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.

From 221A’s invitation to contribute to the library: “We invite you to select a book, document, or text that you’d like to have here as either a reflection on your current practice, or as an opening to your questions or thinking about art and everything else. Your selection does not necessarily need to correspond with your work in the exhibition; rather, we are interested in how your selection may inform a public’s engagement with your work in general, whether as an interpretive device, as a window to alternative perceptions, or perhaps as something that encourages opacity.”

Start year

2016

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

Call No.	Status	Collection	Name	Produced by	Material	Selected by
VSAP 001	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Miles from India: A Celebration of the Music of Miles Davis	Bob Belden	CD	Mina Totino
VSAP 002	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Standard Book of Color	Andrew Berardini	Print	Andrew Berardini
VSAP 003	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Spock Must Die! A Star Trek Novel	James Blish	Print/Paper bag	Mark Delong
VSAP 004	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Garments Against Women	Anne Boyer	Print	Tiziana La Melia
VSAP 005	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Victorian Underworld: A Fascinating Recreation	Kellow Chesney	Print	William Gibson
VSAP 006	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Copp Family Textiles	Grace Rogers Cooper	Print	Anne Low
VSAP 007	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Modulor, Modulor 2	Le Corbusier	Print	Khan Lee
VSAP 008	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Ubik	Philip K. Dick	MP3-CD	Alison Yip
VSAP 009	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Waiting to be Interrupted: Selected Writings 1993-2012	Jimmie Durham	Print	Richard William Hill
VSAP 010	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Vampire in the Text: Narratives of Contemporary Art	Jean Fischer	Print	Jesse McKee
VSAP 011	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Andy Warhol Diaries	Edited by Pat Hackett	Print	Ron Tran
VSAP 012	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Redressing the Pained Body Towards a Theory of Practice	Saidiya V. Hartman	Print	Matt Browning
VSAP 013	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Dreamstage: An Experimental Portrait of the Sleeping Brain	J. Allan Hobson	Print	Julia Feyrer
VSAP 014	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Demon of Writing	Ben Kafka	Print	Raymond Boisjoly
VSAP 015	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants	Robin Wall Kimmerer	Print	Michael Drebert
VSAP 016	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Great Animal Orchestra	Bernie Krause	Print	Tamara Henderson
VSAP 017	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure	Edouard Lanteri	Print	Colleen Brown
VSAP 018	Checked Out	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Passion According to G.H.	Clarice Lispector	Print	Barry Doupé
VSAP 019	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Measurement	Paul Lockhart	Print	Eli Bornowsky
VSAP 020	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Disillusionment	Thomas Mann	Print	Lyse Lemieux
VSAP 021	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Traditions Unbound: Groundbreaking Painters from Eighteenth-century Kyoto	Curated by Matthew P. McKelway	Print	Antoni Oko
VSAP 022	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Ecological Thought	Timothy Morton	Print	Jesse McKee
VSAP 023	Checked Out	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Realistic Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality	Timothy Morton	Print	Jesse McKee
VSAP 024	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World	Timothy Morton	Print	Jesse McKee
VSAP 025	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Service Porch	Fred Moten	Print	Elizabeth McIntosh
VSAP 026	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black	Cookie Mueller	Print	Derya Akay
VSAP 027	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art	Eileen Myles	Print	Mina Totino
VSAP 028	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil	Print	Gareth James
VSAP 029	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep ; Species of Spaces and Other Pieces ; Death of the Deodand: Accursed Objects and the Money Value of Human Life	Georges Perec William Pietz	Print	Gareth James
VSAP 030	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	A Helen Adam Reader	Kristin Prevallet	Print	Anne Low
VSAP 031	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Feelings are Facts	Yvonne Rainer	Print	Justine A. Chambers
VSAP 032	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Alternative Facts Film Screening	Curated by Myriam Salah	Print	Myriam Ben Salah
VSAP 033	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Wendy's Revenge	Walter Scott	Print	Walter Scott
