Collection 00
221A Collection 2005-18
Description
Since 2005, 221A has collected a body of critical texts and artists books that have shaped the organization’s public programming and advanced its original mandate to examine the role of design and art in the production of contemporary society.
Start year
2005
Contributors
- A.E. Benenson
- Alison Yip
- Antoni Oko
- Barry Doupé
- Bopha Chhay
- Brady Cranfield
- Brian McBay
- Dan Starling
- Hyung-min Yoon
- Jade Niklai
- Jamie Hilder
- Jesse McKee
- Joji Fukushima
- Kari Cwynar
- Kristen Chappa
- Michelle Fu
- Nadia Belerique
- Rebecca Bayer
- Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
- Ron Tran
- Russell Baker
- Sarah Todd
- Sasha Bondartchouk
- Steffanie Ling
- Sungpil Yoon
- Sydney Hart
- Tom Sloan
- Vincent Tao
- Michelle Fu is a co-founder and the current Systems Designer at 221A. Previously she completed a degree in industrial design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and worked in the environmental and communication design field, most recently in a management role at Cygnus Group where she developed comprehensive wayfinding systems for clientele such as ICBC, Cadillac Fairview, Civitas Urban Planning and Vancouver Coastal Health. Fu also worked at Emily Carr University managing the Audain Artist-in-Residence program, where she gained key insights into educational and international planning. She is currently on the Board of Directors for Artspeak and Unit/Pitt Projects. Fu contributes her experience working with institutional and governmental partners into 221A’s growing cultural infrastructure, including the development and implementation of financial, informational and technological systems.
- Brian McBay is the Co-founder and Director of 221A, a non-profit organization that works with artists to research and develop infrastructure.
- Sarah Todd is a curator currently living and working in Calgary, where she is an art curator and public programmer at the Glenbow Museum. She has previously worked at Western Front, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, XPACE Cultural Centre, and The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. She has recently produced exhibition projects with organizations including Vtape, Kunstverein München, The Goethe Institute, The Pacific Cinematheque, and The Illingworth Kerr Gallery. Sarah writes for a range of publications.
- Bopha Chhay is the Director/Curator of Artspeak 2016–present.
- Jesse McKee is the Head of Strategy at 221A, Vancouver, where he leads the programming and aligns the organization’s work with a strategic plan that develops and sustains self-organized infrastructures. Previously, he was the Curator of Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre and the Exhibitions Curator, Western Front, Vancouver. Independently, he curated Stopping the Sun in its Course, which looked at contemporary depictions of the grotesque at François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles in 2015 and he was the co-curator of Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, the inaugural edition of a civic triennial at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2017. As a curatorial resident, he has worked with Things that can happen, Hong Kong and Tranzit.org, Romania. McKee served as a juror for the 2013 Sobey Art Award and was a member of the Canada Council for the Art’s Asia Pacific Delegation. He has written essays and reviews for Canadian Art, C Magazine, Fillip, Border Crossings and Kaleidoscope. A forthcoming catalogue essay, Surreal Ghosts and Neuroplastic Ancestors, focuses on Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson’s filmmaking, published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia and Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.
- A.E. Benenson is a writer and curator based in New York interested in how the formal vocabulary of contemporary technology can revise the histories of art, materials, and politics. In 2013 he was a curatorial fellow of the Art and Law Program at Fordham Law School. He was the head curator of the 2014 Impakt Festival in Utrecht and is currently Associate Curator at the Artist’s Institute, New York City.
- Kristen Chappa is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She has organized exhibitions, performances, and public programs with Art in General (New York, New York), SculptureCenter (Long Island City, NY), The Lab (San Francisco, CA), the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (New York, NY), Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (New York, NY), and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University (New York, NY). Ms. Chappa has contributed texts to publications for the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Performa, and SculptureCenter, and has written for periodicals including Art in America, Frieze, and Interventions Journal. She has served as a guest critic at MFA and residency programs including California College of the Arts, Hunter College, Parsons the New School for Design, Recess, SmackMellon, and Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts. Ms. Chappa holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MA from Columbia University’s Modern Art History: Critical and Curatorial Studies program.
