After thirteen years and twenty-one exhibitions, rennie museum announces our final presentation in the historic Wing Sang building. The exhibition opens August 13 and concludes November 12, 2022.

Featuring fifty-one artworks by thirty-seven prominent artists from A(bdessemed) to Y(iadom-Boakye), the farewell exhibition breaks the museum’s self-imposed rule of not titling its shows. 51 @ 51 references the number of artworks in the exhibit as well as the address of the museum—51 East Pender Street.

Long recognized for the depth of its collecting style evince in previous monographic exhibitions, 51 @ 51 will demonstrate the breadth of rennie collection. Selections from acquisitions of the past two decades, including recent additions, illustrate a variety of practices and media that highlight key disciplines in the collection.

Thirty-three artists in 51 @ 51 are exhibiting at rennie museum for the first time, some having never before exhibited in Canada; and every artwork on display is making its Canadian debut, with one notable exception—Richard Jackson’s Rennie 101 (2009-2010). Commissioned for his solo exhibition at rennie museum in 2010, the 33 feet-long wall painting was actuated directly onto the first-floor gallery wall. At the conclusion of the survey, a new wall was built in front of the monumental work, entombing it as a secret, unseen participant to all installations since. Now, for this concluding exhibition, the striking wall painting is once again visible, re-emerging with its full commanding presence.

It’s Showtime!

Visit one of the largest collections of costumes, props, posters and photographs that Hollywood’s North has to offer! Film production in Surrey impacts the workforce, the economy and how Surrey is seen by its citizens and people outside the city. The exhibit will look at film production in Surrey from three key perspectives – people, profit and places. Through these lenses, the exhibit will show how filming in Surrey informs the city’s identity and shows the legacy of film in Surrey.

Even see a collection of objects used in Surrey film and television productions on loan from Warner Bros. Archives of Los Angeles and artifacts from Surrey Heritage Collection.

Out of Control: The Concrete Art of Skateboarding reveals the intersection between contemporary art and skateboarding.

The expansive exhibition will take place throughout two floors of the Museum, beginning with the Out of Control Exhibition Teaser opening August 18 in the Museum’s architecturally-striking Upper Gallery. This section of the exhibition includes film installations, architectural models, and photo-based works by Karin Bubaš, Andrew Dadson, Hannah Dubois, Christian Huizenga, and Alex Morrison.

The downstairs component, in the Tom & Teresa Gautreau Galleries, will open to the public on September 17. Read more.

CICA Vancouver is pleased to announce Dominican-born artist Tania Marmolejo’s first solo exhibition in Canada, opening from September 1st to October 1st, 2022. On view at the Centre of International Contemporary Art are 14 pieces of new paintings inspired by the artist’s personal experience in Vancouver and the surrounding wilderness of the lower mainland. The large-scale portraits of women within coastal landscapes provokes contemplation and resonance with the characters’ expansive and nuanced facial expression. The enigmatic eyes of her characters lead viewers into a labyrinth of familiarity and unfamiliarity, making us yearn to delve into the stories of the imagined characters she creates.

Exploring the delicate, complex, and sometimes hidden emotions of women is like navigating through a forest; The deep and intricate expression is influenced, if not confined, by the sociocultural system. Women are often expected to hide their sensitivity and internalize negative emotions such as sadness and anxiety. Marmolejo has captured the subtlety in these emotions and created fascinating illustrations of their micro-expressions. The artist frees her characters by allowing them to direct her brushes, resulting in an unexpected and compelling image on the canvas. The flood of genuine emotions brings them to life and connects with the audience.

Elemental Cinema brings together the collaborative film works of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. In this series of films, the four elements – water, earth, fire, air – inform the artists’ considerations of an entangled existence, and of time and value that reimagine knowledge and existence “otherwise.” This exhibition includes installations of their films to date: Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy (2019) and Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum (2020), as well as archives related to the films.

In the films, the composition and decomposition of the world is structured through the elements. They are fractal compositions, interfacing between the quantic, organic, historic and cosmic, drawing from visual arts, sciences and philosophy. The works edit together footage of both micro and macro landscapes, animation and archival documentation through references that range from quantum mechanics, the blues, diverse philosophies, classical physics, colonial theory to cartomancy. The intellectual and sensorial experience of the works across scale, surface and perspectives demands an assessment of how subjectivity is constructed, how we come to know and ways to unsettle that knowledge through a polyrhythmic entanglement that displaces hierarchies of rational experience.

