Access Gallery is seeking applicants for the position of Curatorial Assistant. This is a three-month contract (June 3 – August 26, 2012). Applicants must be between 15 and 30 years, and be full-time students intending to return to their studies in the next school year.

The successful applicant will have administrative experience with cultural or non-profit organizations, excellent oral and written communications skills, and a passion for contemporary visual arts.

The Curatorial Assistant will work 30 hours/week. Must be available to work on
Fridays and Saturdays.

Responsibilities:
The Curatorial Assistant will:
- Assist the Director/Curator with general administrative duties
- Sit the gallery five days a week during the run of exhibitions
- Update website
- Help prepare press releases and evites
- Assist the Director with programming related tasks
- Help with Access openings and events
- Overseeing submissions
- Helping with installation of projects
- Prepare a proposal for a future exhibition at Access Gallery
- |Grant research
- Work with artists to facilitate their needs

Qualifications:
- Non-profit administrative experience
- Excellent organizational and time management skills
- Familiarity with artist run culture
- Excellent oral and written communication skills
- Considerable knowledge of contemporary art
- Ability to work well independently and in a team
- Ability to multi-task in a fast-paced environment
- Graphic design skills and installation experience will be considered assets.
- Self-directed work ethic

Salary
$12/hour

Please submit a CV and cover letter by May 24, 2013
Send to:
access@vaarc.ca

ALL LOST: Dawn Johnston

May 24 – July 20, 2013

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:00-9:00pm

A Conversation between the Artist and Access Director/Curator Kimberly Phillips: Thursday, July 18, 7:00-8:30pm

ALL LOST is a solo exhibition of new work by the Vancouver-based artist Dawn Johnston. A recent MFA graduate from the University of Guelph, Johnston’s practice uses documented and imagined histories as a platform on which to develop complex, immersive installations, video and materially focused sculpture. She reinvents or modifies existing objects and narratives—particularly those involving Canada’s origin myths or the sea—in order to examine issues of labour practices and to explore our relationships with the everyday things that surround us. A number of recent works have involved the artist plating unlikely objects in gold, curiously imbuing them with that material’s metaphysical—even magical—properties. In addition, Johnston’s experience in the construction industry has begun to inform both her process and her interaction with raw materials.

For ALL LOST, Johnston has constructed a 1:1 scale replica of a shipping container within Access’ gallery space using wood and gold plated screws. This work, which will only just fit within the confines of the gallery, calls upon several points of reference. The first is Johnston’s own knowledge of sailing and her recent completion of The Arctic Circle Residency Expedition, wherein she lived and worked on a tall ship for a month, sailing the arctic archipelago with fellow artists, activists, scientists and writers. Her second reference point is the 1986 memoir Adrift, written by Steven Callahan, one of the only individuals known to have survived a capsizing and more than a month alone at sea on a raft. The third point of reference is a fragment of wreckage from the S.S. Pacific, a steamship that sank in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in 1875. The shard of wood, now housed in the Vancouver Maritime Museum, was recovered at the shoreline in Victoria some six weeks after the disaster. Scrawled on its surface were presumably the last words of passenger Sewell Moody: “S.P. Moody. All Lost.” Like those sealed cargo containers accidentally pitched from their vessels and left to drift, forgotten, at sea, Johnston’s ALL LOST suggests the threads of connection that entangle disparate narratives and the insistent ways that recorded histories can contain contents unknown.

Dawn Johnston holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and an M.F.A from the University of Guelph. She is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Scholarship. She has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions since 2005.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Arts Council of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver.

Curated by Shaun Dacey

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Kimberly Phillips as the new Director/Curator of Access Gallery! 

An independent writer, curator, art historian, educator, and most recently, Head of Interpretation at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Kimberly Phillips has spent the last decade working in the space between contemporary art and the audiences who encounter it. She holds a doctorate in art history from the University of British Columbia, where she focused on contemporary art, particularly artistic practices sited at the intersection points of discourses on the politics of memory, identity, and urban space. Her doctoral dissertation and post-doctoral fellowship work explored the complexity of German collective memory as negotiated through ephemeral artistic interventions in the public realm of post-1989 Berlin. She is a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the University of British Columbia, where she teaches courses on the history of visual culture, cultural theory and curatorial practice. For 2012-2013, she has also been Curatorial Resident at 221A Artist Run Centre, where she collaborated with Vanessa Kwan to present a solo exhibition of Kara Uzelman’s new work entitled Stratiform, as well as the accompanying publication Unknown Objects, which featured a text by the poet and essayist Lisa Robertson.

