Olivia Whetung

Beads have long held a significant place in the practice of Mississauga-Nishinaabe artist Olivia Whetung. Her work considers how knowledge is held and transferred through water, land and community, and enacts, in her words, “active native presence.” In *Sugarbush Shrapnel*, Whetung considers her own connections to the ecosystem of her home on Chemong Lake, Ontario, in an era of accelerating climate change and environmental destruction. What will be lost through climate change? How might we remember ecosystems after we have forever altered them? These questions are considered in *Stand* (2019), a new suite of large-scale works comprised of thin panels of wood veneer, bead-embroidered with wood-burned lines upon their surfaces. Through the delicate renderings, Whetung traces fragile relationships between plants, animals and humans. Resembling half-remembered scenes pulled from the fog of memory, Whetung’s images offer the barest edges of an ecosystem in the process of irrevocable change. 

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare

*Sugarbush Shrapnel* is generously supported by the Audain Foundation.

### Biography
Olivia Whetung is a member of Curve Lake First Nation and a citizen of the Nishnaabeg Nation. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Gallery 44, Toronto (2018); Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna (2018); Artspace, Peterborough (2017); and 180 Projects, Sault Ste. Marie. She has contributed to two-person and group exhibitions at Queen’s University, Kingston (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2018-19); Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto (2018); Art Gallery of Mississauga (2018); Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2017); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Western Front, Vancouver (2016); Axe Neo 7, Gatineau; VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver (2016); Open Space, Victoria (2014); and many others. She completed her BFA with a minor in Anishinaabemowin at Algoma University (2013) and her MFA in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia (2016). She was awarded the John Hartman Award in 2018, the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in 2016, and is a recipient of a CGS-M Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Award and an Aboriginal Graduate Fellowship. In 2019 she was awarded a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize by the Canada Council for the Arts.



ProgramGuideFall2019.pdf

ExhibitionGuideOliviaWhetung.pdf

An image detail of a wood veneer panel with a rendering of a hummingbird drinking nectar out of a flower. The rendering is composed of bead-embroidered and wood-burned lines.

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Five ultra-thin panels of maple, birch and cherry wood veneer stretch vertically from a gallery floor to ceiling. There are bead-embroidered and etched lines on the surface of the wood.

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An image detail of a panel of wood veneer stretched vertically from the gallery floor to ceiling. Bead-embroidered and etched floral renderings are woven and burned onto the surface of the wood.

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Installation shot of five panels of veneer stretched vertically from the gallery floor to ceiling. A green vitrine sits in the background, placed in front of a large corner window.

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Five small, beaded pods sit in a line on a light green plinth. The beaded pods come in various shapes, colours and patterns. 

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Sugarbush Shrapnel

Sreshta Rit Premnath

For *Those Who Wait*, Sreshta Rit Premnath has developed new work in an ongoing series of investigations on the tension between ownership and occupation of space, and the conditions that define migrant experience. His works are often informed by his own observations and experiences: witnessing facilities for immigrants who await legal proceedings and possible deportation, and enduring security procedures at airports because of his skin colour. In *Those Who Wait*, Premnath employs sculpture to consider the racialized experiences of waiting. Incapable of holding their own weight, plaster-caked forms slump and lean against steel fences, which act as stand-ins for the architectural structures that detain human bodies. Visitors’ own bodies are reflected in the mirrored surfaces. As Premnath writes, “to lean is to be held,” suggesting that waiting might be reconsidered as waiting together, and spaces of uncertainty can also nurture empathy, solidarity and the seeds of political mobilization. 

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

*Those Who Wait* is generously supported by the Embassy of the United States, Ottawa, with additional support from Brigitte and Henning Freybe. The forthcoming publication is partially funded by a Faculty Research Grant from Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York. We acknowledge the support of Emily Carr University of Art + Design towards Premnath’s initial research visit.

### Biography

Sreshta Rit Premnath is a multidisciplinary artist and the founder and co-editor of the publication *Shifter*. His work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Rodriguez Gallery, Poznan (2019); Ace Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Nomas Foundation, Rome (2017); Kansas Gallery, New York (2014); Gallery SKE, Bangalore (2013); The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2012); Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago (2012); Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2011); and Art Statements, Art Basel (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at venues including Westfällischer Kunstverein, Münster (2019); Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Dubai (2017); Queens Museum, New York (2015); YBCA, San Francisco (2011); Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris (2010); and 1A Space, Hong Kong (2010). With a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Bard College, he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan and Smack Mellon. Premnath has received grants from Art Matters and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and was awarded the Arthur Levitt Fellowship from Williams College. Based in Brooklyn, Premnath is the Director of the BFA Fine Arts program at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York.





