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Listening to Pictures playlist for 08/18/2022
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Episode 10 | August 18
Laiwan on Jin-me Yoon

[Image Description: A postcard image shows the artist Jin-me Yoon standing before the frozen waters of Lake Louise and snow-covered mountains. She is wearing a dark patterned cardigan sweater, light blue jeans, and brown leather loafers. She stands erect on top of a stone, gazing directly at the camera with her hands forming loose fists by her side.]

 

Jin-me Yoon, Souvenirs of the Self (Postcard Series), 1991, postcards. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015. Photo: Lief Hall.

 

“We each in turn return to 2021 from 1991
listening to these mountains
listening to this lake…”

Jin-me Yoon has been a critical voice in the development of discussions around identity within visual art for three decades, and has taught as faculty in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts since 1992. Following Yoon's own description of her artistic strategy as "semiotic collisions” — a means of extracting something from one context and placing it in another to ignite a proliferation of meanings — Laiwan composes their own "semiotic collision" in the form of a three-part score, meditating on Yoon's Souvenirs of the Self (Postcard Series) (1991). Laiwan works to leave the space of representation open, citing American Vietnamese philosopher and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, as a commitment to not speaking on their subject's behalf or in their place.

Laiwan is a cultural activist, interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. In 1983, she graduated from Emily Carr College of Art + Design and founded the Or Gallery. She received an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts in 1999. Based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ First Nations, she teaches in the MFA Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College, USA.

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[Image Description: A postcard image shows the artist Jin-me Yoon standing before the frozen waters of Lake Louise and snow-covered mountains. She is wearing a dark patterned cardigan sweater, light blue jeans, and brown leather loafers. She stands erect on top of a stone, gazing directly at the camera with her hands forming loose fists by her side.]

 

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  • Posted on: 19 August 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 08/11/2022
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     Episode 9 | August 11
     Kara Ditte Hansen and Steffanie Ling on Ken Lum

 

 

Image Description: An offset lithograph on newsprint presents a grid of 16 black and white photographic portraits; of diverse youth ranging in age from infants to young adults. Each portrait is closely cropped, where the portraits’ smiling faces gaze outward in various directions.

Ken Lum, Youth Portraits, 1985, offset lithograph on newsprint. Gift of Bill Jeffries, 2017. Photo SFU Galleries.

Comprised of a grid with 16 photographic portraits of youth ranging from infants to young adults from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, Ken Lum's Youth Portraits (1985) was originally installed as part of a series spray-mounted to the walls of Vancouver's Coburg Gallery (1983-1987), creating a constellation of diverse faces. While in conversation about Youth Portraits, Kara Ditte Hansen and Steffanie Ling reflect on memories of encountering Lum’s conceptual art practice, first as self-described "keener art students," and now a decade later, less burdened by the pressure to perform intellectually cumbersome readings of it. They consider Lum’s exploration — at times humorous, other times painful — of social and political belonging that comes into particular focus when tracing tensions between institutional records and personal experience.

Kara Ditte Hansen is an artist and filmmaker. She is a master’s student in the Cinematic Arts program at University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She loves all things pickled. 

Steffanie Ling is an occasional critic and regular reader of Marx. She is a current graduate student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. 

Hansen and Ling attended the same high school in Calgary, Alberta.

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[Image Description: An offset lithograph on newsprint presents a grid of 16 black and white photographic portraits; of diverse youth ranging in age from infants to young adults. Each portrait is closely cropped, where the portraits’ smiling faces gaze outward in various directions.]

 

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  • Posted on: 11 August 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 08/04/2022
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   Episode 8 | August 4

   Fabiola Carranza and Michelle Helene MacKenzie on Althea Thauberger

 

[Image Descriptions: A horizontal photograph depicts a middle-aged white man—the Canadian actor and filmmaker, Nicholas Campbell. He is lying face up upon a stainless steel mortuary table. Part of his upper body and head hangs off the edge of the rimmed table, and his gaze is oriented to the viewer. His legs and feet are bare from the knee down with a white sheet bundled over his waist and thighs. He wears a blue collared shirt and his black plaid tie is askance over his chest. His right hand points loosely upwards near his face: with eyes wide, brows raised and mouth slightly agape.]

Althea Thauberger, Ecce Homo, 2011, metallic digital c-print, ed. 2/5 + 11AP. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015. Photo: Lief Hall.

“Sometimes there's delight in just being able to sit with the references.”

Originally produced as a large-scale photographic mural for the City of Vancouver Public Art Program, Althea Thauberger’s Ecce Homo (2011) entangles western art and regional politics, real life and representation. The artwork’s title means “behold the man” in Latin, and offers a contemporary version of Jacques-Louis David's 1793 painting Death of Marat by way of the popular long-running CBC television program Da Vinci's Inquest. Fabiola Carranza and Michelle Helene Mackenzie call attention to the site of the work’s initial presentation in Vancouver, situated amongst the city's economic and social complexities, while considering the dense web of connections Thauberger draws between art and life.