Welcome and Congratulations Kim!

BRAIDS: Collaborative Installation by Rua Minx and Aja Rose Bond

Installation: March 30 – April 27, 2013

Performance and Reception: Friday, March 29, 2013 8pm

Artist Talk: Saturday, March 30, 2013 7pm

Access Gallery presents Braids, a collaborative installation between emerging Vancouver artist Aja Rose Bond and RUA MINX, an experimental sound project founded by American artist Donna Huanca in 2002. The two artists spent a month together as co-artists-in-residence at Access Gallery, developing an installation and a collaborative sound piece. Linked together through their use of appropriated textiles, garments, objects and sound, their works are informed by the past lives and cultural markers of the mass produced. Labels, logos, beats, and patterns of the ‘found’ enact complex layers of ideology onto inanimate objects. Through processes of manipulating the ‘found’ via cutting, tearing, braiding, amplifying, draping, hanging, etc., both artists evoke our human investment in things as a means of building identity.

Bond and Huanca approach human relation to objects in different ways. Huanca, an artist who lives nomadically, has utilized found fabric and clothing as a core material in her practice. Tied partially to the limitations of constant travel, she is interested in the first and second-hand globalized market flow of the fashion industry. Whether rummaging through a pile of clothes at a thrift store in Vancouver or at a flea market filled with designer labels in Mexico City, Huanca finds a ubiquitous range of styles, cuts, colours, and logos. The globalized market essentializes identity to a set of brand choices. Using this detritus of consumer goods and clothing, Huanca’s installation utilizes the superficial signs and symbols evoked by the mass-produced to construct ritualistic and visceral installations charged by the glossy sexual energy of teen pop idols. For the opening, placed within her installations, a model enacts simple and mundane gestures. This new work produces a mood of both anticipation and melancholy, an adolescent naivety mixed with the next morning’s hangover.

Inspired by the work of Pamela Colman Smith, Radical Faeries, Maria Gimbutas, SCUB Manifesto, and Mary K. Greer, among countless others, Bond develops her practice in relation to the intimate, politically motivated, and active communities with whom she is aligned. Launching from her queer/witchy/feminist perspective, Bond’s works represent personal identities through the frame of dress and costume. Creating both wearable works and stand alone sculptures, Bond’s work brings new energy to reclaimed fur, and worn-in fabric creating bodily forms through the simple act of transforming the mass-produced into the handmade. Attempting to channel a European indigeneity, her works link to ritual. Primal and elemental, yet campy and playful, her artistic practice presents a fantastical and surreal notion of the physical body.

The two artists brought together for this installation have developed a conversation through performance, installation, and a dueling sound work. The room vibrates with the remnants of discarded signs, symbols, and sounds of consumer culture, manipulated and tweaked to both celebrate and interrogate our reliance on objects to generate identity.

Aja Rose Bond, cofounder of the Strathcona Art Gallery (STAG), has built a name for herself in Vancouver’s arts, noise, and activist communities. She has held residencies at Hammock and Artbank, as well as exhibitions at STAG and Goonies. Her other projects and collaborations include; HYPERCRAFT Studio, The STAG (Strathcona Art Gallery) Library, Craft Pride Procession, Her Jazz Noise Collective, UNARC (Underground Network of Artist-Run Culture), WOEVAN (Witches of East Van), Seamrippers Craft Collective, Diadem (with partner Gabriel Saloman), In Flux (with members of Shearing Pinx), DJ Tapes and the Women’s Studies performance series co-produced with VIVO Media Arts Center. Bond is an intermedia artist with background in music, craft and fashion respectively, drawing from the deep influence of D.I.Y. punk, feminisms and magick. Her intimate relationship with certain mystical traditions has informed her process, which often includes the use of divination, symbols and geometry to align and reveal the more hidden elemental and energetic aspects of the work.

