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Brady Cranfield

Brady Cranfield is a sound and visual artist, musician, and writer. As well as his own practice, he has ongoing, long term collaborations with the artists Kathy Slade and Jamie Hilder. He has a MA in Communications and a MFA from SFU.

Exhibitions

  • Artspeak Radio Digest

    BRADY CRANFIELD, GABI DAO, EMMA METCALFE-HURST, AUTUMN SCHNELL, BOPHA CHHAY, ERIK HOOD
    September 18–November 27, 2018

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    Artspeak Radio Digest is a three month long program, run in partnership with Vancouver Co-op Radio a community radio station based in the Downtown Eastside since 1973. Taking the form of an audio journal, ARD is an expanded approach to the organization’s publishing program. Each show has been conceived as an issue of an audio journal. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the digest format will feature new commissions, sound works, poetry, radio plays and music amongst other forms utilizing radio as a medium. The program will be collectively produced and hosted by Brady Cranfield, Gabi Dao, Emma Metcalfe-Hurst and Autumn Schnell with support from Bopha Chhay and Erik Hood.

    The form of radio can seem overtly nostalgic. Why radio? Why now? Artists have long harnessed airwaves as a medium. Radio has long provided a distinct alternative for the presentation of artistic practice outside of the gallery. Radio shifts focus from the visual to the aural, challenging visual primacy in artistic practice. Co-op’s programming has included shows by artists since it’s founding. These include the long-standing Soundscape, first founded by Hildegard Westerkamp, The HP Radio Show hosted by Hank Bull and Patrick Ready and Lux Radio Players.

    Airwaves as a medium presents other challenges. Seemingly intangible, airwaves do not escape commodification, as corporations jockey for licensing rights. Actively working to counter commercial interests, Co-op’s community based programming remains distinct in its prioritization of perspectives, forms and voices not heard through conventional media avenues. Public broadcast regulations dictate what we can say and play during certain hours, as we’re obligated to abide by national broadcasting standards. There are things we can say, things we can’t say and things we won’t say. In Canada, after 9pm, restrictions and quotas ease up. Be sure to tune in weekly to CFRO 100.5-FM beginning Tuesday, September 18, 2018 from 9 to 10pm PST for the first issue of Artspeak Radio Digest.

    Thank you to our partners at Vancouver Co-op Radio, Robert Moya and Kimit Sekhon.

    ARD is part of year of programming at Artspeak that considers ways of learning and studying together as a collaborative process and practice. Upcoming programming will challenge the role of the artist-run center, notably asking how it can contribute to creating space allowing for new forms of engagement to reimagine current limits in cultural production and shape alternative practices. Before the rain really sets in, we’ll take a short hike to Mount Seymour where Co-op’s Transmitter has been located since 1982.

  • Island Developments

    BRADY CRANFIELD, JAMIE HILDER
    May 3–June 7, 2008

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    Island Developments, a collaboration between Vancouver artists Brady Cranfield and Jamie Hilder, is a research-based installation project that investigates contested sites of imagination to bring up dialogues of nationality, utopianism, political and art histories. The installation will have four components: an architectural model of the republic of Rose Island (the independent nation had Esperanto as its official language); a video of a rock islet off the coast of Vancouver (proposed site of a project by American artist Robert Smithson which did not take place due to political and environmental protest); a video of a children’s choir singing in Esperanto; and a display of archival documents and a library.

    Postscript 36: Kristina Lee Podesva on Island Developments (PDF)

  • Threesixty

    KEVIN HANLEY
    March 19–April 23, 2005

    Kevin Hanley is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice includes video, photography, performance and sound. Engaging with the slippery relationship between time, memory and reason, Hanley is best known for structural studies in which he eliminates linear narrative. His humorous investigations into the mechanics of media toy with imagery by distorting the functions of space, movement, sound, context and color to create new perspectives.

    Threesixty is a lifesize video installation of a skateboarder doing a 360 degree turn while cameras shoot him from four angles. The footage is edited so that the skater, while turning, appears to stay still while the room turns around him. The result is a collapse of linearity and a presentation of an impossible view (a view not possible from the subjective position of the skateboarder or cameras, only available to the viewer of the video installation). Hanley draws a parallel between music DJing techniques and his visual work with an interest in the writing and reading of the record (according to Adorno, the record’s message is ‘simultaneously fixed and hidden’, delivering an abstract indexical writing contained within the groove). Accordingly, in the video work Re-counting a Dancing Man, Hanley manually moves the footage of a store-bought Fred Astaire dance performance giving it the appearance of jumping forward and back akin to a DJ’s record scratching.

    Threesixty is the first in a two part series that takes the mixing of music and video as a starting point. Hanely’s exhibition, his first in Canada, is followed by the work of London artist Christian Kuras who also manipulates visual imagery through a relationship to the treatment of sound. Hanley’s suspension of action and conflated viewpoints sets up a dialogue with Kuras’ work that examines the hearing and seeing of looped sound to reflect upon a self-contained circularity of power.

Talks & Events

  • Prairie Aunties On The Coast

    AUTUMN SCHNELL, BILLY-RAY BELCOURT, EMILY RIDDLE, JESSICA JOHNS, SAMANTHA NOCK
    October 18, 2018

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    Organized by Autumn Schnell with an opening by Salia Joseph.

    The event was recorded for broadcast as a feature on Artspeak Radio Digest, which airs Tuesdays, 9-10pm on CFRO 100.5 FM Vancouver.

    Autumn Schnell is a Gwich’in tr’iinjoo currently residing on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh lands while studying at the University of British Columbia as a First Nations and Indigenous studies major. Autumn was raised in amiskwacîwâskahikan and recently moved to Vancouver, now working as a research assistant for HASTAC 2019 and somehow finding time to write in her spare time.

    Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. This Wound is a Worldis his first book and it won the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. It was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and was named by CBC Books as the best collection of Canadian poetry in 2017. His next book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, is due out with House of Anansi Press in the fall of 2019.

    Emily Riddle is a policy analyst/writer/researcher. She is nehiyaw, a member of Alexander First Nation in Treaty 6. She has been published in Canadian Art, Discorder, the Globe and Mail, and Teen Vogue. She is dedicated to Treaty feminism, reality tv, and double denim.

    Jessica Johns is Cree and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta and is currently living, working, and learning on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is the poetry editor for PRISM international, and is a co-organizer of the Indigenous Brilliance reading series in Vancouver. Her debut chapbook, How Not to Spill, is forthcoming with Rahila’s Ghost Press and will be out at the end of October, 2018.

    Samantha Nock is a Cree-Metis writer and poet from Treaty 8 territory in Northeast British Columbia, her family is originally from Ile-a-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan. She has been published in Canadian Art, SAD Mag, GUTS, and PRISM International, among others. Samantha is the host of Heavy Content, a podcast that explores the representations of fat people in the media.

    Thank you to our partners at Vancouver Co-op Radio, Kimit Sekhon and Robert Moya.

    We’re located on the unceded and occupied traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. We are thankful to live on these lands as uninvited guests.

  • Artist Talk

    BRADY CRANFIELD, JAMIE HILDER
    May 3, 2008

    Artists’ talk presented in conjunction with the exhibition Island Developments.

Publications