Tag Archives: exhibitions

Pushing Boundaries 2019

October 10, 2019News and Eventsalumni, exhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

CityScape Community ArtSpace | October 11 – November 16, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 10 from 7 – 9pm

Pushing Boundaries is a biennial group exhibition showcasing and celebrating contemporary Indigenous artists.

Indigenous cultures across North America use blankets in symbolic ways throughout their communities. These artists reference the narratives rooted in their own nations and relate them back to pattern, textile, shape, form or material. The blanket metaphor represents a way that we can use the deep connections of spirit while pushing a contemporary perspective on Indigenous ways of knowing.

James (Nexw’Kalus-Xwalacktun) Harry

Participating artists include: Cheximiya Allison Burns Joseph, Krystle Coughlin, Ocean Hyland, Atheana Picha, Michelle Sound, Manuel Axel Strain, Xwalacktun, Richard Heikkilä-Sawan, and Tiyaltelwet Melanie Rivers.

Curated by James (Nexw’Kalus-Xwalacktun) Harry.

Poster Image: HBC Trapline by Michelle Sound

Oneself, and one another

July 19, 2018News and Eventsalumni, exhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

Oneself, and one another

Lita Fontaine, Whess Harman, Meagan Musseau, Rhayne Vermette
Curated by Jennifer Smith
6pm Friday 20 July 2018
The aceartinc. & National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition’s Indigenous Curator In Residence, invite you to the opening of Oneself, and one another.
Funded by The Winnipeg Foundation.The blanket use of the word ‘Indigenous’ can eclipse the incredible diversity within Indigenous cultures across Turtle Island. Oneself, and one another is an exploration of this and the inter-identities of Indigenous artists in Canada. Each of the four artists creates work about their own distinct culture, interests and lives. What we discover is how non-homogenity is itself a defining feature of Indigenous culture, a means of working together, and a source of great power.The great power brings together four artists, who independent of each other explore ideas of gender, multiple cultural identities, tradition, age, territory, the Dakota Nation, the Metis Nation, the Mi’kmaq Nation, Lake Babine Nation, environmental issues, history, punk culture, decolonization, the lives of artists and Indigeneity. Together the artists form an exhibition that places their Indigeneity at the centre, but makes room to celebrate each difference and explore how combined each difference strengthens each other.

Whess Harman is a queer, mixed-race, trans/non-binary artist, born in prince rupert, BC in 1990 and is a member of the Lake Babine Nation. Their work uses multi-media strategies in print, text and illustration to address issues of representation and memory. Whess completed a BFA at emily carr university in 2014. They have attended residencies at the banff art centre in 2014 and 2016 and at plug-in ICA in winnipeg in 2017. On-going work in includes beadwork and DIY strategies around punk aesthetics creating “Indigenous Punk” jacket series, as well as text based wheat-pasting projects.

Scháyilhen Visual Arts Exhibition

February 5, 2018News and Eventsalumni, exhibitions, studentsAboriginal Gathering Place

Salmon Going Up River (Scháyilhen) immediately invokes a sense of urgency, of struggle, of passion. Questions arise: is it about the journey, the destination, the mission, or is the motive of greatest significance? Is failure an option?

Twelve Indigenous artists have been gathered to address the notion of Salmon Going Up River. From Danielle Bobier’s inorganic grid-lines and circular pools evocative of the built environment in Catchment Area (2017) routed from salvaged mahogany plywood; to Shain Jackson’s twenty-foot natural and painted red cedar with abalone inlay Legacy salmon sculpture; and collections of found objects as in Jay Haven’s Bargain Hunter made from bags gathered from retail stores on reserves throughout British Columbia—themes and stories begin to unravel.
Within a climate of reconciliation, the metaphor of Salmon Going Up River speaks about remembering, of going home—it’s about the future and of survival. It is directional, of going forward by way of the past. Yet, the past at best serves as a guidepost. The journey is arduous and painful, fraught with seemingly impossible barriers demanding multiple attempts to overcome—bruises and battle scars added at each rung. Fight we must, but with each other? Is the river and its many obstacles not battle enough?
There are resting pools along the way—so easy to linger; to set up residence. Complacency threatens. And so the conversation begins.