Born in Chicago, Donna Huanca received a BFA from the University of Houston (2004) and studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany (2009-10). The recent recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, Huanca lived and worked in Mexico City in 2012. Huanca has developed a nomadic practice producing site-specific projects and exhibitions throughout the United States, Austria, Norway, Peru, Germany, and Korea. Although embodied in a wide variety of media, her work expresses a thorough engagement with linguistic experimentation. Huanca’s work conveys distinctive and precise observations on the function of the garment as an ever-evolving manner of language production and a traditional form of cultural transmission. The results are performative platforms that are a product of a compulsive attitude towards the search for material beacons and parallel experiences. This project will be Huanca’s first in Canada.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and the City of Vancouver.

Launch: Saturday April 27 7-9pm

Saturday, April 27 to Friday, May 3, 2013 (please see performance schedule below)

Access Gallery / Project Space 222 E. Georgia St.

Part theater and part demonstration, SWEAT features artist Gaye Chan weaving baskets in a week-long performance. The baskets are made with bale straps, a common detritus of global capitalism found around nearly every box shipped across the globe, binding box to box, paper to paper, and everything to pallets. Chan has salvaged the bale straps from the streets, and from neighboring shopkeepers who save them for her. Some have agreed to do so in exchange for a finished basket, others have agreed just because.

Taking place in a Chinatown storefront encased in a semi-transparent white cube, Chan’s labor is visible only by her working hands inserted through ‘sleeves’ emanating from the cube’s back wall. Through one and the same body and action, SWEAT materializes simultaneous multiple subject positions created by capitalism – the devalued/invisible worker and the reified artist, both ever haunted by the deskilled consumer. The three same subject positions that exist everyday, albeit less acknowledged, in Vancouver’s old Chinatown as it undergoes its most recent episode of development.

Basket making instructions (in Chinese and English) are downloadable from nomoola.com/baskets

SWEAT is a part of Hawaii artist Gaye Chan’s ongoing work with EATING IN PUBLIC, a collective that she co-founded in 2003, and continues to serve as the hub of all of its multi-pronged activities. EIP implements interventions in public and private space “to rekindle the desire for the commons… and demonstrate that it is possible to take care of ourselves while we take care of each other.” EIP has initiated projects at over 800 sites that facilitate autonomous anti-capitalist exchanges and collective actions in a variety of forms.

Sat, April 27: 1 pm to 5 pm; 7 pm to 9 pm
Sun, April 28: 2 pm to 5 pm
Mon, April 29: 4 pm to 7 pm
Tues, April 30 1 pm to 4 pm
Weds, May 1: 4 pm to 7 pm
Thurs, May 2: 1 pm to 4 pm
Fri, May 3: 4 pm to 7 pm

gayechan.com
nomoola.com

In This Together

Alize Zorlutuna, Liz Knox, Luciana D’Anunciacao, Guadalupe Martinez, Charlene Vickers, Annie Briard, Erin Siddall, Deborah Edmeades, Patryk Stasieczek, Michelle OʼByrne, Pascale Théoret-Groulx, Kate Moss, Aaron Carter, Allison (Sunny) Karow, Sydney Koke, Setareh Yasan and Mira Song

May 5 to May 10, 2013

Reception Sunday May 5th 2013, 2-5 pm

In This Together is an exhibition evolving from an independently organized colloquium between students in three Masters of Art programs at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

The artists in this exhibition collaborated across institutions to share their knowledge and diverse experiences of life in art school. The colloquium, which took place in March 2013, centered on discussions around the pressure of professionalization and the growth and understanding of shifts in the artists praxis.

With this in mind, In This Together evokes a formidable space of suspension between different modes of artistic production. The exhibition showcases eight collaborations: a text piece by Alize Zorlutuna and Liz Knox; a performance by Luciana D’Anunciacao, Guadalupe Martinez and Charlene Vickers; a video by Annie Briard, Erin Siddall and Deborah Edmeades; a sculpture by Patryk Stasieczek and Michelle OʼBryne; a sound piece by Pascale Théoret-Groulx, a video by Kate Moss and Aaron Carter; a sculpture by Allison (Sunny) Karow and Sydney Koke and a sculpture and painting by Setareh Yasan and Mira Song.

