Recent Programming
NOTE: an archive of past programming can be found on the brunt magazine site.
Exhibition
Oblique Drift
Nicholas Galanin
October 23, 2009 – November 28, 2009
Opening – Friday Oct. 23rd, 8pm grunt gallery
Artist talk Saturday, October 24, 2009, 2:00 - 3:30 pm,
Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art
630 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia
Alaskan artist Nicholas Galanin brings his transformative work to grunt gallery, which extends from his series, 'The Imaginary Indian' a series that juxtaposes manufactured Northwest Coast masks and French toile. Galanin explores the authentic and inauthentic and how interpretation, appropriation and "cultural drift " inform Northwest Coast art . Showcasing new works from The Curtis Legacy Galanin strips masks, bodies and meaning down to reveal that ,"The real strength in survival of indigenous knowledge and culture lies within the ability to freely and creatively represent ourselves." Shifting the colonial gaze from ethnography to pin-up The Curtis Legacy series includes nude models wearing Indonesian made Tlingit masks, referencing Edward Curtis photographs of the noble savage, these works lay bare the objectification of both the body and the sacred . Both series of works are brought together in Galnin's examination of gloablized culture(s), freedom of cultural expression and the manifestations of change in a world of shifting cultures and ancestral echoes.
Nicholas Galanin was born in Sitka, Alaska, Nicholas Galanin has struck an intriguing balance between his origins and the course of his practice. Having trained extensively in 'traditional' as well as 'contemporary' approaches to art, he pursues them both in parallel paths. His stunning bodies of work simultaneously preserve his culture and explore new perceptual territory. Galanin comes from a long line of Northwest Coast artists, starting with his great-grandfather, who sculpted in wood, down through his father, who works in both precious metal and stone. Galanin studied at the London Guildhall University, where he received a Bachelor's of Fine Arts with honors in Jewelry Design and Silversmithing. Soon after, Galanin discovered a graduate arts program at Massey University in New Zealand that meshed perfectly with his interests and concerns, and in 2004 he began earning a Master's degree there in Indigenous Visual Arts. Valuing his culture as highly as his individuality, Galanin has created an unusual path for himself. He deftly navigates "the politics of cultural representation," as he balances both ends of the aesthetic spectrum. With a fiercely independent spirit, Galanin has found the best of both worlds and has given them back to his audience in stunning form.
Performance
Wiped
Jennifer Campbell
Date: October 17, 2009
Time: 3-6pm
Location: Opus Art & Design Media - 100-207 West Hasting Street
Occurring as part of the LIVE2009 Performance Festival, Wiped is a work featuring two people being swept back and forth across the windows of a storefront, like windshield wipers. To achieve this, the artist, Jennifer Campbell, and collaborator Sven Johansson, will direct performers attached to mechanical moving booms that will form the arms of the wipers and have operators controlling the movements of the performers. The performance will provide insight into Campbell’s process and her continuing exploration of the limits and absurdity of the body.
Set-up for the performance will begin at the location starting at 10am, the actual activity of wiping the windows with the performers will occur in 5 min segments repeating every 20 minutes between 3pm and 6pm.
Jennifer Campbell has a BFA from the University of Victoria and an MFA Photography from Concordia University. She has shown in Canada, Australia and the US, taught at Concordia and The University of Ottawa, and recently completed a three-year tenure as Exhibition Coordinator at Dazibao in Montreal. She is currently the Director of Crawl Space, a non-profit art space in Seattle.
Exhibition & Web project:
Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture
Curated by Tania Willard and Skeena Reece
June 26th - August 1st 2009
www.beatnation.org
Grunt gallery is pleased to present Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture, June 26, 2009. Co-curated by Tania Willard and Skeena Reece, Beat Nation is a web-based project located at beatnation.org. Grunt gallery will be hosting an exhibition of artists' work featured on the site, and an event showcasing DJs and MCs from the web project will occur the evening of the exhibition opening.
"Native graffiti art, indigenized iPods, Inuit break dancing, indigenous-language hip hop and video, Indian bling and urban wear: the roots of hip hop culture and music have been transformed by indigenous cultures and identities into new forms of visual culture and music that echo the realities of Aboriginal people. Beat Nation is about music, it's about art and it's about the spirit of us as indigenous peoples and cultures." (Tania Willard, Co-curator)
Exhibition
Circa Indian
Nathalie Ball
May 15th - June 20th 2009
Opening Friday May 15th @ 8 pm
Natalie Ball's exhibition "Circa Indian" is specific to the place and history of her people in relation to the historical impact of visual and textual narratives. Addressing issues of authenticity, from questioning the role of blood quantum and tribal belonging to practices of ethnographic portraiture, Ball examines internal and external discourses that shape Indigenous identities. Painted textiles partnered with figurative sculpture via hand made dolls are utilized to move "Indian" outside of mainstream discourses in order to construct a new visual genealogy that questions the normalized expectations of Native American identity.