VSAP 034	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Pipes That Won't Smoke, Coal That Won't Burn	Carol Sheehan	Print	Charlene Vickers
VSAP 035	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Ormolu Clock	Muriel Spark	Print	Anne Low
VSAP 036	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Geography and Plays	Gertrude Stein	Print	Derya Akay
VSAP 037	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Indian Artists at Work	Ulli Steltzer	Print	Krista Belle Stewart
VSAP 038	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Vancouver Special Ambivalent Pleasures	Vancouver Art Gallery	Print	Jesse McKee
VSAP 039	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Find Me	Laura Van Den Berg	Print	Kim Dorland
VSAP 040	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Zipper Mouth	Laurie Weeks	Print	Rachelle Sawatsky
VSAP 041	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	The Critic as Artist	Oscar Wilde	Print	Garry Neill Kennedy
VSAP 042 REF	Reference	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	Accidental Ant Hill Sculpture (Born in 2003 after a forest fire made love to a Ford Mustang)	Arvo Leo	Silkscreen on Newsprint	Arvo Leo
VSAP 043	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	These are the tools of the present	Mai Abu ElDahab, November Paynter, Marnie Slater (Eds.)	Print	Mai Abu ElDahab
VSAP 044	Available	Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures	From Cliché to Archetype	Marshall McLuhan with Wilfred Watson	Print	Julian Hou

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.
Angela Teng’s paintings emerge from an interest in craft traditions and unconventional studio practices. The artist produces lines of dried acrylic paint that she uses as “yarn” to crochet abstract paintings and experiments with wool flocking on thick, wet paint, resulting in works that generate an optical sensation as well as a tactile presence. Drawing on the history of women’s labour and produced at a small scale that counters the grand gestures of modernist painting, Teng’s works reconsider the history of abstract painting from a female perspective. Teng was born in Victoria in 1979 and currently lives in Vancouver.
Engaging with the history of textiles materially, Anne Low produces mysterious contemporary forms that speak to wider narratives around the impulse to individuate surface, object and self. The artist produces handwoven textiles that she presents in custom-made glass and wood cases. The works draw upon the distinct presence and autonomy of textiles and allude to some intimate or practical use, while their considered display methods position these as select objects warranting special care and attention. This line of investigation also speaks to the artist’s role in upholding and furthering unique orders of knowledge embedded within these traditional practices.
Andrew Berardini. Born in California. Writer, occasional editor, reluctant curator. Lives and works in Los Angeles. Father of Stella. Recent author of Danh Vo: Relics (Mousse, 2015) and currently finishing another book about colour. Regular contributor to Artforum and ArtReview and an editor at Mousse, Art Agenda, Momus and the Art Book Review. Warhol/Creative Capital and 221A Curatorial Resident. Curated shows at MOCA, Los Angeles; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Faculty at the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles since 2008 and for the last three years at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
The objects and images that appear in the work of Arvo Leo are born out of playfulness and have their own poetic syntax in mind. They often circulate within various gift economies or germinate as improvisations in the sphere of the everyday. Leo’s practice is fascinated by and committed to mobility, a coming toward and moving away from defined spaces where art traditionally exists. Intrinsic to all his works is the flexibility of their meaning within the specific environments in which they appear and their openness to being shaped by the people he encounters. His rambunctious experiments take on many diverse forms, from film documentaries, to papier mâché helmets, to illegal portraits made with red wine. They may involve sleeping in trees around Holland, serving beer and asparagus through holes in a kitchen floor or stalking cows in India.
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.
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.
Charlene Vickers’ work investigates memory, territorial embodiment and cultural gesture as connections to her birthplace of Kenora, Ontario. Vickers, who is Anishinaabe from Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation, explores her Ojibwa identity through painting, sculpture, performance and video. In a recent series of watercolour and gouache paintings, Vickers references traditional porcupine quillwork techniques as formal rhythms and patterns, which gain both subtle detail and increased abstraction with each iteration.
