Saturday, April 6 – 3pm

George Bowering is the oldest surviving editor of Tish. He apparently won’t stop writing books, and keeps reading books by his teachers and companions. He has the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia. He recently published half a book with New Star Books. George Stanley wrote the other half. Speaking of visual artists: his work has been influenced by and decorated by Roy Kiyooka, Gordon Payne, Brian Fisher, Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers, Pierre Coupey and Charles Pachter.

Gladys Maria Hindmarch was born in Ladysmith on Vancouver Island and earned a BA and MA from the University of British Columbia. A lyrical prose writer, Hindmarch is author of The Peter Stories (1976) and a two pregnancies one birth narrative, A Birth Account ; and a twenty linked stories about working on a coastal freighter up and down the outside coast of Vancouver Island, The Watery Part of the World. She was one of the editors of the second phase of the poetry newsletter, TISH. Hindmarch taught in the 60s at Vancouver Community College and from the 70s to early 2000s at Capilano College.

Daphne Marlatt, (born July 11, 1942 in Melbourne, Australia), is a Canadian poet who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. At a young age her family moved to Malaysia and at age nine they moved back to British Columbia, where she attended the University of British Columbia. There she developed her poetry style and her strong feminist views. In 1968, she received an MA in comparative literature from Indiana University. Her poetry, while considered extremely dense and difficult, is also much acclaimed. In 2006, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

B.C. poet Fred Wah’s most recent book is a collaboration with Rita Wong about the Columbia River,beholden: a poem as long as the river. Talonbooks also recently published Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem, is available online, http://highmuckamuck.ca/.

Saturday, March 30, 3:00 PM

Travis O'Brian is an Anglican Priest, and rector of St. Barnabas Church in Victoria. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the Katholiek Universiteit, Leuven in Belgium, and wrote his dissertation on the work of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. For the past few years, Travis was Director of Anglican Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology, and is currently a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. One of his primary interests, which shapes both his academic writing and his poetry, is to engage what he understands to be the spiritual crisis of our modern, secular age. His long poem Raven with Robin's Egg, is an attempt to do so on a number of different levels: the emptying of language, fear of the unknowable and the technological society's 'elimination of chance,' the breakdown of relationships, the confusion and uncertainty around the question, 'in what can we put our hope?'

Saturday, March 30, 12:00-3:00 PM

Held at the Griffin Art Projects Residency, 1180 Welch Street, North Vancouver

Zoe Kreye (Vancouver): Touch Change “Focusing this residency period on intuitive research methods and topics, including: sensation, body knowledge, feminist somatics, movement, care, discovering spaces of past/future, myths and the stories we need to hear, listening, ethereal collaborations, vulnerable observation, creating from what I know is there not from what I see,” says Kreye. “I have a keen interest in letting the body guide us beyond the present to touch true alternatives, ones that we may not recognize or even know how to touch.” Kreye will also undertake an Instagram takeover at Griffin during the course of her residency.

Zoe Kreye creates inter-disciplinary art projects that explore transformation, collective experience and negotiations of public space. Her work looks to engage the public in relations and aesthetics, with the goal of building inclusive, bottom-up associations that have the potential to be small catalysts for change within dominant social systems. Often looking outside the realm of art, her projects take the form of clubs, workshops, rituals, dialogues and journeys. Her focus is to encourage people towards self-reflection and a deeper engagement with themselves and society. She completed a Masters in Public Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar, specializing in community engagement and participatory strategies and co-founded the Process Institute, the Berlin based artist collective. She currently lives in Vancouver and teaches Social Practice at Emily Carr University.

Poets Theatre Workshop

Workshop dates: March 9 and 10th

Public performances: March 10th, 7PM at Griffin Art Projects

In conjunction with the exhibition the poets have always preceded, Griffin Art Projects and The Capilano Review have teamed up to host a Poets Theatre Workshop with Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian.

San Francisco-based writers Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian will be in Vancouver for two days to lead a brief, but intense course in Poets Theatre that will culminate in a live performance on Sunday, March 10 within the exhibition. Bellamy and Killian have worked steadily in the long-running Poets Theatre in the Bay Area since the late 1980s and between them have written parts of, or all of, nearly fifty plays, in collaboration with such English language poets as Leslie Scalapino, Barbara Guest, Brian Kim Stefans, Norma Cole, and dozens of others. We're going to write a series of short ten minute plays, rewrite them, cast them, stage them, direct them, panic about them, cut those terrible slow first ten minutes from them, and then on Sunday afternoon we'll deliver a fully participatory, multimedia extravaganza like Peter Brook or Robert Wilson might do if they had only a tiny budget and actors better at being poets than stars. But as Aleister Crowley said, in Vancouver, "The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die." All welcome to participate—every man and every woman is a star.

Dodie Bellamy is the 2018–19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts’ On Our Mind program, a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading-group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. Her most recent collection of writing is When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e), 2015). Her essay “The Beating of Our Hearts” was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian, she edited, (Nightboat Books, 2017) Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997.

Kevin Killian, one of the original “New Narrative” writers, has written three novels, Shy (1989), Arctic Summer (1997), and Spreadeagle (2012), three books of stories, and four books of poetry, most recently Tweaky Village from Wonder Books. New projects include a volume of memoirs, Fascination, edited by Andrew Durbin, from Semiotexte (December); and Stage Fright: Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater, from Kenning Editions in Chicago (in February 2019). He teaches writing to MFA students at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Limited spaces available in the workshop. Register now!

