Bernadette Phan: LIFELINES AND PORTALS

3 February 2023 through 5 March 2023
Opening reception for the artist Friday 3 February 2023, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong and Christopher Brayshaw

This series of new works by Bernadette Phan build on her previous “Stipple series” (rectangular canvases with concentric lines or the ripples of an occasional wave, against a ground). These new irregularly shaped works pulse with the soft eddies and currents of stippled paint on raw plywood supports.

"I work in series that evolve over time, some of them decades. The series involve repetition, formal restrictions, dialogues between painting and sculpture, memory and illusion. In each series I undertake particular subjects: language and translation, still life as imaginary springboards, perspectives as set ups. My interest and curiosity are nurtured by making percepts that connect sense perceptions and start with the obvious, visual touch as a means to investigate haptic and proximate spaces generated through the painting medium and weaving as of late. The economy of my decisions as part of the process addresses the potency of the work instead of its potentiality. In this “Stipple series”, the texture captures light and creates its own coloured shadow. The cadence and repetition amplifies the dimensional lines as an expression of warmth and intimacy within the cosmic dance of the everyday unknown."
(Bernadette Phan)

Thanh Marie Bernadette Phan was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and moved to Canada with her family at an early age, via France. She received a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal, and graduated from the MFA program at Tyler University, Philadelphia, in 1997. She moved back to Vancouver that same year and has continued her studio practice in painting, drawing and weaving as of late. She has shown locally, nationally, and in Europe for the past 25 years. When not working, she likes to travel to Cambodia and Alert Bay.

All exhibited works are available for sale

Nicole Ondre: PIRL

6 May 2022 NOW EXTENDED THROUGH 19 June 2022
Opening reception Friday 6 May 2022, 6-9pm

Helen Frankenthaler said that the lightest touch is the strongest gesture. Held in proximity to the ethos of antifragile, this reminds me that the redemptive potential of failure is relative to the scale of a condition and one’s response. The preposition anti- suggests that an oppositional energy to fragile–that of force, is needed to experience fortitude in the face of volatility. However, resilience may actually require the strength of the lightest touch–something akin to tenderness, in order to flourish. The works in Pirl express the practice of touching lightly. Lithe brush strokes feather out at their edges. The frayed edge of fabric sutures are subtly exposed. Clay ropes are gently coaxed to bend and loop. A wire is patiently pulled over the surface of a thin clay base. Plastic, fabric and elastic, which bear distinct degrees of tension, are carefully pulled taut.

-Excerpt from the exhibition text by Amy Kazymerchyk

Nicole Ondre is an artist based in Vancouver. Recent exhibitions include The eyes have walls (with Mina Totino) at the West Vancouver Art Museum (2020); and Blood Knot, Unit 17 (2018).

Jessica Buie & Dan Siney: RAUNCH, RAUNCH, DANCE!

27 March 2022 through 24 April 2022
Opening reception for the artists Friday April 1 2022, 6-9pm

Guest curated by Fabiola Carranza

Image: Jessica Buie, Exposure, color photograph

Sean Alward: DARK SALON

27 January 2022 through 6 March 2022
Organized by Christopher Brayshaw and Steven Tong

Get the key,

turn on the light,

and see the

DARK SALON

I began the first painting in this series as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to visualize a distant family member with no known photographs documenting their appearance. I knew where they came from, where they ended up, but little of their life other than their diet: potatoes. So, I painted an arrangement of potatoes on my studio table, avoiding portraiture in favour of still-life as a means of showing one thing via another, conscious that the original subject could never be depicted accurately anyway and thereby allowing metaphor to manifest in unexpected ways. In terms of process, my goal was to be as direct as possible, painting from life without photographic mediation. I wanted a kind of blunt, un-inflected naturalism, similar to that in use around the time photography first appeared (early-mid 19th century), before Impressionism and Modernism. I wanted any sense of inner-life in the subjects to come from an optical experience of their material appearance rather than embellishments of technique such as exaggerated colour or obviously gestural paint application. I also wanted to invoke a consideration of how the physical properties of the subjects were culturally and metaphorically resonant:

potatoes: you are what you eat, subterranean...

butter: solar energy store, fat, oil paint...

copper: distillation, electricity, currency, economy...

wooden sticks: folk art, the woods...

and so on...