Known primarily as a sculptor, Colleen Brown explores the relationships of objects and materials as a means of thinking through abstraction and social encounters. In recent years, Brown has been particularly concerned with the material forms of civic space, producing works using stainless-steel piping, bright bollards, fluorescent forms reminiscent of caution tape and roadside flags, and cast polymer reliefs to consider the sensory and affective nature of common objects in the built environment. In the artist’s most recent body of work, vividly painted organic shapes balance carefully within open-ended frames, encouraging the viewer to engage with the forms as both paintings and sculptures.
Derya Akay approaches everyday objects, materials and experiences as rich sites of knowledge and meaning. The production of ceramic tableware, food, flowers and textiles in his practice provides a ground for research and the acquisition of new skills and creative tools. These materials, along with other found and borrowed elements, are frequently reworked by Akay into immersive, sensory environments, which encourage warm social encounters.
Through his contributions as a painter, writer and curator, Eli Bornowsky has been at the forefront of dialogue around abstraction in Vancouver. Frequently drawing on a wide array of references from art, mysticism, math and science, Bornowsky has produced a significant body of work that takes a consistently studied and exploratory approach to abstract painting, with special emphasis on colour. The artist’s investigations in recent years have resulted in shaped paintings, three-dimensional forms and low wall reliefs.
In her painting, Elizabeth McIntosh explores the formal properties of abstraction through processes of collage, where elements of composi on and colour are con nuously negotiated. Recent work produced during a six-month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York features the emergence of abstracted human figures drawn from art history and reimagined within vividly coloured geometries and abstractions.
Gareth James is an artist who frequently works with discarded, clandestine or unwanted objects such as bicycle components, cheaply made doors and obsolescent ideas. Born in London, England, in 1970, James holds a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and continued his studies at the Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gallery, New York.
With a career spanning five decades, Garry Neill Kennedy is recognized as one of Canada’s foremost conceptual artists. He has produced thoughtful, often slyly humorous, conceptual projects that remark critically on social and cultural systems and situations. In 2012, Kennedy and his wife, Cathy Busby, moved from Halifax to Vancouver, where they began teaching collaboratively at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the University of British Columbia. The artist’s presence in Vancouver has prompted a number of new commissions and restagings of older works. Kennedy was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1935 and studied at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto; the University of Buffalo; and Ohio University.
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.
Julia Feyrer’s 16 mm films are staged within handcrafted sets and animated with analogue effects drawn from the history of the medium. The artist often presents these films alongside sculptures and other elements that collectively reflect upon the complexities and highly mediated nature of the moving image. Dreamy and atmospheric, the films evoke the blurred realms of memory and other visionary experience. Feyrer was born in Victoria in 1982 and currently lives in Vancouver.
Julian Hou is an artist working in textiles, sound, performance, text, and drawing. He adopts empathic and fluid methodologies in addition to hypnagogic practice to produce works that speak about cultural motives, animism and figuration in objects and interiors. Hou's solo exhibitions include Dreamweed, Unit 17, Vancouver (2018); Cloudcuckooville, Soon.tw, Montreal (2018); Milman Parry's Waiting Room Rhapsody, Artspeak, Vancouver (2017); Stupid sun, 8eleven, Toronto (2017); Help me remember, L'escalier, Montreal (2015); Window Bended Harmony, CSA space, Vancouver (2014). He has participated in group exhibitions and performances at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016-2017); Things that can happen, Hong Kong (2017); Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels (2017); Spareroom, Vancouver (2017); 221A @ Occidental Temporary, Paris (2016); Audain gallery, Vancouver (2015); the Apartment Gallery (2015). He has participated in residencies at 221A (2017), Western Front (2018), and Triangle, Marseille (2019). Hou holds a BA in Art and Culture Studies from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and a Masters in Architecture from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Justine A. Chambers’ interests lie in collaborative creation and re-imagining dance performance. She is drawn to the movement of all bodies, and is focused on the dances that are already there: the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her recent choreographic projects include: Family Dinner, Enters and Exits, COPY, On Any Given Day, and Caesura. Chambers’ work has been presented by: Dance in Vancouver, Dance Saskatchewan, Dancing on the Edge Festival, New Dance Horizons, The Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, Vancouver Art Gallery: FUSE and the Western Front. Chambers is a founding member of project bk and is currently artist in residence and associate artist to The Dance Centre.