Presented with support from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, The School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia

Call for Applications: Director/Curator

Access Gallery is an artist run centre dedicated to emergent art practices. We provide a platform for emerging artists, curators, and other cultural practitioners through exhibitions, residencies, and public programs. Access strives to spark critical conversations about contemporary art by nurturing experimentation within the gallery space and beyond.

Access has been contributing to the cultural landscape of Vancouver and Canada since 1991 and is celebrating its 22nd anniversary this year. Over the past few years, Access has made a number of stabilizing changes to the organization. In recent months Access has completed a strategic planning processes and the Director/Curator position will play a key role in realizing these plans. Additionally, the Director/Curator will be responsible for conceiving and executing coherent curatorial programming, producing publications, facilitating public programs and administering the operation of the gallery in consultation with the Board of Directors. We are seeking an applicant with passion for contemporary visual arts. The successful applicant will have curatorial experience and vision, working knowledge of non-profit administration, demonstrated grant writing skills, and a proven history in financial management, team management, and fundraising.

Job Description
This part-time position is for a minimum term of 2 years, with possibility of extension, and is ideal for a curator/artist who also maintains an independent practice.

Responsibilities
The Director/Curator will:
• Manage the program of exhibitions, which includes curating and working with guest curators and with the programming committee on the open call submissions
• Administer the fiscal matters of the organization, including but not limited to budget-forecasting and maintenance
• Research, write and apply for funding opportunities
• Maintain good standing with funders
• Develop and produce public programming
• Develop and maintain relationships with other arts organizations, businesses, community groups and the media
• Work closely with the Board of Directors, including its committees: Executive, Governance, Fundraising, Facilities
• Recruit, train and manage volunteers and staff
• Oversee day-to-day operations of the gallery

Qualifications
• Familiarity with artist run culture and knowledge of diverse contemporary art practices
• Demonstrated curatorial and public programming experience
• Experience preparing and managing organizational budgets
• Proven grant writing experience
• Experience working in the non-profit arts sector and/or with a Boards of Directors
• Familiarity with volunteer coordination and staff management
• Excellent administrative, organizational and time management skills

Skills
• Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suites, social media, database management software

Salary

The Director/Curator receives an annual salary of $22,720.26 based on a 20-hour work week with six weeks paid vacation. Health benefits are negotiable.

How to apply:
Send a cover letter and CV to the Hiring Committee at tsudeyko@accessgallery.ca

Application Deadline: 18 March 2013, 5pm

BRAIDS: Co-residency and Collaborative Installation by Rua Minx and Aja Rose Bond

Residency: March 4 – 28, 2013

Installation: March 30 – April 27, 2013

Performance and Reception: Friday, March 29, 2013 8pm

Access Gallery presents Braids a co-residency between emerging Vancouver artist Aja Rose Bond and RUA MINX, an experimental sound project founded by American artist Donna Huanca in 2002. Both artists have developed experimental sound, performance, and textile-based practices that explore the slippage between conceptual art, noise, fashion, craft, and design through the production of art objects, performances, and installation-based works. Playing with the concept of wearable, both are invested in developing works that serve as platforms or markers for social, interactive and collaborative happenings, using discarded clothing and fabrics to create installations that oscillate between the aesthetic and ritualistic.As Artists-in-Residence, they will transform the Access exhibition space into a working studio to collaboratively produce a series of garments, sound works, and an immersive installation. During this time the gallery will host public studio hours and a workshop introducing basic and experimental textile techniques. On March 28^th, Access will celebrate the completion of the residency and the opening of the installation with a performance produced by Bond and RUA MINX. In preparation for the residency, Aja and Donna have created a blog entitled Braids of Braids to share ideas and inspiration.

