a rich history and culture beyond the galleries and museums."

Ruben Ortiz-Torres was born in Mexico City in 1964. Educated within the utopian models of republican Spanish anarchism soon confronted the tragedies and cultural clashes of post colonial third world. Being the son of a couple of Latin American folklore musicians he soon identified more with the noises of urban punk music. After giving up the dream of playing baseball in the major leagues and some architecture training (Harvard Graduate School of Design) he decided to study art. He went first to the oldest and one of the most academic art schools of the Americas (the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City) and later to one of the newest and more experimental (Calarts in Valencia CA). After enduring Mexico City's earthquake and pollution he moved to Los Angeles with a Fullbright grant to survive riots, fires, floods, more earthquakes, shootings and proposition 187. He still hangs around school but now as a Faculty member of the University of California in San Diego. During all this he has been able to produce artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, sculptures, custom cars and machines, installations, videos, films, text and opera. He has participated in several international exhibitions and film festivals. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museums of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and San Diego, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside CA, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, the Jumex collection and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid Spain among others. He was a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores and has won international awards such as the Andrea Frank Foundation Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in New York, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship, etc. After showing his work around the world and be living abroad, he now finally realizes that his parents music was in fact better than most rock’n roll.

Kathy Slade

2010

Kathy Slade is an artist who works with embroidery, sound,sculpture, books, film, and video. She has exhibited in Canada, the US,China, Europe, and the UK. In 2009 Slade received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award. Slade is the Founding Editor of the Emily Carr University Press. In 1999 she developed READ Books at the Charles H. Scott Gallery. Slade collaborates with Brady Cranfield on their ongoing project The Music Appreciation Society and as Cranfield & Slade whose concept album titled 12 Sun Songs was Released in 2009 (Or Gallery, Vancouver and Christoph Keller Editions, Zurich). In 2010 Slade's work will be included in Cue: Artists' Video at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Die Perfekte Ausstellung at the Heidelberger Kunstverein, and she will have a solo project at the Audain Gallery as part of Coming Soon. Cranfield & Slade will release 10 Riot Songs (Presentation House Gallery and Bywater Brothers Editions, Toronto) upcoming in the fall.

Rebecca Belmore

2010

Rebecca Belmore's performances, sculptures, installations, and photographs address issues of identity as they relate to the politics of history, place, culture, and gender. Her work uses the body and the land as site of contestation, addressing a history of colonialization and the continued conflict and struggle of the first-nations people in Canada. Belmore's gestures and objects often speak on behalf of what is marginalized, absent, forgotten or untold. In her work Vigil, (2002) Belmore memorialized the lives of 50 women, most of whom were Aboriginal, who had gone missing in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. Belmore performed a violent and passionate tribute to the lost women, tearing thorns off of roses with her teeth and nailing her red dress to a telephone pole before ripping it piece by piece off of her body. It was a cleansing of negative connotations attached to identity, and of her personal grief bound to these missing Aboriginal women. Recently, she exhibited a photo-based work, Sister, at the Simon Fraser University Audain Gallery in the group exhibition, First Nations/Second Nature. On April 24th, Belmore's exhibition Friend or Foe, a collaboration with Terrance Houle, will be presented at the Or Gallery in Vancouver.

Rebecca Belmore was born in 1960 into a large Anishinabe family in Upsala, Ontario. She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto; she currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC. Belmore's work has been exhibited and performed internationally and across Canada since the late 80's, including solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery: Rising to the Occasion (2008), The Named and Unnamed (2002) at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver and 33 Pieces (2001) at Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto at Mississauga. In 2005, she was chosen to be Canada's official representative at the 51st Venice Biennale, with Fountain; she was the first Aboriginal woman to represent Canada. In 2004, Rebecca Belmore was awarded the prestigous VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation, and in 2009 she received an award for outstanding achievement from the Hnatyshyn Foundation.

Arthur Renwick

2010

Arthur Renwick, a member of Gallery 44 and the Haisla First Nation, was born and raised in Kitimat, BC. He is a graduate of Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver (1989) and received and MFA from Concordia University, Montreal (1993). He has curated art exhibitions at The Power Plant in Toronto. In the Canadian Mountain Academy of the Arts in Elliot Lake, he assisted in developing the curriculum, designing the darkroom, and taught various art courses (1997-2000).