- Vincent Tao’s projects at 221A include Notes on Political Ecologies, N.O.P.E. 2016; Rereading Room: the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore, 2016; Parallax Study: The New Romantics, 2017; and Deep Blue Open Archive, 2017. Tao took part in documenta 14’s aneducation program at Under the Mango Tree—Sites of Learning, travelling to Kassel to present and workshop 221A’s educational programming. His independent research and organizing work concerns urban displacement and the right to the city. Prior to moving to Vancouver, Tao studied at McGill University in Montreal, where he was the outreach coordinator for a worker-run community kitchen.
- Steffanie Ling is a writer, critic and editor of BARTLEBY REVIEW, a free and occasional pamphlet of art writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She occasionally converges popular media and art to perform cultural criticism and has published one book of minimal poems, Cuts of Thin Meat (Spare Room, 2015) and a collection of short prose, Nascar (Blank Cheque Press, 2016).
- Alison Yip works in a range of media that engage and shift between various genres and styles of visual representation. Her focus moves between observing the everyday to evoking dreamlike atmospheres while always attending to issues of figuration. In recent years, the artist has produced a number of wall paintings that serve as a visual framework or scaffolding, echoing more broadly the fundamental concerns of painting.
- Ron Tran is an artist who was born in Saigon, and currently lives and works in Vancouver. His practice incorporates sculpture, photography, video, performance and installation. He is invested in the social and political nature of space which he foregrounds through interruptive strategies and collaborative practices that engage the public and gallery. His work addresses shifting understandings of public and private space, and questions ideas of individual ownership. Tran studied at Emily Carr University and has participated in group and solo exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Asia. Tran participated in the 6th Berlin Biennale (2010). He was selected for the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien residency in Berlin (2014). He was awarded for Mayor’sArts Awards (2015). His work has been featured in Avant-Gardes of The 21st Century published by Phaidon Press (2013). Tran recently has been awarded a two year (2018-2019) Research and Creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to produce new work in Vietnam.
- Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens have developed a collaborative practice that combines a concise approach to the form and construction of the art object with a desire to make ideas visible. Spanning across multiple media, including video, performance and installation, their work explores the material, affective and sensory dimensions of experience that cannot be fully translated into signs or systems. For several years, they have examined the rationale upon which economic actions are described and represented, and how the logic of economy has come to infiltrate the most intimate aspects of life. Their work has been shown at the 27th Images Festival (Toronto, 2014), Manif d’art 7: Quebec City Biennial (Quebec City, 2014), La Filature, Scène Nationale (Mulhouse, France, 2013-14), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, Norway, 2013), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, 2012), and the 10th Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah, UAE, 2011). Recent solo exhibitions include VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine (Montreal, 2014), Trinity Square Video (Toronto, 2014), Monte Vista Projects (Los Angeles, 2012) and G Gallery (Toronto, 2012).
- Born in Seoul, Hyung-Min Yoon studied Fine Art at Korean National University of Arts in Seoul (BFA) and Chelsea College of Art in London (MFA). Her work deals with everyday life and objects. Crossing different genres – installation, photography, video, etc. – she raises questions about perception of materialistic overabundance and seemingly insignificant matters. At first sight, Yoon’s work lures the spectator into a false sense of immediate understanding with its visual simplicity. At close observation, the viewer discovers that the banality overcomes its limitation and produces vestiges of itself, hence, a poem of the trivial.
- Russell Baker is a sculptor-turned-furniture designer, who co-founded Bombast furniture, a boutique manufacturer of contemporary furniture based in Vancouver, BC. Prior to his retirement, from 1990 to 2016, Baker led a team of fabricators in producing an ever-expanding line of furniture. Marked by his engagement with the modernist legacy, Baker’s work has been recognized recently on display at the Canada House overlooking London’s Trafalgar Square.
