Zoom Registration Link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-5iWONDQTM-HRhsyESjUuQ
Join Griffin’s current artist-in-residence, Chase Keetley, for an artist talk live over zoom to learn more about what he has been up to throughout his time at Griffin Art Projects!
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 like the appropriation of cultural practices and iconography rooted in the Pan-African Ethnography. As a Black artist, Keetley is constantly confronted by Canada’s omission of Black people from our nation’s recorded history. Important information about Black Canadian's work and their personal history has been omitted. In his work "Of Course" 2018, fragments of this information is recorded and inserted into his paintings and sculptural pieces. He does this to see if it evokes emotion from the viewer through the unearthing of hidden truths, attempting to undo the Canadian palimpsest. "Ofcourse" was inspired by the removal and revival of Hogan's Alley, Vancouver’s first historic Black neighborhood, demolished circa 1971. Framed wooden structures in the work highlights the relationship to lumber, land and labor; African people, stolen, and brought here to the Americas in vessels wholly comprised of lumber, forced into slave labor. Building up the United States with the same material they were brought here in. Chase is now continuing his research into Black People Migrating en masse from San Francisco to Victoria on the 17th of April 1858.
In the summer of 2018 Keetley launched Black Arts Vancouver along with co-founder Berlynn Beam, a community organization that aims to further the artistic expression of Pan- African Youth in Vancouver. Now in their third year, Black Arts Vancouver provides secure spaces and educational outreach initiatives for Vancouver’s Black youth, providing a platform for participants to not only learn about themselves, but where they stand in history apart from the white settler narrative.