A Collaboration with the Queer Arts Festival & SUM gallery

Natis is a conceptual painter who lives and works in Berlin. His art materialises itself through multiple parallel and distinct research-based practices. He creates, embodies, and instrumentalists different performative artist personae for each of these practices that challenge the social understanding and the role of the artist as a (post-)modern subject. These alter-egos deal with various fields like; personal or communal memory and forgetting, speculative storytelling (non-)linear temporality, gender, post-colonialism, and new materialism. Besides his art practice, he works towards completing his doctorate at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) Hamburg on art-historical and contemporary use of visual artist alter egos, researching why these mental and physical alternations or mutations take place in artists’ lives.

Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist and currently is living and working on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people. She has received her BFA in Painting from the Art University of Tehran and MFA in Visual arts from the University of British Columbia. Bahmanipour has exhibited her work in a body of solo and group exhibitions internationally as well as in Canada, including her solo and group exhibitions at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Vancouver’s grunt gallery, and Two Rivers Gallery.

Bill Burns, like Trylowsky, has created a project that prompts an examination of parallel economies. Burns’ ongoing research includes The Goat, the Salt, the Oil, a performance series that positions global trade as an art practice; at Griffin’s residency from December 8 to February 28, 2022, titled Three short films and several songs about Donkeys, Cowboys, Truckers and Container Ships, he will research a further speculative iteration of this project, activating the site of the Vancouver Harbour and producing a series of short films, this time proposing the trade of red snapper for goat’s milk, yogurt for honey, organizing a shipment of Nepalese salt for olives or other foodstuffs in Vancouver.

TanTan Hong is a multimedia installation artist, bookmaker, and educator from South Korea. Her practice has been based in Seoul, Hong Kong, LA, and now, in Vancouver. Her practice and research concern microorganisms, memories, and world building; her worlds connect the in-between spaces of fictional and historical landscapes birthed by American imperialism. TanTan holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from ECUAD.

Mollie Burke is a multi-disciplinary artist considering the relationship between computation and social abstraction. She lives and works in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish territory. She holds a BA from McGill University in art history and cultural studies, a diploma of fine art from Langara, and a Masters of Fine Art from Emily Carr University of art and design. She was awarded the Bill Watson award for excellence in printmaking, the Barbara and Arne Vengshoel scholarship for excellence in visual arts, and the SSHRC graduate scholarship for her research in mediation. She was recently shortlisted for the 2021 Lind prize, and has shown in various spaces across Canada.

Esteban Pérez (b. 1992 in Quito, Ecuador) graduated from Emily Carr University of Arts + Design with an MFA degree in 2021. His work has been part of exhibitions such as: ‘Radical Reworlding’ (AHVA Gallery UBC, 2021), ‘Triplete’ (No Lugar, 2018), and Premio Brasil (Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, 2017), and, in 2019 he had his first solo show Transitory (Más Arte, 2019). In 2020, he was the recipient of The Audain Travel Award in Vancouver. In the same year, he won the 2nd Place Award in RAW, an MFA online exhibition, organized by the University of Montana, USA. He was selected for the Premio Brasil –Arte Emergente (CAC), an award funded by the Brazilian embassy in Quito for the promotion of Emerging Artist. He was a resident at the Satellite Residency program at the Shumka Centre for Creative Entrepreneurship in 2021.

Griffin Art Projects is thrilled to announce an international residency exchange in partnership with the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa to take place in August and September 2021. This residency opportunity will connect a BIPOC Canadian artist with a Johannesburg-based artist over the course of an intensive two-month creation period during which the artists will have the opportunity to meet virtually, build a relationship and engage in critical dialogue fostered through scheduled studio visits and discussion sessions. This program will culminate in a live virtual open studio session featuring the artists in conversation over Zoom.

Griffin Art Projects is honoured to announce the distinguished artist Xwalacktun as the inaugural Indigenous Studio Award recipient. Xwalacktun is a renowned Master Carver of Coast Salish ancestry, from the Squamish and Kwakiutl clans. His remarkable work and career extend over forty years and across numerous forms, including public art, sculpture, metalwork, jewelry, glass work, drawing and printmaking. He is the recipient of the Order of British Columbia, the FANS Honours Award from the North Vancouver Arts Council which acknowledged his commitments both locally and worldwide and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes sculpture, new media, installation, and performance, as well as an educational background in both the sciences and arts, my work explores the psychic violence of cultural assimilation and the conditions that inform our understanding of place, citizenship, and national identity. From this groundwork, my practice has led me to question how technology plays a part in reinforcing the violence of nation states, racist economic policies, and human dispossession.

Alannah Clamp is an artist from Vancouver, British Columbia. She has her bachelor of fine arts in Photography from Emily Carr University, a Bachelors in Art History from Concordia University and a Masters in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland.

Chase Keetley is a multi-disciplinary African Canadian artist whose work is based in the Black Experience. He primarily investigates the mimicry and use of Blackness, such as the appropriation of cultural practices and iconography rooted in the Pan-African Ethnography.

Currently based in Vancouver, BC, Navarana Igloliorte is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker working in short gauge film, video, painting, printmaking and dance.

Jillian Ross is a Canadian-born Master Printmaker who currently directs the David Krut Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa. Specializing in intaglio printing, Ross has to date collaborated with over 70 South African and international artists producing unique and editioned fine art prints.