His artwork has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is represented in many private and public collections. His practice explores cultural identity and colonization. His early work explored the impact of industry on the landscape and society, most likely influenced by the presence of Alcan's aluminum smelter in his hometown of Kitimat. Despite the weighty politics, Renwick's work is never didactic or literal; the play of meaning is always rooted in the visual and poetic. Often his guides in this enterprise are the forms and ideas present in Northwest Coast totem poles, complex records of family history, status, and tradition.

Renwick was awarded the K.M. Hunter Artists Award in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include Mask: Artists and Curators (2009), at the Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto, Delegates: Chiefs of the Earth and Sky (2008-13) as part of ANECO Public Art Projects, Shaw Centre, Saskatoon, and BC CHURCHS: And the word was (2007) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. He is in Vancouver to launch his exhibition, Mask, which will be displayed at the Richmond Art Gallery from January 29th to April 4th.

Elke Krasny

2009

Elke Krasny is a cultural theorist, curator, urbanist and author, based in Vienna.  She researches on the interrelations of architecture, urban space, issues of cultural identity and representation, engaged art practices, gender and world fairs, museums and exhibitions as cultural formations. She teaches Art and Public Space, Museum Pedagogy, Visual Didactics, Didactics of Architecture and Space and Cultural Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, "Garden as Community" at the Technical University of Vienna, Cultural Studies at the FH Joanneum Graz and is a visiting professor at the University of Bremen "Urban Transformation and its Narratives" 2006.

Elke Krasny's work is based on long-term research processes and investigations. The methods used during the research processes comprise a variety of different, open-ended formats, such as walks, talks, interviews, active listening, site specific research, historical research, studio visits, picture taking, etc. The process always involves a variety of formats of becoming public: exhibitions, publications, round tables, discussions, tours, walks, talks, etc.

Recent curatorial work, projects and publications: Other Places. Vienna Lerchenfelder Street, together with Angela Heide, 2009. Exhibition in a store Here, There & In Between, KulturKontakt Austria, 2009. Exhibition at the Gallery ArtPoint, Vienna, Walking Ijburg. City Telling, project at the Blue House in Ijburg/Amsterdam, 2009. Walking Linz, Voyage into the Neighbourhood, project at Bellevue, Gelbes Haus, Linz 2009. The Force is in the Mind. The Making of Architecture, exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien 2008/2009, accompanied by the catalogue, The Force is in the Mind. The Making of Architecture, Elke Krasny, Architekturzentrum Wien (Ed.), Birkhäuser Basel/Berlin/Boston, 2008.

Ben Reeves

30 September 2009

"I am interested in the hallucinatory aspect of the everyday. In my work I examine how representations are internalized, then projected outwards mapped onto the world. I am interested in how representation alters and shapes our physical experience and perception of reality. That painting operates as both image and substance parallels this understanding. Painting has a mediated and an immediate aspect. Its otherwise insubstantial images are bodied forth with an inexorable physicality. My paintings accentuate this duality with moments where thick paint insists on its materiality challenging the illusionism of the picture, even as it is integral to it."

Ben Reeves lives and works in Vancouver where he teaches at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

Ruben Ochoa

24 September 2009

Ruben Ochoa's works focuses on the built urban landscape as the starting point in dealing with barriers, borders, class, and perspective. While known for his sculptural works, Ochoa also makes drawings, photos, and installations, a selection of which is currently at his first Canadian exhibition at Charles H. Scott Gallery in Emily Carr University. Previous solo exhibitions include SITE Santa Fe, NM, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY, and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. He has also participated in group shows at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, The Center for Contemporary Arts in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the Haubrok Foundation in Berlin. Ruben Ochoa will be exhibiting a series of cement pallets at Art Basel, Miami. He is preparing new solo works for Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects this winter, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California in March 2010.

Ruben Ochoa's exhibition at Charles H. Scott Gallery, which opens Tuesday, September 22 at 7:30pm, is curated by Cate Rimmer.