Richard Heikkilä-Sawan exhibition curator, Talking Stick Festival 2018

Artists:

Dates & Time:
Opening & Reception: February 14, 2018 @ 7pm
Exhibition: February 14-24, 2018, 10am – 10pm
Location:
Roundhouse Performance Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2W3)

Maureen Gruben QULLIQ: In Darkness, Light

January 15, 2018News and EventsexhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

Maureen Gruben
QULLIQ: In Darkness, Light

2 February to 15 April 2018
Opening Reception Thursday, Feb 1 at 7:30 pm
Artist walk-through Friday, Feb 2 at 12:00 pm

The Libby Leshgold Gallery is pleased to present QULLIQ: In Darkness, Light, a solo exhibition of new work by Maureen Gruben. The qulliq is a traditional oil lamp that was once the heart of the home. It was used to heat, to cook and to bring continuous light during the darkness of the Arctic winter. The new work included in this exhibition explores notions of light and transparency related to the light of the oil lamp as well as the translucence of ice.

Gruben forges critical links between threatened Arctic lands and communities, and international environmental and human conditions through disassembling and re-forming polar bear fur, moose hides, seal skins, gathered kelp. In her work, abstraction of form sits in active tension with the acutely ‘real’ presence of her geographically and culturally embedded mediums.

Gruben spent much of her childhood sewing with her mother, who was a seamstress, and trapping with her father. She has a tacit knowledge of Arctic land and the rich but increasingly precarious resources it offers. Frequently addressing themes such as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), melting ice, and the rights of indigenous hunters to maintain their way of life, Gruben’s practice is permeated with activism while at the same time allowing generous room for her materials themselves to speak. While referring explicitly inwards to localised acts of hunting, gathering, communal preparation and sharing—and even to individual animals—her work, equally, extends decisively outwards, exploring new visual languages that offer compelling and often urgent global associations.

Maureen Gruben is based in Victoria, BC and Tuktoyaktuk, NWT. She was born in Tuktoyaktuk and studied at Kelowna Okanagan College of Fine Arts (Diploma in Fine Arts, 1990), the Enʼowkin Centre in Penticton (Diploma in Fine Arts and Creative Writing, 2000 and Certificate in Indigenous Political Development & Leadership, 2001), and University of Victoria (BFA, 2012). She has been recognized by Kelownaʼs En’owkin Centre with both their Eliza Jane Maracle Award (1998/99) and their Overall Achievement Award (1999/2000). In 2011 she was awarded the Elizabeth Valentine Prangnell Scholarship Award from the University of Victoria. Gruben has most recently exhibited in the group shows Blink at University of Victoria (2012) and Custom Made at Kamloops Art Gallery (2015), 150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact at Art Gallery of Guelph (2017-18), and as part of Landmarks/Reperes2017; her first solo show, UNGALAQ (When Stakes Come Loose) opened at Vancouver’s grunt gallery in 2017.

Pushing Boundaries Exhibition

September 22, 2017News and Eventsalumni, exhibitions, studentsAboriginal Gathering Place

This biennial exhibition showcases and celebrates contemporary local, national and international First Nations artists. Through carvings, portraiture drawings, digital images, textile work, video and more, themes of family, reconciliation, indigenous life, gender, race, politics and nature are explored.

Artists:

Arlene Bowman, Allison Burns, Krystle Coughlin, Alanna Edwards, Dan Friday, Geronimo, Whess Harman, Adele Maskwa-iskwew Arseneau, Shelley McDonald, Ryan McKenna, Levi Nelson, Jacqueline Primeau, Michelle Sound

North Vancouver Community Arts Council

Located at
CityScape Community Art Space
335 Lonsdale Avenue
North Vancouver, BC

Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries

June 16, 2017News and EventsexhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

Third year ECU Visual Arts student Lacie Kanerahtahsóhon Burning will be co-curating Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries with June Scudeler for Queer Arts Festival in partnership with Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival.

Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries is the media art component of the festival that will feature commissioned works by Thirza Cuthand (ECU alumna) and Chandra Melting Tallow, as well as past work by Kent Monkman and Raven Davis.

After the show, Lindsay Nixon, Indigenous Editor-at-large for Canadian Art will moderate a panel discussion.

Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries

June 23 | 7:00pm | Roundhouse

Tickets and information

Kwèykw`áystway Visual Arts Exhibition

February 8, 2017News and Eventsalumni, exhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

The 2017 Talking Stick Festival theme Kwèykw`áystway serves as inspiration for finding a wide variety of works by a number of artists whose visual practice communicates across media, Nations and generations.

Featuring a collection of artworks from 11 multidisciplinary artists of Indigenous ancestry, the exhibition Kwèykw`áystway: Speaking With One Another attempts to create generative spaces for contemplation and conversation using the variety of expression found in Indigenous art today. The Roundhouse Community Centre serves as the meeting place for you, the audience, to witness some of the voices belonging to the Indigenous arts community.

This exhibition includes a number of artists who come from varying areas of British Columbia or reside here. It seems only fitting to use the festival theme as the title for this show because it is this place – the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Nations – that brings us together today in celebration of art and culture. By using a language belonging to this region we recognize the traditional territory and deepen our relationship to the land around us.

Includes Emily Carr alumni and students:
Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Richard Heikkila-Sawan, Edwin Neel,
Levi Nelson, and Michelle Sound.

Opening & Reception
February 15th, 2017
7:00 PM

Exhibition
February 16-25, 2017
All Day

LOCATION: Roundhouse Exhibition Hall
(181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2W3

Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures

December 1, 2016News and Eventsalumni, exhibitions, facultyAboriginal Gathering Place

Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures
December 3, 2016 to April 17, 2017

The Vancouver Art Gallery is pleased to launch Vancouver Special, a triennial exhibition surveying contemporary art in Vancouver. Co-curated by Daina Augaitis and Jesse McKee, Ambivalent Pleasures, the first iteration within this series, assesses the arts activity and discourse in the city over the last five years. Presenting works by forty artists, the exhibition encompasses a range of approaches and reinvigorated explorations of surrealism, abstraction, atemporality and conceptual practices.

Cover Image:Accumulation of Moments Spent Underwater With the Sun and Moon by Charlene Vickers is one of the works in Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures. Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

We Come to Witness: Sonny Assu in Dialogue with Emily Carr

December 1, 2016News and Eventsalumni, exhibitionsAboriginal Gathering Place

We Come to Witness: Sonny Assu in Dialogue with Emily Carr
December 3, 2016 to April 23, 2017

Artist’s Tour: Sonny Assu
We Come to Witness: Sonny Assu in Dialogue with Emily Carr
Saturday December 3, 1pm & 3pm
In the Gallery, 4th floor

Join interdisciplinary artist Sonny Assu for a tour of his exhibition In Dialogue with Emily Carr: Sonny Assu. Challenging the colonial gaze, Assu merges Indigenous
iconography with a pop art sensibility to intervene into the work of Modernist painter Emily Car and her representations of the landscape and First Nations people. Assu will discuss select sculptural works, his ongoing series Interventions on the
Imaginary, which includes digital tags based on a selection of Carr paintings from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection and a new collaboration with ceramic artist
Brendan Tang.

Free for Members or with Gallery Admission.

Sonny Assu
Spaced Invaders, 2014
digital intervention on an Emily Carr Painting (Heina, 1928)
Courtesy of the Artist

Boarder X

November 22, 2016News and Eventsexhibitions, facultyAboriginal Gathering Place

Boarder X
November 19, 2016 to April 23, 2017
Winnipeg Art Gallery

Boarder X features new work by Indigenous artists that use snowboarding, skateboarding, and surfing to demonstrate knowledge and relationships to the land. The artwork reflects cultural, political, environmental, and social perspectives related to the landscapes and territories we occupy. These boarding lifestyles share synergies with Indigeneity, connected by an appreciation for the land and water. The exhibit reveals how culture, art, and board intersect. In this context, board culture works to examine contested spaces, political borders, hybrid identities, and traditional territories.

Artists: Jordan Bennett, Roger Crait, Steven Davies, Mark Igloliorte, Mason Mashon, Meghann O’Brien, and Les Ramsay

Curated by Jaimie Isaac, WAG Curatorial Resident of Indigenous & Contemporary Art