This series seeks to recreate figures of mythological and religious origin as modern people. In creating each painting the objective is to match each model to different figures based on a moment of perceived similarity, while also deliberately mismatching the models in other aspects of their visual characteristics, such as their perceived racial identity, or biological sex. In doing this an attempt is made to draw focus upon the idea that mythological and spiritual figures are deeply connected to – and inspired by – various aspects of the human condition. With this the viewer is encouraged to identify with these figures – as well as with the individuals acting as them – and by extension, engage with the stories surrounding them without feelings of exclusion.

Nickie Lewis is a self taught sculpture and installation artist who lives in Burnaby B.C.
“I am currently passionate about creating sustainable eco-friendly art with natural materials such as cedar sticks, jute twine, Ivy, and moss. I recently caused a stir when I created 8 large-scale sculptures from sticks in a Burnaby Park. I have since then, created a 10ft wide 5ft long phoenix for the Deer Lake Gallery’s garden, and am currently working on 3 large sculptures for the City of New Westminster.”
Nickie Lewis began her artistic career in theatre. Six years ago, after discovering a community of people who embraced art and seemed to break down the belief that art needs to be shown in a gallery, and it is something that needs training to do, Lewis was inspired to create art. Working with her husband and friends, Lewis built a large-scale (8’ x 6’)  interactive art installation called The Ballsy Rocker, a wooden rocking pirate ship that lights up when rocked from the inside. The project’s tongue-in-cheek reference being, “It takes balls to rock the boat, but when you do, you just might light up the world.” The piece has been displayed at Burning Man and has since been rebuilt and redesigned three times. For the past six years, Lewis has been creating a large-scale installation for display until the COVID-19 lockdown at which point she determined she needed another way to get her art out to the world.

For this exhibition, you can expect the gallery to be consumed by Nickie’s work. Both large and small works will create a wonderful space to walk into.

In Nadya Isabella’s debut solo exhibition A Toast to This Moment, everyday encounters open portals into hidden worlds. Phone screens, ponds, makeup, personal flames, moods, and urban ecology offer gateways into desires floating between fantasy and reality. Gesturing to a vivid elsewhere, Nadya’s paintings emerge from a process of daydreaming and remembering: inflatable tubes create space for peaceful ruminations at the centre of a lake; a cigarette droops between lips while lit behind an umbrella sheltering the wind; fluffy day glow moths gossip, sway, and nibble light; dew drops on spider silks mirror a thousand moons over an ocean.

The picture plane is a diary-—a place to index and recall aspirations, secrets, crushes. Snapshots kept on Nadya’s camera roll of past parties and loved ones are translated into painting. Shahin’s Cake (2022) and Baby’s Cake (2021) are part of an ongoing series documenting cakes shared with friends at celebratory gatherings. Mimicking the size of greeting cards, the intimately scaled paintings show the cakes lit with candles, catching the hold at the top of an inhale before blowing a wish. Within the ritual of celebration, a suspended breath opens a world of possibility.

Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 presents a series of works inspired by historical events of social and political turbulence. Douglas connects points of social rupture, rendering in minute detail and with technical ingenuity historic moments of protest, riot, and occupation from 2011 that echoed upheavals that swept Europe in 1848.

The exhibition features five large-scale panoramic photographs depicting different protests and riots from 2011: the start of the Arab Spring in Tunis on Jan. 12 with sit-ins and protests along Avenue Habib Bourguiba; the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver on June 15; clashes between youth and police in London on Aug. 9; and the arrest of Occupy Wall Street protestors on Brooklyn Bridge in New York on Oct. 1. Douglas created the images by combining meticulous and elaborate re-enactments of the events, high-resolution plate shots of each city site, together with aerial documentary footage.

The exhibition also features a two-channel video installation ISDN, an immersive installation that depicts a fictionalized collaboration between rappers from London’s Grime and Cairo’s Mahraganat music scenes. Titled ISDN, after a now-outdated mode of transmitting high-quality audio over telephone lines, the video imagines rappers from the two cities exchanging beats and lyrics in improvised studios, working across space and time to create music collaboratively.

Tracing Water presents an extensive assembly of work by Toronto-based artist Ed Pien. Ranging from drawing to lithography to prints and video, the works span over 20 years and explore and incorporate water in these artistic creations.

Two Worlds, for instance, comprises 12 drawings excerpted from a large series of narrative-based drawings. This suite of drawings imagines a future where humans battle watery beings to gain domination and control. The war wages on for centuries, and amidst destruction, suffering and death, hybridized, part water and part humans are born. The epic war finally comes to a halt as the two originating factions can no longer be distinguished.