"Ruben Ochoa's monumental use of building materials in sculpture, photography, and public interventions deconstructs a constructionworker aesthetic by investigating urban locations under contention. Cataloguing places of social and economic transactions as sites for documentation or site-specific installations, he presents a finely tuned vision of Los Angeles as a city socially, economically, and geographically described by its freeways and street curbs. Beyond its formal references to civil engineering, Ochoa's work critiques class boundaries determined by these borders in his rejection of traditionally exclusionary exhibition styles. Relocating industrial or outdoor materials such as cement, rebar, pallets, and dirt into the gallery and displaying artworks in unlikely areas throughout the city, he juxtaposes refinement with grit, as did Walter De Maria and environmental sculptors like Edward Kienholz. Increasingly Ochoa studies areas where nature buttresses itself against annihilation, a cultural metaphor lending hope and vivacity to his work." – Trinie Dalton.   

Ruben Ochoa is born in 1974 in Oceanside, California and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Allison Hrabluik

15 September 2009

Allison Hrabluik is an artist from Calgary and currently lives in Vancouver. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions and film festivals across Canada.

Allison Hrabluik's stop-animations, drawings, and sculptures have focused on explorations of the anti- or accidental-hero (a Manitoba farmer and his inventions and a pair of could-be lovers at a terrible job to name a few). Her recent work continues a character study, however questions the effectiveness of these accidental heroics to look more directly at choice. In a recent video work this takes the form of a woman trying to solve the question - what it means to be an active member of society - to quote the narrator in A Mild Case of Smallpox, 2007. Hrabluik and her characters use humor and allegory to discuss the role that ownership, faith, history, and the language of arguments play in answering and interfering with such questions. (Artforum, 2007)

Lisl Ponger

2009

Lisl Ponger lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She has shown widely in Europe, including recent solo shows at the CUC, Berlin, Kunsthaus Dresden, and Charim Galerie, in Vienna. She is in Vancouver to do a residency of several weeks.

In ArtForum, March 2007, Bridgitte Huck summarizes Ponger's work:

“For the Dak'Art Biennial of Contemporary African Art 2004, Austrian artist Lisl Ponger hoped to photograph selections from the famous ethnographic collection of Dakar's Musee d'Art Africain. As she waited for permission from the museum, she started a series of photographs in her hotel room; when the official okay never came, these works became her biennial contribution. Si j'avais eu l'autorisation ... (If I Had Had Authorization ...) – thus ran the project's subjunctive title – then she wouldn't have stayed in her room photographing props from her own personal archive of materials relating to the themes of colonialism, globalization, and travel. She grouped these items on the tile mosaic of the hotel floor according to classificatory patterns: ethnologist, painter, photographer, tourist. Although this was not the project that Ponger originally planned, it hews closely to her interests. Her politically motivated work continues to investigate issues of colonialism, ethnology, ideology, and constructions of identity. A visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker, Ponger is equally at home at Documenta (she participated in 2002) and at film festivals. Acting (often in the same work) as director, set designer, performer, and archivist, she investigates the interfaces between art and science, between sociology, art history, and political activism, moving obliquely through these disciplines to create compositions of explosive power and precise observation. Ponger interrogates the resonances of non-Western art within Western modernism.”

Hadley and Maxwell

2009

Hadley+Maxwell have been working together since 1997 and until recently they were based in Vancouver, but now are working from Berlin. They are currently in Vancouver to participate in the exhibition How Soon is Now: Contemporary art from here. Now, which runs Feb. 7 to May 3rd. Their investigations into cultural history, contemporary philosophy, models of subjectivity, and aesthetics have taken the form of conceptually driven works in a variety of media. In their practice they employ video, music and installation to reset the staging of human relations, often appropriating iconic images, traditional forms and contested histories as they are expressed in pop-cultural, artistic and political movements of the past. In deconstructing and recombining the symbolic economies of these images, forms and histories, they perform a critique of their ideological underpinnings while celebrating the desire they represent for a sense of belonging.

