Queer Arts Festival

Janet Smith – The Georgia Straight – June 19, 2018

It’s hard to believe, given the charismatic provocateur who’s her subject, but Lesley Ewen has been working on getting her play about celebrated Vancouver multimedia artist Paul Wong made for 16 years.

She never lost faith as she tried to get a company to pick up her passion project—but now that frank theatre is finally producingCamera Obscura (hungry ghosts), and the Queer Arts Festival is presenting it, she thinks maybe it’s all been for a reason. The script, devoted to a friend and talent who’s fascinated her for decades longer than that, tackles questions of diversity and suicide that have never been more relevant.

“Now all of that crazy-making waiting is done,” the well-known local actor, director, producer, writer, and acting teacher adds with a good-natured laugh over the phone. “Just think: the actors were 11 when I started writing this!

“Lots of people were really happy to see this story finally told and glad to see these people honoured.”

Camera Obscura (hungry ghosts) reimagines the artist during a career retrospective, when he’s haunted by two people who have died in his past: the subject of his celebrated 1977 work Murder Research and the creative partner who helped him make it. The former character is based on Eugene Lloyd Pelly, an Indigenous man who was stabbed and escaped out a window in February 1976; his bloody body lay covered with snow in the street below the Main-area house where Wong was living at the time. Wong took photos of the scene of quiet violence. The latter character is based on Kenneth Fletcher, the close friend who worked with Wong to fully research the death, gaining access to the coroner’s office and turning all their findings into the multifaceted, photo-heavy Murder Research (which the Vancouver Art Gallery acquired in 2001).

The next year, in 1978, Fletcher took his own life at just 23, a loss that hit Wong’s art group the Mainstreeters hard and a trauma that the grieving Wong explored in his photo-video work for years (especially in ten sity and Untitled [Ken Fletcher 1954–1978]). Ewen remembers being at the Venice Biennale in 2003, when Wong famously projected images from those pieces and others onto the curtains of a moving vaporetto (one of the city’s sea taxis), Fletcher’s face appearing fleetingly on the fluttering, translucent “screen”. The installation was called Hungry Ghosts—a reference to the Chinese belief that some of those who have passed away stay connected to the living.

Ewen remembers looking at a different shocking photo Wong had exhibited decades earlier, one that showed Fletcher cutting his wrist vertically. “And I stood in front of that and said, ‘What is this relationship that they’re so intimate? This man is so distressed that he doesn’t want to be here anymore, but he lets Paul Wong take these photos.’ There’s this trust, and this desire for witnessing,” says Ewen. “And I stood there for probably half an hour in front of this one photo. I’d been brought up by so many gay men in Vancouver with long-term relationships, and knowing those relationships intimately, I was literally possessed.”

Ethical questions about permission and artistic licence connect with those around Murder Research’s subject, Pelly, she says. “This human being never got a choice in being semifamous—that photo was taken at the lowest point of his life,” Ewen comments.

Ewen weaves all these ideas into her three-person play (starring Braiden Houle, Julien Galipeau, and Jeff Ho). In it, Bradley (the stand-in for Wong) confronts his past and the project that helped launch his art career. Fittingly for a production about Paul Wong, Camera Obscura has strong multimedia components, Sammy Chien’s video elements innovatively allowing the main character to speak directly to the figures in his past—his “hungry ghosts”.

The dramatic subject matter lends itself easily to theatre, but Ewen also feels deeply connected to Wong’s expressions of identity and race—she began speaking out about the need for diversity in arts long before it became a national talking point. And the topic of suicide, top of mind due to the recent deaths of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, hits home too: she’s lost two friends to it.

“I wanted to show people how sometimes, if somebody doesn’t want to live in the absolute torment, they can hide that—even when you’re living with them,” she says. “And also there’s a lot of gay youth suicide—a lot of young men who don’t have anyone in their immediate community, no support, just condemnation. And it’s hard to know it gets better.”

Through it all, she’s found Wong an inspiring source—one she spent long hours talking to in candid interviews. “He’s an amazing human,” she says. “One of the things that is incredible is he is comfortable with discomfort and comfortable with revealing himself.”

The Queer Arts Festival presents frank theatre’s Camera Obscura (hungry ghosts) at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre from Wednesday (June 19) to June 23.For anyone feeling distress in British Columbia, helpful resources include the Crisis Centre (604-872-3311), the 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433) line, hospital emergency rooms, and medical doctors. 