ExhibitionGuideSreshtaRitPremnath.pdf

Leaning on either side of a chain link fence, two thin, foam cutouts in human-like form sit slumped on a floor. Two of three fence sections have stretched emergency blankets instead of chain links. 

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An aluminum bench is installed in the corner of a gallery. On it sits a thin, slumped foam cutout in a human-like form. An exit sign reading EXILE instead of exit hangs on the wall above.

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Leaning on either side of a chain link fence, two thin, foam cutouts in human-like form sit slumped on a floor. Two of three fence sections have stretched emergency blankets instead of  chain links.

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Two, thin foam cutouts in human-like forms are wedged between two chain link fence panels. An adjacent fence panel to the left has a stretched emergency blanket instead of chain links. 

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Various chain link fences sit staggered within a gallery space. Some have emergency blankets stretched taut in replace of chain links while thin, foam cutouts in human-like forms lean against others.

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Those Who Wait

Ingrid Koenig

Ingrid Koenig’s practice encompasses the fields of theoretical physics, philosophies of knowledge and social history. Her work considers the possibilities of how knowledge can be translated across different disciplines so that we might more imaginatively negotiate our everyday existence in the contemporary world. *Navigating the Uncertainty Principle* presents enlarged vinyl versions of graphite drawings developed out of the artist’s long-time interest in the visual diagrams that scientists use to describe the complex phenomena of physics, from chain reactions to black holes. In each work, Koenig quite literally entangles this mode of communication with iconography of domestic life — the everyday activities of cooking, refrigerating, repairing and washing up. In this way, she charts the interconnected currents and chaos of everyday existence, and proposes a means of visualizing those abstract laws that bind our most intimate and banal movements physically — and, as Koenig would argue, poetically — to the rest of the universe. 

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare


### Biography 

Ingrid Koenig is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Goethe Institute, as well as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the project *Leaning Out of Windows — Art and Physics Collaborations Through Aesthetic Transformations* (2016-2020), co-awarded with artist collaborator Randy Lee Cutler. Koenig has exhibited her drawings and paintings in public galleries across Canada, Europe and New Zealand. In 2019 she was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant to join the Arctic Circle Art & Science Residency in the international territory of Svalbard. Koenig earned her MFA at NSCAD, Halifax. Based in Vancouver, she is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.



ExhibitionGuideIngridKoenig.pdf

A graphite drawing depicting black circles and arrows which form a loose, pyramid-like stack expanding down from the top on a plain white background. 

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Exterior image of CAG with the work of Ingrid Koeing installed on the ground floor facade windows. Six windows display six, large-scale vinyl prints of back and white graphite drawings. 

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Image of two vinyl prints of black & white graphite drawings in two windows. The left has dynamic swirls of arrows and circles and the right has a stack of plates converging with a cloud-like shape.  

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Exterior image of CAG with the work of Ingrid Koeing installed on the ground floor facade windows. Eight windows display eight, large-scale vinyl prints of back and white graphite drawings. 

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Image of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station facade with a vinyl print of a large-scale, graphite drawing affixed to its exterior; black circles form a loose, pyramid-like stack expanding down from the top. 

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Navigating the Uncertainty Principle

Maddie Leach

*Lowering Simon Fraser* culminates Maddie Leach’s Burrard Marina Field House residency and research project focusing on the Simon Fraser Monument currently sited on the riverside boardwalk of the Quay in New Westminster, British Columbia. The monument commemorates the controversial early nineteenth century fur trader and explorer credited with charting much of what is now understood as British Columbia. In 1808, with the aid of many Indigenous communities, he explored the river that now bears his name, long a transportation and exchange route and source of food for Coast Salish Nations near the mouth of the Fraser; the Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan, Secwepemc, St’át’imc and Tsilhqot’in in the central Fraser; and the Dakelh, Sekani and Wet’suwet’en in the regions around its northernmost origins.