Aja Rose Bond, a cofounder of the Strathcona Art Gallery (STAG), has built a name for herself in Vancouver’s arts, noise, and activist communities. She has held residencies at Hammock and Artbank, as well as exhibitions at STAG and Goonies. Her other projects and collaborations include; HYPERCRAFT Studio, The STAG (Strathcona Art Gallery) Library, Craft Pride Procession, Her Jazz Noise Collective, UNARC (Underground Network of Artist-Run Culture), WOEVAN (Witches of East Van), Seamrippers Craft Collective, Diadem (w/partner Gabriel Saloman), In Flux (w/members of Shearing Pinx), DJ Tapes and the Women’s Studies performance series co-produced w/VIVO Media Arts Center. Bond is an intermedia artist with background in music, craft and fashion respectively, drawing from the deep influence of D.I.Y. punk, feminisms and magick. Her intimate relationship with certain mystical traditions has informed her process which often includes the use of divination, symbols and geometry to align and reveal the more hidden elemental and energetic aspects of the work.

Born in Chicago, Huanca received a BFA from the University of Houston (2004) and studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany (2009-10). The recent recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, Huanca lived and worked in Mexico City in 2012. Huanca has developed a nomadic practice producing site-specific projects and exhibitions throughout the United States, Austria, Norway, Peru, Germany, and Korea. Although embodied in a wide variety of media, her work expresses a thorough engagement with linguistic experimentation.  Huanca’s work conveys distinctive and precise observations on the function of the garment as an ever-evolving manner of language production and a traditional form of cultural transmission. The results are performative platforms that are a product of a compulsive attitude towards the search for material beacons and parallel experiences. This project will be Huanca’s first in Canada.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and the City of Vancouver.

Sunday February 24, 2 – 4pm,
Access Gallery, 222 East Georgia St.

Access invites you to an informal afternoon with the gallery’s curator-in-residence. Mohammad Salemy has been involved with a project titled ENCYCLONOSPACE IRANICA, an extensive curatorial research initiative that engages with diasporic Iranian artists and other knowledge producers. Instead of exclusively looking at “Iranian art”, his research is an investigation into how the dominant tele-computational paradigm-marked by the accelerated deployment of computers, networked technologies, software, big data and digital visuality-has transformed the way Iranian artists and other knowledge producers self-represent, research, and practice their work.

In this talk Salemy will speak about some of his recent works and discuss his methodologies as well as the theoretical and practical frame for his ongoing research project with Access Gallery.

This residency is made possible by the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Mohammad Salemy is a Vancouver-based independent curator from Iran. He has curated exhibitions for Moris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Koerner Gallery and Satellite Gallery, AMS Gallery, and Dadabase. Salemy holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia.

انسایکلوسپیس ایرانیکا: گفت و گو با کوراتور مهمان

یکشنبه بیست و چهارم فوریه، ساعت ۲ تا ۴ بعد از ظهر
گالری آکسس، ۲۲۲ خیابان جورجیای شرقی

گالری اکسس ونکور شما را به گفت و گوی غیر رسمی با کوراتور مهمان این گالری محمد سالمی که مشغول کار روی پروژه تحقیقی بنام انسایکلوسپیس ایرانیکا است دعوت میکند. این پروژه موبوط به تحقیقات دیجیتالی گروهی از هنرمندان و دانش پژوهان ایرانی و ساکن نقاط مختلف جهان است. این پروژه به جای تمرکز منحصرانه بر آثار هنری، تحقیق روی موضوع است که چگونه سیستم تله-کامپیوتری حاکم بر دنیای علم، فرهنگ و هنر که مشخصه ی امروزی آن وابستگی شتاب گرفته به کامپوتر، اینترنت، نرم افزار، کلان داده ها و عناصر بصری دیجیتالی است، تولید دانش توسط دانشمندان روشنفکران و هنرمندان ایرانی بخصوص متودولوژی آنها در خود-ارائه گری، پژوهش و تولید دانش را دگرگون ساخته است.

در این گردهمایی، سالمی درباره روش و کارهای اخیر خود و همچنین چهارچوب نظری و عملی این پروژه صحبت خواهد کرد.

این پروژه با حمایت های بی شائبه انجمن هنری کانادا (Canada Council for the Arts) محقق شده است.

محمد سالمی کوراتوری ایرانی و مقیم ونکوور ست که تا کنون پروژه های مختلفی را در گالری های موریس و هلن بلکین، کورونر. ستلایت آ.م.س. و دادابیس به نمایش گذاشته است. سالمی دارای مدرک کارشناسی ارشد
در تاریخ هنر با تخصص کوراتوری انتقادی از دانشگاه بریتیش کلمبیاست.