Fabiola Carranza is an artist and writer. Having lived and studied in Vancouver since 2002, Carranza relocated to San Diego to pursue her art practice and critical gender studies PhD at the University of California. She has exhibited in Canada and internationally, and her art writing has been published in several magazines.

Michelle Helene Mackenzie is a writer, musician, and artist born in Vancouver, the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. Mackenzie has studied at Simon Fraser University, Duke University, and began a PhD at the University of California, San Diego in autumn 2020. 

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[Image Descriptions: A horizontal photograph depicts a middle-aged white man—the Canadian actor and filmmaker, Nicholas Campbell. He is lying face up upon a stainless steel mortuary table. Part of his upper body and head hangs off the edge of the rimmed table, and his gaze is oriented to the viewer. His legs and feet are bare from the knee down with a white sheet bundled over his waist and thighs. He wears a blue collared shirt and his black plaid tie is askance over his chest. His right hand points loosely upwards near his face: with eyes wide, brows raised and mouth slightly agape.]

 

Highlighted/Featured Program: 
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  • Posted on: 5 August 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 07/28/2022
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Episode 7 | July 28
C̸OSINIYE Paul and Sage Paul on Susan Point

Susan Point, Written in the Earth, 2000, cast aluminum and red cedar. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Salish Weave Collection of George and Christiane Smyth, 2018. SFU Galleries.

Susan Point, Written in the Earth, 2000, cast aluminum and red cedar. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Salish Weave Collection of George and Christiane Smyth, 2018. SFU Galleries.

 

“One way we did ‘write in the earth’ was through farming. As Coast Salish People, we farmed by thinking of the future, asking ourselves, ‘How do we help the land as it provides for us? How do I care for the earth as she cares for me?’”

 

Written in the Earth (2000)is a series of four engraved aluminum and cedar works by Susan Point installed in the Saywell Atrium at SFU’s Burnaby campus. A xʷməθkwəy̓əm Coast Salish artist who was born in Alert Bay and grew up on the xʷməθkwəy̓əm Reserve, Point's artistic practice combines contemporary and traditional techniques to assert Coast Salish culture. At the outset of Point’s career over three decades ago, there were few visible precedents of women carving, though traditionally women did practice carving. Coast Salish artists and sisters C̸OSINIYE Paul and Sage Paul speak on the legacy and techniques of Point’s expansive practice and her influence on new generations of Indigenous artists.

C̸OSINIYE Paul is a Coast Salish artist, born in the year 2000 to artist Chris Paul and raised in Tsartlip territory. Their traditional Coast Salish name, which means Star Woman, was given to them by their aunt Linda Eilliott. Their work often features astrological elements, like the stars and moon, with new-age colour palettes and bold lines. Besides printmaking they work in illustration, logo design, wood, metal, glass, and jewelry design. Their work has been exhibited in Alcheringa Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and UVIC.
 
Sage Paul is a Coast Salish artist, born in 1995 to artist Chris Paul. Her work is influenced by the natural world around her, and often features animals stylistically rendered with a bright colour palette. Her work has been exhibited in Alcheringa Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and UVIC Legacy Art Gallery. She is the recipient of the YVR Art Foundation’s Frank O’Neill Award for her sandblasted piece titled Grandpa.

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[Image description: Hanging along a cement wall are four aluminium works in the shape of bell-curves. Each carved metal surface depicts an etched face in a Coast Salish design, flanked by a different pair of birds: hummingbirds, thunderbirds, owls, and phoenixes, that represent the Earth, stars, moon, and sun, respectively. Each work is lined with a strip of red cedar. The works alternate between facing upwards and downwards.]

 

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  • Posted on: 5 August 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 07/21/2022
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Episode 6 | July 21

Marian Penner Bancroft and Patrik Andersson on Christos Dikeakos

Christos Dikeakos, x wáyxway / x' áy'xi, 1991, c-print, sandblasted glass, metal. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O'Brian, 2015. Photo SFU Galleries.

Christos Dikeakos, x wáyxway / x' áy'xi, 1991, c-print, sandblasted glass, metal. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O'Brian, 2015. Photo SFU Galleries.

"What we're looking at...all seems very innocent. And yet, when you think about the word X wáyxway...and sitting in what we now know as a tourist destination, you begin to adjust your ideas of what it means to be a settler in this part of the world."

