Category: Past Events

Gathering of Wishes and 1000 Paper Butterflies

Phase 1 of Mass Reincarnation of Wish Fragments 願片大量転生 (Ganhen Tairyou Tensei)

Workshop | Wed Aug 4, 6pm | SUM gallery & Online

With Artists: Naoko Fukumaru and Eva Wong

An ancient Japanese folk tale promises that anyone who folds 1000 paper cranes will have their wish answered by the gods. In this project, these wishes are instead carried by the wings of butterflies, a symbol with many intricate meanings. In chaos theory, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings is said to be able to cause storms on the other side of the world, a statement that one individual is capable of bringing about great change. In biology, the butterfly hatching process symbolizes rebirth, a new life, coming out, and the transformation into something beautiful, common themes in 2SLGBTQ+ culture and especially the transgender experience.  

During phase one, Naoko Fukumaru and Eva Wong host a workshop where participants learn to create origami and are shown how to utilize the ink bleeding process to create a butterfly with their own unique patterns and colors. The end goal is to collect 1000 butterflies before moving on to the next phase. This workshop is open to anyone who wants to participate, and where they can submit their own pieces of Origami to be included as part of the installation at SUM galley in the fall. This workshop can either be attended virtually, or in-person at SUM gallery. Space in-gallery is limited.

Naoko Fukumaru and Eva Wong bring together a wide array of diverse interrelated artistic practices in a collaborative process that highlights each of their extensive skill sets to create a work that objects into a unified expression of transformation. Naoko professionally trained in the conservation techniques of both Japanese and European traditions to restore precious objects d’art while exposing the actual procedure of restoration as in the traditional art of which highlights the repair with gold known as Kintsugi. While highlighting the techniques as creative embellishments to expose the experience of metamorphosis into a new work of art. Eva brings her extensive knowledge of origami and gaming development to turn richly painted papers with geometric shapes and astrological symbols into butterflies and flowers. Eva and Naoko come together in an original installation that reveals the transformation process as a dynamic innovative art form, using old roots to bring forth new leaves. Their work has a profound emotionally healing, intensely felt ability of turning complicated ruptures into more enduring experiences of emerging beauty.

Time-lapse: Posthumous Conversations

Pride in Art Community Art Show

Art Show | July 16 -26

From the roots of the Queer Arts Festival, this open visual art show honours our founder, Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong and 21 years of Pride in Art organizing.

This show will launch online on July 16 and run through to July 26.

2020 Artists

Chris Watson
CREATEIIV
Edward Bader
Ilena Lee
Jackson Photographix
Kate Braun
Kyla Yin
Michel Dumont
Mikayla Fawcett
Vladimir Kolosov

Curator Tour

Curated by Jonny Sopotiuk | July 16 – 26 |

Curator Statement

Queer life is a reality of ongoing survival. From government and societal oppression, to family rejection and social isolation our memories and experiences have been defined and shaped by the structures that are designed to contain us.

Our identities and experiences are mediated. Living is a constant battle against and with these systems of containment.

Wicked brings together a multigenerational group of artists living and producing work across Canada and the United States as they explore the body, community, and architecture of homonormativity. 

In 2020 we’re learning to live through a new form of containment during a global health pandemic. Our long fight for recognition and the foundations of community infrastructures that we created to sustain us are being fundamentally questioned.

We’re now asked to rethink how we build individual and collective responses to queer and trans trauma and erasure? 

With new connections and intimacy now mediated by requirements to shelter in place, artists critically examine our communities’ oppression and expose implications of complicity in the homonormative systems created to contain us.

— Jonny Sopotiuk.

Jonny Sopotiuk is a visual artist, curator and community organizer living and working on the Unceded Indigenous territories belonging to the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh-ulh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and Tsleil-Watututh peoples in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His interdisciplinary practice explores compulsion and control through the lenses of production, labour, and work. Jonny is the President of the Arts and Cultural Workers Union (ACWU), IATSE Local B778, Vice-President of CARFAC BC and a founding member of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union Cooperative or VALU CO-OP.

Artist Panel Discussion chaired by Jonny Sopotiuk with participating artists Tom Hsu, Avram Finkelstein, Elektra KB, and Tajliya Jamal.