Natalie Ball is an emerging, Portland based Aboriginal artist (Modoc/Klamath). Ball is the great great granddaughter of Kintpuash (Captain Jack). Her own genealogy informs her attempts to unsettle old foundations by loosening ideological attachments belonging to race and experience by moving history outside of hegemonic discourses. Her work invites participation in a new auto-ethnographic narrative, a new history and a new manifestation for a critical way to understand America.Ball holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from the University of Oregon and a Master's in Maori and Indigenous Visual Arts from MasseyUniversity, New Zealand. She has exhibited in the US, New Zealand, and Europe.
Exhibition
...as if a forest
Dmitry Strakovsky
April 3 to May 9, 2009
Opening Friday, April 3 @ 8pm
Artist Talk, Saturday, April 4 @ 2pm
Dmitry Strakovsky' s installation, ...as if a forest, will begin with a performance: the artist will read an IKEA-like ten step assembly set of instructions for generation of an aural experience of a forest. Each step is "performed" and sampled via custom multi-channel software. Remixed and looped, the sounds will play through speakers hung on vine-like chords throughout the exhibition space. Video of the performance will be added to complete the experience for the duration of the exhibition.
Strakovsky's installation will highlight the illusionistic nature of processes involved in "experience delivery", the fluidity of the audience members' perceptions and choices, and the simultaneous construction/deconstruction of the sound experience begun during the performance phase.
Dmitry Strakovsky has a BFA and MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. He has shown extensively in the US, Japan, South Korea, China, Estonia, and at the New Forms Festival in Vancouver. He was nominated for the "Sony's Heart" Sony Europe Award in 2000, and received the Residency Award at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 2004.
Exhibition
Andrea Cooper
Fickle as Poison
February 20th - March 28th 2009
Opening Friday, February 20th @ 8pm
Andrea Cooper's single-channel video installation, Fickle As Poison, uses non-conventional narrative combined with complementary photographs and text to retell a family story of desire and death. Through the re-arrangement of key elements, Cooper explores the limits of visual and oral language, female sexuality and its relationship to the psyche, the convergence of place and identity, and the "dream-logic beneath the surface of things".
Andrea Cooper, originally from Newfoundland, has been an art educator, guest lecturer, conference panelist and curator. Her work has been shown in Canada, the US and in Germany at the Berlin International Film Festival. She holds a BFA (Honors with Distinction) from Concordia University and a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
Exhibition
Photo by Paul Litherland
Claude Perreault
Elizabeth
January 9 - February 14, 2009
Opening Friday, January 9th @ 8pm
Claude Perreault's upcoming exhibition, Elizabeth, explores the artist's long-standing fascination with glamour, while playfully subverting idealized representations within celebrity culture. Elizabeth enacts a complex train of mediated signification. Perreault has chosen to revisit Queen Elizabeth I through cinema and television portrayals by celebrity actors (such as Judi Dench in Shakespeare In Love or Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth).
At first glance, Perreault's portraits might appear to be expertly crafted oil paintings, but closer inspection reveals each picture plane to be entirely comprised of collaged erotic images from gay magazines. Displaying an inspiring sense of humor and incredible technical precision, Perreault provokes reconsiderations of the construction and functions of desire within contemporary society.
Claude Perreault returns to the pre-digital material processes and subversive potentials within avant-garde collage practices of the twentieth century. Drawing primarily from gay print erotica, he selects, cuts, archives and sometimes destroys pre-existing documents, rather than replicating them electronically. Pop-culture icons are often portrayed within works that are consistently camp, queer and kitsch-like. Perreault currently lives and works in the city of Montreal.
Exhibition
Wally Dion
Red Worker
October 25th - November 29, 2008
Opening Friday, October 24th, 8-11pm
Artist Talk, Saturday, October 25th, 3pm
Wally Dion is a member of the Yellow Quill First Nation (Salteaux) who probes issues of First Nations identity. His art has typically consisted of large-scale painted portraiture, often addressing First Nations class struggles in modern Canadian life, particularly in his home province of Saskatchewan.
The large-scale panel paintings that comprise this grunt exhibition adopt social realist aesthetic tropes, directly referencing the propaganda posters of the Chinese Revolution and the iconography of the Soviet Proletariat. Through this knowing appropriation of form, the artist is able to speak to the effacement of First Nations contributions to the building and definition of Canada and Canadian cultural identity.
