Tag Archives: alumni

Kwèykw`áystway Visual Arts Exhibition

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

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What’s At Stake? Intertextual Indigenous Knowledges

Saturday, February 4, 2017
12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
World Art Centre, SFU, 149 West Hastings, Vancouver

What’s At Stake? Intertextual Indigenous Knowledges is an afternoon of talks, panels and a spoken word performance that examines knowledge, power, authority, and sovereignty in the construction of artistic practices.

Following on Intertextual: Art in Dialogue, a roving reading group that was held at participating galleries over the last year, this program is meant to function less like a syllabus and more like a web of ideas. Taking the critical historiography of Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A Changing History of Ideas (UBC Press, 2013) as a point of provocation, this event belongs to an intertextual discussion of artistic practice and the role of art institutions (from artist-run centres to public gallery models) in Vancouver.

Intertextual aims to examine/critique and create/support a community based in text, recognizing the process of selection and concomitant erasure that occurs in any process of representation.

Beginning with a welcome by Musqueam artist and knowledge keeper Debra Sparrow and concluding with a spoken word performance by Nuu-chah-nulth/Kwakwaka’wakw poet Valeen Jules, the afternoon features talks by notable cultural figures involved in Indigenous art: art historian Charlotte Townsend Gault, Nuu-chah-nulth historian, poet and artist Ron Hamilton (Ki-Ke-In), Kwakwaka’wakw artist, activist and scholar Marianne Nicolson, and Cree curator and scholar Richard Hill, Canada Research Chair at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In addition, a lively discussion between Vancouver Indigenous scholars, curators and artists – Lindsay Lachance, Jordan Wilson, Jeneen Frei Nijootli and Jennifer Kramer – promises to be a highlight.

This series has been produced with the participation of SFU Galleries, Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, Contemporary Art Gallery, grunt gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology, Presentation House Gallery, UBC Press, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Western Front.

Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures

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.

Artists:
Derya Akay | Maya Beaudry | Raymond Boisjoly | Eli Bornowsky | Rebecca Brewer | Colleen Brown | Matt Browning | Mark Delong | Kim Dorland | Barry DoupÉ | Michael Drebert | Julia Feyrer | Jeneen Frei Njootli | Tamara Henderson | Colleen Heslin | Julian Hou | Allison Hrabluik | Gareth James | Garry Neill Kennedy | Tiziana La Melia | Khan Lee | Arvo Leo | Lyse Lemieux | Glenn Lewis | Anne Low | Elizabeth McIntosh | Jordan Milner | Antoni Oko | Ryan Peter | Sylvain Sailly | Rachelle Sawatsky | Walter Scott | Krista Belle Stewart | Angela Teng | Mina Totino | Ron Tran | Tristan Unrau | Charlene Vickers | Brent Wadden | Alison Yip

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

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.
assu

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

Alumni Honoured with BC First Nations Art Awards

Emily Carr University is delighted to share news that alumni Xwalacktun (’82) and Luke Parnell (MAA ’12) have been awarded BC Creative Achievement Awards for First Nations Art. This annual award celebrates artistic excellence in traditional, contemporary or media art.

“These 2016 award recipients, continue a tradition of excellence in First Nations Art that the Foundation has had the privilege of honouring over the past decade. We thank Polygon Homes, its Chair, Michael Audain, and its President, Neil Chrystal, for their tremendous commitment and support of the BC Creative Achievement Awards for First Nations Art.”
Keith Mitchell, BC Achievement Foundation Chair

Emily Carr Honorary Doctorate recipient Susan Point, a Coast Salish artist from Musqueam, will receive this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award, an honour bestowed on individuals who have made a profound contribution to their First Nations culture.

2016 Recipients:

Corrine Hunt – Kwakiutl / Komoyue
Maxine Matilpi – Ma’mtagila / Tlowitsis
Corey W. Moraes – Lax Kw’alaams
Luke Parnell – Nisga’a / Haida
Xwalacktun – Coast Salish / Squamish / Kwakwaka’wakw

Members of the jury panel included: world renowned carver and teacher Stan Bevan; Aboriginal Program Director at Emily Carr University, Brenda Crabtree; the Museum of Anthropology’s Curator Emeritus, Bill McLennan; and celebrated curator and artist, Tania Willard.