Commissioned early in the twentieth century by the New Westminster branch of the Native Sons of BC, a patriotic order sworn to uphold the values of British Columbia’s colonial pioneers, the Simon Fraser Monument has a curious history of disassembly, reassembly and relocation. In 1908 a tall granite column was unveiled by Premier Richard McBride, on a mound in Albert Crescent Park, overlooking the river. A bronze bust of Fraser was completed in 1911 by Montreal-based academy sculptor Louis-Phillipe Hebert and positioned atop the column. Over the following decades the monument underwent several relocations due to the construction, and reconstruction, of road approaches to the Pattullo Bridge. At each occasion it was shifted further downhill towards the river. When the monument arrived at its current site on the Quay in 1988, its granite plinth had been substantially reduced in height, the bust turned 180 degrees to face away from the river and its gaze directed towards a waterfront pub.

This series of unacknowledged “lowerings” have quietly taken place alongside, on the one hand, continued circulation of heroic narratives of Fraser’s 1808 expedition and, on the other, increasing calls to re-examine those colonial histories and acknowledge the way they perpetuate erasures of Indigenous presence, particularly given the profound significance of this body of water for local First Nations’ cultural practices and sovereignty. The monument’s seeming restlessness and physical diminishment might be argued to mirror public shifts of opinion — from celebration to indifference and a generalized forgetting of things in plain site — and the growing need to re-examine Fraser’s role in the region’s colonial history.

Leach’s original proposal to the New Westminster’s Civic Council, reframed as a conceptual premise for the realized project, requested permission to make an adjustment to the monument by removing a narrow slab of the granite plinth and transporting it to the source of the Fraser River in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains. There, the modest granite monolith would have been left to be reshaped and reduced by the effects of weather and running water, and slowly carried downriver over eons of time. The artist imagined that one day, the granite slab may have arrived back in New Westminster as a small, insignificant stone. This imagined alternate future is now chronicled in a limited-edition bookwork, with illustrations by Michael Kluckner. It will be launched in tandem with a text displayed on the north-facing electronic billboard over the Queensborough Bridge, and a public conversation hosted in New Westminster.

In her 2015 book of lyric prose *Garments Against Women*, American poet Anne Boyer meditates on the capacity of monuments to dictate the conditions of being seen: “Monuments are interesting mostly in how they diminish all other aspects of the landscape,” she states. “Each highly perceptible thing makes something else almost imperceptible. This is so matter of fact, but I’ve been told I’m incomprehensible: Anne, what do you mean that noticing one thing can make the other things disappear?” The intent of Lowing Simon Fraser is to serve as a platform on which to ask this question of a speculated disappearance, and to catalyze public awareness around the historical purpose of such acts of commemoration and the complex implications of their continued presence in our contemporary moment.

Organized by Nigel Prince with Shaun Dacey and Jas Lally


### Biography 

Maddie Leach was born in Auckland, New Zealand and is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is also a doctoral candidate at Deakin University, Melbourne. Recent presentations of her work include *The Grief Prophecy*, Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2017); *The Blue Spring / Mata Air Murni*, Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia (2015) and *28th October 2834*, Western Australian Museum, Perth (2015). Her project *If you find the good oil let us know* (2012-2014) was nominated for the Walters Prize 2014 at Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand. *Lowering Simon Fraser* was selected via a peer-reviewed process for the 2019 *Project Anywhere* platform — a partnership between the Centre of Visual Art, University of Melbourne and Parsons Fine Art, Parsons School of Design, The New School.


ProgramGuideSummer2019.pdf

Lowering Simon Fraser whole publication.pdf

A black and white illustration of a Simon Fraser monument on a wharf. The statue’s bust has been removed from its plinth and sits on the ground next to a rock slab and saw.

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A clear display case with multiple stacks of books sits directly on a marble floor. The book cover reads “Lowering Simon Fraser” in illustrated text. The case is outlined with neon orange tape. 

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A billboard stands high off the ground with a bridge on one side and shipping containers on the other. The billboard reads “ANYONE SEEN SIMON?” in black text. 

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An image of a monument to Simon Fraser installed on a wooden pier by water. The monument is a bronze bust of Fraser atop a granite plinth.

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An image of a monument to Simon Fraser installed on a wooden pier by water. The monument is a bronze bust of Fraser atop a granite plinth. 

