Break the Legs of What I Want to Happen

Meaghen Buckley, Tommy Chain, Emily Chou, Troy Gronsdal, Anna Kasko, Scott Kemp, Lexie Owen, Rachel & Sarah Seburn, Stephan Wright

7 to 21 Jun 2014

Opening Reception Friday 6 June, 2014, 7:00 pm

Curators’ and Artists’ Tours Saturday 7 June, 2014 hourly from 1:00 until 4:00 pm and Friday 13 June, 2014 from 2:00 until 4:00 pm

Draw No Conclusions: Access Gallery with Vancouver Draw Down 2014

Saturday 14 June, 2014, 2:00 - 4:00 pm

Hovering - as our culture now seems to be - on the brink of abandoning so many paradigms of knowledge and, along with them, assumptions about what it means to succeed, the notion of failure itself is proving to be an increasingly evocative site of investigation for artists. Break the Legs Of What I Want To Happen is a collaborative curatorial project developed and realized at Access Gallery by the students of Emily Carr University’s AHIS 401 Topics in Curatorial Projects seminar under the instruction of Access Director/Curator Kimberly Phillips. Selected by the seminar cohort from an open call, all ten exhibitors in Break the Legs of What I Want to Happen are student artists of exceptional promise. Their media is diverse, from lathe-turned wood to construction scaffolding, brand name garments to video-game code. What they share is a compelling desire to fail: to explore the fallibility of materials or process, the foundering of language and communication, or the point at which presumptions around assigned value and viewership expectations collapse. Whether colossal or quiet, the “failures” that mark these works are not end-points but beginnings. Assuming the role of provocateur, their makers (and the curatorial cohort that selected their inclusion) playfully address the emergent stage of their careers, and in so doing prompt us to question our assumptions about productivity, completion and consider the rich field of possibility that opens up when we abandon (or sabotage) the drive to make things work.

Jointly curated by Elliat Albrecht, Emily Boulton, Emilie Caron, Zoe Cilliers, Monserrat Collantes, Alyssa Dusevic, Olivia Fauland, Madison Killough, Deborah Kisiel, Erika YoungHwa Lim, Elaine Low, Laura McIntosh, Eric Miranda, Gabriela Munoz, Taryn Porter, Pamela Powley, Olivia Qiu, David Roth, Roberta Sciarretta,Ali Yaqubian and Jacobo Zambrano

(image: Stephan Wright, median, 2014. Photo courtesy of the artist)

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming, the City of Vancouver, The Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation, the Michael Audain Foundation, The Hamber Foundation, Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s Imagining Our Future, and our committed donors, members and volunteers.

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Access is a platform for emergent and experimental art practices. We enable critical conversations and risk taking through new configurations of audience, artists and community.