Sean Alward is a Vancouver-based artist working primarily with painting and photography. He has shown at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Or Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery, 304 Days Gallery, and most recently, Access Gallery. His writing has been published in various publications. He received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and MFA from the University of British Columbia.
Sydney Hermant is a Vancouver-based artist who has devoted time to organizing the work of other artists, making and recording music with her partner as Hello, Blue Roses, and is a co-director in the media collective Project Rainbow. Hermant is a graduate from the MFA program at the University of British Columbia (2010). Her online weekly drawing and newsletter service is available at www.yourdrawingweekly.com.
A curator and writer based in San Francisco, where she is Curator and Head of Programs at the CCA Wattis Institute. Nguyen was formerly Director/Curator of Artspeak from 2011-2016. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues and periodicals nationally and internationally, with recent texts in catalogues published by Pied-à-Terre (San Francisco), Gluck 50/Mousse (Milan), and the Herning Museum of Art (Denmark). Nguyen is the recipient of the 2015 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Emerging Curators in Contemporary Canadian Art and the 2016 Joan Lowndes Award from the Canada Council for the Arts for excellence in critical and curatorial writing.
Speakeasy: Salon
SEAN ALWARD, SYDNEY HERMANT
May 11, 2013
Speakeasy: Salon is a series of talks and presentations that interrogates Artspeak’s mandate to encourage a dialogue between visual art and writing. In this incarnation, speakers will present within the conversational salon format on wide-ranging subjects including art, music, literature, politics, popular culture, and science. Speakers select their own topics for discussion and are not expected to be experts in the subjects they present. Each session ends with a conversation between participants and speakers, creating an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and critical discourse, and a mutual scholarship of the topics explored. Speakeasy: Salon references both the demand for interdisciplinary learning in contemporary art and writing practices and an interest in the informal academic institution.
SEAN ALWARD
Figures in Landscapes: Lion-People and Hermaphrodites (an archeology travelogue and slide-show)
From the caves of Baden-Wurttemburg to the coast of British Columbia: the world’s oldest portable sculpture, the world’s oldest musical instrument, lion-people, mammoth slivers, live German cavemen, Einstein’s basement, sea-life turned to stone, compressed tropical substance, petroglyphs, and hermaphrodites.
SYDNEY HERMANT
Getting to Know You: What My 4 and 7/8 yr old Daughter Taught Me About Textiles