- Dan Starling creates artworks by juxtaposing different aesthetic traditions in order to produce contradictions that illuminate the unresolved antagonisms of our culture. Taking popular subjects as a starting point, his work plays with the formal conventions of narrative through intervention, extrapolation and reconfiguration to explore latent possibilities. Starling’s work is an effusive and eclectic approach to art, making use of all manner of media and genres. Having studied at the University of British Columbia, he went on to complete a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2005) and a Meisterschüler from the Städelschule, Frankfurt (2011). Starling has recently exhibited his work at Tyler Wood Gallery, San Francisco. Starling lives in Vancouver.
- Sungpil Yoon is the Site Manager at 221A. Prior to joining 221A, Sungpil completed a Bachelor’s degree in Art History at the University of British Columbia. Yoon is a Korean-born Canadian and is the founder and curator of Spare Room, a non-profit contemporary art organization located in Vancouver. Yoon is also the Co-Curator of VIVO Media Arts exhibitions and events. Yoon’s role at 221A involves the onsite property management of 222 E Georgia Street and 1654 Franklin Street, including direct involvement with tenant activities, contracts and inspections, communications and interfacing between tenants and administration at 221A.
- Over the last decade, Barry Doupé has produced an acclaimed body of hand-drawn and computer-generated animated films. Shaped in part by experimental writing and drawing exercises, Doupé’s films are often characterized by fragmented and porous narrative structures, richly textured characters and surreal everyday situations. The artist has recently produced a series of digital drawings and animations using software developed for the Commodore Amiga, a computer that was first introduced in the mid- eighties and became the industry standard for graphics and animation. The resulting works revel in the capacities of this early technology to evoke both strange and nostalgic visual effects. Born in Victoria in 1982, Doupé holds a Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. His films have been screened nationally and internationally at festivals and venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon; Pleasure Dome, Toronto; MOCCA, Toronto; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. Recent exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Western Front, Vancouver, and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.
- Antoni Oko’s practice is interested in painting and parallel analyses of the material nature and qualities of surface and colour. The artist has produced a significant series of paintings, large works on paper and artists’ books. The latter are cut and folded and resonate as familiar and intimate objects while gesturing, in some cases, at the forms and colours of well-known paintings, reconceived in three dimensions. Oko was born in 1977 in Poland and immigrated to Canada as a child. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto and studied at the Banff Centre.
- Kari Cwynar (1985, Canada) is a curator and writer from Ottawa, Canada. She holds an MA from Carleton University, Ottawa and a BA from Queen’s University, Kingston, both in Art History. Currently she is the Curatorial Research Work Study with Kitty Scott at The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada. She recently worked with Scott on the exhibition À Ciel Ouvert at the Musée nationale des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City (2012); this summer she will assist with The Retreat, a section of dOCUMENTA(13) taking place in Banff in August 2012. Previously Cwynar held positions at the National Gallery of Canada and the Ottawa Art Gallery. Recent exhibitions curated by Cwynar include Lynne Cohen Photographs from 1973 to 1978, The Banff Centre, Banff (2012); The Work Locates Itself, Columbia University, New York (2012); and The Collector’s Circle, The Banff Park Museum National Historic Site, Banff, (2012). She is currently preparing a mobile gallery in a truck for Open Engagement, Portland (2012), and has been invited to curate The Last Laugh at apexart, New York (2013). Cwynar has written about contemporary art for C Magazine, Canadian Art, and Color Magazine, among other publications, and was the winner of the 2011 C Magazine New Critics Competition. In November 2011, she was a participant in Independent Curators International’s Curatorial Intensive.
- Brady Cranfield is an artist, musician and instructor based in Vancouver, with an avid and varied interest in sound and music. He is the founder and co-organizer (in collaboration with the artist Kathy Slade) of the ongoing public art project The Music Appreciation Society, and he frequently collaborates with artist Jamie Hilder on projects exploring the politics and culture of global capitalism. He has presented work at the Or Gallery, the Western Front, The Contemporary Art Gallery, The Charles H. Scott Gallery and Artspeak in Vancouver. He is also a member of the bands Womankind and Leviathans.