To register, please visit, https://thecapilanoreview.com/workshop/.

Saturday, March 2, 1:00-2:30 PM

Join Griffin Art Projects Residency Artists Mahdyar Jamshidi and Zoe Kreye, independent curator Elham Puriya Mehr and senior Canadian painter Landon Mackenzie for presentations and discussion on embodied research and the interdisciplinary nature of creating methods for navigating experience, examining ideas of worldmaking in geo-political, social, sensory and psychic realms.

This event will take place during GAP’s Open House for the weekend of the North Shore Art Crawl.

Click here for more information or to register.

Saturday, February 23, 3pm

Mackenzie Ground is a writer from Enoch Cree Nation and Edmonton, Alberta. She is a PhD student at Simon Fraser University. Her writing explores the spaces of the city and the reserve, what does it mean to be here and to be a nehiyaw iskwew, and how can writing give back. She is honoured and thankful for her family and friends' support.

Rhoda Rosenfeld is a visual artist and poet whose work is concerned with perception and light. A photographic work, Environmental Opera, was shown recently at the Belkin Gallery. Her poetry has been published in magazines such as The Capilano Review, Zarf 2 and Yellowfield.

Fenn Stewart reads and writes in Vancouver, BC, on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land. She is an editor at The Capilano Review, a lecturer at UBC, and the author of Better Nature (2017), as well as the chapbooks An OK Organ Man (2012), Vegetable Inventory (2013), and from Waltzing (2014).

Saturday, February 16, 3pm

Andrea Actis lives on occupied Coast Salish lands and teaches literature and writing at Capilano University and Emily Carr University of Art + Design. A former editor of the literary and visual-arts journal The Capilano Review, she has published poetry and criticism in Fence, Pelt, World Picture, and The Poetic Front. She is close to finishing a book about competing definitions of seriousness that is also a book about the formalism, conservatism, and voyeurism of whiteness, and has recently completed an autoconceptualist project about her dead father and aliens.

Danielle LaFrance lives on occupied and stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ lands. She is a poet, community librarian, and independent scholar, among other things, venusian, anarcha-feminist, stupid ... She is the author of species branding (CUE 2010), Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks 2016), and the chapbook Pink Slip (SIC 2013), with a forthcoming book of poetry and autotheory JUST LIKE I LIKE IT expected Autumn 2019 with Talonbooks. Her more recent poetry project #postdildo thinks and acts through fucking, fantasy, rape culture, and modes of communication. She is committed to listening, addressing, and responding to the radical root of things. Her favourite colour is purple. Her favourite word is no.

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is a Vancouver-based writer. Her books include Ogress Oblige (Krupskaya, 2001), Oral Tragedy (Tsunami Editions, 1988), Redactive (Talonbooks, 1990, pulped 1995), Volume Delays(Sprang Texts, 1995), and Sleek Vinyl Drill (Thuja, 2000). She is associated with the collectives Vultures, Red Queen, the Kootenay School of Writing, and About a Bicycle.

Saturday, February 9, 3pm

Tiziana La Melia is the author of The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect (Blank Cheque Press, 2015/2018). Exhibitions of her work include Garden Gossip, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2017-18); Ambivalent Pleasures, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016-17); Down to Write You This Poem Sat, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2016); The Pigeon Looks for Death in the Space Between the Needle and the Haystack, Unit 17, Vancouver (2018); Broom Emotion, galerie anne baurrault, Paris (2017); Domestic like a Pre-raphaelite brotherhood, Truth and Consequences, Geneva (2017); Stopping the Sun in its Course, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2015). Her poetry and criticism has appeared in Art21, Public, Charcuterie, The Capilano Review and C Magazine.

As a UBC student in the 60s Judith Penner sat at Robert Duncan’s feet in the Tallman’s living room. She didn’t call herself a writer then, but left the country, worked for the ICA in London and wrote professionally in the U.K. and Canada until a film project did her in and she stopped. She sold books in Vancouver, taught yoga in several countries and became an editor, often for the VAG. After a long hiatus, her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in a number of art and literary publications. Her chapbook A Bed of Half Full: a landscape (Nomados Literary Publishers) came out in 2018.

Renee Rodin has lived her entire life on unceded Indigenous territory/land. She was born and raised in Montreal (Park Extension) by working class Jewish parents. She’s been living in Vancouver (Kitsilano) since the late 60s. Her books are “Bread and Salt” (Talon, 1996) and “Subject To Change” (Talon, 2010) and the chapbook “Ready for Freddy” (Nomados, 2005). She still hopes to find whatever it is she’s looking for in writing.

the poets have always preceded

art and poetry in Vancouver, 1960 - present

January 26, 2019 – April 27, 2019

Opening Reception, January 25, 7-9 pm

Tour with Guest Curator Lee Plested, Saturday, January 26, 1 pm

Marion Penner Bancroft, bill bissett, Robin Blaser, Judy Chartrand, Jess, Judith Copithorne, Pierre Coupey, Christos Dikeakos, Stan Douglas, Beau Dick, Geoffrey Farmer, Fran Herndon, Carole Itter, Roy Kiyooka, Tiziana La Melia, Al Neil, Judy Radul, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Trudy Rubenfeld, Nancy Shaw with many more.

