Collections

Collection 08

Science Fiction and The Other

Description

As part of her Spring 2018 N.O.P.E. fellowship with 221A, Juli Majer will host Science Fiction and the Other, a semester of programs that consider articulations of alterity — other beings, other worlds, other forms-of-life — as a speculative method for imagining an otherwise present.

Join Majer at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library for a semester of five study sessions where participants will be lead through close readings of speculative texts across fiction and theory. Akin to the science-fictional practice of world-building, this semester will see the making of community through the collective labours of thought, dialogue, and imagination. To complement and cultivate this worlding, Pollyanna 圖書館 Library’s reading room will be repopulated with modular soft furniture made by Sonja Ratkay and Melanie Thibodeau.

Contributors

• Juli Majer

Collection 07

The Sculpture Fund

Description

The Sculpture Fund is a research collection created by 221A Research Fellow Amy Nugent. Over the past five years, Amy Nugent’s research has focused on the history and restitution of artists sculptors Frances Loring (1887-1968) and Florence Wyle (1881-1968), the current state of Canadian art collections, and the limited acquisition funds to support them. The Sculpture Fund collection at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library activates Frances and Florence memoirs and archives.

Contributor

• Amy Nugent

Collection 06

sum of the parts

Description

sum of the parts, brings together a selection of films and performances by artists who activate personal histories drawn from familial and public record. Through a compelling excavation of the past, these artists draw from familial, historic, and archival sources, visualizing complex narratives of race and class, and their recognition within official records.

Contributors

• Casey Wei
• Deanna Bowen
• Divya Mehra
• Felix Kalmenson
• Jenn Jackson
• Krista Belle Stewart

Collection 05

Woodward’s Amateur Historical Society Archives

Description

Woodward’s Amateur Historical Society Archives collects the work of W.W.A.S., a provisional research collective assembled by Josh Gabert-Doyon as part of his Notes on Permanent Education (N.O.P.E.) fellowship with 221A. The collective (Brit Bachmann, Gabi Dao, Josh Gabert-Doyon, and Byron Peters) occupied Pollyanna 圖書館 Library to plan and carry out an investigation into Vancouver’s Woodward’s building as a historic theatre of class struggle. W.W.A.S. charted the building’s varied articulations over the past century to grasp Woodward’s as a historical constellation; that is, as a tangle of intertwined narratives through which to comprehend the distinct co-development of urbanism and capitalism in Vancouver.

Contributors

• Brit Bachmann
• Byron Peters
• Gabi Dao
• Jakob Knudsen
• Josh Gabert-Doyon

Collection 04

波丽安娜声音档案库 〇一

Description

波丽安娜声音档案库 〇一 is a speculative sound archive compiled by artist Yu Su as part of her Notes on Permanent Education (N.O.P.E.) fellowship with 221A. Yu Su’s research at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library sought to invert the standard procedures of sound archiving—procedures analogous to a kind of capture, submitting vibrations to the jurisdiction of the archive—to remake its infrastructure in the liquid form of sound.

Contributors

• Dylan Godwin
• Jean Brazeau
• Jonathan Scherk
• Julian Hou
• Michelle Mackenzie
• PSAP 01 Fieldwork Research Team
• Scott Johnson Gailey
• Yu Su

Collection 03

Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures

Description

In 2017, 221A presented a season of public talks, performances, and workshops in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery for the occasion of the exhibition Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures. 221A’s program sought to provide the exhibition’s 40 artists with a space and time oblique to the civic museum to traverse alternative lines of thought and forms of engagement. For the duration of the program, 221A hosted a public reading room and library collection presenting books selected by the various contributors and collaborators involved in the exhibition.

Contributors

• Alison Yip
• Andrew Berardini
• Angela Teng
• Anne Low
• Antoni Oko
• Arvo Leo
• Barry Doupé
• Charlene Vickers
• Colleen Brown
• Derya Akay
• Eli Bornowsky
• Elizabeth McIntosh
• Gareth James
• Garry Neill Kennedy
• Jesse McKee
• Julia Feyrer
• Julian Hou
• Justine A. Chambers
• Khan Lee
• Kim Dorland
• Krista Belle Stewart
• Lyse Lemieux
• Mark Delong
• Matt Browning
• Michael Drebert
• Mina Totino
• Rachelle Sawatsky
• Raymond Boisjoly
• Richard William Hill
• Ron Tran
• Tamara Henderson
• Tiziana La Melia
• Walter Scott
• William Gibson

Collection 02

Prosper Center

Description

For its Winter 2016 collection, Prosper Center’s sportswear is mixed with street fighter motifs and stock market data. “Symbols of desired power are worn as appropriations of our opponents’ strengths.” The collection points to the intersectionality of the human-data-animal assemblage, marking the contemporary body as meeting place of technologic and organic streams of influence.

Contributors

• Prosper Center
• tranzit.ro iasi

Collection 01

Notes on Political Ecologies (N.O.P.E. 2016)

Description

Notes on Political Ecologies (N.O.P.E. 2016) was an institutional experiment that assembled a collective of artists, writers, and researchers, and invited them to appropriate 221A’s exhibition space as a site of communal study between May and August 2016. The collective convened twice a week to plan and carry out an investigation into the institution’s intimate surroundings: Vancouver’s Chinatown and Downtown Eastside.

Contributors

• Alex Braidek
• Alexandra Bischoff
• Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes
• Sierra Komar
• Steffanie Ling
• Vincent Tao

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.

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