Following our official welcome, guest visual art curator Jonny Sopotiuk gives a virtual tour of the Curated Visual Art Exhibition joined by guest artists.

Tom Hsu is a studio-based visual artist whose works seeks to investigate the curious condition of spaces, and their correlation to the bodies that attend them, as communicated through the photography of the everyday mundane. He comes from a base in analog photography, and this stability allows him to extend into made, found, and choreographic sculpture, all of which deal with the everyday mundane. He currently lives and works in Vancouver and holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He undertook a residency at Burrard Arts Foundation from April to June 2018. He has exhibited at Centre A, Unit/Pitt, Index Gallery, and Yactac Gallery in Vancouver.

www.tomhsu.com

Avram Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney, The New Museum and The Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book, “After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images” was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction, and an ICP Infinity Award in Critical Writing. 

http://avramfinkelstein.com/

Elektra KB is a Latinx immigrant artist, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. They graduated with an MFA from Hunter College in 2016 and received a DAAD award, pursued at UDK—Berlin with artist Hito Steyerl. Their work engages corporeal sickness and disability, with utopian possibilities and alternative universes. KB investigates: gender, migration, transculturality, and abuse of power. Their work entangles mutual aid, political action, and communication, often with a documentarian-sci-fi-like hybrid approach, exploring utopia and dystopia. Across: photography, textiles, video, installation and performance. KB’s work has been written about in: Art Forum, Artnews and The New York Times. Recent shows include: ‘Nobody Promised You Tomorrow’ at the Brooklyn Museum.

elektrakb.com

Tajliya Jamal is a queer, mixed-race artist of Cantonese and Indian heritage. She uses illustration, text, and storytelling, often to highlight relationships between race, sexuality, and (in)visibility. Focus on pattern and detail aim to involve viewers more intimately.

https://tajliyaj.tumblr.com/

Born and raised on Coast Salish Territory, Shanique (also known as Softieshan) is a DJ and event producer widely known for her femme-forward, hip hop heavy sets. She founded ‘LEVEL UP’, the city’s only QTBIPOC centred hip hop dance party, and works adamantly to carve out community space for folks who exist within marginalized communities. Softieshan is a resident DJ at the Fox, the American, The Boxcar and has recently embarked on a new initiative “Cue Club” which offers low barrier DJ and professional development workshops for women, LGBTQ2+, disabled and BIPOC folks in a fun and supportive environment. 

This Event is ASL Interpreted.

Wicked: Curated Visual Arts Exhibition

Curated by Jonny Sopotiuk | July 16 – 26 |

Queer life is a reality of ongoing survival. From government and societal oppression, to family rejection and social isolation our memories and experiences have been defined and shaped by the structures that are designed to contain us.

Our identities and experiences are mediated. Living is a constant battle against and with these systems of containment.

Wicked brings together a multigenerational group of artists living and producing work across Canada and the United States as they explore the body, community, and architecture of homonormativity. 

In 2020 we’re learning to live through a new form of containment during a global health pandemic. Our long fight for recognition and the foundations of community infrastructures that we created to sustain us are being fundamentally questioned.

We’re now asked to rethink how we build individual and collective responses to queer and trans trauma and erasure? 

With new connections and intimacy now mediated by requirements to shelter in place, artists critically examine our communities’ oppression and expose implications of complicity in the homonormative systems created to contain us.

Visual Artists

Avram Finkelstein
Christopher Lacroix
Dayna Danger
Elektra KB
Flash Collective
Joseph Liatela
Kama La Mackerel
KUNST
Love Intersections
Micheal Morris
Shauna Dempsey + Lori Millan
Tom Hsu
Xandra Ibarra

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The Garden: Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa in Recital

Thu, 13 February 2020 | 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM PST
Buy Tickets Now

Solo piano recital by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa of works by queer & trans composers, including Rodney Sharman, Ann Southam & Mary Jane Paquette 

Celebrated contemporary piano virtuoso Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa performs a solo recital of queer and trans composers. The programme centres around the work of composer Rodney Sharman, as Rachel prepares to record his complete solo piano works. It will feature world premieres by Sharman and Mary Jane Paquette, paired with works by Ann Southam.

The concert takes its name from Rodney’s notorious music theatre piece The Garden, in which a man visits a gay sex club for the first time and finds his life transformed by a single, perfect kiss. Theatre direction by David Bloom.