Tara Lee – Inside Vancouver – June 14, 2018

Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival Marks A Decade Of Provocative And Innovative ProgrammingFor its tenth year, the Queer Arts Festival (QAF) will be a showcasing an array of multidisciplinary artists who offer complex, nuanced, and boundary-challenging work meant to incite conversation.

This year’s QAF will feature performance, panels, curated exhibitions, and parties that will be sure to engage attendees in new avenues of thought and artistic creation.

Running from June 16 to 28, 2018, the QAF takes place at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews). This year’s festival is so monumental, not only because of its tenth anniversary, but also because Pride in Art is celebrating their two decades in existence. Organizers hope to continue to give voice and space for those marginalized and/or silenced, as well as to bring to the forefront the possibilities of contesting what is considered normative and acceptable. The QAF is special in that it is artist run, and is considered one of the top five festivals of its kind.

Here are five events/exhibitions/programming to look forward to:

CAMERA OBSCURA (HUNGRY GHOSTS)

June 19-23, 2018 (June 19 preview)
This world premiere, written by Lesley Ewen and presented with the frank theatre company, is a multimedia performance that looks at the early years of Paul Wong and a project of his, “Murder Research.” It explores the fraught nature of creativity, the ghosts of past artistic work, and the difficulties of racialized artists to create within the nation.

DECADENCE: CURATED VISUAL ART EXHIBITION

June 16-27, 2018
Curated by Valérie D. Walker, DECADEnce considers what is marked and what is unmarked within a “settler colonial society,” particularly drawing attention to that which exists beyond official and mainstream notice. Artists represented include Jenny Lin, TJ Norris, Chandra Melting Tallow, and Guerrilla Girls.

JEREMY DUTCHER: WOLASTOQIYIK LINTUWAKONAWA (MALISEET SONGS)

June 27, 2018
Jeremy Dutcher, an operatic tenor, will sing traditional pieces from his Wolastoqiyik ancestors. He will incorporate, in his performance, recordings from century-old archival wax cylinders that he was able to locate.

SKIN & METAL: HOMOEROTIC MUSIC THEATRE WORKS BY BARRY TRUAX

June 24, 2018
This thirty-year retrospective concert looks at the work of Barry Truax, a ground breaking electro-acoustic Vancouver composer. Music will be performed by Erato Ensemble with special guest Jerry Pergolesi, with selections focusing on those that leverage music’s ability to challenge boundaries.

EVERYTHING

June 26, 2018
This performance by dancer Lee Su-Feh promises to be a complicated examination of Asian diaspora, Canadian indigeneity, and the conflict and possibilities of movement and object flight.

LAY OF THE LAND

June 19, 2018
Curated by Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), the evening will entail erotic literary readings. Writers featured include Lydia Kwa, Smokii Sumac, and Johnny Trinh.

Further info and tickets can be found online.

Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival Celebrates 10 Years of Boundary-Pushing Art

 ALEXIS BARAN– MetroSource – June 13, 2018

Dare to be challenged. Risk being changed. That’s the motto behind Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival. The festival marks its 10th anniversary this year, with DECADEnce as the theme — celebrating a decade of trailblazers and progress while honoring losses.

They’re doing it loudly with many voices expressing strength and vulnerability through art. SD Holman, the festival’s artistic director, is one of the founders who has been participating since the very first show of Pride in Art in 1998 and is part of the continuation, change, and development that paved the way for today’s trans-disciplinary Queer Arts Festival.

Holman is a photo-based artist whose accolades include a YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Arts and Culture. But if you ask, Holman self-identifies as a failure. “When you embrace failure,” says Holman, “you are not beholden to society’s rules, it frees you up to follow your own. If you have never failed, you have never tried something new.”

Queer artists and everyone who is inspired by art that’s daring and sometimes delightfully uncomfortable can thank Holman for being a “failure;” it’s Holman’s perseverance that has in part made the Queer Arts Festival a success. “I considered Vancouver a small town when I came here 35 years ago,” says Holman, who hails originally from LA, a city of some four million locals (as opposed to Vancouver’s approximately 2.5 million population).