Screens and Thresholds

October 7 – December 4, 2016
Screens and Thresholds
Curated by Raymond Boisjoly

Friday, October 7, 7 PM:  Introduction with Raymond Boisjoly, Tricia Livingston, and Krista Belle Stewart, followed by opening reception

Thursday, October 13, 8 PM: Sound performance by Postcommodity

“Screens and Thresholds” considers the impact of mediation on our understanding of history and experience. Diverse works in photography, video, and installation are brought together to examine the anxieties and possibilities in visualizing cultural knowledge—from the limits of scientific objectivity, to the ways knowledge is transferred from one person to another, to the persistence of certain practices in changing circumstances. The exhibition highlights the processes of transformation, not simply their results; in this way, the works may be framed as “medial,” situated somewhere between a beginning and an end. “Screens and Thresholds” features the work of Scott Benesiinaabandan, Tricia Livingston, Mike MacDonald, Karthik Pandian, Krista Belle Stewart, and the art collective Postcommodity.

Raymond Boisjoly has exhibited widely across Canada and internationally. He received the 2016 VIVA Award and was also shortlisted for this year’s Sobey Art Prize. He is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

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Karthik Pandian, Oversight, (2011)

Cover Image, Scott Benesiinaabandan: little resistances: marylezin, 2015, digital media

Jeneen Frei Njootli

Alumna Jeneen Frei Njootli Receives a 2016 William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists

Emily Carr University of Art + Design is pleased to share news that alumna Jeneen Frei Njootli has been awarded one of three William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Canadian Artists through The Hnatyshyn Foundation. The $5,000 prizes are intended to nurture emerging talent in the visual arts in Canada.

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist and a founding member of the ReMatriate collective. In 2012, she graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and went on to a Visual Art Studio Work Study position at The Banff Centre, followed by two thematic residencies there. She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of British Columbia as an uninvited guest on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories. Performance artist, curator, fashion designer, workshop facilitator and crime-prevention youth-coordinator are some of the positions Frei Njootli has held while exhibiting across Canada. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at Macaulay & Co. Fine Arts in Vancouver, January 2017. Frei Njootli is from Old Crow, Yukon, and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Image by Ash Tanasiychuk for VANDOCUMENT

Alumnus Peter Morin Receives the 2016 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award

Emily Carr University is pleased to share news that The Hnatyshyn Foundation has named alumnus Peter Morin (’01) as the recipient of the 2016 Visual Arts Award for outstanding achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist. The award is accompanied by a $25,000 cash prize.

Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist, curator and writer. He recently relocated from British Columbia to Brandon Manitoba where he joined the Visual and Aboriginal Arts Faculty at Brandon University. In both his artistic practice and as his curatorial work Morin investigates the impact between indigenous cultural -based practices and western settler colonialism. This work,defined by Tahltan Nation epistemological production, often takes on the form of performance interventions. Morin has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Team Diversity Bannock and the World’s Largest Bannock attempt (2005), A return to the place where God outstretched hi s hand (2007); 12 Making Objects AKA First Nations DADA (12 Indigenous Interventions) (2009); Peter Morin’s Museum (2011); Peter Morin’s Ceremony Experiments 1 through 8 Circle (2013). In addition to his art making and performance -based practice, Morin has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery, and Yukon Art Centre.

Peter Morin’s interventions and projects take us outside our own experience and into a new space of humour and wisdom. His work as an artist, a teacher, and curator have defined him as a leader within a new generation of artists.”
Glenn Alteen, Juror

The award winners were selected by a panel of five experts:

Glenn Alteen – Curator and Writer, Co-founder and Program Director at grunt Gallery
David Balzer – Author, Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Art Magazine
Marie-Ève Beaupré – Curator at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
David Garneau– Artist, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina
Linda Graif –Art consultant

View some of Peter’s work below:
Peter Morin’s Museum

Raymond Boisjoly Exhibition

Raymond Boisjoly
Catriona Jeffries
16 September – 29 October, 2016
Opening reception: Thursday, 15 September, 7-9pm

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Matter out of place and out of time. Raymond Boisjoly’s most recent body of work, Discrepants, circulates around textual figures of temporal and spatial displacements. It is presented together with the correlating series “From age to age, as its shape slowly unraveled…” and a related exterior artwork on the side of the gallery itself. This constellation of works considers Sculptures Also Die, a 1953 anti-colonial film by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet, which poetically articulates what occurs when we come to look at African statuary as simply aesthetic objects. Art is presented as a category convenient to western thinking through which immense things can be reduced to manageable dimensions.

