Charlene Vickers

Charlene Vickers
Vital Presence, 2014
mixed media

March 25 - June 30, 2016

We are pleased to welcome Charlene Vickers, an Anishnabe artist living and working in Vancouver, to be our inaugural artist is residence. Vickers’ residency will run from March 25 through the end of June.

Born in Kenora Ontario and raised in Toronto, Vickers art explores her Ojibway ancestry and experiences growing up and living in urban spaces. In speaking about her project Vickers has said: “My work concerns memory and expression of Aboriginal identity where materials carry social and cultural significance. In the past my work has dealt with the commodity aspect of Aboriginal culture selling an idealized First Nations body. Issues of racism and marginalization are exposed in the works presenting a realistic rather than romanticized reality for Aboriginal peoples. I reinvented typical Native objects sold to tourists and combined them with personal comments on urban living for aboriginal peoples.”

During her residency at Griffin Art Projects, Vickers will evolve installations of recent sculptural work and utilize the large studio space to produce a new body of expansive abstract paintings.

Charlene Vickers has shown her work in Canada and the United States, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 2015, Vickers participated in the group exhibitions The Fifth World at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon (curated by Wanda Nanibush), and Custom Made at Kamloops Art Gallery (curated by Tania Willard). She has recently presented solo exhibitions locally at Artspeak and grunt gallery, Vancouver.