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Lowering Simon Fraser

Maddie Leach 

Deanna Bowen

Deanna Bowen’s artistic practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US. Her focus is the “dark matter” in our midst: that which remains overlooked, not because it is impossible to ﬁnd but because it is uncomfortable to acknowledge, due to the systematized racism it might expose. Through her work, Bowen asks demanding questions about who records history, reactivating historic documents from overlooked archives through a process of extraction, translation and enlargement, and then reinserting this material into public consciousness in a new form.

Over the past two years, Bowen undertook research in Vancouver to trace a series of intertwined ﬁgures who formed an integral part of this city’s Black entertainment community from the 1940s through the 1970s. She mapped a constellation of nightclubs, theatres and hotels where they gathered, many of which have been erased from the city’s physical fabric and collective memory, but exist as traces in archives. Her aim is to posit a powerful counterpoint to common narratives that oversimplify the city’s historical Black presence here.

*Night Prowl* captures part of a film frame from a CBC news story that aired in October 1959, reporting on the dramatic purging and forced closures of many nightclubs in Vancouver’s ethnically diverse east end. Racially-motivated anxieties around such nightclubs—and the neighbourhoods in which they were situated—fueled the calls for urban renewal that would displace and disperse Black communities in the coming decades. Depicting the marquee of the Blue Sky dance club, its neon light extinguished following the bar’s closure earlier that same month, the image is interrupted by a series of circular voids: visible fragments of batch numbers punched through the cellulose ﬁlm at its time of manufacture. The holes are a banal artifact found at the end of any ﬁlm reel, but for Bowen, the ruptured cellulose reminds us of ﬁlm’s fragile materiality and undermines our ability to trust photography’s seductive promise of “truth”. Considered this way, even blemished and seemingly insigniﬁcant documents can be rich repositories for unintended readings, and for questioning who has been charged with writing our histories and why.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips


### Biography

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited across North America, including at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Royal Ontario Museum of Art, Toronto; the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She has received several awards in support of her artistic practice including Canada Council New Chapter and Ontario Arts Council Media Arts production grants, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.


A black and white image of a film frame depicting an unlit neon sign and street light at night. The neon sign reads “DANC BLUE SKY.” Black circles cover the surface of the image.

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An image of the side of a building framed by two trees in the foreground. Installed on the building is a billboard-sized printed image of a neon sign and street light. The neon sign reads BLUE SKY.

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Night Prowl

Maryam Jafri

*Automatic Negative Thought* is the first major solo exhibition in Canada of works by Copenhagen and New York based artist Maryam Jafri. Jafri works across a breadth of media, including video, sculpture, performance and photography. Her practice draws from diverse traditions of literature, theatre, pop and conceptual art, often bringing together both found and original material. For the past fifteen years she has questioned the cultural and visual representations of history, politics and economics, interrogating the politics of food production and consumption, the highly-coded performance rituals of nascent nation-states, cultural memory and copyright law, as well as the impacts of graphic design, branding and display.

Across both gallery spaces, *Automatic Negative Thought* interrogates our contemporary culture’s fixation on “wellness” and self-care, suggesting the ways in which these trends are often manifested through consumerism and materialism, and entangled with underlying conditions of economic precariousness. Jafri uses strategies of  appropriation and analysis to expose and dissect the systems that underpin our post-industrial, capital-focused society and implicate us in its maintenance.

Organized by Nigel Prince

*Automatic Negative Thought* is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation

### Biography

Maryam Jafri’s work has been the focus of recent solo exhibitions at Taxispalais Kunstahalle Tirol in Innsbruck (2019); ICA Los Angeles (2019); Van Abbemuseum, Eindoven (2016); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016) and Kunsthalle Basel (2015) and included in the Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018); Sao Paulo Biennial (2016) and the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial (2015).


ExhibitionGuideMaryamJafri.pdf

A close up view of a sculpture forming a large-scale crossword puzzle. The dead squares of the crossword are filled with physical books affixed directly to the wooden surface. 

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Two sculptures sit on the floor of a gallery space. The sculptures are made of wooden rectangular boxes with prosthetic feet protruding out of them. Four photographs are placed in various spots. 

