Category: Visual Art
Visual Art
Scroll down to see all our visual art listings.
Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm
Visual Art Exhibition | Sun Wah 268 Keefer, Lower Ground Floor
Featured Artists:
Beric Manywounds
Blake Angeconeb
Chad Baba
Duane Isaac
Falak Vasa
Grace House
Ho Tam
Isaac Murdoch
Jay Pahre
Kali Spitzer
Katherine Atkins
Kathleen Ross
Manuel Axel Strain
Oluseye
pablo muñoz
The exhibition is open to the public and free to view on the Lower Ground Floor of the Sun Wah Centre for the duration of the festival, open Tue – Sat from 12 – 6pm.
Green. Ascribed with multiplicities such as spring’s cyclical lush green rematriation: growth, hope, vitality, balance – health … to spectrums of radioactive and toxic neons … to pestilent dark greens symbolizing mutation, jealousy, greed and wealth. Green inhabits interconnectedness, relationship with the Other, the seen and unseen, as well as the very lands and waters the West — WE — continue to occupy. Green maturates deviance, neuro-divergence, epoch and paranormality.
Strange pop-cultural oddities/underdog/anti-heroes emerge from fantastically unconventional, metaphorical trappings of the colour green: Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West; Rainbow Connection Kermit the Frog; Joaquin Phoenix’s invocation of Arthur Fleck’s becomings into The Joker; The Mandalorian’s Grogu (Baby Yoda) taking the visual lexicon by storm — It’s not easy being Green.
Was there a time of Utopic Queer being and doing? What are the implications of being privy to pre-apocalypto hauntings? Post-apocalyptic expectations with an evidence base indicating we already have arrived in the end-time — we all have diverse ancestries of forced migration and forced dislocation/relocations along linear entry points, we remain and WE are/can/could still be vanished at any given moment.
Green is linked to power. The currency of Green has the power to legally mark action and activism(s) as terrorism. Settler Environmental ally/accomplices are marked deviant not only for their vote, but akin to Canadian News media’s necropolitical castings of Indigenous land and water protectors as violent. As protester.
We witness the world grappling with end-time realities, seemingly surreal and relentlessly coming into view, as we fight for a world yet to be realized, waiting to be seen — and by one that consistently rejects WE. Green, in its final transformation, exists as representing the supernatural, the great mystery — time and power intertwined. An apocalyptic green glows lasciviously as it courts both eschatological time (Philosopher Byung-Chul Hans’ naming of an apocalyptic/temporal end point) and the status quo’s living in romantic despair that the end of the world in which the existing exalted beings are not free subjects of apocalypticism(s).
Green is the complex terrain of extended kinship ties between Indigiqueer/two-spirit and queer settlers. Green spectrals haunt the hyphenated margins of the subaltern; enduring perpetually frequent gaslighting of post-traumatic settler-colonial and concurrent disorders. Together/apart WE endure our own private apocalyptics. Cataclysmic temporal end-points that exist as seemingly fixed and an unavoidable global terminus, from which Indigiqueer/queer resurgence erupts relentless into the ongoing colonial.
Curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman
Visual Art Tour
Tue Jul 27 | 5pm
Come together for our Visual Art Tour with the curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman and guest artists
Tue Jul 27, 5pm
Visual Art Tour | Sun Wah 268 Keefer, Lower Ground Floor
Come together for our Visual Art Tour of our exhibition it’s not easy being green, with the curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman + guest artists.
Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13
Community Art Showcase | Online
The digital culmination of the Kindred Spirits digital artist residency run by and for 2Spirit and Indigiqueer artists. Guided by Faculty members Dayna Danger, DJ O Show, Raven Davis and Art Auntie Shane Sable, this digital exhibition focuses on re-storying 2Spirit identities and futures through community connection and self-portraiture beyond colonial constructs.
Participated artists TBA.
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
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.