Exhibitions

• ARD Proximities

  BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN, STEFFANIE LING, STEVE HUBERT, CHARMAINE LEE, DASHES, BARBARA LAZARA, CHRISTINA BATTLE, RAVEN CHACON, SYDNEY HERMANT, SAMANTHA NOCK, LINDSAY MCKINNAN, MELISSA ANDREWS, DAVIDE BALULA, KAITLYN PURCELL
  June 23–August 11, 2020

  Tuesdays, 9–10pm
  Vancouver Co-op Radio, CFRO 100.5FM
  coopradio.org

  While staff have been working remotely, we wanted to find ways to remain connected to the neighbourhood and communities surrounding Artspeak. With the temporary closure of the gallery, we’ve decided to renew a feature of Artspeak’s programming of the past years: radio broadcasting. We’re excited to continue to work with Vancouver Co-Op Radio, for another edition of Artspeak Radio Digest. Located a couple of blocks from Artspeak, Vancouver Co-op Radio is a community radio station that has been based in the Downtown Eastside since 1973. In Fall 2018 Artspeak Radio Digest was collectively run by Brady Cranfield, Gabi Dao, Emma Metcalfe-Hurst, Autumn Schnell, with support from myself and Erik Hood.

  As an audio journal, Artspeak Radio Digest is an expanded approach to our publishing program. In the true form of a digest, over the next several weeks of the PROXIMITIES EDITION, we will be hosting many exceptional artists, writers, arts workers and musicians. All of who maintain an interdisciplinary practice and work with sound, voice, publishing, and writing.

  For the duration of PROXIMITIES – we’re very excited to be introducing – Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed of Big Rock Candy Mountain who will be our resident guests on the show presenting Bubble Broadcast. Each week they will be sharing their research as part of their Sleepy Soda project, which will develop a special edition of soda with grade 6 students in Edmonton, Alberta.

  As the goal posts keep shifting, and it’s difficult to know when we can gather in ways that feel familiar, we hope to share with you via Artspeak Radio Digest a series that will allow us to share space together in auditory proximity.

• Artspeak Radio Digest

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

  

  

   

  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.

• Tapetum Lucidum

  AJAY KURIAN
  April 12–May 24, 2014

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  AJAY KURIAN:

  Do you think that I’m attempting to trace any ghosts?

  KIM NGUYEN:

  I don’t know if you are tracing the ghost or if you are collecting, relocating, and generating them. The ghost always exists somewhere in between but is never the original, and I think you are not particularly interested in accuracy even if your work has elements of precision. It’s not about following the ghosts to a specific end point or in a predetermined manner but rather making the path less finite or elongated.

  AK:

  Art often feels much more like an encounter of some kind than a thing–an encounter that can unfold a series of divergent paths, an encounter with a thing that never has as good of a name as the encounter itself.

  KN:

  Do we really want art to be the encounter though?

  AK:

  The encounter is something that exists whether we want it to or not. Some days the painting in my bedroom is art. Other days it is decor and stuff on the wall. Some days the Pollock at the Met is art. Other days it is an oversized print that I’ve seen in too many clichés. The tradition of much of art from the 20th century is to make us avid and inquisitive in how we address the world around us. Much of it came from out of daily life, asking and sometimes imploring us to look again. Sometimes for beauty, sometimes for savagery, oftentimes a cocktail of the two and many other ingredients. In a way, art kept training us to see differently, to begin to diagnose the world on our own, without its help. After seeing so many Aaron Siskind photographs as a kid, I certainly didn’t look at the marks on the walls the same way. But after I noticed the marks on the walls, Aaron Siskind wasn’t really that compelling anymore. I realized early that art was not eternal, it was something that mattered sometimes and not in a linear way. I suppose this is what I mean by the encounter.  Some encounters don’t go away, but some do—some come back. Either way, cultural periods allow for different encounters and what that means.

  KN:

  I initially interpreted your definition of encounter in a different way, but I think we actually agree, or that we have arrived at the same destination through different paths. It helps to hear your exposition. I also believe that these definitions are shifting, contingent on time, circumstance and context, and that this fluidity of time, memory, and perception is a bit of a trained exercise. I do not consider art to be eternal and actually have grown so incredibly weary of “legacy” in the past few years for similar reasons. Your perspective is perhaps less cynical than mine. To clarify my initial reaction: let’s say I see a billowing curtain in a window. At some point in my life maybe I think it’s beautiful and poetic in that American Beauty bag in the wind sort of way. And then tomorrow I think it’s just a curtain. And maybe I like that it’s just a curtain, and that there isn’t much more to it, and that’s okay. I have such a sensitivity to the colonialist nature of art that maybe I just want certain things in my life to not be defined by it, to somehow exist in parallel but not be in service of. Sometimes I so painfully want a curtain to just be a curtain because if it’s anything more, I may not have much left to give.

  AK:

  I have a bottle in my studio that has layers of painting medium encrusted within it like layered, golden skins. Every time I’d use it (when I used to paint) it would crust over and I’d have to bust its surface to get more out. So you can see all that history in this bottle. It’s a beautiful object, but I never want it to be art…

  I named the title of this show “Tapetum Lucidum.”  Why do you think that is?

  KN:

  I think the title references an abstract understanding of time but also a tension between senses and the ability to see the infinite. Perhaps somewhere in these reflections of light lies the myth of salvation.

  AK:

  I wonder what the myth of salvation means today…
  

  LINK

  On another track, I might bring your attention to this as well:

  LINK

  Maybe these are the clouds of salvation?

  KN:

  The darkest part of that video for me was how they made a very close mold of the man’s head and then proceeded to erase his face entirely in order to make the mask. Both this mask and Sabbath’s song are like a sad reverse Medusa. Are these replicas and surrogates some form of uchronic dream?

  There is also a funny uncanny moment in which Letterman is smoking the e-cig and I realize that he’s allowed to do it because we have no rules about televising the smoking of nicotine water vapour (or when Katherine Heigl stumbled over whether or not she could say she inhaled). It’s okay because we all believe in the artifice? Is it depressing that we no longer see (or desire to see?) beyond the myth?

  AK:

  I didn’t know what uchronic meant so I searched for it on Google and was really fascinated by its definition: not a completely fictional time, but one that is maybe an alternative, a hypothetical, still related to our reality but still not ours.  Its provenance is also rather interesting.

  LINK

  KN:

  It is indeed. I think I initially encountered it with regards to reenactments, particularly historical reenactors and their desire to participate in these activities. It was sort of questioning whether they reenacted events because they were not personally involved but feel that they can somehow change history (or memories), or write themselves into it, to generate some sort of alternate (but equally real) history.

  AK:

  I curated a show in St. Louis at White Flag Projects about 4 years ago and they have a library upstairs and I thought of creating various plaques for the library: Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, Religious Fiction, Utility Fiction, Platonic Fiction, Bastard Fiction…the list could go on almost endlessly.

  KN:

  Platonic Fiction is really just the best, I love that.

  AK:

  Thanks Kim.

  Postscript 57: Steffanie Ling on Tapetum Lucidum (PDF)