Reception to follow.

Pyatt Hall is on the second floor of the VSO School of Music, accessible by elevator, with wheelchair accessible seating and bathrooms.

About the artist

Hailed in the press as a “keyboard virtuoso and avant-garde muse” (Georgia Straight) with the “emotional intensity” to take a piece “from notes on a page to a stunning work of art” (Victoria Times Colonist), Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa is recognized among Canada’s foremost contemporary music pianists. Check this website >

BUy Tickets NOW

Glitter Technics – Show

Daxgyet Hanak – Strong Woman

Yellow Peril; The Celestial Elements

Curated by Love Intersections


Feb 1 – Apr 18, 2020 | Opening Reception: Feb 1, 4-6 pm

Yellow Peril; The Celestial Elements is a visual art exhibit inspired by the Chinese Five Elemental forces, seized by the urgent tensions between Queer Chinese diasporic identities. A collection of multichannel installations, visual and sculptural activations provoke a cosmic encounter of our living past and present as we ‘race’ towards a healing future. These elemental activations attempt to collapse the linear temporality to dislodge an emotional, spiritual, cosmological, and metaphysical enunciation of our Queer ‘Chineseness’. Rather than focus on the trauma that queer people of colour face, this project is fundamentally an invitation to an exuberant celebration of queerness that is unabashedly Chinese.

We invite you to celebrate with us. Featuring artists Jen Sungshine, Kendell Yan, Kai Cheng Thom, Jay Cabalu, and David Ng.

Yellow Peril; The Celestial Elements Workshop

running running trees go by…

Curated by Justin Ducharme in collaboration with the artist, this year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival offers a pop-up exhibit featuring new and retrospective works from artist Zachery Longboy.

Longboy is from Churchill, Manitoba and is of Sayisi Dene lineage. This new and retrospective collection continues the artists’ exploration within a fractured cultural experience through deeply felt layered videos, paintings and archival film.

The exhibit has been held over until September 14.

Glitter Technics

Glitter Technics is a 13 week workshop held every Wednesday from September 11th to December 4th, from 4pm to 8pm, with the exception of a special 5-hour workshop with Reel Youth on October 30th from 4pm to 9pm. All classes take place at The SUM Gallery in Chinatown, located at #425 268 Keefer Street. The workshop is free, with snacks and transit passes provided.

Produced in partnership with Pride in Art Society, Community Arts Council of Vancouver, and TELUS.

Glitter Technics is an experiential creative empowerment workshop series designed to shine the light on you and a story you want to develop and share. Participants will have the opportunity to discover and enhance new and existing artistic practices, tools and techniques as well as choose the creative medium(s) that will help them share their story with the greater public. Come join in the glitter of some of the cities most inspiring performing artists and facilitators who will guide and mentor participants to explore their artistic curiosity and self-expression, take creative risks and increase their self-esteem, confidence and leadership.

Led by Mutya Macatumpag (moo-cha) (maca-toom-pag), participants will work as a collective, creating community, culture, a healthy environment to gain new skills, encourage existing ones to a new level and produce meaningful work. Our aim is to foster solo and group collaboration and production, through exploration, support, fun and mentorship. We will be building up our technical skills in digital story telling, music, movement, theatre, writing, visual and performance art.



Stonewall 50: Glitter is Forever

Fri Jun 28 | 9pm | Free with QSO ticket | Party only $20 – $15

You can’t get that shit out!

On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the closing of QAF 2019 we’re throwing the party of the half-century! Get ready for a culmination of the creative outpouring of this festival season and the past fifty years of queer art and culture.

Join us at The Roundhouse in collaboration with Vancouver Pride Society, The Frank Theatre Company, and Zee Zee Theatre to revel in the queerevolution with live performances, DJ’s spinning us through the decades, and more!

It’s not your story. It’s your LEGEND.

QAF 2019 rEvolution gathers together artists who disassemble, push, and transgress: art as the evolution of the revolution.

“Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.” — Jeanette Winterson

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69 Positions – Curator Tour

June 27 @ the Sum Gallery

adrian-stimson-naked-napi-artist-talk/

This event is over. For more information on the exhibition, visit: https://sumgallery.ca/2019/03/22/adrian-stimson-naked-napi/

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