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A sculpture sits on the floor against a wall of a gallery. The sculpture is a wooden box with prosthetic feet protruding out in front. Two photographs of people’s backs and an egg carton sit on top. 

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A sculpture forming a large-scale crossword puzzle hangs on the gallery wall. The dead squares of the crossword are filled with physical books affixed directly to the wooden surface. 

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A sculpture forming a large-scale crossword puzzle hangs on the wall. Across the gallery, a wooden, two-tier box displays Buddha toys and a monitor. The monitor displays video of soldiers' meditating.

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A video is projected onto a dark gallery wall with a black bench in front. The video displays a photograph of Maryam Jafri’s sculptures watermarked with a Getty Images copyright. 

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Automatic Negative Thought

Deanna Bowen’s solo exhibition, *A Harlem Nocturne*, comprises two separate strands of research following the artist’s family lineage in Canada. Her practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US that remain below the threshold of visibility, not because they are impossible to see but because they are difficult for the majority culture to acknowledge. Mining overlooked archives and forgotten documents, Bowen employs a range of artistic gestures to bring traces of a complex, deeply personal and often violent past into public visibility.

In the Alvin Balkind Gallery, a four-channel video installation presents footage from *On Trial The Long Doorway* (2017), which focuses on a lost 1956 CBC teledrama in which Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby played a supporting role.

The B.C. Binning Gallery features works presenting a terrain of research that Bowen undertook in Vancouver in 2017–18, recovered from civic documents, newspaper clippings and numerous personal and organizational archives. Each of these materials trace interconnected figures forming an integral part of Vancouver’s Black entertainment community from the 1940s to 1970s. As Black bodies living and working in a settler colony surrounded by societal and institutionalized racism, they were both invisible and hypervisible, variously admired, exoticized, surveilled, discriminated against and violently attacked. What these recovered documents ultimately reveal is the picture of a complex and varied Black community in Vancouver.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare

Presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival. *On Trial The Long Doorway* was commissioned and produced through a partnership between the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and Mercer Union, Toronto. Production support was provided through a Media Arts residency at the Western Front, Vancouver. Additional support provided by Clark’s Audio Visual. The artist wishes to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their support.


### Biography 

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines race, migration, historical writing and authorship. Bowen makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, Bowen’s work has involved rigorous examination of her family lineage and their connections to the Black Prairie pioneers of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Creek Negroes and All-Black towns of Oklahoma, the extended Kentucky/Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan. She has received several awards in support of her artistic practice including 2017 Canada Council New Chapter and Ontario Arts Council Media Arts production grants, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. She has exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, Toronto (2017); the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2015); McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton (2015 – 14) and the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2013)

ProgramGuideSpring2019.pdf

ExhibitionGuideDeannaBowen.pdf

An image depicting Benesh notation dance scores. The scores are white on a solid black background and resemble sheet music. “Farm Duet.” is written above the score on the top left.

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Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a video on a monitor, a framed print, an overhead projector projecting a text document, a black & white painting, and choreographic notes in three lightboxes.

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Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a video projected onto the white gallery wall, a TV monitor on a plinth, a framed print of a newspaper spread, a photograph, and a print of city subdivisions. 

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Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a TV monitor on a plinth, two framed prints, a framed print of a newspaper spread, a print of city subdivisions, a vitrine with an open book.

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A corner wall of a gallery space with a photograph and a print of city subdivisions hanging on each side of the wall. A vitrine with an open book sits to the right. 

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Four monitors are installed in a circle in a gallery. They are all on stands, with the screens facing inwards. Cords and black tape lines lay on the concrete floor. 

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A Harlem Nocturne

Rolande Souliere

The multi-media practice of Australia-based Anishinaabe artist Rolande Souliere entangles the visual language of hard-edged geometric abstraction with that of contemporary traffic signage to consider how colonial infrastructures mark both spaces and the people inhabiting them. Her solo exhibition, *Frequent Stopping IV and V*, presents two new large-scale, site-specific works across the street level façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery and offsite at the nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. These installations draw from Souliere’s ongoing body of work that creates interventions using caution tape and street barrier patterns in immersive installations. 

