Tag Archives: alumni

Brain Jungen Exhibition

January 22, 2016News and Eventsalumni, exhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

Brian Jungen
22 January – 27 February, 2016

Catriona Jeffries is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Brian Jungen featuring his most recent sculptural work. Using new Air Jordan trainers, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015, Jungen returns to a material he is both familiar with and continues to experiment through. Adopting an alternative approach to dissecting and rearranging the material that was developed in earlier work, these new sculptures are produced using the same tools that were utilized to manufacture them: band saw, punches, rivets, drills and an industrial sewing machine, personalizing their industrial production.
As the shoes themselves have changed in terms of design and colour schemes over time, so has the artist’s strategy of using them as representational objects of colonial and First Nation art histories merging with contemporary collective imagery. These new works become more abstract and colorful, continuing to allow the material of the shoe itself to guide his decision about their form and assembly while pushing the possibilities of material depiction. Utilizing as much of the shoe as possible in their production, these objects minimize extraneous material and armatures and act as free standing sculptures.
The resulting works are less a direct representation and contain more a suggestion of animal and human faces, taking advantage of how we innately search for and recognize these particular patterns. This phenomena, oscillating between representation and abstraction, has historically been used in the visual representation of diverse mythologies. It could be argued that myths are always born from trauma and intertwine with the uncanny and supernatural, itself by definition unknown and indescribable. Considering our continued abstraction of faces and bodies through masks and dress, these works can be considered in direct relation to the diverse but unified aesthetics of contemporary global economic, political and cultural conflict.

http://catrionajeffries.com/exhibitions/current/

James Harry

January 22, 2016News and Eventsalumni, exhibitions, opening doorsAboriginal Gathering Place

In some ways, this piece is inspired by my father Xwalaktun’s carvings and how the thunderbird and bear are relational to his work. I created the thunderbird and bear as the centre of my piece with an angled perspective, as if you are looking up at them. This piece is about my identity and how I have been affected by the people in my life and who I look up to.
Closer to the ground, the piece becomes more obscure and abstract; a spirit representation. These abstractions are influenced by my lifelong interest in formline and Coast Salish artwork, as well as observation of organic landscapes and ecosystems. Although we never had a written language I view carving these abstractions as if writing poetry; obscuring and abstracting visual language and ideas to alter and create a different meaning.

I spent most of my childhood and early adolescence learning First Nations form and design from my father, Xwalacktun, a master carver of the Squamish Nation. I developed my own techniques and artistic methodology after fully understanding the traditional foundation of his work. Materials I turn to are metal, red and yellow cedar, lighting, paint, fabrics and found objects to create installations, sculptures, paintings, and film.   I have been given the unique opportunity to approach my art from the different perspectives provided by my complex ethnic background: Euro-Canadian, Coast Salish and Kwakwaka‘wakw, ethically I am responsible for representing the intrinsic values of my First Nations culture. My goal is to continually challenge non-Native and Native definitions and assumptions of what is traditional, spiritual and environmentally ethical. Drawing influence from urban and rural, and by Native and non-Native cultures. I explore concepts of community and identity, reflecting in the study of cultural theory. Through the combination of familiar symbolism of West Coast form-line, modern media and techniques, my work pushes the boundaries of First Nations cultural traditions and the way the world functions around the confines of these understandings. I want to broaden the place held by Native art and culture in the world of contemporary art.

Xwa Lack Tun

January 20, 2016News and Eventsalumni, exhibitions, opening doorsAboriginal Gathering Place

Xwa Lack Tun (Rick Harry), Squamish Nation. Xwa-lack-tun was born and raised in Squamish. His mother is originally from Squamish and Alert Bay (Coast Salish, Kwakiutl) while his father was Coast Salish (Squamish). Xwa-lack-tun was given his indigenous name by his father, Pekultn, who was a hereditary chief, originally from the Seymour Creek area. This artist gained his skills and education from Emily Carr College of Art and Capilano College, but also feels he learned a lot through trial and error.
Xwa-lack-tun is an artist whose works are recognized internationally. In 2005 he received an honorable award from the North Vancouver Arts Council, which acknowledged his contributions both locally and world-wide. Harry’s art focuses on how the traditional stories relate to his life, and how this knowledge can assist us all in healing ourselves. Respect for all people, regardless of race or religion, is a central theme for Xwa-lack-tun.