This exhibition will explore some of the common methods and musings of poets and artists in Vancouver since 1960. Importantly, it gestures to the deep influence of the San Francisco Renaissance Poets on local writers (largely through the invitation of Ellen and Warren Tallman who hosted them in their home and at UBC). This project presents moments from this entwined history of visual and textual poets through examples of publications alongside focused presentations of artist’s work. A conversation emerges through similar modes of cut-up reference and shared formal experimentation, bounding beyond traditional metrical device to realize elegiac elaborations.

  the poets have always preceded will begin its rhizomatic journey around 1960, collecting resonate examples of experimentation in art and poetry to uncover some of the fervent conversation, collaboration and innovation which developed here. Rather than attempting to abridge this incredibly rich history, the exhibition touches on successive moments in artist’s practices to give an inspiring sample of the regions sophisticated achievements in art and letters.

  Many of these artists are known for both their words and images (bissett, Kiyooka, Copithorne, Itter, Neil, Coupey, Rosenfeld, Shaw, etc.) and actively publish writing and exhibit their art. Several these double threats are there from the beginning, and the exhibition takes the opportunity to present works by these steadfast radicals at various points over the decades. Other participants are focused on making art, but deeply involved in conversations with poets, engaged in their critical discussions at venues like Intermedia, the Western Front, the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak, to mention only the most public. San Francisco writers play an ongoing role, as they do in the exhibition. Their presence (Duncan, Blaser, Jess, Herndon, Killian, Bellamy) in this project is a tribute to their role in Vancouver’s scene as teachers, champions and companions. The exhibition continues through recent art from Vancouver that goes further in melding the moldable resonances of text with image (Chartrand, Douglas, Farmer, Radul, Dick, La Melia), to bring forward a few contemporary examples of this rich textual tradition.

  An essential element of the exhibition will be the written word itself, and will present the library of the Kootenay School of Writing as a public reading room within the gallery space. Visitors will have the opportunity to dive into a focused selection of the vast production of critical poetry that has been produced in Vancouver. This library space will also host a series of readings and discussion groups to present writing in a direct form, performed in the voice of the poet and digested and dissected through group discussion and review. Programs will include a reading by founding editors of TISH (a highly influential student journal which emerged from UBC in 1960), a Poet Theatre Workshop with Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy presented in collaboration with The Capilano Review, and readings and discussion groups conceived by local poets.

December 8, 2018, 1 – 2:30 PM

Please join us for a public reading group and discussion led by Griffin’s Curatorial Assistants, Mitra Kazemi and Bahar Mohazabinia.
The works in Griffin Art Projects’ current exhibition, Flower Petal Tongues, are united by their relation to performance and performativity, either as text, documentation, or objects. In conjunction with the central themes of the exhibition, which highlight spectatorship, durational viewing, and object-to-body relations, we will read from the chapter ‘The Young-Girl as Technique of the Self’ in Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun. A mediation on the “anthropomorphosis of Capital” in modern society, and expressed in dozens of disjointed, cryptic theses, Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses the the forms of the ‘living spectacle’ that have emerged in the wake of Capital’s total colonization of the feminine, consumptive, reproductive, and bodily spheres of life. Tiqqun proposes the format of the ‘Young-Girl’ as a way of speaking about the disorientating feminization of consumption and self-hood within capitalism. To create a historical basis for our discussion, we will also be reading from a short selection of materials by feminist theorist Silvia Federici and philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
In this public program, we will collectively read excerpts from the texts and discuss them in relation to the works on view in Flower Petal Tongues. We will encourage open discussion and engagement with the texts and the artworks to conceptualize new meanings and nuanced interpretations of artmaking and objecthood through the figure of the ‘Young-Girl.’

Readings:
“Identity without the Person” (pg. 46-54) in Nudities by Giorgio Agamben. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
“Why Sexuality is Work” (pg. 23-27) in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici. (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).
“The Young-Girl as Technique of the Self” (pg 48-61), in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl by Tiqqun. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012).

Please email info@griffinartprojects.ca for advance copies of the readings. Hard copies will be available on the day of. Familiarity with the material is preferable, but we will also be reading the texts aloud together at the session.

This event is free and open to the public. Coffee and refreshments will be served.

Exhibition Tour with Corrie Jackson, Saturday, September 15th, 3 PM

Griffin Art Projects is pleased to present our fall exhibition, Flower Petal Tongues, curated by RBC Senior Curator Corrie Jackson.

The exhibition presents work resulting from or inducing the action of performance, either as text, documentation, or objects. All works are selected from private collections from across Canada, furthering the element of the ongoing, intimate performance of living with works of contemporary art. In this way, the exhibition explores the sensual awareness of viewership, the echoing of the object in the body. The investigation, presented here through a selection of works, draw from the artist’s own interest in performance, spectatorship, and durational viewing. The pieces themselves draw upon the intimate act of looking and the durational dialogue that springs between the viewer and the object.

Corrie Jackson, RBC Senior Curator, joined RBC in 2014, overseeing the management and strategy of the RBC Corporate Art Collection. Previ­ously she worked at the University of Toronto art Museum, at Sotheby’s Canada, and as an independent curator. She finished her Masters in Visual Studies, Curatorial Practice at the University of Toronto with a focus on contemporary Canadian artists. Jackson’s curatorial interests focus on cross-generational dialogues and developing the role of collections as accountable and inclusive narratives.

