Gallery 881 Archives - West Coast Curated

Gallery 881

881 East Hastings

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june, 2025

01febAll DayKihl ‘Yahda Christian White: Master Haida Artist(All Day: saturday) 639 Hornby StreetEvent Type:ExhibitionAdmission Type:Ticketed

Event Details

This exhibition is the first major solo exhibition of Haida artist Kihl ‘Yahda, Christian White. Guest curated by Sdahl Ḵ’awaas, Lucy Bell, also of the Haida Nation, the exhibition features artworks that span the entirety of Christian’s 50-year career, as well as collaborative works from several of his apprentices.

Christian White is of the Yahgulaanas Haida Raven Clan. Influenced by his father Chief Edenshaw, Christian and his family have been major forces in keeping the Haida culture, art and language alive. Early highlights of his career include the creation of a 35-foot pole with his father, and the carving of a sculpture titled Raven Dancer, which was purchased by the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, BC, when he was only 22 years old and the recent Tluuwée Kwiiyaas, a 52-foot canoe.

He is best known for his intricate argillite carvings, inlay work and monumental works. Christian also creates wood-carved masks and boxes, gold and silver jewelry, and steamed cedar canoes. He began carving argillite at fourteen and has been working as a full-time artist since the age of seventeen. In 2005, Christian constructed a traditional longhouse in his home village of Old Massett which is the home of Tluu Xaada Naay Society and dance group.

Time

All Day (Saturday)

Location

Bill Reid Gallery

639 Hornby Street

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12marAll Day09junColourwork by Angela Teng(All Day) 3642 Commercial StreetEvent Type:ExhibitionAdmission Type:Free

01aprAll Day30junSit Still(All Day) 10305 City Pkwy #105, Surrey, BCEvent Type:Exhibition

Event Details

The history of Blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.
In the Break – Fred Moten

How does the imposition and often demanding expectation of stillness traverse from being a gesture to a necessary apparatus of white supremacy? How many steps away from stillness would be needed to start a movement? How could the movement, stillness, and marked presence of Blackness be employed as both aesthetic and praxis of liberation, self-definition, and self-actualization? In Sit Still, exhibiting artists Arshi Chadha and Collin Patrick explore the tensions between the mandated stillness of the Black body and the urgency, negotiations, and movements that comprise the Black diasporic experience.

From the documentation of colonial subjects to the annotation of scenes of subjugation during enslavement, the camera has been used as a weapon not only to mark Blackness as the diminished other but further as a tool of control, power, and dispossession, with the image asserting itself as a neutral depiction of reality. In this vein, the stillness captured through the lens’s aperture is rife with politics, meaning, and definition cast onto the subject’s likeness from elsewhere.

As cognizant observers—and perhaps victims—of the intrusion of stillness and inexpression on Black life, Chadha and Patrick’s lens-based and material practices establish themselves as an inquiry into the politics of neutrality and the extended uses of self-representation through gesture, abstraction, and physical and psychic interventions that ponder how images are defined and the relationship between the image’s subject, viewer, and documentarian.