Khan Lee produces sculpture, video, installation and performance works, which frequently draw on everyday objects and situations. Stacks of ceramic plates, three-dimensional reliefs composed of pencils and melted eyeglasses, stuffed socks and mounds of acrylic caulking playfully explore formal arrangements of common materials, while film and video works often address the specificity of the medium, in some cases exploiting the materiality and durational nature of the moving image.
Kim Dorland is a painter who has been influenced by the urban and natural landscape as well as the history of painting in Canada. Much in the same way as his modernist predecessors, Dorland’s paintings are characterized by a densely impastoed surface, developed through an intensive process of layering and scraping paint from the canvas. Since relocating to Vancouver from Toronto in 2014, Dorland has been acclimatizing to the Northwest Coast, which features in his current paintings as a mysterious and enigmatic setting where alienated figures hover within lush forests. Born in Wainwright, Alberta, in 1974, Dorland holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, and an MFA from York University, Toronto.
Krista Belle Stewart is known for her ability to draw out the complexities of archival material that allow for both intimacy, coincidence, and the meeting of histories across time. Working with video, photography, design, ephemera, textiles and audio, Stewart engages the gaps found between personal narratives and institutional histories. Her work has been exhibited at the Independent Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery; Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Mercer Union, Toronto; and the Esker Foundation, Calgary. Stewart holds an MFA from Bard College, New York. She is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation and is currently based in Vancouver. As a recent recipient of the British Columbia Art Council’s mentorship award, Stewart is working with T’uy’tanat-Cease Wyss and Brian Jungen to lead her in a process of decolonizing her education.
Lyse Lemieux’s thirty-year art practice has focused on drawing. Through considerations of process and materiality, she has explored the space between abstraction and representation while consistently maintaining an interest in the human figure. In recent works this reference to the body has manifested in collaged elements of second-hand clothing. The artist has also recently been experimenting with expansive, site-specific wall drawings, in which felt shapes are used to emulate the flowing lines of black ink.
Born in New Brunswick in 1978, Delong is a self-taught artist. His work has been included in exhibitions at Colette, Paris; Bee Studios, Tokyo; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; ABEL Neue Kunst, Berlin; Perugi Artecontemporanea, Padova, Italy; MOCCA, Toronto; and LES Gallery, Vancouver. Delong has collaborated with artists such as Paul Butler, Jason McLean, Jacob Gleeson and Geoffrey Farmer and has published books with Nieves, Seems Books and TV Books. The artist is represented by Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Ed. Varie, New York.
Matt Browning’s work concerns time, latency and the selective and hierarchical valuations of human activity. Taking the form of sculpture, painting, weaving and carving, his practice involves slow and intensive processes, resulting in complex forms that negotiate conditions of labour and value. Browning lives and works between Vancouver and Seattle.
Michael Drebert’s artistic practice often takes the form of symbolic journeys, repeated gestures, small events and subtle ceremonies. For Drebert, empirical experience and personal encounters are critical ways of exploring the complexities of the natural world. In some cases, these passages are ends unto themselves; in others, they are motivated by a particular task or quest. The artist for example has travelled to distant sites to reunite objects and materials that have been separated over time. Closer to home, Drebert has developed a number of projects that involve daily practices, routines and invented customs. Elegant in their simplicity, these poetic and sensitive interventions often unfold within exhibition contexts as painted texts, stories relayed by the traveller.
