Maureen Gruben

Diane Severin Nguyen

Please join us to celebrate CAG's winter 2024 exhibitions, *Diane Severin Nguyen: If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s* and *Maureen Gruben: The land that used to be*.

All ages welcome. Cash bar.

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No advance registration required.

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Winter 2024

Opening Reception

Across her moving image work, Diane Severin Nguyen depicts characters driven to express the enigmatic truths of their existence. Faced with the stultifying effects of historical trauma and the ungraspable nature of intergenerational memory, Nguyen’s works explore her protagonists’ struggle to realize their agency in the present. 

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Nguyen presents *In Her Time (Iris’ Version)*, a new edit of her 2023 feature-length film *In Her Time*. Set amid the outsized period sets of Hengdian World Studios, the largest film studio in Asia, the film follows Iris, a young actress searching for her voice as she prepares for the leading role in a Chinese historical epic. Couched in the conceit of a “making of” special, *In Her Time* depicts Iris behind the scenes, rehearsing lines and describing the artistic process of coming to inhabit her character. Throughout, she deliberates over the demand the film places upon her to master performing pain and victimization. *Iris’ Version* introduces new content shot from Iris’ iPhone camera, intercutting the “official” footage with reflections on the filmmaking process from the actress’ perspective.

*In Her Time* was commissioned and produced by the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, with support from the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. 

*Iris’ Version* is 67 minutes and begins at the following times each day:
12:00, 1:10, 2:20, 3:30, 4:40

#### Biography
Diane Severin Nguyen works with photography, video and installation. Through material and sculptural experimentations, Nguyen approaches the photographic moment as one of transformation. The artist is particularly interested in exceeding photography as a mode of documentation, and engages with it rather as a set of conditions shaped by desire and speculation. Her video work narrativizes these tensions by examining the histories of power, victimhood and forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image-making. She has exhibited her work internationally, in places like SculptureCenter, The Renaissance Society, Rockbund Art Museum, MoMA PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Schinkel Pavilion, Jeu du Paume, the Hammer Museum, and many others. Her films have been screened at film festivals such as the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Berlinale. Nguyen is a recent recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim fellowship and lives and works in New York.

CAG - Diane Severin Nguyen - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - FINAL.pdf

CAG - Diane Severin Nguyen - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - FINAL.pdf

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01 DIane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

Diagonal view of four benches facing a large screen with pink and red ribbons surrounding a perimeter. Onscreen, several bodies lay in a darkened room surrounded by bubbles and ribbons.

thumbnail_01 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

01 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

Diagonal view of four benches facing a large screen with pink and red ribbons forming a curtain around the perimeter. Onscreen, a child sits on a bed in a dark room, clutching a pink object and looking out a window.

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02 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

View of a large screen seen through a wall of pink and ribbon ribbons. Onscreen, a woman lies on a bed with arms crossed gazing into the eyes of a stuffed yellow bear wearing a red ascot.

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03 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

Two rows of benches face a screen in a room with pink and red ribbons walls. Onscreen, red liquid drips down the palm of a paper cut-out propaganda-style image of a young girl saluting. 

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04 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

Two rows of benches face a screen in a room with pink and red ribbons walls. Onscreen, an image of a woman blowdrying her hair is overlain on a collage made of movie paraphernalia.

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05 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

Two rows of benches face a screen in a room with pink and red ribbons walls. Onscreen, a woman surrounded by smiling soldiers clutches her chest while confetti falls on her.

thumbnail_06 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

06 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

Two rows of benches face a screen in a room with pink and red ribbons walls. Onscreen, a woman faces the viewer with the text caption If I hadn’t created my own world at the bottom of the screen. 

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07 Diane Severin Nguyen 2024.jpg

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Province, Capture + Clark's logos amalgamated.jpg

If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s

Land is fundamental to the work of Tuktoyaktuk-based artist Maureen Gruben. Often drawing on the intimacy of the handmade, Gruben’s work balances the vastness of tundra with the scales at which its inhabitants live with it. Engaging traditional materials, techniques and knowledge alongside the detritus of modern life, Gruben places global ecological crisis in conversation with local Inuvialuit ingenuity, exploring the persistence of this ingenuity from past to present to future. 

*The land that used to be* features the new installation *Qikuryuaq (Clay Hills)*, comprised of approximately 1,000 clay beads prepared by Gruben with the help of family and community members. The number of beads corresponds to Tuktoyaktuk’s population, while the clay they are made from, sourced from nearby shores, alludes to the material erosion of its shorelines, which has reached a state of emergency and within thirty years will necessitate the relocation of Tuktoyaktuk’s community inland. *Qikuryuaq* is accompanied in the exhibition by two works depicting handmade sleds. These sleds have an intimate relationship to land, touching its contours as they effect passage. As they evoke movement across and around the territory, including the potential inland migration, they also echo the aspiration of *Qikuryuaq* to, in the artist’s words, “hold the land a little bit longer before it is gone.”

#### Biography
Maureen Gruben’s diverse multi-media practice incorporates organic and industrial materials that are frequently found or salvaged. She was born and raised in Tuktoyaktuk, where her parents were traditional Inuvialuk knowledge keepers and founders of E. Gruben’s Transport. Gruben holds a BFA from the University of Victoria and a Certificate in Indigenous Political Development & Leadership, En’owkin Centre, Penticton. Recent exhibitions include presentations at Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; National Nordic Museum, Seattle; and Women’s Gallery & Darkroom, New York. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award and longlisted for the 2019 Aesthetica Art Prize and the 2021 Sobey Art Award. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Indigenous Art Centre, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

CAG - Maureen Gruben - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - FINAL.pdf

CAG - Maureen Gruben - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - FINAL.pdf

Maureen Gruben at Qikuryuaq, Husky Lakes.

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Quikuryuaq.jpg

A thousand small clay beads are pinned across two walls in an amorphous shape, with most of the beads displayed on the left wall. In the foreground is a sculpture of a child's sled on a plinth.

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01 Maureen Gruben 2024.jpg

A sculpture of a child's sled sits on a plinth. The sled is covered in textured clay and coated in bronze.

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02 Maureen Gruben 2024.jpg

A photograph of fourteen sleds of various shapes and colours arranged upright on a body of ice. 

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03 Maureen Gruben 2024.jpg

A wide view of a room with a bronze sled on a plinth in the foreground. In the background are a photograph of fourteen sleds and a sculpture, made of a thousand small clay beads pinned to the wall. 

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04 Maureen Gruben 2024.jpg

A thousand small clay beads of various colours are pinned across two white walls in the corner of a room. The beads are arranged in an amorphous shape with the majority of the beads on the left wall.

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05 Maureen Gruben 2024.jpg

Hundreds of small clay beads of various colours are pinned to a white wall with varying distances between each bead.

Opening Reception

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