Boisjoly’s interest in the film Sculptures Also Die is in the way it mediates objects and focuses on how works by non-western peoples come to be understood as art. The work in the exhibition suggests the importance of looking at how this historical trajectory can be considered more broadly. From this general situation, and from his own specific position as an indigenous person, the artist considers that these same processes and transformations occur to the material of his own people. For historical example, totem poles of the Northwest Coast were cut down like trees and shipped to institutions all over the world, into a museological state they were never meant to be seen in.

Materially, all of the works in the exhibition use commercial consumer printing services rather than art printing. From inkjet ink on adhesive backed vinyl, to UV ink on flat vinyl with grommets, to exterior vinyl on aluminum frame. In order to foreground the existence of images culturally outside the bounded, if expanding realm of art, these printing methods concern the contingent character of art and its attendant practices.

For the project of “From age to age, as its shape slowly unraveled…”, Boisjoly began with a technique he has used previously, playing a video of the film on an iPhone, placing it on a scanner, which attempts to capture the image as it is moving, which of course is futile. This strategy creates strange, distorted, partial images that are outputted to large, adhesive inkjet on vinyl murals that are applied directly to the gallery walls. These create an alternate relationship to the exhibition space, in that they cannot be taken off the wall and moved around. To take them off the wall is to ultimately change them permanently. Instead of simply re-presenting historical images, this work draws attention to the method and time of its own altered transmission, implicating us in the creation of meaning in the present.

In this, there is an anxiety of the visual, the “thing” is never presented to you fully. While there are things that can be named in terms of recognizable imagery, there is obviously missing information. The text in the Discrepants series functions as a kind of withholding, manifesting a differing anxiety about imagery. It uses ambiguous statements that are in effect reflections on the general premise of the printed images. They are an attempt to discuss, as opposed to leaving them as images or simply as pictures. They reflect the discursive aspect of the image, where the images cannot speak in that way, offering a different entry point to a shared concern. Surrounding the text, Boisjoly has incorporated images of clouds and television noise. As a complex aggregate, a clouds existence and form is determined as multiple parts coalesce, water droplets combining to form vapor, similar in structure to complex social and cultural phenomena. The artist asks us to consider the film as a model for discrepancy, how we can imagine the possibilities of difference, and the future of the discrepant.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories

Vancouver artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, is showcased in this provocative exhibition of works that confront the colonialist suppression of First Nations peoples and the ongoing struggle for Indigenous rights to lands, resources, and sovereignty.

Twenty years since his last major Canadian solo show, Unceded Territories will demonstrate the progression of Yuxweluptun’s artistry and ideas through hard-hitting, polemical, but also playful artworks that span his remarkable 30- year career, featuring a selection of brand-new works exhibited publicly for the first time.

Co-curated by Karen Duffek (MOA Curator, Contemporary Visual Arts & Pacific Northwest) and Tania Willard (artist and independent curator, Secwepemc Nation), Unceded Territories promises colour and controversy through this display of over 60 of Yuxweluptun’s most significant paintings, drawings, and works in other media – a critical and impassioned melding of modernism, history, and Indigenous perspectives that records what the artist feels are the major issues facing Indigenous people today.

This exhibition will undoubtedly fuel dialogue, indignation, and even spiritual awareness as it tackles land rights, environmental destruction, and changing ideas about what we can expect of Indigenous art from the Northwest Coast. The issues Yuxweluptun addresses are impossible to ignore.

Yuxweluptun, an artist of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in BC. Influential as both artist and activist, Yuxweluptun merges traditional iconography with representations of the environment and the history of colonization, resulting in his powerful, contemporary imagery; his work is replete with masked fish farmers, super-predator oil barons, abstracted ovoids, and unforgettable depictions of a spirit-filled, but now toxic, natural world.

Highly respected locally, Yuxweluptun’s work has also been displayed in numerous international group and solo exhibitions, including the National Gallery of Canada’s special exhibition, Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art. In 1998, Yuxweluptun was the recipient of the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award. He was also honoured in 2013 with a prestigious Fellowship at the Eitelijorg Musem of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, where his art was featured in an exhibition and book, and was acquired for the museum’s permanent collection.

http://moa.ubc.ca/portfolio_page/lawrence-paul

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