Corner Store : Session 3 | Community & Solidarity

Elliot Hearte (of SUM Gallery), Andrea Creamer, and Vincent Tao, moderated by Am Johal

In collaboration with Art Book Week organized by Vancouver Art Book Fair

The Corner Store discussion and events series is a critical component of this project through which community members at-large can come together to discuss pertinent questions of social practice and community engagement in contemporary art, as well as urgent and specific local issues of food commodity and production, gentrification, and the erosion of community under conditions of financial precarity. The three discussion sessions in the series are led by artists, curators, and cultural workers knowledgeable to the respective topics being addressed, and are punctuated by special events such as Andrea Creamer’s Anti-Fascist Karaoke, and Lexie Owen’s walking tour of the Burrardview/Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood. More about the Corner Store project.

This third session is dedicated to a frank and open discussion about Community and Solidarity, and how we might be better neighbours within our geographical location as arts institutions and arts workers.

Participant BIOS

ANDREA CREAMER is renter, a worker, community organizer, and interdisciplinary artist currently residing in Toronto. Her works investigate spaces of contestation, counterpublics, and notions of site-specificity. Often articulated in the form of text, painting, sculpture or video, her material practice reflects on forms of protest, the mechanisms that produce social spaces, and the ephemeral and always shifting character of socially-based practices. She is a recent graduate from the Masters of Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto.

SUM Gallery produces, presents and exhibits with a curatorial vision favouring challenging, thought-provoking multidisciplinary work that pushes boundaries and initiates dialogue. We began as Pride in Art, founded by Two-Spirit artist and activist Robbie Hong in 1998. In 2008 Pride in Art mounted the first Queer Arts Festival. This year, SUM opens as a permanent space, presenting year-round multidisciplinary exhibitions and events that further the artistic vision of the Queer Arts Festival. SUM brings diverse communities together to support artistic risk-taking, incite creative collaboration and experimentation, and celebrate the rich heritage of queer artists and art.

VINCENT TAO is the Librarian at Pollyanna Library, where he is responsible for the collection and associated programs. Tao’s recent projects at 221A include Notes on Political Ecologies, N.O.P.E. 2016; Rereading Room: the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore, 2016; Parallax Study: The New Romantics, 2017; and Deep Blue Open Archive, 2017. Recently, Tao took part in documenta 14’s aneducation program at Under the Mango Tree—Sites of Learning, travelling to Kassel to present and workshop the 221A’s forthcoming educational programming. His independent research and organizing work concerns urban displacement and the right to the city. Prior to moving to Vancouver, Tao studied at McGill University in Montreal, where he was the outreach coordinator for a worker-run community kitchen.

AM JOHAL is Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and author of 'Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene' (Atropos Press, 2015) and co-author with Matt Hern (with contributions from Joe Sacco) of 'Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale' (The MIT Press, 2018).