Mina Totino is an established artist who has contributed signi cantly to cri cal discussions around painting in the city. Her commi ed studio practice, teaching, writing and curating are informed by her continued research into the history of art and painting. The result of prolonged reading, thinking, looking and reflecting, To no’s rigorous paintings are concerned with the nuances of colour, gesture and the physical and conceptual space of the canvas.
Rachelle Sawatsky is an artist and writer whose paintings, drawings, ceramics and writing explore internal narra ves and sensory percep on. Recent works by the artist draw on childlike subjects and ideas—animal characters rendered in vivid colour, the imagined interiors of lumpy bodies, and joyful, scribbled weathers, conjuring alternating currents of dream, memory and other visionary experience. The drawings are presented as a poem, to be read through their titles, and punctuated with ceramic asterisks, which have been screenprinted and painted with watercolour washes. Combining allegory and intuition, the works are at once abstract and familiar, formal and spontaneous.
Raymond Boisjoly engages language and culturally resonant images to assess, disturb and otherwise question the migration and transmission of meaning. Previous works by the artist have obscured the legibility of Indigenous place names and distorted images from film and video aligned with the documentary conventions of anthropology, drawing attention to inherent gaps within these dominant modes of representation, but also allowing for other possibilities for language and image-making to emerge.
Richard William Hill is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. Hill taught full-time in the Art History program at York University, Toronto, beginning in 2007 and leaving as Associate Professor in 2015. As Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, he oversaw the museum’s first substantial effort to include Indigenous North American art and ideas in permanent-collection galleries. His regular column "Close Readings," featuring extended reviews of contemporary Indigenous art, began in FUSE Magazine in 2013 and now continues in C Magazine. He also writes a regular online column for Canadian Art.
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.
Tamara Henderson’s immersive installations often include painting, film, textiles, sculpture and audio. Drawing on mythology and investigating shadow states and other realms of consciousness, Henderson’s sensory explorations are informed by dreams, hypnosis, literature and psychotropic experiences. Invoking the aims and strategies of Surrealist literature, theatre, art and film, the artist’s anthropomorphic forms and fantastical films are at once droll and foreboding. Henderson was born in Sackville, New Brunswick in 1982 and studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax; the Städelschule, Frankfurt; and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.
Tiziana La Melia lives and works on unceded Coast Salish Territories/Vancouver and received an MFA from the University of Guelph. She brings together references from literature, film, history, bio-ecology, the pastoral, and personal history to elaborate on the multifaceted meanings and layers latent within images, matter, symbols, class, gender and text. She is the author of The Eyelash and the Monochrome, (Talonbooks, and Oral Like Cloaks, Blank Cheque Press. Solo and group exhibitions of her work have taken place at Mercer Union, Toronto; Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels, The Rooms, Saint John’s; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries , Anne Baurrault, Paris; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Truth and Consequences, Geneva; and Unit 17, Vancouver.
Walter Scott was born in Kahnawake, Quebec, in 1985. He holds a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph. Scott has participated in exhibitions and projects at Artspace, Peterborough; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto; Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama; and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, and has performed at events at the Or Gallery, Vancouver; Art Metropole, Toronto; Images Festival, Toronto; and Brud, Warsaw. He also has published books with Koyama Press and Art Metropole. His most recent book, Wendy’s Revenge, is set in Vancouver and examines the role of gossip.
Born in Conway, South Carolina in 1948, William Gibson is a novelist and screenwriter who’s lived in Vancouver since 1972. His first novel, Neuromancer (1984), considers the evolution of artificial intelligence and the term “cyberspace.” His most recent novel, The Peripheral (2014), is set in two imagined futures: one an economically depressed near-future rural America, the other an affluent, radically depopulated mid-twenty-first-century London. His work often deals with emergent technologies, the role of subcultures in industrial and post-industrial societies and the cultural impact of marketing and advertising. He has also written for film and television. His non-fiction is collected as Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012).