Publication about the artists' work include: Negotiating Desire, with text by Kathleen Ritter, Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver; The Decor Project, with text by Melanie O'Brian, Clint Burnham and Jonathan Middleton, Projectile Publishing, Vancouver; and 1+1-1: Endless, Nameless, by Eric Fredericksen, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

Recent exhibitions include: "Where is the Contemporary Art?" Museu de Arte Contemporanea (Sao Paolo); "Just Play: Musik als Sociale Praxis," Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst (Oldenburg); "Into the Musik," Kunstraum München; "Good Gangsters," Taipei Fine Art Museum; and the solo exhibition "1+1-1," Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin). Upcoming activities include participation in: "If we can't get it together," curated by Nina Möntmann, Power Plant (Toronto); "Nomads" curated by Jose Drouin-Brisebois, National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); "There is no Audience," curated by Adnan Yildiz, Montehermoso Cultural Centre (Spain).

Bik Van der Pol

2009

Bik Van der Pol have worked collectively since 1995. They live and work in Rotterdam. Rather than produce discrete objects their work responds to the specifics of an exhibition, a site, a community, creating a response which calls into question the norms of institutions, promotion, public spaces, community boundaries, discourses. Their work uses a creative, aesthetic, critical approach to invent a corresponding response which might take the form of a book, a billboard, a built environment, or a sign on a traveling truck. The art investigates methods of working and the potential of art to produce and transmit knowledge. They describe their working method as one which engages with "functionality, site sensitivity and negotiation at an institutional and intimate, local level. Generation of knowledge and memory as a necessary potential for dialogue and the development of a certain level of understanding is one of its main objectives."

Bik Van der Pol will be in Vancouver to do a residency at Western Front media program. Recent projects and exhibitions include I've got something in my eye, Marie Louise Hessel Museum/CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Becoming Dutch, Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven; Plug In, Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven; For Reasons of State, ISP Whitney, New York; Utopia Transfer, Kiscelli Museum, Budapest (2008). All their projects and updated information can be found on their amazing website: www.bikvanderpol.net.

Vishal Jugdeo

2009

Vishal Jugdeo's work will be of particular interest to SFU Visual Arts students as he was a graduate of the School for the Contemporary Arts before going on to complete his MFA (2007) at U.C.L.A in Los Angeles. He has shown at in numerous group shows and has had solo exhibitions at LA><ART, Los Angeles, and  The Western Front, Vancouver. He is in Vancouver for an exhibition at the Pitt Gallery, titled "Square Configuration Study" opening on January 9th. It could be said that Jugdeo uses props, objects, video in sculptural configurations that evoke absurd narratives, or, just as accurately that Judgdeo creates theatrical configurations which evoke sculpture. Sculptural objects feature in the videos and videos feature in the sculptural objects. There is a back and forth exchange, sometimes involving language, between the animate and the inanimate, in Jugdeo's installations. Describing one of Jugdeo's installations in ArtReview, Ed Schad, writes, "The absurdity creates a disjoint between the uncertain or undefined and universals. "Hurry up and mean something" is said in desperation at one point.

Althea Thauberger

2008

Althea Thauberger very recently produced a work called "Carrall Street" through artspeak gallery. It was an evening in which the artist cordoned off one block of Carall Street in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. The resulting pedestrian-only street was lit with film-style lights and animated by several different types of performances, from the nearly invisible, to theatrical recreations of historical moments which pertain to the area. Thauberger also worked with various neighbourhood groups including those on the streets of this historical area which presently faces many challenges including drugs, poverty, and gentrification. The work is in keeping with Thauberger's larger practice. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves collaboration with a group or community that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings, and books. Thauberger gravitates towards social enclaves – groups of people who exist or develop in some form of seclusion and are often perpetuated by social controls – that are both coercive and voluntary. Thauberger's performances have involved diverse groups including young Canadian female singer/songwriters, U.S. military wives, Canadian tree planters, Vancouver-based reserve soldiers, and male youth in the German civil service. These amateur performers express concepts of self-definition, alienation, and community through their stories.

Thauberger's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work has been presented at Manifesta 7, Trento, Itlay; the Gaungzhou Triennial, China; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2008; Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008; BAK, Utrecht, 2007; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2006; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, 2006; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, 2006; Singapore History Museum, 2006; Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, 2005; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, 2005; Berkeley Art Museum, 2005; Insite, San Diego/Tijuana, 2005; White Columns, New York, 2004; and Seattle Art Museum, 2004. In 2008 she will be traveling to the Canadian Forces Base in Kandahar, Afghanistan to work on a collaborative photograph with military members there.