Recent works by Pien included in the exhibition delve more deeply into exploring the sentience of water, that water has co-agency, liveliness, and creativity. According to Pien, water is a material that is highly process-based and plays a significant role in how a drawing can unfold. These explorations include photographs entitled Breath that capture ephemeral drawings made by the artist’s breath in minus 45 degrees.

Other works, such as Ocean Water Drawing, involve the participation of captured salty ocean water and how it makes and leaves its marks as it intervenes with white ink. The subsequent marks and images made are in direct response to the trace residuals marked up on the surface of the black-coloured papers as ocean water makes its inevitable escape.

The prescient work of Jerry Pethick (b. 1935, London, Ontario; d. 2003, Hornby Island, British Columbia) is the result of a lifelong quest to explore the unique possibilities of our perception and the optical experience. Through a career of enthusiastic, intellectual enquiry into the historical relationships between artistic, scientific, technological, and cultural development—specifically those of the 19^th and early 20^th century—his works emanate a contagious exuberance, humour, and irreverence. Rejecting suggested hierarchies of material and method to achieve phenomenological effect, Pethick embraced an economy of means to produce his work. His unique, complex language emphasizes the possibilities of visual experience in our everyday lives and hisinfluence is felt through multiple generations of artists on the West Coast and beyond. This exhibition brings together five decades of his practice: from early experiments with plastics in the ‘60s, to his ambitious sculptural proposals of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and finally to his profound formal material resolutions of the early 2000s prior to his death.

This exhibition connects seven artists (Oluseye Ogunlesi, Karice Mitchell, Fegor Obuwoma, Clancy Ngolah, Odera Igbokwe, Michèle Bygodt, and Nura Ali) whose works in this exhibit are connected through a desire to make visible the specificities of language that emerge as a result of lived experiences in the diasporic world. The representation of Blackness is understood in this exhibition as a means of communication interpreted through storytelling and portraiture. These stories unfold and interweave with one another through film, photography, and printmaking amongst other media, deepening a consideration of how community is visualized with agency. Bringing together themes of community, language, racial violence, voyeurism, spirituality, Black agency, erasure, and cultural reconnection, Concealed Cultures is meant to be expansive.

Celebrate this exhibit at our opening reception on September 17 where some of the artists will be in conversation with the exhibition curators.

As the title suggests, videopoetry could be considered a combination of video art and poetry. However, for Surrey-based poet-critic and guest curator Tom Konyves, videopoetry is much more than this. His essay “Videopoetry: A Manifesto” (2011) has helped define the genre internationally.

Konyves describes videopoetry as the “rendering of poetry as an object to be experienced through the medium of video.” To succeed as a legitimate artform, the imagery in a videopoem—including on-screen text—does not illustrate the voiced text. Rather, videopoetry (as opposed to documentation of a poetry reading) distinguishes itself by poetic juxtapositions of images with text and sound. In the measured blending of these three elements, it produces in the viewer, Konyves argues, “the realization of a poetic experience.” It is an artform that perfectly reflects our image- and text-saturated culture.

Poets with a Video Camera presents the largest retrospective of videopoetry in Canada to date. The exhibition features over twenty-five works by some of the world’s leading practitioners. It is organized around five categories of videopoetry: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance, cin(e)poetry.

Curated by the Black Arts Centre, this exhibition builds on the theme of plurality of Blackness presented in the Concealed Cultures: Visualizing the Black Vernacular exhibition. Going beyond the theme of representation, Nancy Ainomugisha and Olúwáṣọlá Kẹ́hìndé Olówó-Aké use storytelling, photography, and film to expand the conversation on how society interprets Blackness. A thought-provoking dialogue emerges from the personal narratives of these two artists that highlights the multifaceted nature of the Black female and femme experience.

Celebrate this exhibit at our opening reception on September 17 where some of the artists will be in conversation with the exhibition curators.

For more than ten years now, Christine Sun Kim has been engaged expansively with the ways sound is understood, experienced and valued. Upending the notion of the sonic as a solely auditory occurrence, the California-born, Berlin-based artist foregrounds sound’s visual, spatial and political properties across a variety of mediums including drawing, video, performance, and installation. Exploring and employing elements of American Sign Language (ASL) — the artist’s first language — alongside other visual communication systems such as musical notation, infographics and memes, the formal vocabulary of Kim’s work is a singular one, engaging with critical precision and deadpan humour the politics of language, listening and voice.