- Jamie Hilder is a Los Angeles and Vancouver-based artist whose practice engages with issues surrounding economics, information, and urbanism. He completed his PhD in English at the University of British Columbia in 2010, where he wrote a dissertation on the International Concrete Poetry Movement’s relationship to an emerging global imaginary around the middle of the 20th century. He is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is pursuing a project that draws connections between post-1970 economic theory and aesthetics. His visual work has been exhibited and published in North America and England. His critical writing has appeared in Contemporary Literature, Fillip, Yishu: Contemporary Chinese Art, Critical Survey, and in the recent edition of Rodney Graham’s The System of Landor’s Cottage: A Pendant to Poe’s Last Story.
- Jade Niklai is a curator with specialist interests in contemporary art, architecture and design. She has fulfilled curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000-2001), the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest (2002) and at London’s Architecture Foundation (2005-2007). She has also worked in the commercial sector as the founding director of a leading art dealership in Melbourne and as the first and only curator in Norman Foster’s 40-year architecture practice, Foster + Partners (2008-2009). Jade holds a BA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (2000) with a dissertation in performance art and Central Eastern European politics; and an MA in Art Curatorship from the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne (2004) with a thesis examining the museology of design. Born in Hungary, raised in Australia, educated and trained in England and America; Jade’s international background and professional outlook make her a strong believer that the arts motivate cultural diversity, tolerance and social integration. Jade works as Blood Mountain’s founding director since January 2010 and as a freelance writer (Flash Art US and Hungary) and juror/advisor (Esterhazy Stiftung, Eisenstadt and Budapest; and Apexart, New York: 2012). www.bloodmountain.org
- Tom Sloan is an Australian-born industrial designer with built-work ranging from furniture, products, interior and lighting to architecture. He began as a product designer at Lab Architecture Studio in Melbourne (2000-2002), where he developed the furniture and interactive components of several art institutions comprising Federation Square: Australia’s largest cultural and civic precinct. Tom founded his first company in 2003 and has since worked independently and on behalf of various design practices. His position as Senior Designer at London’s Jason Bruges Studio (2006-2009) enabled him to design and deliver bespoke artworks and interactive design objects for clients including Veuve Cliquot, Established & Sons, BBC1, Nike, O2 and various property developers and architecture firms. Recent projects include the Origo bistro and restaurant in Budapest (voted the best new Hungarian interior of 2011), a new language learning facility at Monash University in Melbourne, new commission for Siemens for the 2012 London Olympics and the exhibition design for the artist-collective, lonelyfingers’ first exhibition at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengaldbach. With a BA in Industrial Design (RMIT University, Melbourne Australia, 1999), a strong work ethic and genuine belief that good design improves lives, Tom is an ardent believer in practical knowledge and private entrepreneurship. Tom is Blood Mountain’s co-founder and director of the board. http://www.tomsloan.net
- Rebecca Bayer is a Vancouver-based artist and architectural designer. She is engaged in the production of public art projects, building design, community collaborations, as well as public space research and teaching appointments. Rebecca holds a M.Arch from the University of British Columbia, and a MFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. From 2008 to 2013, she worked at Bricault Design on residential, restaurant, and exhibition design projects in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and New York. In 2013 she became co-founder of spacemakeplace, an art and design studio. She teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She is currently part of ten fifteen maple, an artist residency at the City of Vancouver’s Hadden Park Field House.
- Sasha Bondartchouk is an artist/writer working in Vancouver, Canada. She studied creative writing and literature at Douglas College and is currently beginning at Emily Carr University with a major in Critical and Cultural Practices. Her work includes mostly poetry, short experimental fiction, book-making and comics. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in EVENT magazine and PEARLS anthology. Her work is often informed by themes of cultural or gender identity, as well as science fiction, memory, and alternative systems or ideas around archiving, cataloguing and storage.
- Nadia Belerique constructs installations that engage with the poetics of perception and asks how images perform in contemporary culture. Primarily invested in questions around materiality and dematerialization through the illusion of photographs, her image-based works are often interrupted by sculptural objects. She received her MFA from the University of Guelph, and has recently exhibited at such venues as Narwhal, Daniel Faria Gallery, XPACE, The Drake Hotel, and Diaz Contemporary in Toronto. She is part of an upcoming group show at the Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna in October 2014.