Sean Alward is an artist based in Vancouver. His paintings explore the intersection of materials and historical consciousness. He received his MFA from the University of British Columbia and BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has exhibited across Canada and in the U.S., most recently at the Art Gallery at Evergreen, WAAP Projects Vancouver/Vacation Gallery New York, AHVA Gallery at UBC, Surrey Art Gallery, and the Nanaimo Art Gallery. He has published writing in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Border Crossings.

https://www.instagram.com/seanalward/  

Image: Sean Alward, Wavelength, oil on linen, 2021

Rowan Melling: BOSS BODIES

5 November 2021 through 12 December 2021

Opening reception for the artist Friday 5 November 2021, 6-9pm

Organized by Steven Tong with essays by Dan Adleman and Neal Rockwell

 

Exhibition P(review) by Michael Turner

"For reasons that I hope are quite clear, you will not encounter many exhibitions like Boss Bodies around town. The local press won’t likely have much to say about it either. That’s because the exhibition, in its own modest way, challenges a fantasy system to which so many of us remain indentured. Even at this disastrous stage of the crisis, developer-funded media outlets would have you believe that the Vancouver model provides the only feasible optics for finding our way within a city in freefall. Just try not to look down. "
Dan Adleman Interfacing with the Vancouver Model

"In a certain way, Boss Bodies is a vibe-based reply to [the] image economy. ...The violence inherent in the concrete actions of these companies leaked through in promotional photographs of these organizations' CEOs. They could not quite gloss over their role in dispossessions, demolitions, driving up housing costs, annihilating the meaning of language, and the apparent foreclosing of imagination and possibilities towards a deeply mediocre aspirational vision of corporate citizenship. Their cracked smiles and glinting eyes registered something more sinister than the "good vibes only" image they were attempting to promote."
Neal Rockwell Portraits of the  Vibeconomy 

 

Rowan Melling started oil painting in 2019 to “deal” with his feelings. When he was anxious, he painted plants. When he felt love, he painted his friends and family. When he suffered horror at entrepreneurial superheroes re-making the world in their crappy brand-image, he painted upsetting portraits of CEOs. These latter paintings make up his first solo show, Boss Bodies. This work seeks to reground its branded, transcendental subjects in the abjection of their bodies through the thick materiality of oil paint. As a whole, Rowan’s painting practice tries to resuscitate a bodily intimacy, slowly being strangled by the alienation of digital capitalism. He has previously shown work at CSA Space in Vancouver and the Decadent Squalor in Montreal. Rowan has an M.A. in German Studies from UBC and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Communication Studies at SFU.

Ana Vojnovic: PERFORMATIVE GEOMETRY: GRIDS & GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION

1 April 2021 through 9 May 2021

Organized by Christopher Brayshaw & Steven Tong

Ana Vojnovic works as an educator, artist, design researcher and a lecturer. Her pedagogical and art practices are an interdisciplinary response to urban conditions, and questions of how built/designed environments affect and condition human perception, our responses to designed circumstances and the ways we engage with each other.

Through her hand-drawn compositions and collage analysis, Ana narrates the inter-relations and intimacy between geometric language and space, and indirectly proposes multiple ways one can perceive and experience the work.

While her drawings and collage pieces are guided by the unexpectedness of inspiration and inner vision, they are performed through a deliberate, rhythmic re-working of compositional elements. As such, Ana’s work offers multi-layered engagement, one of a soothing dynamic and the activation of temporal images revealed within the white space.