For more information about please visit his website at:
xwalacktun.ca

Raymond Boisjoly shortlisted for 2015 Sobey art award

June 5, 2015News and Eventsalumni, facultyAboriginal Gathering Place

Created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation, the Sobey Art Award is Canada’s preeminent award for contemporary Canadian art. The annual $50,000 prize is given to an artist under 40 who has exhibited in a public generic viagra or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated.
The 2015 Shortlist, announced June 3, 2015, includes alumnus Raymond Boisjoly (’06), representing the West Coast and the Yukon. Raymond is an Indigenous artist of Haida and Quebecois descent from Chilliwack, BC. He has previously taught at Emily Carr as cialis super active sessional faculty and we’re pleased to announce he australian pharmacy degree canada will join us August 1 as Assistant Professor genericcialis-rxtopstore.com in the Faculty of Visual Art and Material Practice, Audain School of Visual Arts.
Raymond is the recipient of the Fleck Fellowship at the Banff Centre (2010), and has exhibited locally at SFU Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, where he is currently cialis for bph reviews represented.
The 2015 Sobey Art Award winner will be announced at a gala event on October cialis 20 mg bottle 28, 2015.

Lyle Wilson Artist Talk

January 27, 2015News and Eventsalumni, artist talkAboriginal Gathering Place

Please join us for a talk with acclaimed artist Lyle Wilson at the Aboriginal Gathering Place on Thursday February 19 at 4:30pm.

Lyle Wilson was born in 1955 and raised in the Haisla community of Kitamaat, near the townsite of Kitamat, south of Prince Rupert, in British Columbia.

The Haisla Clan system is matrilineal and although Wilson was born into the Beaver Clan, he was formally adopted into his father’s Eagle Clan, and thus a stylized image of the Eagle crest often appears as the artist’s signature in his prints and drawings.

Wilson was enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s Native Indian Teacher Education Program (NITEP) in 1976. Wilson and went on to study fine arts and education at both the University of BC and the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. He graduated with a Print-Making Diploma and began to develop his individual artistic style. This style has its roots in graphics but the concepts learned from all his life experiences — including his formal education — is to be seen in his three dimensional works in wood and jewellery.

Jennifer Pighin creates designs for 2015 Winter Games

January 20, 2015News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

Team BC has partnered with Lheidli T’enneh artist, Jennifer commissioned three unique designs that will be used on Team BC apparel and pins for the 2015 Canada Winter Games.
Jennifer was born and raised in Prince George and is a proud council member of the Lheidli T’enneh.Holding a Bachelor of Arts from Emily Carr, as well as a Bachelor of Education from UBC, she currently teaches art at Prince George Secondary School. “I am excited to be part of this project as it involves youth. Opportunities like this are so uplifting and the chance to share the pride of our culture and our province is exciting.”
Growing up on the North Nechako River, Jennifer developed a true understanding of and strong enduring bond with the natural environment which comes through in the three designs she created for Team BC.
The Team BC scarf is a unique design of a sockeye salmon, a staple food of the interior people. Jennifer explained, “Salmon take a phenomenal journey to Prince George and they are nothing like they were when they started, changing colours and becoming lean as they move up the river.” Athletes and coaches from across Canada will also be making an incredible journey to arrive in Prince George for the Games.

Krista Belle Stewart at the CAG

January 7, 2015News and Eventsalumni, exhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by artist Krista Belle Stewart  Motion and Moment Always
January 23 to February 15, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, January 22, 7-10pm.
Stewart’s practice reclaims personal and cultural narratives from archival material, situating them in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous discourse and engaging the complexities of intention and interpretation. Within this reframing of documents, Stewart’s new installation considers First Nations women’s self-representation and sovereignty. Central to the exhibition is an ongoing project, a bucket filled with distinctive dried clay from land owned by Stewart on the Douglas Lake reservation, and passed down to her from her mother’s family. Not only is this a physical connection to her heritage but also a poetic response to the continued dispossession of First Nations women’s land rights.  Working with her own personal stories and those of the women she met in Nisga’a, Stewart investigates how cultural knowledge is created and exchanged, weaving together new lens-based works with archival photographs and objects from the Nisga’a Museum. These include an image originally shot by Benjamin Haldane, a Tsimshian photographer from Alaska, picturing a Nisga’a woman in a full chief’s regalia surrounded by men dressed in traditional and western clothing. Typical of his work, it offers an example of First Nations self-representation, a counter to the more usual colonial-settler’s gaze.
There is a kinship between Haldane’s and Stewart’s practices through the production of complex and diverse documents of First Nations self-representation. Within this Stewart infiltrates narratives of colonial culture and reasserts connections to pre-colonial traditions while considering the tensions present between institutions as colonial support structures and as living entities shaped by the community they represent.
Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and is currently an MFA candidate at Bard College in New York. At Western Front, Stewart produced a collaborative multimedia performance working with, circa 1918, wax-cylinder recordings by anthropologist James Alexander Teit of her great-grandmother, Terese Kaimetko. Most recently, Stewart was commissioned by the City of Vancouver as part of the “Year of Reconciliation,” Public Art Project where Her Story (2014), a public photo mural and video installation, utilized footage of a 1967 CBC documentary entitled Seraphine: Her Own Story, a scripted interpretation of her mother’s journey from residential school to becoming BC’s first Aboriginal public health nurse. This work was also exhibited in Where Does it Hurt? at Artspeak (2014). Stewart juxtaposes the 1967 film, in which her mother plays herself, alongside a video of her mother’s 2013 Truth and Reconciliation Commission interview, generating a conversation between depiction and lived experience.