Althea Thauberger is based in Vancouver.

Ron Tran

8 October 2008

Ron Tran is a Vancouver-based artist whose practice explores the ways that chance and coincidence influence daily life. Tran uses a subtle methodology of interaction and collaboration to produce works in a variety of media which appear as quiet, playful interpersonal gestures. Tran often inserts art into public life through absurdity, physical endurance and provocation. For instance his recent work at the Western Front Gallery featured only a low quality wooden door in the gallery. This, however was Tran's apartment door which he had removed and which he lived without for the duration of the exhibition. His work could be described as exploring issues of power and cultural anxiety as well as engaging with the critical potential of humour. Tran studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Canada including Saidye Bronfman Centre, Helen Pitt Gallery, Artspeak Gallery, Access Artist Run Centre, and Charles H. Scott gallery. Tran has also exhibited in Liu-Haisu Museum Shanghai, China. Recently, Tran was selected to be in East International 2007 Norwich England, and completed his two months residency in Sweden at Neon Gallery. Tran's recent work is on display at Lawrence Eng Gallery, Vancouver.

Jamelie Hassan

2008

Jamelie Hassan is a visual artist and activist based in London, Ontario, Canada. Since the 1970's she has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. In 1993 she was presented the "Canada 125 Medal" in recognition to her outstanding service to the community and in 2001 she received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. She received the Chalmers Art Fellowship in 2006 and Canada Council for the Arts Award in 2007. Her interdisciplinary works incorporate ceramic, painting, video, photography, text and other media and explore personal and public histories.  Her recent installation Garden of Light was selected for the Pearson Garden of Peace & Understanding at University of Toronto for the city's first Nuit Blanche, September 30, 2006.Jamelie Hassan curated the exhibition Orientalism & Ephemera which opens at Centre A on March 14th.

Stefan Römer

2008

As a resident with the visual art area in collaboration with the OR Gallery, Stefan Roemer will give an artist talk, screen the film conceptual Paradise and conduct a seminar In three years of filmic research, the artist and author Stefan Römer has interviewed numerous outstanding international artists with his film team. In engaging in intellectual exchanges before the camera, Stefan Römer is able to develop a special filmic mode of reflecting on the state of international contemporary art.

The film essay Conceptual Paradise: There Is a Place for Sophistication traces out the debates that allowed the intellectual art movement of Conceptual art to emerge in the 1960s and led to the most relevant questions in art today. The artists speak about their own artistic practices and the socio-historical development of the various conceptual movements. In so doing, it becomes clear that there can be no one valid definition of conceptual art, since a permanent engagement also makes up its theoretical and philosophical complexity, including for example the question of whether there can be art without an object.

In these discussions with the most interesting artists and art theorists alive today, the fiction and ideal of art as political engagement are brought to life. The history of art is a history of struggles around strategies of representation. This makes this film about Conceptual art also a film about filmmaking. Stefan Römer reflects in numerous passages of the film with the well-known German filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky about the documentary as a genre.

With the documentary essay Conceptual Paradise, Stefan Römer continues his analytic engagement with forms and modes of narrative for artistic documentation. Beside his extensive body of photography, his recent work includes the Super 8 film Corporate Psycho Ambient (235 media Köln on DVD 2004) and The Analysis of Beauty, a short film produced on the basis of single photographic montages (on the DVD Loop Pool by Graw Böckler, commissioned by Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 2005). His filmic praxis extends back before the period of video activism in the mid-1990s, including interview videos, for example on the 1993 exhibition Unfair, and numerous multimedia punk performances in the 1980s.

Screening CONCEPTUAL PARADISE
Wednesday, March 5th, 7.30 pm, Cinemateque

Seminar with Stefan Romer
Thursday, March 6th, 10.30 am - 4.00 pm, Alexander Studio

Lida Abdul

2008

Abdul’s video, film, photography, installation and performance works explore relationships between architecture and identity in post-war Afghanistan. Architectural ruins, many the result of numerous wars, appear throughout her landscapes as both real and surreal images. While acknowledging the devastation of conflict, the gestures of the men, women, and children depicted amidst the ruins in these works evoke, among many things, the survival, recovery, and resilience of this country.

