Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo will be the second in what is envisioned as a series of exhibitions intended to provide an expansive look at contemporary art in the Greater Vancouver region. For the 2021 version of Vancouver Special, primary emphasis is on recent works that hold a particular resonance for this time and place that have not been previously exhibited in Vancouver. The exhibition will reflect the activity of both artists at an early point in their career and more established artists whose practices span several decades. Encompassing a variety of media, scale and modes of presentation, the artworks that comprise the exhibition address themes that include cultural resilience, the articulation of suppressed histories, the imagining of emancipated futures, the performance of identity and embodied knowledge.

Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo is organized by five co-curators: artist, curator and cultural critic Phanuel Antwi; artist, University of British Columbia assistant professor and curator Jeneen Frei Njootli; independent curator and author Jenn Jackson; artist and independent curator Christian Vistan; and Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Grant Arnold. The exhibition will feature work by artists Jim Adams, Afuwa, Simranpreet Anand, Lacie Burning, Charles Campbell, Patrick Cruz with Francis Cruz and Qian Cheng, Gabi Dao with John Brennan and Elisa Ferrari, Chief Janice George and ‘Buddy’ Willard Joseph, Simon Grefiel, Whess Harman, James Harry and Lauren Brevner, Odera Igbokwe, Kwiigay iiwaans, Chief Floyd Joseph, Katie Kozak, Yaimel López Zaldívar, Betty Mulat and Zam Zam Warsame of NuZi Collective, Oraf, Manuel Axel Strain, Valérie d. Walker, MV Williams, Lam Wong, Marika St. Rose Yeo and Kenneth Yuen.

Louie Palu’s documentary project provides a window into the evolving militarization of the North American Arctic, documenting the vestigial legacies of the Cold War and the increased military presence in the North today. The changes in the region are exacerbated by the many unknowns the Arctic faces, among them the warming of the planet and the increasing global traffic in the region. Over several years—from 2015 to 2018—what began for Palu as a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship evolved into an assignment for National Geographic magazine, as he deepened his engagement with his subject. Taken as a whole, the series examines the growing geopolitical tensions and changing life around Inuit communities in one of the planet’s most extreme and challenging places.

The first retrospective of Itee Pootoogook (1951–2014), this exhibition gathers more than 60 drawings from the late artist’s body of work. As one of the key members of the third generation of Inuit artists from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Itee contributed to the transformation of the creative traditions inherited from his elders at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative’s Kinngait Studios. The son of artists Ishuhungitok and Paulassie Pootoogook, cousin of Annie Pootoogook and nephew of Kananginak Pootoogook, he began his artistic practice in the 1970s with an experiment in film animation, later adopting drawing as his medium of choice. By the late 1990s, he was actively involved in his newfound career as a graphic artist at Kinngait Studios.

Known as a meticulous draftsperson and an inventive landscapist, Itee looked primarily to contemporary Northern life for his subject matter. Although he produced his compositions from a combination of memory and imagination, Itee also based many of his drawings on photographs, an aspect of his artistic process that further highlights his contemporaneity. Featuring a minimum of incident, these understated images celebrate the mundane moments that make up the everyday but also the flashes of unrivalled natural beauty that are the delight of all who live in the North.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully bilingual (English and Inuktitut) publication, which includes texts by guest curator Nancy Campbell as well as responses to Pootoogook’s work from prominent contemporary artists and art historians.

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver. Her painting, sculpture and performance works explore memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. She recreates moccasins and blankets with materials that point to current social and cultural conditions in urban First Nations life and combines them with personal artifacts.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, of Coast Salish descent, graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in British Columbia. Yuxweluptun is Salish for “man of many masks,” a name given to the artist during his initiation into the Sxwaixwe Society at the age of fourteen.  Lets’lo:tseltun was given to Lawrence by Sto:lo artist Laura Wee Lay Laq in 2018 and means “man of many colours.”  His paintings and sculptures combine Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast design, and Western landscape painting. Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun’s paintings can be brutal critiques of issues affecting Canada’s First Nations. He broaches topics such as land title, residential schools, and the destruction of the environment.

Interior Infinite brings together an international group of artists whose works span photography, video, performance, and sculpture. Predominantly featuring portraiture, with an emphasis on self-portraiture, the exhibition focuses on costume and masquerade as strategies for revealing, rather than concealing, identities. Across these works, disguise functions as an unmasking, as artists construct their own images through adornment in order to visually represent embodied experience, memory, and understanding.