“With a smaller demographic, it’s an uphill battle to put on an art festival called ‘Queer,’ but it is important to make art that is thought-provoking, contemporary and avant-garde.” With events ranging from the world premiere of Lesley Ewen’s multi-media play Camera Obscura,to Barry Truax’s homoerotic avant-garde music — to films addressing how violence is navigated by trans and gender-non-conforming artists, to a concert by two-spirit rising star Jeremy Dutcher — visitors who jump into the festival with an open mind have an opportunity to experience new perspectives in creative ways.

The first decade of the festival also marks a beginning: the opening of a permanent, year-round art gallery. The Pride in Art Society (the society behind the Queer Arts Festival) has just opened the SUM Gallery, the only permanent gallery and presentation space in Canada dedicated to multidisciplinary queer art and artists.

In the heart of Vancouver’s Chinatown, SUM shares space with other arts groups such as the Vancouver Indigenous Arts Festival and the Talking Stick Festival. To honor their location, the inaugural solo show was of Karin Lee, a fourth generation Chinese-Canadian queer female-identified artist with a transgressive breadth of work. Going forward, SUM gallery will be a festival hub and will be a place to see queer art year-round.

“I think it’s important to be challenged every day,” says Holman,“when people say ‘I don’t understand it,’ then that’s the beginning of something interesting. Art changes people, and people change the world.” The Queer Arts Festival runs June 16-27, 2018 and June 15-27, 2019.

Stuart Derdeyn– Vancouver Sun– June 13, 2018

Vancouver visual artist SD Holman is also the artistic director of the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival. 

Queer Arts Festival: DECADEnce

When: June 16 to 28, various times

Where: Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre and other venues

Tickets and info: queerartsfestival.com

The 2018 Queer Arts Festival marks 10 years of presenting an annual showcase for boundary pushing work which raises the profiles, voices and work of diverse creators in a society that still has a long way to go in recognizing them.

The multi-disciplinary summer celebration, titled DECADEnce will also honour Pride in Art’s 20th year as an artist-led organization dedicated to exhibiting unique art.

Among the highlights of the summer festival is the world premiere of Lesley Ewen’s work Camera Obscura (hungry ghosts), a 30-year retrospective concert honouring Barry Truax’s three decades of trail-blazing musical experiments and the local debut of operatic tenor Jeremy Dutcher’s performance of traditional Wolastoqiyik songs from his highly buzzed-about debut release Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (Maliseet Songs).

Artistic director SD Holman says that the Queer Arts Festival’s evolution into the event it is today wasn’t without challenges, but now the event is both better and bigger.

“I always said I wanted the event to keep getting better, and to keep bringing more innovative, adventurous and cutting edge artists to Vancouver,” said Holman. “That didn’t have to mean getting bigger, but this year we have opened a gallery so I guess that means bigger too. Ultimately, I just want to give artists exposure because I’m an artist first, not an arts administrator.”

Holman said that events such as the Queer Arts Festival and Pride in Arts Society are key in giving support to artists that haven’t really found a place for their art in the mainstream.

Holman’s photo-based artwork in projects such as BUTCH: Not like the other girls challenges traditional gender roles and the highly limited range of women depicted in mainstream media and has toured North America. With the opening of the SUM gallery — in the Sun Wah building in the heart of Vancouver’s Chinatown — not only does the festival have a permanent home but there is now a year-round space available for use in Canada’s only permanent space devoted to exhibiting queer art.

SUM takes its name from the fact that the fourth floor space in the Sun Wah building on Keefer Street was originally intended for use as a dim sum restaurant but was never occupied. The inaugural exhibit is a solo show of video works by Karin Lee curated by Paul Wong and Holman. Holman is also the executive director of SUM.

“SUM is one of the very few spaces of its kind in the world and, here where it is so expensive to have a home, we have had to move every few years,” said Holman. “This is the land of festivals for that reason, because a permanent space is next to impossible to secure, and now we have a place to do work year-round when the artists are available rather than under the mandate of a set time event.”

Right from its roots, the Queer Arts Festival has always been on the cutting edge of inclusion.

Founded by artists Robbie Hong and Jeff Gibson, the event has tackled such challenging topics as UnSettled (2017), curated by Two-Spirit and queer-identified Indigenous artists; Stonewall Was A Riot (2016) and Trigger: Drawing the Line (2015), which looked at the increase in “trigger warnings” placed on art to alert viewers about the potentially disturbing material long before the term became a hot topic.