Lida Abdul (b. 1973) was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. She lived in Germany and India as a refugee before relocating to the United States. Abdul has exhibited widely including solo presentations at the Afghanistan Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale; Central Asian Biennial; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff; and Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Netherlands. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at such venues as the Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil; the Kwangju Biennale, South Korea; and the Singapore Biennale; Tate Modern; Centre d’Art Contemporain de Bretigny, France; Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Milwaukee; ifa Galleries, Berlin and Stuttgart; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Le capc Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France; and Le Parvis, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Tarbes, France. Lida Abdul is represented by Giorgio Persano Gallery, Turin.

Lida Abdul’s survey exhibition at the Western Front is curated by Candice Hopkins and Makiko Hara.

www.lidaabdul.com

Jochen Becker

2008

Jochen Becker lives and works in Berlin as a critic (taz/die tageszeitung, springerin), project teacher (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich) and cultural producer (Baustop.randstadt,-/NGBK, Berlin, 1998; MoneyNations2/Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2000; Urban Control/Forum Stadtpark, Graz, 2001; Werkleitz Biennale, 2002). He is a founding member of BüroBert, co-editor of Copyshop – Kunstpraxis & politische Öffentlichkeit (1993), editor of BIGNES? on recent urban development, and co-editor, with Stephan Lanz, of Metropolen (2001), Space//Troubles (2003), Hier Entsteht (2004), Self-Service City: Istanbul (2004), City of COOP: Buenos Aires/Rio de Janeiro (2004), Kabul/Teheran 1979ff (2006) and Architektur auf Zeit (2006). In 2007 he launched the mediaZones book line, whose forthcoming titles include Nollywood, EuroMaps and Roaming Around.

Corin Sworn

2008

We are very fortunate to have Corin Sworn speaking at SFU as she will only be in Vancouver very briefly to install work at UBC for the Exponential Future Exhibition. Corin Sworn is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Her video work, drawings and sculpture examine how the proposed social organizing principles of architecture are complicated by the actual experience of the subjects that use them.  Corin graduated from Emily Carr Institute for Art and Design in 2002, following this she participated in a three month residency at the Bauhaus in Dessau. She has exhibited in group shows across Europe and North America including exhibitions at Gasworks, London and the Kunstverein Wolfsburg in Germany.  Most recently she has completed solo exhibitions in New York and Vancouver.

Tim Lee

2007

"When looked upon in a very matter of fact way one could sum up the practice of Vancouver-based artist Tim Lee as photographic or video-based performance work that addresses issues relating to cultural identity, art history (more specifically Conceptual art), popular culture (particularly Hollywood cinema and early hip hop music) and the notion of humour." – Jens Hoffmann

Recently Tim Lee has shown at Galerie Radiger Schottle, Munich, Lisson Gallery, London, Cohan and Leslie, New York, "Sliding Doors: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions", The Tate Modern, London, "All About Laughter", Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, and "Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre", Vancouver Art Gallery.  Tim Lee has an exhibition of new work, Remakes, Variations (1741-2049) opening on November 16th at Presentation House Gallery.

Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby

2007

The artists will screen their work followed by a discussion moderated by Laura Marks. They will be showing the following videos:

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure: 14 mins
Bad Ideas for Paradise: 20 mins
The New Freedom Founders (a trilogy): 26 mins
Being Fucked Up: 10 mins

In preparation for the discussion, you can find on their website articles under the "writing" section: dukeandbattersby.com/m-writing. Of particular interest is an article that Emily Vey Duke wrote with her brother Peter Duke, entitled "Suffering, Empathy, Art and the Greater Good."

Barry Schwabsky

2007

Barry Schwabsky is an American art critic and poet living in London. He is co-editor of international reviews for Artforum and also writes regularly for such publications as The Nation, Art in America, and Afterall. He will be speaking on "Painting after Photography." Everyone is welcome to attend. The talk will be of particular interest to Visual Art students and Art and Culture Studies students. Here are some links to Barry's recent reviews: A Painter of Our Time and Modern Love Octoberfest.