Saturday, August 18, 2:00 pm

Join us for the final day of our current exhibition zero, ground, for a set of performative lectures by local artists, Randy Lee Cutler and Marina Roy.

While the primary concerns of the exhibition pivot around figure-ground relations and the potential of blackness as a formal negation, Cutler and Roy will approach these theoretical ideas in a literal sense by considering two potent black substances found in the ground. Coal and petroleum products, as cultural and environmental ciphers, collapse discreet disciplinary knowledge into new arrangements, informing the ways in which their raw materiality is transformed into a resource, a commodity and an inspiration for art making. A creative and destructive force, they are powerful and troubling symbols of energy, waste and transformation. – Randy Lee Cutler

Cutler and Roy will each present their recent bodies of research into coal and petroleum products respectively, incorporating responses to the exhibition into their performative talks.

Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver based writer, artist and educator. Through the intersections of gender, art, science and technology Cutler investigates the emergence of new cultural forms and expression. Cutler maintains a collaborative research practice that is engaged with the intersections of materiality storytelling and magic. Her 2016 multi platform project SaltWalks: Three Movements included a series of walks and a video in which she explored the enduring relationship civilizations have had with salt, from its importance in food preservation and healing to more aesthetic and philosophical implications.

Cutler is a Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in the Faculty of Art. In addition to her performance and video work, she contributes essays to catalogues and magazines while maintaining an experimental relationship to pedagogy, hospitality and embodiment.

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist whose research practice investigates materiality, ecology, post-humanism and psychoanalysis. Working across a variety of media, Roy creates visual languages in which human, animal, plant, mineral and microbial life coalesce into new formations, challenging the way nature is conceptualised in industrialized cultures. In 2016, she completed a temporary public installation for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite location which broached ecological issues through the use of tar, bitumen and plastics.

Roy has participated in exhibitions across Canada, as well as in Europe, India and the US, and was the recipient of the VIVA Award in 2010. She is Associate Professor of visual arts in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

This event has been rescheduled to Saturday, August 11, 2:00 pm.

Guadalupe Martinez will respond to the exhibition through a performative action that animates the landscape surrounding the gallery space, its materiality, and the silent connections that are established, disrupted, and evoked through the artistic narrative of the show.

Guadalupe Martinez is an artist, researcher and educator living in Vancouver, BC. Her practice explores the poetic and political relationship between the body, memory and place. Through a research-based process, Martinez creates installations and performances that look at the invisibility of particular narratives and their historical relation to time and place. Martinez is a Sessional Instructor in Performance Art and Actions at UBC.Her ongoing research in Performance Art and Pedagogy infuses her teaching practice with notions of embodiment, phenomenology, healing, and decolonization of bodies and institutions.

View Guadalupe Martinez’s extended biography here.

Saturday August 11, 1:00 pm

Join exhibition curator Lee Plested for a presentation on these early, career making works by Frank Stella and their subsequent realization in the Gemini editioned lithographs featured in the current exhibition. Plested will discuss the historical influences on Stella’s mechanical approach to painting, arguing for the social potential of these otherwise formalist works. The Black Paintings, as they are now known, are often cited as the works that signalled the turn away from the romantic individualism of Abstract Expressionism. Plested will explore the possibilities inherent in this new mode of picture making, how the works were described at that time, and their subsequent contribution to a formalist discussion of art’s potential.

Lee Plested is a Vancouver based curator and writer. Plested has organized numerous exhibitions for galleries across the US and Canada including American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection of UC Davis; Common Threads for the Confederation Centre, PEI and Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Material Witness: Mario Garcia Torres and Konrad Wendt for the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, UBC, Vancouver; and Primary Research Lab from the collection of Western Gallery at Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA. His writing has appeared in Canadian Art, Momus, Art 21 and Artforum. Currently, Plested is Director of Griffin Art Projects where he recently curated Lewis Baltz: Portfolios and Civilization (inverted), an extensive exhibition of Canadian painter Paul P, in collaboration with Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto.

Saturday July 28, 2:00 pm

Join Artist-in-Residence Steven Cottingham and Programs Coordinator Laurie White for a reading and discussion.

In Zeros and Ones, feminist scholar Sadie Plant considers how the digital binary has extended across Western cosmology to characterise the world as a relation between activity and passivity. In this way, ‘male and female’ can be read not only as ‘one and zero’, but also as ‘figure and ground’. An alternative model can be found in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space, where what matters most are the movements between states, rather than the states themselves.

In this public program, we will elaborate on figure/ground relationships in order to discuss and critically reflect on the works in the exhibition. Combining Plant’s observations with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas allows the possibility of upending conventional modes of interpreting images, wherein the figure plays an active role posed against the passive surface, to consider ground as an actor in its own right.

Readings:

Plant, Sadie, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, (London: Fourth Estate, 1997): “Binaries” 32-25, “Holes” 55-57.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): “The Aesthetic Model” 492-500.

Please email Laurie White for advance copies of the readings. Hard copies will be available on the day. We will read passages aloud at the session but familiarity of the readings in advance is preferable.