Marian Penner Bancroft and Patrik Andersson consider fellow Vancouver artist Christos Dikeakos' photographic work x wáyxway / x' áy’xi (1991).Since the late 1960s Dikeakos has played an important role in discourse on conceptual photography in Vancouver, and x wáyxway / x' áy'xi  is part of a larger photographic series engaging with memories, histories, and urban typologies within contemporary urban areas. Penner Bancroft and Andersson discuss the work's depicted view from Stanley Park looking north over Burrard Inlet toward the mountains and the industrial sites along the shoreline, as well as Dikeakos’ efforts to convey how these sites were named and described by the xʷməθkwəy̓əm First Nation prior to and since European settlement.

Patrik Andersson is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He has curated exhibitions locally and internationally and operates Trapp Projects, an independent curatorial platform founded in 1997.

Marian Penner Bancroft is a Vancouver artist working with photography, text, video, sculpture and sound. She is a Professor Emerita at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and recipient of the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Visual Arts Award (2009), the Audain Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts (2012) and the Overseas Photographer Award at the Higashikawa International Photography Festival in Japan (2018).

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Transcript
 

 

[Image Description: A panoramic colour photograph depicts a view of a desolate waterpark in Stanley Park overlooking the Northshore mountains and industry, which lines the edge of the Burrard Inlet. A painted river bisects the centre of the image through the park, which appears to vanish as it edges towards the north. Bright yellow fountain structures are in a small grouping to the left and in the distance to the right, across the harbour, are bright yellow sulfur piles. A sheet of glass hovers over the image, fastened with metal rods, and has sandblasted text at the center which reads “x wáyxway,” and at the bottom left it reads “masks.”]

 

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  • Posted on: 5 August 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 07/14/2022
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   Episode 5 | July 14 Ken Lum on Corita Kent

"I think there are a lot of really interesting figures who are outliers to the system of art, who offer all kinds of lessons for the art world.”

Corita Kent, song about the greatness, 1964, silkscreen, edition of 50. SFU ArtCollection, Purchase, 1970. Photo: Lief Hall.

 

Ken Lum chronicles the influence and impact of Corita Kent (1918 - 1986), an American artist, educator, and religious sister who, as he argues, was "in many ways the embodiment of pop.” Kent produced a large body of graphically powerful serigraphs that often incorporated song lyrics, biblical verses, literature, advertising imagery and slogans. Lum explains how the focus of Kent’s work became increasingly political throughout the 1960s, particularly concerning urgent issues of poverty and racism. While contextualizing her life and work in relation to her cultural moment, Lum considers her position as a relative outlier within the art world, and a frequently overlooked but important voice in the field of pop art.

 

Ken Lum is a Canadian artist based in Philadelphia, USA, where he is Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He has a long exhibition record as well as an extensive record of essay publications and curatorial activities. 

 

 

 

[Image Description: An offset lithograph on newsprint presents a grid of 16 black and white photographic portraits; of diverse youth ranging in age from infants to young adults. Each portrait is closely cropped, where the portraits’ smiling faces gaze outward in various directions.]

 

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  • Posted on: 15 July 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 07/07/2022
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   Episode 4 | July 7

Carol Sawyer and Laurance Playford-Beaudet on May Wilson

May Wilson, Untitled, 1973, photo stamp collage. SFU Art Collection. Gift, 1976. Photo: Lief Hall.

Carol Sawyer and Laurance Playford-Beaudet, both artists whose practices incorporate sound, focus on the work of May Wilson (1905 - 1986), a prominent figure in the 1960s and 70s North American feminist and correspondence art movements. Following extensive research, Sawyer and Playford-Beaudet explore Wilson’s practice in a textured homage that echoes her approach to collage, splicing audio drawn from archival recordings together with current responsive voice work. Through their experimental process, Sawyer and Playford-Beaudet emphasize the inextricable connections between life and work and how each inform and enrich the other.

Carol Sawyer is a visual artist, singer, and educator living and working on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes research, narrative, photography, video, and improvised music.

Laurance Playford-Beaudet is a research assistant, tree-planter, collaborator, and sound artist who focuses on that which is overlooked or unnoticed. Playford-Beaudet lives in Tla'amin territory (Texada Island, BC) after graduating from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in New Media and Sound Arts.

[Image Description: The surface of a postcard is covered in black spray paint in irregular block shapes. A stamp that shows a diagram of two dissected torsos is centrally placed. The anatomical diagram is of two feminine bodies. The one on the right depicts a much narrower waist than the body on the left. Both show cloth wrapped loosely around the waists, referring to the effects of corsetry. Collaged in place of the heads are cut-outs of May Wilson’s face; the one on the left has a wide and carefree smile, while the other grimaces with distaste.]

 

Highlighted/Featured Program: 
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  • Posted on: 7 July 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 06/30/2022
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Episode 3 | June 30
Brady Cranfield and Kathy Slade on Bridge Beardslee

“When the pyramid first arrived, I was quite pleased. I was even more pleased when I thought that the pyramid was realigned to magnetic north in response to my letter of September 8, 1977.”