Screening and Talk- Krista Belle Stewart  Western Front, 303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver Thursday, January 29, 7pm

Alumni Spotlight: Robert Davidson

January 7, 2015News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

Robert Davidson (Haida name: guud san glans) is one of Canada’s most important contemporary artists. He has been immensely influential in the direction that modern Northwest Coast art has developed and over the last five decades he has set a standard that many artists in this field have sought to emulate. He is a master in every medium, including wood, gold, silver, argillite, silkscreen and bronze.
Davidson belongs to the Eagle clan and his Haida name is guud san glans, Eagle of the Dawn. Born in Hydaburg, Alaska, in 1946, he grew up in Old Massett, Haida Gwaii. At the early age of 13, he received training as an argillite and wood carver from his father, Claude Davidson, and grandfather, Robert Davidson Senior. Davidson’s great grandfather, Charles Edenshaw, was a renowned turn-of-the-century Haida artist. Much of Davidson’s cultural knowledge of Haida traditions was passed down to him by his paternal grandmother Florence Davidson, who had been raised in the old Haida ways.
In the late 1960s, Davidson apprenticed with Bill Reid and studied at the Vancouver School of Art. In 1969 he carved and raised a 40-foot totem pole in Old Massett which was the first to be raised in the village since 1871. He has since carved many totem poles for public institutions as well as private collectors around the world. In 1993 the Vancouver Art Gallery had a major retrospective exhibition of Davidson’s work. Eagle of the Dawn chronicled Davidson’s and its influence on contemporary Northwest Coast Art. In 2007 this was expanded on in a solo exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, The Abstract Edge focused on Davidson’s abstract work and the exploration and expansion of the Haida culture within it. As Davidson states: “The Haida Philosophy is what bred the art, and now the art has become the catalyst for us to explore the philosophy” (from “The Abstract Edge”)
Davidson has always taken seriously his trusteeship of his Haida knowledge and much of the focus of his life has been about reclaiming and exploring Haida art, song and story. In 1995 he received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for his contribution to First Nations art and culture. He holds numerous honourary degrees. He has received the Order of British Columbia, and in 1996 was awarded the prestigious Order of Canada. He received both the Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts in 2010.

To learn more visit: http://www.robertdavidson.ca

Claiming Space Exhibition at MOA

December 16, 2014News and Eventsalumni, exhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

Claiming Space: Voices of Urban Aboriginal Youth looks at the diverse ways urban Aboriginal youth are asserting their identity and affirming their relationship to both urban spaces and ancestral territories. Unfiltered and unapologetic, over 20 young artists from across Canada, the US, and around the world define what it really means to be an urban Aboriginal youth today. In doing so they challenge centuries of stereotyping and assimilation policies. This exhibit will leave visitors with the understanding that today’s urban Aboriginal youth are not only acutely aware of the ongoing impacts of colonization, but are also creatively engaging with decolonizing movements through new media, film, fashion, photography, painting, performance, creative writing and traditional art forms.

If you have a chance during the Holiday break, check out the Claiming Space exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology before it closes January 4th. It features the work of Emily Carr’s graduates and students from our degree program and Continuing Studies Summer Institutes including; Jeneen Frei Njootli, Ippiksaut Friesen, Ellena Neel, Diamond Point. Kelsey Sparrow, and Taleetha Tait

http://moa.ubc.ca/portfolio_page/claiming-space/

http://moa.ubc.ca/claimingspace/

Bracken Hanuse Corlett receives BC Creative Achievement Award for First Nations’ Art

November 27, 2014News and EventsalumniAboriginal Gathering Place

A member of the Wuikinuxv Nation, Bracken Hanuse Corlett is a graduate of the Enowkin Centre of Indigenous Art in Penticton and attended Emily Carr University of Art & Design (’11). He is a multi-disciplinary artist who began first working in theatre and performance prior to transitioning to digital-media and visual arts. Bracken represents a new face of Aboriginal art in Canada, with his ability to move between traditional and contemporary media with ease.
The BC Creative Achievement Awards for First Nations’ Art celebrate artistic excellence in traditional, contemporary or media art.
The awards were selected by jury members: renowned artist Robert Davidson, international photo-based artist Roy Arden, contemporary visual art curator Tania Willard, MOA’s curator emeritus Bill McLennan, and Kathleen Bartels, Director, Vancouver Art Gallery (non-voting chair).
The awards will be presented on November 28 at a ceremony in Vancouver.
Visit the British Columbia Achievement Foundation for the complete list of recipients.
See his work here: http://brackenstudio.weebly.com/