Steven Cottingham is an artist and curator based in Vancouver. His recent work investigates the spectral qualities of material culture and labour. He is the founder of the Calgary Biennial, an extra-institutional exhibition of contemporary art in public spaces. The most recent program, titled Atlas Sighed, endeavoured to appropriate commercial sites of the urban landscape, such as bill boards and bus shelters, in order to challenge conservative paradigms of image production. Cottingham holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. His work has been included in exhibitions across the US and Canada, as well as several locations in Europe and Cuba. Laurie White is a curator and writer based in Vancouver whose research aims to locate ecological methodologies in artistic practice, theory and curation. A graduate student in Critical and Curatorial Studies and UBC, White has worked with the fifty fifty arts collective, Victoria, The Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, and documenta 14, Kassel. She recently curated We Built a House Out of The Things We Had Gathered at Or Gallery, Vancouver, which considered assemblage as a mode of ecological participation in the work of artists from Canada and Norway.

Laurie White is a curator and writer based in Vancouver whose research aims to locate ecological methodologies in artistic practice, theory and curation. A graduate student in Critical and Curatorial Studies and UBC, White has worked with the fifty fifty arts collective, Victoria, The Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, and documenta 14, Kassel. She recently curated We Built a House Out of The Things We Had Gathered at Or Gallery, Vancouver, which considered assemblage as a mode of ecological participation in the work of artists from Canada and Norway

Saturday, July 28, 12:00 pm

Join zero, ground curator, Lee Plested for a tour of the exhibition.

zero, ground brings together a range of modern and contemporary works by international artists that investigate the potential of darkness and the monochrome. Taking inspiration for its title from 0, 10 The Last Futurist Exhibition, this project considers the impact of formal negation as a device since the obliterating effect of Malevich’s Black Square (1915).

Lee Plested is a Vancouver based curator and writer. Plested has organized numerous exhibitions for galleries across the US and Canada including American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection of UC Davis; Common Threads for the Confederation Centre, PEI and Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Material Witness: Mario Garcia Torres and Konrad Wendt for the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, UBC, Vancouver; and Primary Research Lab from the collection of Western Gallery at Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA. His writing has appeared in Canadian Art, Momus, Art 21 and Artforum. Currently, Plested is Director of Griffin Art Projects where he recently curated Lewis Baltz: Portfolios and Civilization (inverted), an extensive exhibition of Canadian painter Paul P, in collaboration with Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto.

Saturday, July 21, 2:00 pm

This event is limited to ten guests, please RSVP to register at info@griffinartprojects.ca.

Join artist Lam Wong for an intercultural tea gathering and conversation exploring the works in zero, ground. Lam is a contemporary painter, designer and scholar of Eastern philosophies whose family background has revolved around the art of tea for over 15 generations. Continuing these traditions of Chinese style tea ceremony (gongfu cha) and tea meditation, guests are invited to participate in aesthetic dialogues through spiritual and cultural communion. The journey goes from light to dark tea, over two hours, with periods of looking, drinking and discussing.

Saturday, July 21, 12:00 pm

Join Curatorial Assistants Bahar Mohazabnia and Mitra Kazemi for a tour of the exhibition in Farsi.

Saturday July 7, 2:00 pm

Join artist Denzil Hurley for an artist talk and discussion on his series of Glyph paintings on display in zero, ground. In this series, monochrome canvasses are repeatedly layered with paint that is then partially scraped off to create tears and ruptures through their textured surfaces. Resembling protest placards, the paintings are mounted on found poles and broom handles, realizing assertive declarations of oblivion. These works were included in Hurley’s 2017 solo exhibition Disclosures at the Seattle Art Museum. Hurley will discuss the ways in which legacies of minimalism and abstraction influence his work, as well as ideas about protest, ingenuity and self censorship.

Denzil Hurley is an abstract painter based in Seattle. His interests in modular forms and structures involving squares and rectangles lead him to consider the interconnectivity and conjunctions of paintings and signs, material and meaning, presence and absence, and the languages of painting and speech. He earned his BFA at the Portland Museum Art School, Oregon, and his MFA at Yale University. Until 2017, he was professor of Painting and Drawing in the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington, Seattle where he taught for over two decades.

Additional reading:

Denzil Hurley’s Monochromes-on-a-Stick: Corn-dog Reinhardts?

The Art of Reduction: Denzil Hurley

Denzil Hurley at the Seattle Art Museum

View Denzil Hurley’s extended biography here.

Saturday June 30, 2:00 pm

Join Amber Frid-Jimenez and T’ai Smith as they discuss Frid-Jimenez’s work in the exhibition, Burning Ballet Méchanique. The piece’s title refers to the 1924 experimental film Ballet Méchanique by artist Fernand Léger and filmmaker Dudley Murphy. This early dadaist work produced a psychological meditation on mechanised technology in the wake of the First World War, an early realization of the uncanny dimensions of an increasingly industrialised Europe. After deconstructing this film into sequential frames, Frid-Jimenez uses these images to “train” an artificial neural network, or AI, which then produces a new composite film automatically. Citing the history of the film score, Smith and Frid-Jimenez will discuss the technology of AI and the invisible and recursive figure of the automaton after dada and surrealism.

Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist based in Vancouver whose recent work explores the aesthetics and cultural mechanics of the network. Her work is situated at the intersection of contemporary art, design and technology, looking at the circulation of digital images through physical installations, visual systems, code, books and virtual platforms. Her work has been shown at the Casco Office for Art Design and Theory; the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie; the Jan van Eyck, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among other venues. Frid-Jimenez holds an MSc in Media Arts and Sciences from the M.I.T. Media Laboratory and has a BA in visual art and philosophy from Wesleyan University. She is currently Canada Research Chair in art and design technology at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, where she directs the Studio for Extensive Aesthetics.

T’ai Smith is Associate Professor of Art History at The University of British Columbia, where she has worked on unceded Musqueam territory since 2012. Focused on issues of gender, anonymity, textile media, and political economy, she has published in various journals and museum catalogues, including Art Journal, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, ZMK (Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung), the Museum of Modern Art in NY, and the ICA Boston. Author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), she is currently finishing a second book manuscript titled Fashion After Capital, to be published by Bloomsbury.

View Amber Frid-Jimenez’s extended biography here.

View T’ai Smith’s extended biography here.

In celebration of International Earth Day, Griffin Art Projects presents a series of afternoon events reflecting on the neighboring Mackay Creek wetland, directly behind the gallery, and our collective responsibility for its protection. We encourage you to come and contemplate this important geographic site through a range of artistic events. Please join us for one, or a series, of these exciting activities!

12:00 pm, Mark Timmings and Stephen Morris, Wetland Senario, Performed by musica intima

12:30 pm, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss, Indigenous Plant Walk

3:00 pm, Julia Alards-Tomalin, Echo Ecological - Wetlands Restoration Presentation

4:00 pm, Mark Timmings and Stephen Morris, Wetland Senario, Performed by musica intima

This special Earth Day program is the first in what we envision as an ongoing commitment to cultural production that raises awareness of this delicate ecosystem. Griffin Art Projects is dedicated to joining these pioneering restoration efforts to protect this essential part of our environment.

Video screening and discussion

Please join us on Friday, March 23, at 7:30pm, for a studio based presentation of our current Artist in Residence, Mario Asef. Asef will be screening recent work Cenit, in dialogue with sculptural gestures and various publications. Refreshments and discussion will follow to further explore the themes employed in this project in relation to his overall practice. The video Cenit tells a love story that is a metaphor for the celestial moment when the sun casts no shadow. Spinoza’s Ethics and an archaeological examination of Aztec ruins serve as the point of departure for a theory of reality and emotions. In Asef’s view, reconstructing and representing real space in the mind draws on the same mental processes used for constructing the idea of love and happiness. Accordingly, wandering the earth induces an emotional experience that prompts the main character of Cenit to search for the geographical point of happiness.

Image: Cenit, video, 11min, color, stereo digital – Mario Asef © 2016-17

Saturday, March 17, 2:00 - 4:00 pm

Ages 6 – 12 years

Share an artful afternoon together with painter and educator Julie Pappajohn through the extraordinary art works of the exhibition Modernism in Iran. Join a lively discussion and engaging activities, including a fun, interactive mixed media art project. Julie has facilitated art education for over 15 years on the North Shore.

Note that this event is limited to 10 participants, accompanied by an adult. Please register by emailing us at info@griffinartprojects.ca

Saturday, March 31, 12:00 – 2:00 pm

Join artist Lam Wong for an intercultural tea gathering and conversation exploring the modernist art of Iran. Lam is a contemporary painter, designer and scholar of Eastern philosophies whose family background has revolved around the art of tea for over 15 generations. Continuing these traditions of Chinese style tea ceremony (gongfu cha) and tea meditation, guests are invited to participate in aesthetic dialogues through spiritual and cultural communion.

Saturday, March 3, 2:00 – 4:00 pm
Saturday, March 17, 2:00 – 4:00 pm

Please join us for guided tours with curator Pantea Haghighi in both English and Farsi, to learn more about the works in Modernism in Iran. From 1958 – 1978, Iranian cultural practices underwent a dramatic transformation, signaling widespread and diverse approaches to conveying contemporary Iranian experiences. New visual languages were created, which resulted in a bifurcation of art production into a national artistic identity on the one hand, and one heavily influenced by “Westernization” on the other. Visitors are invited to learn about the experimentation and innovation in artistic practices that emerged during this time.

Saturday, December 9, 8pm

For the last thirty years, Vancouver artist Oraf Orafsson has worked in film, video, performance, and installation. Performing across Canada and the US, Orafsson’s projects have addressed postwar politics, oppositional cultural movements, and AIDS activism. He will present a new performance, Burnt Offering, in conjunction with our current exhibition, Civilization (inverted).

Click for images.

Caption: Oraf Orafsson, First Work of Complete Fiction as Burnt Offering, 1971

Tania Gleave and Dina González Mascaró Local Designer Jewelry Event Friday November 24, 6-9pm Saturday November 25, 11-5pm

We are proud to host two distinguished local designers for a two day presentation of their new work at the gallery. Please join us on Friday evening for Bubbles and Beats with DJ Quest, or all day Saturday, and get your hands on some amazing local design.

