Category: Visual Art

Visual Art

Scroll down to see all our visual art listings.

bumfuzzled monachopsis: innerspace out

Curated Visual Art Exhibition

Sat Jun 17 – Wed Jun 28 

Mon – Fri 9am – 9pm
Sat – Sun 9am – 5pm

Roundhouse Exhibition Hall – 181 Roundhouse Mews

————

Zandi Dandizette, Curator

bumfuzzled monachopsis: innerspace out

Free Guided Curator Tour with Zandi Dandizette

Sat Jun 24, 2pm

Roundhouse Exhibition Hall – 181 Roundhouse Mews

This event is ASL Interpreted.

Featured Artists:
Eda Birthing
Helena St Tearer
JAIK PUPPYTEETH
Judah Kong
Kale Roberts
Kali Fish
Leby Le Morìa
Levi Nelson
Makoto Chi
Odera Igbokwe
Moozhan Ahmadzadegan
Parisa Rafat
Pastiche Lumumba
Rachel Britton
Raven John
Romi Kim, Kendell Yan & Chris Reed

bumfuzzled monachopsis: innerspace out reflects the uncertain times in which our collective world does not ascertain belonging to those occupying it. Our parallel universes of experience, never quite overlapping, seeking out an idealized community, that “me-shaped” hole in which inclusion is touted. A confused subtle space of emotion as the external world points at what we are and who we are, yet never quite where we are welcome to be. 

The present state in which queer artists take up space, share space, and embody the ownership of it. Sharing our inner worlds out visually via developed characters, worlds, or visual language that provides safety in exploring identity or the relation to the spaces around them. 

Zandi Dandizette’s curation asks viewers to “wander the maze of our hearts and open them to the multiplicity of being.” We are not a homogenized whole, but many individuals all seeking that future space in which belonging can be achieved. 

Zandi Dandizette, QAF 2023 Visual Art Exhibition guest curator

Zandi Dandizette is a nonbinary settler-immigrant interdisciplinary arts and cultural worker that likens their medium as space whether 2D, 3D, or 4D. Their work vacillates between focus shifts on identity, dis/connection, and collective problem solving. Zandi’s practice attempts to investigate and share the lessons they’ve absorbed in navigating the complexity of existence by utilizing repeating shape and colour motifs.  Zandi has a BMA in Animation (2014) from Emily Carr University and has shown varied new media and installation works over the last decade across Canada and internationally. They balance their artistic practice with supporting arts advocacy and community building. Zandi Dandizette co-founded and leads The James Black Gallery (2014) which is located on the stolen unceded ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. They are a current board member of CARFAC National, and chartering member of the Arts and Cultural Workers Union (ACWU local 778-B).  

Cosmic Connections: Queer Indigenous Astronomy (A View From Above and Below)

 Preston Buffalo AR works

Sat Jun 17 – Wed Jun 28

9am to 9pm daily

Roundhouse Exhibition Hall – 181 Roundhouse Mews

Augmented Reality artist Preston Buffalo secretly brings the Roundhouse to life with Indigiqueer pasts and futures – including a creation story of how the Cree People originated from the Pleiades star cluster. Buffalo’s AR images are invisible and inaudible to the naked eye and ear – but revealed when your phone scans a QR code! Presented in partnership with Little Chamber Music. 

Preston Buffalo

Preston Buffalo (he/him) is a Two-Spirited Cree man residing in the unceded Coast Salish Territories in British Columbia. His interdisciplinary practice is centred around exploring personal Indigenous iconography and symbolism through the use of photography, alternative photo processes, digital illustration and AR. Preston’s work is informed by pressing issues faced by Indigenous communities, including mental health, harm reduction, loss of culture and language resulting from displacement and the residential school system. By intersecting traditional material practice with contemporary techniques, his work seeks to challenge viewers’ perceptions of contemporary Indigenous Identity.

Queers in Space: Pride in Art Community Show

Mon Jun 19 – Sat Jul 8

Exhibition open Tue thru Sat, 12 – 6pm

The James Black Gallery – 144 E 6th Ave.

Opening Reception: Mon Jun 19, 7pm

Long regarded as the bedrock of the Queer Arts Festival, the Pride in Art Community Show honours the legacy of founder, activist, and Two-Spirit artist, Robbie Hong. Each year, QAF opens submissions to artists of all skills levels to submit their work, preferably centred around the festival theme. For the second year running, QAF has teamed up with queer partner-in-crime, The James Black Gallery, to showcase the otherworldly artwork of our local 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.

Featured Artists:

Ale Cabiddu
Avery Chace
B Malinsky
Caden Lane
Dana Ayotte
Delaney Yvonne
Dmitrii Severov
Ilena Lee
lisa g
Pari
Nico McGiffin
Rafael Zen
Sunny Nestler
Thomas Anfield
Viviana (Ming) Ni
Wilson S. Wilson

New Yams Festival

 Odera Igbokwe solo exhibit

Thu Jun 22 – Fri Jul 28

Exhibition is open Tue-Sat, 12 to 6pm

SUM gallery – #425-268 Keefer St.

New Yams Festival
Opening reception with Odera Igbokwe

Thu Jun 22, 7pm

SUM gallery – #425-268 Keefer St.

SUM gallery presents a solo exhibition by Odera Igbokwe, an illustrator and painter who celebrates the magic of the African Diaspora and QTBIPOC. New Yams Festival is a direct reflection, response, and Queer reclamation of The New Yam Festival of the Igbo people. Traditionally, it is a celebration of abundance, ancestral veneration, and protection. In referencing The New Yam Festival, Odera seeks to create a visual lineage between Queer Afrofuturism and ancestral rituals.

Igbokwe’s colourful, sensuous visions of Queer Black Futurisms opens with a reception on June 22 and will remain on display at SUM gallery until July 28.

Odera Igbokwe

Odera Igbokwe (they/them & he/him) is an illustrator and painter located on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Odera loves to explore storytelling through Afro-diasporic mythologies, Black resilience and magical girl transformation sequences. Their work explores the magic of the Black imagination, and responds to the fractures that occur via diaspora and displacement. Ultimately their paintings celebrate joy, mundanity, and fantasy coexisting alongside pain and healing. As a freelance illustrator, Odera works with clients and galleries to create work that is deeply personal, soulful and intersectional.

MOTORBIKE/SUPERDYKE

Vanishing Act extended at Centre A

Centipede—Flavourcel Animation Collective

SOVEREIGNTY at SUM gallery — DUANE ISAAC

Mass Reincarnation of Wish Fragments

Curated Visual Art Exhibition

Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm

Visual Art Exhibition | Sun Wah 268 Keefer, Lower Ground Floor

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

Preston Buffalo
Tejal Shah
Tsohil Bhatia

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

Curator Tour with 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.

Kindred Spirits

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.

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.

Share