In Conversation: Grant Arnold with Birthe Piontek

Access' In Conversation series invites established artists and thinkers into dialogue with our exhibiting emergent practitioners, with the aim of creating conversations that "thicken" our experience of exhibitions, and link artists of different generations to one another and to the wider community.

Join Vancouver-based curator Grant Arnold in the gallery as he converses with Birthe Piontek about the new, assemblage based body of work that comprises the exhibition Miss Solitude, and about the role of the photograph as both image and found object in her practice.

This event is part of the programming for Birthe Piontek: Miss Solitude, on exhibition from April 22 to June 19, 2017, in conjunction with Capture Photography Festival.

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Grant Arnold is Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where he contributes to the exhibition program and development of the collection. Recent exhibition projects include Susan Point: Spindle Whorl (with Ian Thom); Stephen Waddell: Dark Matter Atlas; Jerry Pethick: Shooting the Sun/Splitting the Pie; Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Wood Chopper and the Monkey; Myfanwy MacLeod, or There and Back Again (with Cassandra Getty); In Dialogue with Carr - Gareth Moor: Allochthonous Windows; Rodney Graham: Canadian Humourist; and Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 (with Catherine Crowston, Barbara Fischer, Michèle Theriault and Vincent Bonin, and Jayne Wark). Arnold has contributed essays to a number of publications and has lectured on historical and contemporary art. Arnold is the 2017 recipient of the Alvin Balkind Curator's Prize.

Birthe Piontek is originally from Germany and moved to Canada in 2005 after receiving her MFA from the University of Essen in Communication Design and Photography. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is featured in many private and public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the Museum of Applied Arts in Gera, Germany. Piontek’s project The Idea of the North won the Critical Mass Book Award 2009, and was published as a monograph in 2011. She was nominated for the AIMIA AGO Award 2014, and her recent project Lying Still was shortlisted for the Edward Burtynsky Grant in 2015. Piontek maintains her practice in Vancouver, BC.