Utilizing a collapsed stylistic paradigm within global capitalism, the Red Worker series dynamically explores the contentious arenas of institutional history, memory, racism, class struggle, pride and identity. In doing so, these works are able to reveal and question how representational practices can both open and close such complex and ongoing social dialogues.
Wally Dion was born in 1976 and graduated in 2004 from the University of Saskatchewan's BFA program. As a commissioned portrait artist, he received Grants from the Saskatchewan Arts Board and has also been awarded Canada Council support. He has been in numerous group exhibitions and had his first solo show this past summer at the Mackenize Art Gallery in Regina. His work is also part of public collections including those of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canada Council Art Bank and the MacKenzie Art Gallery.
Performance/Installation
Kevin MacKenzie
SCREEN
November 8 - November 29, 2008
Opening: November 8 at 8 pm
This performance work consists of the artist building a wall that will serve as a screen for a video documenting the building of the wall. The conceptual piece speaks to construction and fa�ades in the period leading up to the 2010 Olympic Games. McKenzie works as a plasterer in the construction industry and this piece addresses the massive build-up of new construction in the city. The wall is both a sample of current construction and a fa�ade. Its role as a screen questions what it reveals and what it hides.
Kevin McKenzie is Métis Cree from Regina who currently works in Vancouver. He has studied at the University of Regina as well as OCA and ECIAD. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Richmond Art Gallery, the Indian and Inuit Art Gallery, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum and the MacKenzie Art Gallery. He has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions and attended several artist residency programs.
Exhibition
Jake Hill
New Work
September 4th - October 11th 2008.
Opening Thursday Sept 4 @ 8pm.
Jake Hill is a young emerging artist who has shown in local Vancouver artist-run centres. His work is rooted in sculpture and this new work is significantly different from this previous work for its minimal mass and implied rather than real form.
Jake comments on his new work, "The installation continues research into achieving scale and form through the use of materials that are absent, vacant or almost nothing. The work is inspired by drawings that depict making things - like shop sketches or illustrated recipes. Such devices lie or at least they cannot tell the whole truth. They need faith or willful misreading to believe that something could exist as a result of them."
Hill's exhibit, comprised of installation and drawing, uses the cast shadow of a ping pong ball against a wall to create an instance of "artificial logic." The exhibit provides an opportunity for the viewer's "willful misreading of rational evidence" to produce an imaginary space informed by a "new physics" of presence. Jake Hill is a sculptor whose work investigates the construction of artificial relationalities.
Jake Hill is a graduate from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and has a Masters Degree in Architecture from UBC. He received the Helen Pitt and the Alvin Balkind Prizes at ECIAD and the Kenny Charow Prize at UBC.
Hill's practice is informed by considerations of the body and culture and interests itself, particularly, in questions of scale.
Performance/New Media:
Vision Division
Workshops: Sept 15 - 17, noon to 6 pm each day
Performance: Thursday, Sept 18, noon to midnight
At Open Studios - 252 East 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC
Vision Division is the inaugural event of the Vancouver chapter of SHARE, a global organization dedicated to supporting collaboration and knowledge exchange in new media communities. Twelve participants will be invited to collectively create a networked, collaborative, and peer-led new media installation over the course of four days, culminating in a final public performance. Vision Division will focus specifically upon video environments, methodologies, and technologies, while networked SHARE chapters from around the globe will provide sonic material.
Co-presented by SHARE VAN, NFF, and grunt gallery Curator: Jesse Scott in conjunction with the New Forms Festival
Performance:
Laurie Anderson
Homeland
October 18, 2008 at 8 pm
At the Centre For Performing Arts, Vancouver
Laurie Anderson's Homeland is a series of songs and stories whose interconnections construct a political poetics of contemporary American culture. A sustained musical piece, Homeland explores the issues associated with panic culture, including our growing preoccupations with information and security. A groove electronics composition, Homeland showcases Anderson's new-form violin arrangements, her developments with electronic systems and her interest in Tuvan throat singers. Working with a group of experienced improvisational musicians, each performance of Homeland will be unique.
Based in New York, Laurie Anderson is an internationally recognized multimedia artist whose work has ranged from visual art and musical composition to filmmaking and electronics. Anderson's career, spanning over three decades, has been centrally preoccupied with the relational effects of technology on human interaction and communication. In 2002, Anderson was appointed NASA's first artist-in-residence, culminating in the solo performance production "The End of the Moon," which premiered in 2004 and toured internationally throughout 2006.
Presented in conjunction with
International Arts Initiatives.