Dina González Mascaró lives and works in Vancouver. Trained as a sculptor in her native Argentina, DGM works in an -open space - overlap space - non place- between the art and design world. It is within that gap where González Mascaró displays her (always three-dimensional) view of things… expressed in works where structure, rubble, architecture are present.

wood. stone. horn. skin. metal. bone. paint. These are the current materials found in Tania Gleave’s art and design. She travels to corners of the planet to source all kinds of natural materials and returns to her Vancouver studio to combine them into textural compositions that reflect her lifelong interest in art, printmaking, architecture, design and things hand made. Tania received a degree ( Asian Studies and Japanese) from the University of Victoria, and a diploma in Textile Art and Design (Capilano College). She has studied drawing, print making and metal sculpture at Emily Carr University. In 2014 she was a recipient of the BC Creative Achievement Award.

Join us in launching two new publications which document the exhibitions Woosh and Surrogates, curated by Helga Pakasaar. These first exhibitions hosted by the gallery, and drawn entirely from private collections, display the remarkable, museum quality works collected locally.

As a final part of her residency at Griffin Art Projects, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss led participants on a walk along the Spirit Trail and shared stories and cultural information about the Skwxwu7mesh peoples as well as incorporated her knowledge about local indigenous plants and their uses. The walk was accompanied with local indigenous iced tea that Cease Wyss prepared to carry on the journey.

Click for images.

Please join us at Griffin Art Projects for a conversation on the work of our spring artist in residence, Michael Bauer. We will present this public conversation between Michael Bauer and GAP Director Lee Plested on Saturday, April 22, 3pm.

The discussion will centre around Bauer’s influences, approach to painting and the evolution of his pictorial language over the last 20 years. He will also play samples of the music he makes, which we will be broadcasting on our website. Please visit and subscribe to keep up on the downloads.

The uncertain and the uncanny often act as organizing devices in the paintings of Michael Bauer. Like the writing of George Bataille, his image systems utilize the ghoulish and discarded to float as defiant signifiers which are set loose to negotiate fields of defecated smears and corporal masses of painterly surface. Essentially a hermetic mode of research, Bauer is dedicated to the act of painting as enquiry, even if this work is done in a subjective pictorial language. This reckless reasoning is often framed by categorizing elements (sometimes in the form of a demarcating border, sometimes as an architectural detail) that define the picture plane as a field of linguistic research, but one dedicated to an improvisational and intuitive image-based mapping of contemporary human experience.

The gallery is currently presenting the exhibition Lewis Baltz, Portfolios, from the collection of David Knaus, Palm Springs and Selections from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft.

Griffin Art Projects is happy to present a panel on the life and work of Lewis Baltz. Collectors Claudia Beck, Vancouver, and David Knaus, Palm Springs, will be joined by Vancouver artist Christos Dikeakos for a lively afternoon discussion.

Drawn entirely from the private collection of David Knaus, Palm Springs, the exhibition is an opportunity to experience Baltz’s early work in its intended form, organized in grids of images from portfolios of serial shots. This is the first solo exhibition of Lewis Baltz’s concept driven photography in Vancouver. At this time, we are also presenting a concise Selection from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft to further explore the stark photographic mode that, along with Lewis Baltz, gained attention through the 1975 exhibition New Topographics.

This exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of collectors David Knaus, Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft, Theresa Luisotti and everybody at Gallerie Luisotti, Los Angeles, Griffin Art Foundation, and our dedicated board and staff. 

Please join us for this special, one day only event!

Inspired by the materialist subject of Lewis Baltz’s photographic investigations and responding to the gallery’s mandate to present private collections, local artists Zoe Kreye and Guadalupe Martinez will host a Saturday gathering.

Working to understand the quiet attraction we hold for objects, our impulse desires, and how these processes accumulate in the body, the artists will lead participants through a series of framing devices to be utilized in a communal dérive. Starting in the gallery, they will go out, following their senses and intuition to explore the fields, creeks, parking lots, causeways, and their various intersections around Griffin Art Projects. Setting about to follow their desires, object collections will be accumulated and brought back to the gallery for further contemplation and discovering.

Zoe Kreye creates inter-disciplinary art projects that explore transformation, collective experience and negotiations of public. Recent projects include Our Missing Body (Western Front), FutureLoss (grunt gallery), Unlearning Walking Club (Unit Pitt), Unlearning Weekenders (Goethe Satellite Vancouver and <rotor>, Graz) and Überlebenskuns.klub (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). She completed a MFA in Public Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and co-founded the Berlin based artist collective Process Institute. She is currently based in Vancouver and teaches Social Practice at Emily Carr University.

Guadalupe Martinez is an artist, researcher and educator. She is interested in the intersection between theory and embodiment, performance and pedogogy, the body and sculpture. From this perspective, her work is the consequence of a constant attempt to intervene with the present moment and through that connection, reflect larger poetic and political conditions. Guadalupe Martinez received her MFA from UBC, Vancouver, where she recently participated in the Performing Utopias conference with collaborators Guillermo Gomez and Saul Garcia Lopez.

Please meet at the gallery, this group workshop will start at 11am. See you then!

Marian Penner Bancroft has been a practicing artist for over thirty years. In addition to her photography, Penner Bancroft’s practice has included text, sound, drawing, sculpture, and video work. Penner Bancroft’s collecting practice is expansive and varied, ranging from found rocks to 19th century collectibles. Penner Bancroft will discuss the personalities and memories of the objects loaned to the exhibit, addressing ideas of collecting, memory, narrative, and history.

Michael Morris has been an integral figure in the development of Vancouver’s artistic character. During his studies in London, the influence of Fluxus left a lasting impact on the artist. In this conversation with Griffin Art Project’s Director Lee Plested, Morris charts a winding path between his artistic practice over the years, the plurality of Vancouver’s art scene, as well as the impact of ceramic art and the history of ceramics on the West Coast.