Both exhibits and performances at QAF aren’t shy about taking on challenging subject matter in fascinating ways.

“I’ve been working towards getting more and more recognition of those kinds of subjects, and Camera Obscura (hungry ghosts) gets into our lonely specificities that are set about by these larger systems of oppression and marginalization,” said Holman. “It’s almost 10 years in the making and having it for our anniversary is quite special. Paul Wong, who inspired the play, is a Governor General Award-winning Vancouver-based artist who has been with us for a very long time, both featured in exhibits and as a curator.”

Despair, death and being haunted by the past all turn up in this latest piece by Lesley Ewen which is being co-produced by QAF. QAF commissioned a theatre work earlier. Leslie Uyeda and Rachel Rose’s lesbian opera, When the Sun Comes Out, was groundbreaking. Holman says it’s deeply satisfying to participate in this kind of creation as it is “work that needs to be done.”

The artistic director takes inspiration for the hard work that goes into these sorts of collaborations from a quote by new music titan Barry Truax. The composer receives a 30-year retrospective titled Skin & Metal: Homoerotic Music Theatre Works By Barry Truax at this year’s festival (June 24, 7 p.m.).

“He says “if art is meant to mirror society and you look in the mirror and see no reflection then the implicit message is that you don’t exist,”” said Holman. “Our event challenges that view and it’s exciting to me every year to see our reflections in big deals such as our signature art show, DECADEnce, which has always set us apart from most festivals.”

Among the famous works on display will be AA Bronson’s Felix Partz, a giant vinyl print of the famous painting from the Whitney Gallery collection of the departed artist Partz depicting him right after his passing from AIDS. The 14 foot print on loan from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University took four conservators to hang.

twitter.com/stuartderdeyn

Elizabeth Holliday– Sad Mag– June 18, 2018

Over the past 10 years, the Queer Arts Festival (QAF) has staked its place in the histories of Vancouver and the world. Beginning in 1988 as a volunteer-run community arts show through artist collective Pride in Art (PIA), and now one of the top festivals of its kind worldwide, the QAF and its precursor has a total of 20 years of showcasing queer art in Vancouver under its belt. With this year’s theme—DECADEnce—the QAF celebrates their anniversary and looks to the future while honouring the past.

Since its early days, the QAF has striven for representation of and professional opportunities for queer artists. SD Holman, the festival’s Artistic Director, got involved with the organization because there “wasn’t a place for [them] in the art world, a butch doing a lot of work around identity, and [they] wanted to make a space for other artists to show their work in a professional context.” Holman has been involved since the beginning, when PIA was run by Two-spirit artist Robbie Hong. They began working in an organizational capacity as PIA gained not-for-profit status in 2006, and soon it became a full-fledged professional festival. Holman was hired as Artistic Director, and the team have been “working [their] assess off” ever since.

Plenty has changed in the last 10 years, with perhaps the biggest change being recent establishment of the QAF’s first permanent location, the SUM Gallery in Chinatown. SUM is “the only dedicated queer visual arts gallery in Canada,” Holman relates. They express how important it is to the QAF that the space does not contribute to displacement in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. The building that houses SUM has sat unoccupied since the 1980s, and the festival organizers intend to assistin the neighbourhood’s current struggles against gentrification. Along with translating all materials into Chinese and establishing community partnerships, they intend to fight with art: “The first show that’s in there, Karen Lee’s show, is really addressing some of [those tensions],” says Holman. “She’s fourth-generation Chinese, she grew up in that area, and her work is really talking about the Chinese experience and dysphoria and displacement.”

The importance of providing a dedicated space for queer art is manifold and has always been the centre of the QAF vision. As Holman shares, “We believe that art changes people and people change the world. Art is really the first step to revolution.” They share a quote from artist and composer Barry Truax, whose work is receiving a 30-year retrospective at this year’s festival: “Art is said to mirror society, but if you look in the mirror and see no reflection, the implicit message is that you don’t exist.” The Queer Arts Festival holds up that mirror, while tapping into the “visceral power of the arts” and inciting change.