Souliere has a long history of working with the materials and metaphors of the road. She strips these seemingly universal symbols from their usual contexts and separates them from their role as wayfinding aids to suggest the extent to which authorities dictate our movements on the land. The *Frequent Stopping* series points to the ways in which our perception of boundaries shift according to perspective and to the fact that so many Indigenous land claims — despite being first pressed decades or even centuries ago — have yet to be resolved. Especially in Vancouver, which sits upon the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Souliere’s ultra-visible, highly public interventions mark space in a gesture that speaks of permanent visibility and reclamation. They delineate lines that cannot be drawn and redrawn.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare


### Biography

Rolande Souliere is a member of the Michipicoten First Nation, born in Toronto, Canada and currently living in Sydney, Australia. In 2017 she received a PhD from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. A selection of Souliere’s international solo exhibitions include *Form and Content*, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe (2018); *Coyote Responds: I Like America and America Likes Me*, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Sydney Non Objective (2015); *CrossRoads*, Urban Shaman, Winnipeg (2011); and *Materiality and Otherness*, grunt gallery, Vancouver (2008). Recent group exhibitions include *niigaanikwewag*, Art Gallery of Mississauga (2018); *Language as Puncture*, Gallery 101, Ottawa (2017); the cross-Canada touring exhibition *Beat Nation* (2012-2014); the Australia-wide touring exhibition Alterbeast (2014);  Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto (2010); and *Point of Origin*, Artspace, Sydney (2008). Her public art commissions include *Bringing Back Wabakinine* (2015) in the Bala Underpass, Toronto and the recently completed *Mediating the Treaties* (2017-18) at Air Canada Park in Winnipeg, commissioned by the Winnipeg Art Council.

ExhibitionGuideRolandeSouliere.pdf

Transcript: Rolande Souliere in Conversation with Kimberly Phillips

An image detail of black-and-yellow caution tape layered in horizontal striations. To the left, there is a single vertical strip of red-and-white caution tape.

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Exterior image of CAG with red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across the ground floor façade windows. The tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes, covering each window.

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An image detail of red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across CAG’s ground floor façade windows. The caution tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes. 

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Exterior image of the Yaletown-Roundhouse station façade covered in a pattern of vinyl rhombus and triangle shapes. Each shape contains patterns of alternating red, white, black and yellow rhombuses. 

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Frequent Stopping IV and V

Anne Low

Anne Low’s roving exploration of historical decorative objects forms the basis for her work. Objects are invented that seem both familiar yet mysterious, with the artists’ imagination taking over where records no longer remain. Imagery, surfaces and materials are taken apart, brought together or recombined anew. Concerned with the conditions in which objects are produced and consumed — particularly by women — and the domestic spaces they defined, her artistic approach imagines the interior worlds of the woman who may have purchased, owned or used them.

 While in previous exhibitions Low imagined a singular woman through her installation, *Chair for a woman* expands to imply a multitude of different possible fictional women and the emotional and psychological states that might be implied from the domestic objects she owns. In the purpose-built space of the gallery, Low takes the opportunity to consider systems of presentation often found in decorative arts museums, where historical rooms and objects are removed and reinterpreted beyond their original sites and contexts. Details in Low’s sculptures offer clues to the women who might have lived among such objects, but as with all of her work, that which remains unknown is as potent as what is offered up in all its pleasurable specificity.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare 

### Biography

Anne Low is based in Montréal, Canada. Recent solo exhibitions include *The Fine Line of Deviation* (with Evan Calder Williams) and Paperstainer, Mercer Union, Toronto (2018);* A wall as a table with candlestick legs*, Tensta Konstall, Stockholm (2018) and *Witch with Comb*, Artspeak, Vancouver (2017). Recent group exhibitions include *Soon Enough – Art in Action*, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2018); *Clive Hodgson & Anne Low*, The Block, London and *Dream Islands*, Nanaimo Art Gallery (2017); *Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery; *Standard Incomparable*, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2016); *The Grantchester Pottery Paints the Stage*, Jerwood Visual Arts, London and *Reading the Line*, The Western Front, Vancouver (2015). In 2017 Low was included in the Loewe Craft Prize, La Fundación Arquitectura COAM, Madrid; Chamber Gallery, New York; and 21_21 Museum, Tokyo. 




ProgramGuideWinter2019.pdf

ExhibitionGuideAnneLow.pdf

A close up section of hand-painted floral wallpaper. The wallpaper has a vertical green striped background with a pattern made up of blue flowers, green diamond shapes and orange circles overtop.