Born in Chilliwack, BC, Marian Penner Bancroft studied at the University of British Columbia, the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art + Design), and Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University). Penner Bancroft previous taught at Emily Carr University as an Associate Professor. In 2012, she was awarded the prestigious Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with exhibitions at institutions including the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Michael Morris is a painter, photographer, video and performance artist and curator. His work is often media based and collaborative, involved with developing networks and in the production and presentation of new art activity. Morris studied at the University of Victoria, the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art + Design), and the Slade School, University of London. In 2011, Morris was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and in 2012, Morris received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. Morris has exhibited at institutions such as the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

It’s the ‘place to be’ for anyone with a passion for the arts, this annual awards gala recognizes and honours distinguished North Shore artists, provides funding support to local artists, and fund raises to sustain the Fund for the Arts on the North Shore (FANS) and its continuing support for the creative community.

The 2016 Tribute to the Arts will shine a spotlight on the outstanding cultural and creative achievements of two deserving artists; acclaimed dancer Jennifer Mascall, and writer / animator Lynn Johnston of For Better or Worse comic strip fame. The evening includes entertainment, art exhibits, food and fun.

Featuring an essay by curator Patrik Andersson, NO BIG PICTURE illuminates the work of Vancouver artist Enn Erisalu through a series of personal and aesthetic lenses. Drawing works from the collection of Erisalu and his partner and gallerist, Ilana Aloni, the exhibition presents the work of a dynamic and experimental painter in a conversation with the art, communities, and histories he lived with.

Please join curator Patrik Andersson for a tour of our current exhibition NO BIG PICTURE: The Personal Art of Enn Erisalu and Ilana Aloni.

NO BIG PICTURE: The Personal Art of Enn Erisalu and Ilana Aloni presents a survey of the artist Enn Erisalu (1943-2005). This exhibition does not give us a “big picture” of Erisalu’s practice, but offers a series of filters to view the extra-ordinary work. Presented alongside his art, this exhibition includes artwork from the joint collection of Erisalu and his partner, gallerist Ilana Aloni, who operated Atelier Gallery. The selected works do not only provide insight into the esoteric nature of Erisalu’s practice, but exemplify how interconnected art making, curating and collecting can be.

Patrik Andersson is a writer, critic and curator of historical and contemporary art. He teaches in the Department of Critical and Curatorial Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Charlene Vickers and Chad MacQuarrie
Portals and Improvisations

In a series of in-the-moment-moments Charlene Vickers and Chad MacQuarrie will activate the gallery space using improvised sound, vocals, and performed action followed by a music set of guitar and electronics. Things to see and hear could include a Jeff Wall portal, a megaphone tutorial, invisible painting making and meditations between guitar and Kaosillator Pad. Vickers and MacQuarrie have been involved in making improvised sound together since 2014, this will mark their first exploration combining performance art and music.

This event will also mark the last day of the exhibition Surrogates.

Watch the performance.

Griffin Art Projects and Royal Bank Collection are coming together to present an intimate discussion with RBC Assistant Curator Corrie Jackson and the collectors from our current exhibition, Surrogates.

Brigitte Freybe, Jane Irwin and Leonardo Lara all had an active life in art and design before they came to collect contemporary art. This conversation takes their common interest as a starting point to discuss their first ventures into collecting, the greatest chases, the ones that got away and the experience of living with a collection of, and passion for, contemporary art.

Corrie Jackson joined RBC as the Assistant Art Curator in 2014, overseeing the management of the RBC Corporate Art Collection. Previ­ously she worked at the Justina M. Barnicke at the University of Toronto, at Sotheby’s Canada, and as an independent curator. She finished her Masters in Visual Studies, Curatorial Practice at the University of Toronto in 2014 with a focus on contemporary art and modern and con­temporary Canadian artists.

Please join Helga Pakasaar this coming Tuesday, for a tour of this inaugural exhibition.

WOOSH: From Two North Shore Collections

The exhibition brings together a breadth of contemporary artworks ranging from minimalist and conceptually-inflected approaches to social practices. Last day of the exhibition is this coming Saturday January 16, 12-5pm

This is a CASV members-only event.

The Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver will meet at Griffin Art Projects for a tour of our inaugural exhibition.

The FANS Society has been hosting an annual arts awards event, to celebrate the vibrant and accomplished North Shore artistic community, since 1995. Over the years the evening has taken on many varied formats and provided the society with the opportunity to:

– Recognize and honour nationally renowned artists who are North Shore residents. – Award arts grants to innovative local artists. – Showcase the diversity of artistic talent based on the North Shore. – Fundraise for the FANS Capital Fund.

General Admission $30.00

Photo: Don S. Williams grant recipient Maria Josenhans and FANS award winner Cori Creed

Dear friends,

Please join us for the opening of Griffin Art Projects

Griffin Art Projects is a new art space in North Vancouver that showcases contemporary art exhibitions, primarily from private collections. The inaugural exhibition has been drawn from the collections of Brigitte and Henning Freybe and Kathleen and Laing Brown, longstanding collectors and arts philanthropists from the North Shore who have been collecting art for over forty years.

Griffin Art Projects is founded by the Freybe family.