For additional information on Ana’s practice and additional work(s), please visit her artist website conceptfioka.com

David Khang: SWORDS 2 PLOUGHSHARES (CUT PIECE 2 SEW PIECE) & ANTHROPOCENE 2 SYMBIOCENE (BOMBERS 2 BUTTERFLIES)

Swords 2 Ploughshares (Cut Piece 2 Sew Peace)

Performance, 24 October 2020, 1-4pm, Gertrude Guerin Plaza, Main/Kingsway

Anthropocene 2 Symbiocene (Bombers 2 Butterflies)

24 October 2020 through 27 December 2020

 

Organized by Steven Tong

 

In Swords 2 Ploughshares (Cut Piece 2 Sew Peace), David Khang de-commissioned his butterfly-covered, bicycle-powered tank. Invoking Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), public members were invited to participate in cutting pieces of fabric from the tank, to re-purpose them into sewn masks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The project functions as a fundraiser for legal defence of Indigenous land defenders and water protectors in British Columbia. The masks will continue to be produced until the fabric from the tank runs out. Masks can be ordered at: cutpiece2sewpeace@gmail.com

 

Anthropocene 2 Symbiocene (Bombers 2 Butterflies) is a body of work that Khang produced while studying in law school. Off-cuts from the fabric used to cover the tank were collaged with paper cut-outs to produce two thematic series composed of military and animal imagery. Metamorphosis of Turtle Island is a piece that Khang produced in lieu of an academic paper for a class on Aboriginal and Treaty Rights.

David Khang’s art practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang imbeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages in visual, textual, and spoken forms. In performing, Khang embodies these languages to interrogate social constructions of gender, race, and interspecies relations. By strategically switching languages and codes, Khang produces divergent and dissonant readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political.

Khang received his BSc and DDS from the University of Toronto, BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, and MFA with Empahsis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. He has taught at Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2005–2016), and Goddard College (2009-2010). Khang was born in Seoul, grew up in Toronto, and currently resides in Vancouver, where he divides his time between art practice, dentistry, and studying law at the University of British Columbia (2016 – 2021).

Heidi Meixner: UNMOVED MOVERS: THE MOVE TOWARD, AWAY AND THROUGH

10 September 2020 now extended until 29 October 2020, 7pm!
Virtual launch 10 September 2020  

“When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it. ” 
                                                      – Meister Eckhart

The sun, like the hub of a wheel, is an unmoved mover. The centre is static yet the perimeter rotates and the result is that we trundle – or even fly, as the case may be – onward with a cosmic momentum. The Aristotelian theory of the “unmoved mover,” which some dismiss as absurd, puts forth the idea that for every motion there is a mover and that at the mystic centre, the original mover is still. This concept speaks to the experience that the inanimate objects and images around us, occupying a seemingly static existence, can animate shifts and changes within our consciousness.
 
Rituals are created and performed in order to facilitate transformation. A “wünshelrute” (wishing rod), dowsing rod or witching rod is an instrument used to locate subterranean sources of water. In water witching, when someone suspects a valuable source lying beneath, a ritual search or sacred sourcing is performed to locate and move toward that which could nourish and sustain.
 
In A Dictionary of Symbols, J.E. Circlot writes “to leave the circumference for the centre is the equivalent of moving from the exterior to the interior, from form to contemplation, from multiplicity to unity, from space to spacelessness, from time to timelessness.” Unmoved Movers is an inquiry into the perennial and regenerative nature of symbols that are revitalized with each contemplation and explores the idea of symbol as “mover.” 
__________
 
A body of water, The many within the one, Towards centre, Darkness & light, Energetics, Towards expansion, Her proliferated reflections and The Braid are a series of painted papier-mâché witching rods that rest at the edges of the gallery, leaning with upward reaching arms, poised for conduction. These sculptures take the forked form of a Y, a symbol that has been associated with the sacred feminine and evokes both celebration and connectivity. 
 
Cotton fabric is pulled in measured loops through a woven backing to create the hooked rug. Here, at the edge of things is a two-part textile work that suggests adjacent thresholds or portals. Sun wheel and Nyx explore the collectively experienced transitional spaces of sunrise and moonrise and welcome contemplation of the liminal spaces occupied in the everyday.
  \
Heidi Meixner works in sculpture, painting and textiles. Her practice is inspired by folk art and traditions as well as alternative philosophies. Through slow-process materials and techniques, she explores the relationship between ritual and the everyday as an antidote to the pace and modes of engagement in contemporary culture. She is continuously drawn to the soft, versatile and buffering nature of textiles and is motivated by the vast history and contexts of fibre art. She lives on the traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations known as Vancouver, B.C. In 2009 she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in visual arts from Simon Fraser University.

