Strategies of Assembly presents print matter documenting over four decades of social, cultural and political life in this province, drawn from two collections held by SFU’s Special Collections & Rare Books: an expansive poster archive collected by Perry Giguere (aka “Perry the Poster Man”), and a series of photographs taken for the weekly Vancouver labour newspaper, the Pacific Tribune. A singular print by Black Canadian artist Deanna Bowen punctuates the installation.

Viewed together, these materials not only offer an historical overview of social life in BC. They also highlight enduring contentions between differing visions of the social itself, expressed through demands for better living conditions, struggles for fair wages and working hours, transparency in public spending, Indigenous sovereignty, ecological preservation, and freedom of expression.

Any such history of social gatherings is also, by definition, a history of exclusions. It is a history of those unable or unallowed to gather, and of those whose gatherings have been permitted under “special conditions,” never far from the threat of sanction, discipline, and violence. It is a history of events whose documentations, if any, survive in forms inaccessible here.

Selected from the SFU Art Collection’s print holdings, Working Proof presents key works by four artists—Leslie J. Fawkes, Susan Gransby, Libby Hague, and Anna Wong—whose decades-long practices have consistently expanded the possibilities of printmaking.

The selections span an especially vibrant period of printmaking in Canada—between 1975 and 1990—when institutions such as the Malaspina Printmaking Society and the Print and Drawing Council of Canada, run by printmakers themselves, responded to growing public awareness of printmaking as an art form and furthered this interest through dedicated workshops and exhibitions.

Working Proof draws attention to the artists’ varied contributions to such institutions. Whether as educators, editors, or arts administrators, their individual printmaking practices went hand in hand with efforts to increase access to print education and to develop wider audiences for the medium.