This force of change extends into the festival itself. From its visual art beginnings, it has grown to include transdisciplinary works in a wide breadth of formats, including media art, music, and theatre. Maintaining their community roots, the festival still features an open community visual art show, as well as a central curated exhibition, along with a constellation of other presentations and performances. And the aim of providing professional opportunities for queer artists and youth goes beyond exhibition; the QAF has recently made mentorship a central part of their operations, enabling them to build up their community while creating opportunities for a variety of skillsets: “We find with all marginalized folks, [they] sometimes don’t have the same access to education, and of course we still live in such a misogynist world and racist world—we are not necessarily given those kinds of opportunities,” Holman shares. “Coming from our own experiences, [we know we need to] make those opportunities available.”

“Youth are our future,” they stress, “I think teachers are the most important professionals.”

This year’s theme of DECADEnce honours and explores the legacies of queer artists who have blazed a trail for the modern generation. Holman expresses how important it is that queer youth “know their elders and know their history.Their histories are erased over and over and over again. If we knew throughout history that most of our [creative] masters were queer […] how could there be homophobia? How could there be queer youth having the highest homeless and suicide rate if we knew these things?” The curator of this year’s Visual Arts Exhibition is Valérie d. Walker, an interdisciplinary multimedia artist whose work deals with environmentalism, technology, and gender. “A lot of my work revolves around time,” Walker says, “so it was very interesting for me to come for the 10th anniversary of the QAF and the 20th of PIA. We’re at a time when there’s a lot of other anniversaries going on in queer art and many artists are being lost to us now.” As a teacher at Emily Carr and Concordia University in Montreal, Walker expresses surprise at the lack of historical knowledge in younger queer artists. “A lot of the artists that I’m dealing with, the ones that are now in their 60s or older, are achieving a certain level of fame, but at the same time most of their life and their practice has been built on trying to find ways to just exist in the shadows,” Walker shares. “It’s about appreciating the precariousness of our position in time and pushing it forward. This feels like a time when cycles are changing, and it’s time to pass on a lot of knowledge to the next generation so that we can continue from a strong place.”

Walker has curated a selection of works from both established and emerging artists, including General Idea member AA Bronson and Carl Pope. “What I said to everyone was, “this is our anniversary, this is our chance to stand in the public and say it took us so long and we’re here and we’re going to keep going. What do you have in your art archive that you’ve never shown anyone, but that conveys your sense of being a queer, gay, out there artist, and show me that.”The results of this entreaty include some never-before-seen works by foundational Canadian artists, sitting amongst works by artists for whom DECADEnce marks their first professionally curated show. Syrus Marcus Ware and Dayna Danger, as well as installation artist Chandra Melting Tallow, are just a few of the many diverse creative folks.“In the form of results,” Walker says, “it’s been my best curating practice so far.”

Yet with a roster so full of incredible artists and work, “the biggest struggle,” SD Holman says, is “getting people to come to the shows. It’s hard to sell a festival called ‘queer.’” They cite recent events wherein artists’ friends refused to come to the festival, and artists’ agencies intentionally left QAF bookings out of their tour listings. “We still struggle with getting recognition and respect because we chose to call ourselves queer,” Holman says, but “the artists are so happy to be in a place where they can be one-hundred percent themselves.” Ultimately, providing that kind of space is what the history—and future—of the Queer Arts Festival is all about.

The Queer Arts Festival runs from June 16 to June 28. More information can be found on the QAF website. We hope to see you at some of their excellent upcoming events, gazing at art and meeting new friends!

Murray Patterson Marketing Group – April 25, 2018
The sun was shining and the view of the city was spectacular as we sat perched on the tailgate of SD Holman’s truck on the rooftop of the Chinatown building that is home to the new Pride In Art Society office and SUM Gallery (which will open for its inaugural exhibition next month). Holman, Artistic Director of the above plus the Queer Arts Festival, is a passionate and impactful MPMG client and we are thrilled to share SD’s insights and musings.

Queer Arts Festival is one of the top three LGBTQ festivals in the world. What are QAF’s differentiating qualities when compared to other LGBTQ festivals in this distinguished list?

That’s a tricky question. I don’t want to do a compare and contrast. Queer art spaces are limited and contingent worldwide, we are all doing really great work, and I’m glad for everyone that exists.

One thing that distinguishes us is the curated visual art exhibition—something that few festivals have, and which is our signature program.

I would say our longevity, as we head into our 10th Anniversary, is a differentiating quality. Some on that ‘Top 5 Queer Arts Festivals in the World’ list sadly aren’t functioning anymore. The New York festival that was featured lasted only a couple of years. I’ve had a difficult time finding much info on the Singapore one. I am looking forward to going to the other two on the list, Melbourne and San Francisco, which is the first and longest-running.