 

Bridge Beardslee, Energy Alignment Sculpture: Pyramid in the Golden Section, 1976, steel and paint. SFU Art Collection. Gift of Ian Davidson, 1977. Photo: SFU Galleries.

In the central courtyard of SFU’s Burnaby campus is a steel framed, cerulean blue pyramid created by sculptor Bridge Beardslee. Energy Alignment Sculpture (1976) was made to reference the proportions of Cheops’ pyramid in Egypt, and positioned to align with the rotation of the Earth’s axis; although some questioned whether it was appropriately positioned to harness “pyramid power.” Brady Cranfield and Kathy Slade read letters and articles written following the sculpture's installation in 1977, to map a heated and often humorous exchange of local controversy surrounding the artwork. The sounds of a synthetic drone and gong are heard throughout, in reference to metaphysical speculations of the frequency 432 Hz, a number which also has connections to mythologies surrounding the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Brady Cranfield is a Vancouver-based sound and visual artist, musician, and writer. He holds a MA in Communications and MFA from Simon Fraser University. The founder and co-organizer (in collaboration with Kathy Slade) of the ongoing public art project The Music Appreciation Society, he is also a member of the improv/electronic/jazz trio Alfred Jarry and the duo Vomit Fraud with Kay Higgins.

Kathy Slade is based in Vancouver and works across disciplines in a variety of media including textiles, sculpture, sound, performance, film, video, print, and publication. Her work often points to moments and events in literature, art history and popular culture from which to reimagine temporalities and existing texts. She is faculty at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts.

 

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  • Posted on: 7 July 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 06/23/2022
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Episode 2 | June 23
Christian Vistan and Kiel Torres on Roy Kiyooka

 

Roy Kiyooka (1926 – 1994) was a painter, photographer, musician, and poet, whose legacy is still profoundly felt in artistic and literary circles of the Northwest Coast. A regular participant in the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops in the 1950s in Saskatchewan, Kiyooka moved to Vancouver in the 1960s and taught at the Vancouver School of Art, where he explored various modes of abstraction. Christian Vistan and Kiel Torres honour Kiyooka’s work with a poetic response provoked by viewing his silkscreened print #3 Court (1971). They question how meaning is made through language, shapes, reflexes, and memory. While Vistan and Torres move through an exchange of impressions and relations, their dialogue embodies the playful and confined parlay of a court game.

Kiel Torres is a writer and editor who lives and works on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ Nations. Her work considers friendship, reading, embodiment, and fandom as apparatuses to navigate social and emotional worlds. Torres is a 2022 curatorial resident at Artspeak, and holds a BA in Art History from the University of British Columbia.

Christian Vistan is an artist from the peninsula now known as Bataan, Philippines, currently living and working on unceded and traditional xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Sc̓əwaθn Məsteyəxʷ, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ territories. They run dreams comma delta with Aubin Kwon, a space for artist projects and exhibitions located inside their family home in Delta, BC.

[Image Description: A squarish silkscreen of coloured ovals are grouped within a series of colour blocks. The centre shows a silver block, which is framed by a duotone one—with magenta above and a greyish purple below. Within the centre silver block, twelve ovals are in groups of four at the left and right, and two at the top and bottom. The ovals are in different solid colours: cobalt blue, lime green, and the same magenta and purple of the outer colours.]

 

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  • Posted on: 23 June 2022
  • By: cjsfpa
Listening to Pictures playlist for 06/16/2022
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Episode 1 | June 16
Lucien Durey on Allyson Clay

 

“Allyson's work asks a lot of big questions that I also grapple with, such as how to use language to talk about something that escapes language.” 

 

Walking through the city streets of Vancouver, Lucien Durey traces an interconnected web of speech and sound in response to Vancouver artist and educator Allyson Clay’sphotographic work Double Self-Portrait (2001). He considers how Clay’s expansive visual art practice navigates pathways and permeabilities of the affective city through explorations in different media. Exploring the tenuous membrane between fact and fiction, Durey leads listeners through realms of what may be considered public and private, landing on unintentional outcomes that shape knowledge and experience.

 

Lucien Durey is an artist, writer, and singer based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. His mixed media and performance-based practice engages with found objects, photographs, sounds, and place. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

 

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[Image Description: Double Self-Portrait depicts twinned images of Allyson Clay tossing books out of the window of a modernist building with a technique similar to shooting a basketball. All of the windows have the curtains drawn except for two sets of three, with Clay in the centre of the open drapes. The only indication that they are two separate images joined together is the slight change in the angle of her throw and the positions of the books falling.]

 

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  • Posted on: 22 June 2022
  • By: cjsfpa