In Oh Me Oh My, Kim brings together a broad selection of recent drawings, along with a new large-scale mural and two public artworks installed on the CAG Façade and at nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Whether diagramming the structural and cultural underpinnings of seemingly personal decisions, tracing social debts to consider what we owe one another, or mapping the distortions and delays inherent to Deaf/hearing communication, Kim’s works challenge widely held hierarchies that tether voice inextricably to sound, disrupting the implicit authority of the spoken over the signed and the aural over other perceptual planes.

The practice of Tanya Lukin Linklater is at once an exploration and articulation of insistence. Across works encompassing performance, video, installation, and writing, Lukin Linklater traces the expansive ways Indigenous knowledges, histories and structures have been embodied and sustained amidst colonialisms’ systemic dispossessions. Centering her focus in and through the body, her works map continuance as an iterative practice, often most powerfully enacted through relational gestures such as conversation, movement, listening and touch.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Lukin Linklater presents An amplification through many minds (2019), a work that extends from her close engagement with a collection of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq and Unagan belongings originating from her homelands in southern Alaska and the Aleutian Chain, now held by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley. This video follows Lukin Linklater and a trio of dancers through the process of developing a choreographic score for these displaced belongings that is subsequently performed in the museum’s storage vaults. A gesture towards both restoration and repatriation, this piece is accompanied by a series of new works on paper that index the artist’s presence through land and movement alike.

Brother Armand Lammineur was a Roman Catholic missionary who travelled from Belgium to the Philippines, photographing extensively from the late 1930s until his death in the early 2000s. Many of his photographs were taken in or near the mountainous city of Baguio, where a seminary called “Home Sweet Home” housed Belgian priests on mission. Baguio is also the birthplace of artist Rydel Cerezo.

Cerezo would discover Lammineur’s photographs of Baguio decades later, in Belgium, as he happened to be dating a member of Lammineur’s extended family. He would go on to learn that members of his own family knew the priest. Intersecting across time and place, these coincidences undergird a cross-cultural archive, one that encompasses both photographers: Lammineur as a visitor to the Philippines; and Cerezo as a guest in Belgium, also working at home in community with fellow queer Filipinx-Canadians. The two photographers’ depictions of Filipinx bodies exist at once in tension and in dialogue, variously contradicting and echoing each other.

Filipinx subjects are central figures in this exhibition, seen from different vantages: through Lammineur’s camera, as seminarians to be indoctrinated; in Cerezo’s lens, as intimate friends and collaborators; from Cerezo’s first-person perspective, as a queer Filipinx person questioning the ethics of archive creation, and its capacity to convey the nuances of lived, diasporic experience. Across original photographs and vintage images collaged with found material, Cerezo’s autobiographical new work is a profound meditation on home, compassion, and belonging.

…people’s voices are more revelatory than their eyes or the looks on their faces […]: the vocalised sound goes from inside to inside, links two existences without further mediation. Paul Zumthor

We are delighted to present four extraordinary artists who explore the complexities of the human condition through fragmented bodies and the human voice. The voice is a generic human practice with aesthetic, physiological, cultural, historical, and psychological texture and meaning. This is a portraiture of ideas, containing allegorical works with mouths that voice and communicate human behaviours, beliefs and fears. Singing, speaking, humming and whispering, they are delivered to us through a world of technology.

A pioneer of video and installation art, Tony Oursler’s glass-headed, AI b0ts have been inoculated with miniature video and sound technologies. Described as ‘Metaphors for alienated, isolated modern individuals in a technology-driven culture”, the bOts question our belief in the future of technology & AI, whispering, questioning and predicting dystopian futures.

Mellors & Nissinen present us with the absurd character Bad Mantras, from their grand political parody, The Aalto Natives (Venice Biennale). Attached to the wall of a ubiquitous recording studio, a mass of pink-felt, muppet heads, without a body, attempt a group hum while trying to play musical instruments together. Trapped on the wall, their tangled robotic arms reach out to attempt contact…and harmony.

Originally from Treaty 4 territory Saskatchewan, Jeanette Kotowich is an independent dance artist and choreographer of Nêhiyaw, Métis and mixed settler ancestry. Her work reflects Nêhiyaw/Métis cosmology within the context of contemporary dance performance, referencing protocol, ritual, our relationship to the natural and Spirit world, and ancestral knowledge. Kisiskâciwan is a creative return to the swift-flowing landscape of Saskatchewan, the robust undulating land of her grandmothers’ mothers and great-great-grandfathers. Conceived and performed by Kotowich in collaboration with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, this solo work is a journey to one’s self.