What is the importance of creating spaces dedicated to the queer community within the arts? and/or spaces dedicated to the arts within the queer community?

Our program is to create space for the things that are hard to do as queers in the art world, as well as hard to do as artists in the queer world. To paraphrase Jonathan D. Katz, North America has reached a place where we have carved out a space for queers in entertainment, but not, if you’ll pardon the term, in high art.

In art, although we’ve come a long way, there’s still homogenizing. I recently read an article about how the galleries representing Félix González-Torres have totally sanitized him. They don’t mention his partner, they don’t mention AIDS or HIV, and that’s what his work is about.

Some people say ‘well, why does this person’s sexuality have anything to do with their art?’ But of course it does—who you are informs your work. The arts are honeycombed with homosexuals. Throughout history, many of the great masters were “that way.” What would happen if the sexualities of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Caravaggio et al. were not left out anymore when they are taught in the schools? We might see less hatred and less bullying if we all grew up knowing how many of the people we admire are queers.

It’s the naming of it. There is this polite silence—queer artists are welcome, so long as we don’t flaunt it. At the Queer Arts Festival, the work itself doesn’t have to be identity based, but it’s identified as queer art. It’s not stripped of that. We get a lot of artists telling us how much they appreciate being in a festival where they can be completely themselves, and they can just do the work without having to be concerned about it being perceived as too queer.

All that said, you see why we’ve kept our name the way it is, but it comes with challenges. Creating a dedicated space for queer art, we can find ourselves fighting for legitimacy and recognition. Folks have misconceptions and a narrow view of what queer art is and can be.

How does your experience as an artist inform your work as an Artistic Director and your role as a leader?

Well, I don’t call myself a leader. You know that Bif Naked song? ‘I’m no leader, don’t wanna be your leader…”

I did this because I hadn’t found a place for myself in the art world here, so I wanted to create that space for other artists. I’m not trained as an administrator. It has all been learning on the job.

As an artist, I don’t want to think about the commodification of the art. I want to think about whether it’s interesting, important, challenging, connected. That is what informs my decisions as an artistic director.

I wish everybody went to art school — not only artists, but lawyers, doctors politicians, everyone. Art is the first step to revolution. You learn to look at the world in a consciously critical way through art.

You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you are ‘learning disabled’ and that becoming an administrator was somewhat challenging. What advice do you have for others who may not have confidence in their abilities to take on such roles?

Know that you’re in good company. Albert Einstein was learning disabled as well as so many illustrious folks.

Remember that you have superpowers. Realize that if you’re learning differently, you have a different perspective. That’s valuable.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” My favourite Samuel Beckett quote. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be a loser, embrace that, make it into an art. Read ‘The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly.’ Don’t watch the video, read it. Read ‘Art Objects’ by Jeanette Winterson, my favourite book right now, it will give you courage.

Finally, surround yourself with smart people who believe in you. You only really need one person if they truly believe in you. I found that in my late wife Catherine.

With the 10th anniversary of the Queer Arts Festival approaching, what is one thing you’ve learned as Artistic Director and what do you hope to achieve for the festival over the next ten years?

I couldn’t possibly choose one thing. I’ve learned so much.

I’ve learned to not give up. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Keep your heart open to what’s possible, even through rejection.

I’ve learned how important it is to look to history and consider who decides what marks are worth noting. We have to do this kind of palimpsest un-layering, because our histories are erased over and over, but they are there. We must continue to uncover, expose, write anew, as it keeps getting erased—resistance is important too, not because it changes anything but because it keeps us human.

In the next ten years, what do I hope achieve? Save the world of course. To have our work survive and thrive, as living well is the best revenge. I hope to continue making and presenting work that is meaningful and transformative

Our Gallery SUM has just opened, the only dedicated queer gallery and presentation space in Canada and one of very few in the world, so working and nurturing that. I hope to do some travelling to other festivals, and expand our research and connections. We have some exciting plans to connect queer presenters around the world to a greater extent.

Anything else you’d like to share with MPMG readers?

Come to the festival. Dare to be challenged. Risk being changed. You’ll like it.