 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: A WALK IN THE PARK

WALKING PIECE

Walk in the footsteps of the person in front.

1. on ground

2. in mud

3. in snow

4. on ice

5. in water

Try not to make sounds.

- Yoko Ono, 1964 spring

The time of the COVID-19 “lockdown” has not been a walk in the park. During the last few months, those of us who are able to take walks have done so of simple necessity: to get groceries, to do laundry, and to keep sane. The recent mass outpouring of rage following the police murder of George Floyd have been a reminder (if anyone had forgotten) that walking remains a powerful symbol of solidarity. There are indeed multiple, intertwined histories of walking, including regulation of who can walk, where they can walk, and when they can walk.

With these contexts in mind, CSA would like to invite you to join us in a socially-distanced art project, to take place in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park. Taking inspiration from Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (1964), we invite submissions of instructions for socially-distanced walking activities and/or performances, to be completed by persons other than those issuing the instructions. Up to 30 instructions will be selected from submissions received, then freely distributed through CSA’s website as a PDF.

At 130 acres, QE is the second-largest park in the city of Vancouver. The spaciousness of QE Park will allow participants to maintain virally safe distances, while potentially allowing numerous participants to enact the same set of instructions at the same time. QE Park’s history as a former quarry makes it one of the most topographically interesting parks in Vancouver, providing all kinds of nooks and crannies where performances and/or activities could take place.

QE Park is at 4600 Cambie Street. A virtual drive-through of the park is available on Google Maps.

Submissions will be accepted, reviewed and released on a rolling basis, with a new batch released every Monday, until the end of the COVID-19 crisis. The curators may edit and format accepted submissions for clarity or brevity, in consultation with the artists.

JELENA AND THE MAGIC FLUTE: A STORY IN 12 ARTWORKS

12 March 2020 through 30 April 2020
Opening reception for the artists Thursday 12 March 2020, 6-9pm

Guest curated by Dan Starling

Jelena is an optimistic university student who spends a lot of time in coffee shops, dividing her time between serving customers and working on writing her first novel. After being offered a magic flute that has the power to turn sorrow into joy, she is at first hesitant to accept the gift and the responsibility that comes with it. But after she finds her grandmother Denise missing and a mysterious messenger delivers a note to her that uncovers the truth behind a historical assassination, the flute becomes indispensable in outwitting a group of conspirators including Humpty Dumpty and Canadian billionaire Chip Wilson whose aim is to keep the world ignorant of the truth. Will Jelena find her grandmother and save the world, or is the whole thing just deep fake news story?

The idea for the exhibition is to generate a sequence of works by different artists that builds a narrative in their accumulation. The works were selected sequentially following the "monomyth"; the description given by Joseph Campbell of a narrative sequence in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces that determines the plot points common among stories. The structure is so pervasive that it saturates our popular entertainment. The "stages" are, in simplified form:


Artist 1. Stephen Waddell

Stage 1. ORDINARY WORLD


Artist 2 - Claire Geddes Bailey

Stage 2. DISRUPTION also known as the “CALL TO ADVENTURE”


Artist 3 - Luke Parnell

Stage 3. QUESTIONING also known as the “REFUSAL OF THE CALL”


Artist 4 - Rosamunde Bordo

Stage 4. DECISION (to act or not) can be encouraged to act by a “MEETING WITH THE MENTOR”


Artist 5 - Tom Richardson

Stage 5. UNKNOWN also known as “CROSSING THE THRESHOLD”


Artist 6 - Michael Lachman

Stage 6. HELP OR TESTS FROM ALLIES OR ENEMIES, whom they meet on their journey.


Artist 7 - Marina Roy

Stage 7. QUESTIONING THE CONSEQUENCES (of the decision, “Can I go back to the old life?”)