Interior Infinite draws on the spirit of Carnival, a celebration of both radical togetherness and unique self-expression. The title is drawn from Rabelais and His World, an influential text by Mikhail Bakhtin, which extolled the potential for carnivalesque practices to overcome the limits of repressive conformity and expand our social imagination. The vibrant, fluid, and myriad expressions of identities seen in the exhibition become an act of resistance to erasure, pushing narrow definitions of normativity to include a broader range of lived realities. As Bakhtin writes: “The interior infinite could not have been found in a closed and finished world”.

This survey exhibition presents work by Vancouver-based contemporary artist Lyse Lemieux, whose interdisciplinary practice focuses primarily on drawing, sculpture and installation. Lemieux’s works on paper investigate the space between painting and drawing, abstraction and representation as it relates to the human figure.

Trespassers / Intrus focuses on Lemieux’s evolving engagement with the body. Through sculpture and drawings in ink, paint, and fabric, her work evokes transformation through a choreography of hybridized elements – through animal references, appendages, and articles of clothing that both obscure and reveal. Her longstanding interest in the personal and symbolic associations of garments is also explored.

A complex installation of suspended glass school tunics, titled The Classroom, revisits a previous work that the artist created in the 1980s. Based on a formative memory and a dream-like experience from childhood, the work evokes the thrill of rebellion and the promise of transformation.

Within the public economic sphere, the common, result-driven curatorial strategies of institutions can result in an excess of immaterial exertion and refuse.

In May 2021, the curatorial team at Centre A decided to challenge this sociopolitical mode of curatorial labour. By repurposing pre-existing structures from our previous exhibition and negotiating the demand to create, we invite you to join us in contesting this cycle of delivery, contemplating the meaning of production, and reclaiming this space.

The title of this exhibition-installation, “Nothing is more important than independence and freedom”, a pivotal quote from the novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, asserts the supremacy of self-liberation and cheekily highlights the conceptual power of nothing.

This year’s juried exhibition is the fourth and final exhibition in the Fort Gallery’s Making Home exhibition series; and reflects on our changing relationship to our living spaces in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Lower Mainland’s housing crisis.  It blurs boundaries between public and private spheres and explores ideas of confinement and space.

Selected artists: Aimée Benny Brown, Carolina Bergonzoni, Carrie Lam, Damla Tamer, Fei Disbrow, Gemma Crowe, Janine Schroedter, Jen McGowan, Kat Grabowski, Keely O’Brien, Khim Hipol, Kristy Carse, Madalen Claire Benson, Michal Tkachenko, Nam Le, Nicole Melnicky, Rebecca Wang, Romane Bladou, Sebastian Laskowski, and Susan Jessop.

​Tuesday to Friday 12 to 5pm.
Saturday 10:30am to 4:30pm.

or over thirty years, Jan Wade has been creating mixed-media paintings, textiles and sculptural objects, drawing upon her lived experience as an African Canadian person and her mixed cultural heritage. Jan Wade: Soul Power brings together the artist’s diverse body of work alongside new pieces made specifically for the exhibition.

Personal experience and sustained research inform Wade’s unique practice, which she conceptualizes as an ongoing journey—one that is philosophical, cultural, intellectual and embodied—as she explores the places and practices of her ancestors alongside contemporary political concerns and social issues.

Political, social, spiritual and material transformations are integral to Wade’s practice, and she often uses found objects and recycled materials in her works. Picked up in alleys, given to her by friends and sourced from thrift stores, these objects are used to point to a “generational ecological consciousness practiced by the disenfranchised.” In other words, Wade’s unique aesthetic was born out of necessity as well as social conscience.

Both Wade’s materials and processes reflect a continued interest in the traditions of making as handed down from generation to generation. This sense of continuity between past and present informs all aspects of her art making. Painted wood, text, symbols and common everyday objects including buttons, figurines, Scrabble tiles and religious icons are assembled into large-scale sculptures and installations. Textile pieces stemming from the traditions of Black Southern quilting, such as the abstract forms of Gee’s Bend quilts and African and Indigenous textiles, also feature in her practice. Alongside text and painted blocks of bold colours, Wade employs repetition, accumulation, open-endedness and aspects of improvisation connected to the traditions of jazz and blues in her art. She adds to, paints over and continually evolves works over time.

Edith Heath and Emily Carr: From the Earth brings together the work of two artists whose art was profoundly influenced by the land and landscape—its colours, light and materials. Emily Carr (1871–1945) and Edith Heath (1911–2005) never met, but both were modernist women living on the West Coast who built careers in the creative arts that spoke to their time and place. This project builds on an ongoing program of exhibitions that offer an opportunity to consider the art of Emily Carr in a different light. Some of the exhibitions have focused on directly shared histories or on stylistic affinities, while others have pointed to the significance of Carr’s influence on modern and contemporary artists.

Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art celebrates the milestone centennial birthday of Bill Reid (1920–1998) with an exhibition about his extraordinary life and legacy, To Speak With a Golden Voice, from July 16, 2020 to September 6, 2021. Guest curated by Gwaai Edenshaw — considered to be Reid’s last apprentice — the group exhibition includes rarely seen treasures by Reid and works from artists such as Robert Davidson and Beau Dick. Tracing the iconic Haida artist’s lasting influence, two new artworks by contemporary artist Cori Savard (Haida) and singer-songwriter Kinnie Starr (Mohawk/Dutch/German//Irish) will be created for this highly anticipated exhibition.

QAF shows artists upcycling & recycling apocalyptic fear & dread into art & social change. Green symbolizes not only our relationship to each other & the lands we occupy, but also difference & marginalization, exemplified by popular culture green underdogs Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West & Rainbow Connection, Kermit the Frog. It’s not easy being green, fighting for a world that consistently rejects us. With imminent climate catastrophe upon us, we witness the world grappling with the end times, but when were the queered privy to life outside the apocalypse?

Green is the complex terrain of extended kinship ties of Indigiqueer/two-spirit and queer settlers. Green spectrals haunt the hyphened margins of the subaltern; enduring perpetually frequent gaslighting(s) of post-traumatic settler-colonial and concurrent disorders. Together/apart WE endure our own private apocalyptics. Cataclysmic temporal end-points that exist as seemingly fixed and an unavoidable global terminus – from which Indigiqueer/queer resurgence erupts relentlessly into the ongoing colonial.

QAF shows artists cast as see-ers/oracles/alchemists upcycling/rebranding/reclaiming/transgressing/transforming apocalyptic visions towards queer utopic landscapes, transmuting fear, dread and a collective broken heart of forced disslocations with departures and arrivals, using art as transformative praxis and practice towards social and spiritual metamorphoses.

QAF 2021 Dispersed: it’s not easy being green  runs 3 weeks from your computer, our home base, the Sun Wah Centre in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, and Vancouver’s only cemetery, Mountain View Cemetery.

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why,
but why wonder?

– Kermit the Frog

Equinox Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of works by Takao Tanabe that span almost seven decades and have come directly from the artist’s personal collection. Takao Tanabe is an important figure in Canadian painting and printmaking; this exhibition ranges from geometric abstractions of the1960s through to his iconic prairie and west coast landscape paintings.

Tanabe has been a leading figure in Canadian art for over sixty years, his artistic career has included over 70 solo exhibitions. Tanabe has received honourary doctorates from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the University of Lethbridge, the Order of British Columbia (1993), the Order of Canada (1999), the Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award (2003), and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts (2013). His work is included in many private and public collections, including the Tate Museum (UK), Cleveland Museum, Edmonton Art Gallery, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Art Gallery of Ontario, Glenbow Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Access Gallery is pleased to present Conditional Belonging, a multi-media exhibition curated by Rebecca Wang, featuring local artists Art Action Earwig, Taryn Goodwin, Maria-Margaretta, Sydney Frances Pickering, Neena Robertson, and Tadafumi Tamura. Working within varied realities and cultural contexts, these artists make possible a temporary belonging for alternative ways of being, knowing, and making outside the parameters set by the dominant culture. Through a variety of mediums such as shadow puppetry performance, beadwork, video, and photography, they champion their nuanced personal/communal narratives around power relations, access, resistance, and healing.

By recontextualizing memories, events, and fiction across time and space, and through kinship and location, Art Action Earwig and Sydney Pickering transform personal narratives into sites of collective healing. When faced with disempowering policies, Taryn Goodwin and Neena Robertson confront power-laden colonial frameworks with creative interventions to validate their presence and occupy public and institutional space. Through activating the nuances and symbolism embedded in everyday objects, Tadafumi Tamura and Maria-Margaretta communicate the intangible and relational value accrued from embodied knowledge.

Chester Fields is an initiative of The Polygon Gallery that encourages the development of visionary young photographers, giving them an opportunity to show their work on a professional platform. Teen artists from across the region are invited to submit original works of photographic art in response to a theme. All submittals are reviewed by a jury of artists and arts professionals, who select works to be shown in both virtual and onsite exhibitions.

View the Chester Fields long list here

The theme for this year’s Chester Fields Teen Photography Program is Be Your Selves. Students were invited to submit self-portraits showing sides of their identities that the camera would not normally capture.

Identities are complex, evolving things. There’s the persona that we show to the world when we leave the house. There are things we choose to present, and other things beyond our control. There are also hidden aspects that make us who we are: our hobbies, our dreams, our memories and experiences, and lineage.