Queer Arts Festival: DECADEnce
June 16 – 28
queerartsfestival.com

SUM Gallery Inaugural Exhibition
Karin Lee: QueerSUM 心
May 12 – August 18
queerartsfestival.com/queersum-show-karin-lee

Peter Knegt· CBC Arts· May 9

Karin Lee’s My Sweet Peony, part of the first exhibition at Vancouver’s new SUM gallery. (SUM)0comments

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

Next week, Vancouver’s SUM Gallery debuts its very first exhibition with “Karin Lee: QueerSUM 心“. It’s both a long time coming and a very big deal. The organization behind it — Queer Arts Festival— has been actively working toward having a permanent, year-round space since it began in 1998 as a volunteer-run artist collective. But as we all know, space in Vancouver isn’t exactly cheap.

“With a mix of dogged perseverance, some luck and a lotof help from our friends, SUM became a reality this year,” SUM artistic director SD Holmantells CBC Arts.

And in that reality, SUM becomes the only queer multidisciplinary gallery in Canada — and one of only a few in the entire world.

The name SUM is inspired by its location in the B.C. Artscape Sun Wah building in Vancouver’s Chinatown, which, according to its website, “was designed to house a Chinese restaurant, complete with a traditional round window, but was never occupied and has existed only in shell condition.”

“To honour the space’s original intended use as a Dim Sum (點心) restaurant, we dubbed our new gallery and presentation space SUM,” Holman says.

But it’s more layered than that. Holman’s explanation of the name’s meaning essentially breaks down like this:

• summation (∑) the sum of its parts, the sum total = LGBTQ2Si+
• Sum (心) means heart in the Cantonese dialect which we use here, to pay tribute to the early immigrants from the Pearl River Delta in Canton who settled here 150 years ago.
• The word for queer in Chinese 同性戀 has Sum 心 in it.

We wanted the first solo exhibition be a female-identified queer artist. We wanted an artist with deep links to Vancouver’s Chinese and queer communities both. We wanted a woman whose work was challenging, and transgressive, and very queer — in other words, we wanted Karin Lee.- SD Holman, SUM artistic director

On that note, Holman and her co-curator Paul Wongwanted SUM’s inaugural exhibition to represent much of what its name does.

“We wanted the first solo exhibition be a female-identified queer artist,” she says. “We wanted an artist with deep links to Vancouver’s Chinese and queer communities both. We wanted a woman whose work was challenging, and transgressive, and very queer — in other words, we wanted Karin Lee.”

Born and raised a fourth generation Chinese-Canadian in Vancouver, Karin Leeis “a unique storyteller whose critical voice and perspective touches on the past and the present, both local and international,” Holman says. “Themes of trans-Pacific migration, gender, identity and intercultural contact surface in her work. Lee often uses humour and transgression in her work, traversing untold territories.”

The poster for SUM’s first exhibition. (SUM)

And Lee is only the beginning. SUM will build on the model developed at the Queer Arts Festival, where Holman worked with guest curators. The programming will be queer not only in its sexuality but in “the most fundamental sense of the word.”

“‘Queer’ takes its etymological roots from the German ‘quer’ — oblique, or cutting across categories,” Holman explains. “SUM’s programming will be transdisciplinary, extending that connective principle to bring artists together across discipline, time and place. Inhabiting a demographic so irreducibly diverse that we are commonly identified by an acronym, we bring those lessons of intersectionality, coalition-building and complex, fluid identities to our artistic collaborations, risk taking and genre-bending explorations.”

SUM is a room of our own, here and queer for not only a couple weeks, but all year.- SD Holman, SUM artistic director

Holman notes that for generations, LGBTQ people have had to carve our own spaces “out of a hostile world.”

“Spaces where we can sing and dance and draw and rhyme and fuck our resistance,” she says. “Spaces that meld struggle with celebration, politics with sex, serious purpose with more fabulous than anyone could ever swallow.”

Like the Queer Arts Festival that it grew from, SUM has been consciously created to be of these spaces.

“[It’s] a site for queer artists to do the things that are hard to do as queers in the art world, as well as those things that are hard to do as artists in the queer world, including — perhaps especially — at the intersections that get stonewalled in both of these worlds. Unlike QAF, SUM is a room of our own, here and queer for not only a couple of weeks, but all year.”

Read more about SUM Gallery here.

Kevin Griffin – Vancouver Sun – May 9, 2018

In art-world terms, something unusual is happening Saturday, May 12* in Vancouver.