Artist 8 - Rowan Melling

Stage 8. THE FINAL TEST/ ORDEAL


Artist 9 - Diyan Achjadi

Stage 9. REWARD (new knowledge)


Artist 10 - Stephanie Gagne

Stage 10. ROAD BACK


Artist 11 - Shelley Rothenburger

Stage 11. RESURRECTION


Artist 12 - Liljana Mead Martin

Stage 12. MASTER OF TWO WORLDS


Stephen Waddell received his MFA from the University of British Columbia in 1994, and has exhibited in galleries and institutions including Monte Clark Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló in Castello, Spain, Kunstforum Baloise in Basel, Switzerland, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, and C/O in Berlin. Waddell’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Armand Hammer Collection in Los Angeles, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, and numerous others. Waddell’s most recent books include Dark Matter Atlas (2017) published by Distanz and Hunt and Gather (2011) published by Steidl. In 2019, Waddell won the Scotiabank Photography Award. The artist lives and works in Vancouver, B.C. Canada.

Claire Geddes Bailey makes videos, structures, sounds, cakes, and texts. Dwelling on the narrative qualities of materials, words, symbols, and spaces, her work often addresses legibility. She sees a parallel between surfaces of objects and the texture of language. Claire holds a BA in English literature and visual art from UBC. She lives and works as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.

Luke Parnell is Wilp Laxgiik Nisga’a (House of Eagles) from Gingolx on his mother’s side and Haida from Massett on his father’s side.  His artistic training is both traditional and classical - he apprenticed with a Master Northwest Coast Indigenous carver and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from OCAD University and a Masters of Applied Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. His medium is predominantly wood, however his materiality is determined on a project by project basis. Northwest coast Indigenous art is the basis of his practice and praxis, centering on narrative, specifically transformation narratives.

Rosamunde Bordo is an interdisciplinary artist invested in exploring narrative possibilities through collections of objects and images, appropriated/ready-made texts, and a practice of creative writing. She is currently an MFA candidate in visual art at the University of British Columbia. For her thesis she is working on an ongoing project called The Denise File which is an investigation of a woman known to the artist through a collection of postcards. Within this sprawling multidisciplinary project, she explores love and desire, the role of mediation, and the construction and conflation of factual and fictional narratives. She is also cofounder of everydaystollen, an experimental podcast series. She is currently based on the traditional unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, known as Vancouver, B.C.

Tom Richardson’s practice explores intersecting themes in art history, narrative, music, and politics. His work has found itself in various forms ranging from exuberant multi-channel installation, single channel video, sculptural assemblage, drawing and painting. Richardson was a cofounding member and organizer of Duplex, an artist run gallery and studio facility in Vancouver. Richardson’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally, recent solo exhibitions include Big Industrial Zoetrope, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver (2018), Rehearsal for a Synthetic Theatre, Field Contemporary, Vancouver (2017), The Bureau of True Vision, Spare Room, Vancouver (2016).

Michael Lachman is an artist based in Vancouver, BC. His works take the form of sculptural installation, video, drawing and printmaking. He explores the mythos constructed through storytelling and questions the authority of the storyteller. He is particularly drawn to stories of duplicity and the unreliable narrative, which materialize through projects that are both investigatory and fictional, and at times draw from the esoteric and speculative.

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer, and associate professor in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia. She works across a variety of media — drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and animation. Her artwork investigates the grotesque at the intersection of language, image, and materiality; and her research interests include ecology, post humanism, and biopolitics. In 2001 she published Sign After the X (Arsenal/Artspeak); her newest book Queuejumping (Information Office) will come out in October 2020. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA art award.

Rowan Melling's research-based practice is rooted in and informed by literature and philosophy. Recently, he has started oil painting as a way to critique the multiplying culture of corporate self-actualization and self-branding. Motivated by his alienation and a desire for something less bad, Melling seeks alternatives to the entrepreneurial-self in his work. Melling has studied at the University of British Columbia.

Diyan Achjadi's practice in drawing, printmaking and animation considers surface ornamentation, historical prints, and illustrations as pictorial archives, and the potential of these forms as sites for knowledge transmission. She has exhibited widely at galleries and film festivals across Canada and internationally. Recent projects include Coming Soon!, a year-long commission for the City of Vancouver Public Art Program, and NonSerie (In Commute), part of How far do you travel?, a year-long exhibition on the exterior of public buses, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in partnership with Translink BC. Diyan received a BFA from the Cooper Union (New York, NY) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal, QC), and is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

Stephanie Gagne is a Vancouver-based artist. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree in visual arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a master of fine arts degree in interdisciplinary studies from Simon Fraser University. Her interests include popular culture, sexuality, neighbourhoods and childhood nostalgia. Stephanie's interdisciplinary projects involve sculpture, photography, drawing, and video.