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A large t-shaped plinth sits in the middle of the gallery. Five furniture-like sculptures sit on top. Patterned wallpaper hangs on the wall behind.

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A rectangular section of floral wallpaper hangs on the gallery wall. A door within the wallpaper is half open. A rectangle and a semicircle piece is cut out of the top and bottom of the wallpaper.

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A fire screen with a brown and beige striped wooden frame sits on top of a plinth. Within the screen, a thread and sequined embroidery sun with a grinning face sits off center. 

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A black stool with black and white striped upholstery sits on top of a plinth. The fabric is made out of hand-woven silk.

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An orange bedstep sits on a plinth. Edged in wooden pearl beading, the tread of the steps is upholstered in a hand-dyed and woven, embossed orange fabric.

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Chair for a woman

Aslan Gaisumov

*If No One Asks* marks the first solo presentation of Aslan Gaisumov’s work in North America. His artistic practice speculates on the entanglement of fictions and truth, the inaccessible with the present and the acknowledged with the lost. As expressive forms, his artworks — whether moving or still images, found objects or installations — consider the pressures withstood by bodies and things as witnesses to events. 

Bringing together two works that have never been previously shown with one another, this exhibition offers a new way in which to consider many of the concerns that have shaped the artist’s practice over the past several years. Both artworks carry a story while simultaneously withholding it from view. Gaisumov’s work makes present both the stories and the silences that surround them, where the audience is given the responsibility of listener to images and witness to the witnesses.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare

### Biography

Aslan Gaisumov was born in Chechnya in 1991. Recent solo exhibitions include Dark Shelters, Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons, Lyon (2018-19); Crystals and Shards, Kohta, Helsinki (2018); All That You See Here, Forget, Emalin, London (2018); People of No Consequence, Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp (2016); and Memory Belongs to the Stones, Zink Galerie, Berlin (2015). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Liverpool Biennial and the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, (2017); Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2017); and Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2016), among many others. In 2014, he was awarded the Special Prize of the Future Generation Art Prize of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, Ukraine, and in 2016 the Innovation Prize of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, Russia. He lives and works in Grozny and Amsterdam.



ExhibitionGuideAslanGaisumov.pdf

An image of a blue carpeted room filled with rows of chairs. A large photograph of a cityscape fills the back wall. Windows line the left wall, two doors are on the right. Both have ornate drapery

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A short hallway leading into a gallery is depicted in this image. A blue-grey wall is visible at the end of this hallway. A small, two-dimensional framed artwork is installed on this wall.

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A wooden frame hangs on a blue-grey wall. Mounted in the frame is a page from a book. The title of the page reads “WAR MEMORIES.” The rest of the page is redacted, excluding one word, “war.” 

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A large screen is installed in a darkened gallery displaying a projected single-channel video work. In the video, an older person with a white beard walks into a room filled with rows of chairs.

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A large screen is displayed in a dark gallery. On the screen, a group of people sit facing the front of a large room. A person stands at the front of the room with their face turned away.

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If No One Asks

Diyan Achjadi

Patrick Cruz

Anna Torma

Erdem Taşdelen

Throughout 2019, the Contemporary Art Gallery is producing a major public art initiative in partnership with TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transportation authority. Five Canadian artists — Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen and Anna Torma — were commissioned to graphically wrap the exterior of a series of articulated buses traveling on major routes throughout Vancouver. The nature of this project — public transit vehicles enveloped by visual imagery and traversing the space of the city — offers a lyrical opportunity to explore connections between images, meaning and movement. Buses and trains are not the only transit systems that we navigate in our everyday lives: visual images constantly transport ideas and meaning from one place to another. They link and organize histories, spaces and identities. They connect us with others. The English word commute is derived from the Latin *commutare*, which means to change or transform. Each of the five artists featured in this project has an artistic practice that is deeply attentive to the commute of visual language across time and space. This project asks “how far do you travel?”, a question that could well be posed to each rider on the bus, but also to the graphic imagery that Achjadi, Cruz, Souliere, Taşdelen and Torma use to interrogate how and why images move and communicate through time and place.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

This project is produced in partnership with TransLink.

A graphic pattern made up of a purple, blue and green geometric background with various illustrations of buildings, swirling clouds, imaginary birds and plants superimposed on top.