It’s the opening of SUM Gallerywhich describes itself as the country’s only permanent space dedicated to exhibiting queer art. It’s on the fourth floor of the Sun Wah Building on Keefer east of Main in Chinatown.

SUM Gallery opens with a solo show of video works by Karin Lee. It’s curated by Paul Wongand SD Holman. Holman is also the executive director of SUM.

SUM is both a gallery space and the year-round home of the annual Queer Arts Festivalof which Holman is also the artistic director.

Programming in the new space will include solo shows, workshops and performances.

“We’re going to continue doing our diverse programming that pushes boundaries and initiates dialogue,” Holman said in a phone interview.

The permanent space gives a curator of the QAF group show the option of choosing an artist or artists for solo exhibitions at SUM. The gallery will also be able to accommodate QAF events that previously would have been held at other venues.

“If we have a group exhibition at the festival, I’ll see artists and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about what you might be able to do in the gallery,’” Holman said.

Historically, explicitly queer art spaces have tended to be transitory.

From 2012 to 2016, Videofagwas an alternative arts space in the home of Jordan Tannahill and William Ellis in Toronto’s Kensington neighbourhood.

Also in Toronto is FAG Feminist Art Gallerystarted in 2010 by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. Although its name suggests a permanent space, FAG’s online presence makes it sound more like a two-artist collective project that moves from venue to venue.

In Vancouver, Vancouver Arts and Leisureor VAL is another arts group with a slightly different focus on electronic dance music and club culture. It’s also functioned as a venue for fashion, visual arts and dance but has had to move into several different locations for the past four years. VAL now has a permanent home again at Manitoba and Sixth Avenue

The best known permanent home for queer art, however, is theLeslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York. As part of its mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQ art, the museum has amassed a collection of 30,000 objects spanning 300 years. In 2006, it moved into a ground floor space in Soho.

From 1999 to 2001, Holman ran Studio Q, an art salon in Vancouver. Ever since that closed, she’s been looking to revive the idea of a queer art venue. Involved in the Pride in Art Societysince 2006, she became festival director three years later and then artistic director.

In 2009, Pride in Art organized the first Queer Arts Festival.

The tipping point was the arrival of BC Artscape, the west coast version of the successful Toronto arts organization called Artscape. In 2014, BC Artscape was given $300,000 seed money from the city of Vancouver to start developing creative spaces for arts organizations and artists.

“With (BC) Artscape, everything moved really quickly because they were able to cut the red tape,” Holman said.

BC Artscape’s first big project is the Chinatown Community Cultural Hub in the Sun Wah Centre, the big red brick building on Keefer. Although finished in 1987, the 3rd and 4th floors of the building were never occupied. BC Artscape identified the space and has been able to turn it into permanent homes for a diverse range of arts groups and artist studios. Next door to SUM Gallery, for example, is artist Paul Wong‘s new studio.

SUM Gallery and Pride in Art Society are among the hub’s inaugural tenants.

“Having a home base really changes the whole game,” Holman said.

“It makes us able to do so many more things.”

The gallery is called SUM after the dim sum restaurant that was planned but never opened in the space where the gallery is located. As well, the Chinese characters for the ‘sum’ in ‘dim sum’ mean heart; in Cantonese, the version of Chinese spoken by many of the original immigrants from China to Canada, words referring to queer people includes the same ‘sum’ character.

The gallery logo is ∑. It’s a symbol used in math to designate summation.

QueerSumopens Saturday, May 12 from 2 to 4 pm. The exhibition continues to Saturday, Aug. 18.* The exhibition presents three of Lee‘s films: My Sweet Peony, a drama shot in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden; Portrait of a Girl: A Story of Dance, Sexuality, Adoption and Love, a documentary about Han Dong Qing in Beijing; and Small Pleasures, a period drama set in Barkerville about a Chinese women explaining her bound feet to a European woman and an indigenous woman.

Some of Lee’s other films include: Made in China: The Story of Adopted Chinese Children in Canada, Comrade Dad: Growing Up With a Socialist Father, and Vancouver 1907 Race Riots: Shattered.

SUM Gallery and Pride in Society Office– which organizes the annual Queer Arts Festival– are in the Chinatown Community Cultural Hub, Sun Wah Building, Suite 425, 268 Keefer.