Shelley Rothenburger was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario and now resides in Richmond, B.C.  She began formal studies in art in 1989 at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Fine Art in 1995 majoring in Painting. She continued her art education in 1997 upon entering Graduate School at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and completed her formal studies with a Master of Fine Art degree in painting in 2000. She has had multiple solo, juried and group exhibitions nationwide, most noted being a juried exhibition at the Art Gallery on Ontario in Toronto in 1996 and a solo exhibition at the Nickel Museum in Calgary in 2000.  Her work is represented in the University of Alberta Master of Fine Art Collection, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Collection and also in private regional, national and international collections.

Liljana Mead Martin is a visual artist living and working on unceded Coast Salish territories, Vancouver. Through sculptural and choreographic processes she explores connections between memory, embodiment, material and geography. In recent sculpture she deals with the external and internal environments as interchangeable forms engaged in a constant exchange, with reference to injury, resilience, loss and survival. Martin’s artworks and performance have been exhibited at The Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture (Dawson City YT), Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto Island ON) the Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax NS), Dynamo Arts Association (Vancouver), Recess (NYC) and the Nanaimo Art Gallery (Vancouver Island).

Dan Starling’s work plays with the conventions of narratives through intervention, extrapolation and reconfiguration to produce exciting juxtapositions that encourage critical engagement. Based in research, Starling’s work deals with how historical and contemporary aesthetic forms frame the narratives that in turn influence how we see ourselves individually and collectively. Starling has studied at Emily Carr University and Städelschule, Frankfurt, and has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. Starling’s work was most recently shown at Wil Aballe Art Projects, VIVO Media Arts Centre and the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver.

Megan Hepburn: PASSING THROUGH SMOKE

14 June 2019 through 28 July 2019
Reception for the artist Thursday 13 June 2019, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong

A selection of recent olfactory objects and painting by Megan Hepburn. Created over nine months at residencies in Sofia, Bulgaria and Vermont, USA, this exhibition questions the temporality and endurance of an internal life or mind conditioned by terminal illness and loss.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council in the making of this work.⁣
⁣⁣
⁣Megan Hepburn is an artist currently based in the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her work is grounded in painting and perfumery, and has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2006. Hepburn's work has been recognized by the Joseph Plaskett Award for Painting, the RBC Painting Competition, The Salzburg Society of Friends of the Summer Academy and The Vermont Studio Centre among others. Recent exhibitions include Megan Hepburn and Hannah Yuill at Kombinat in Sofia, Bulgaria, Banana Dust at Spare Room, Vancouver and Dark Sands Ask Why You Talk So Fast at Deluge Contemporary in Victoria, Canada.

Alina Senchenko: Праця та відпочинок (WORK AND LEISURE)

12 April 2019 through 12 May 2019
Reception for the artist Friday 12 April 2019, 6-9pm

Vasyl wakes up every day at 5:30 AM, boils some water for coffee, two eggs and a slice of rye bread with kovbasa and cheese. He looks out the window and waits for the sound of the train that is scheduled to come by at 5:45 AM. The sound fills the small kitchen. The windows tremble. Still looking out, rows of chestnut trees are full bloom now, into the street where Natalia Oleksandivna in an orange safety vest swipes the pavement with an old wooden broom. The air is filled with spring.

Leaning before a row of peaches, Olena closes her eyes, inhales a scent of her childhood vocations: the mix of peaches and pine. She buys two peaches before walking on her own for the first time down the road towards the sea. The heat causes the road around her to shimmer, towards the beach.

Alina Senchenko is a Ukrainian artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada. She graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
In the past few years, Senchenko has examined the cultural, social structures of contemporary society, with an interest in the urban and rural spaces that we create and occupy. The current Ukrainian political situation is a preoccupation of her practice. Senchenko’s practice primarily focuses on photographs, found images, text, collage, and performance.