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Tue 18 Apr 2017 7–9PM
Kara Uzelman & Holly Ward
Kara Uzelman on remote experiments in health care and art making.
Holly Ward on her recent reflections on the peasant as a vital historical reference in the context of the neo-liberal city.
222 East Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC
A series of informal session of research and knowledge exchange. Join us for these brief presentations followed by discussion:
Kara Uzelman will discuss his interest in how art becomes public, and how sites become specific, through anonymous or publicized interventions, vandalism, parody, and time.
Holly Ward will approach questions of political art in public space along three vectors--the aesthetics of taking a stance, the politics in social choreographies, and protest as an artistic gesture--towards teasing out the tensions between presentation and representation, while attending to the resonances between community and commutiny, in the 21st century.
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Kara Uzelman will present a new work, 'Where the Necessary Tools Do Not Exist, the Thoughts in Question are Not Expressed and Not Even Conceived’. Inspired by a summer field-trip to an abandoned brick plant, this work continues an undisciplined line of inquiry into the history and folklore around the Saskatchewan LSD experiments and their association with the rise of socialised medical care in the province during the first half of the cold war. Uzelman will discuss this work in relation to themes and questions around place, alternate platforms, audience, experimentation, framing, networks of exchange, and the opportunities and challenges of living and working in remote settings.
Holly Ward will discuss her ‘Monument to the Vanquished Peasants’ (2016) a public intervention located on an empty lot at Broadway and Carolina and based on Albrecht Durer’s plans for a monument to commemorate the bloody Peasant Uprisings of 1525. Serving as an inquiry into the potential role of collective action and class solidarity the work considers Vancouver’s overheated and unsustainable real estate market in relation to the fate of serfs and their right to the commons.
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Kara Uzelman lives and works in the rural, farming community of Nokomis, Saskatchewan. Interested in the self-sustaining potential of handmade and DIY culture, Uzelman’s work engages with the processes of gathering, making and inventing as a self-directed study of her surrounding environments. Her provisional constellations of gleaned objects create alternate systems, cycles and networks. Often using wood, earth, paper, rope, outmoded electronic devices, and household remnants, her sculptures, collections and archives activate the narrative potential of objects and explore the immaterial qualities of the material world. Her working methods include folk techniques, field trips, internet research and peripheral fields of scientific study.
Since graduating from Emily Carr University in 2004, Uzelman has presented her sculpture and site-specific installations in group and solo exhibitions including those at The Power Plant, Toronto; Le Commissariat, Paris; Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin; and Mercer Union, Toronto. She has participated in residencies at The Klondike Institute of Art, Dawson City; Triangle, Marseille, France; and Mains D’oeuvres, Paris.
Based between Vancouver and Heffley Creek, BC, Holly Ward is an interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Stemming from research of various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, her work investigates the arbitrary nature of symbolic designation and the use-value of form in a social context.
During the academic year 2009-2010 Ward was the Artist in Residence at Langara College, wherein she commenced The Pavilion project, a 22’ geodesic dome serving as a catalyst for artistic experimentation involving artists, writers, designers and Langara College students. The Pavilion has since been moved to rural Heffley Creek BC, where it is currently under construction as a long-term, life-as-art project, being performed in collaboration with artist Kevin Schmidt.
Recent publications include Every Force Evolves a Form (Artspeak, 2012), and For Now, on Holly Ward’s Persistence of Vision, a critical essay in Jeff Derksen’s After Euphoria (JRP Ringier Press, 2013).
http://hollywardpavilion.blogspot.ca/
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Image Left: Kara Uzelman, 'Where the Necessary Tools Do Not Exist, the Thoughts in Question are Not Expressed and Not Even Conceived', 2017
Image Right: Maegan Hill Carol: Holly Ward, 'Monument to the Vanquished Peasants', 2015
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The Foreshore is a year-long collaboration between Access Gallery and Other Sights’ for Artist Projects inspired by the deep influence of the waterways on our cities and societies on the West Coast.
The foreshore is a place of unclear jurisdiction, and thus of contestation, friction, and constant movement. Those who dwell in this zone must continually adapt to a changing environment. The foreshore also conjures histories specific to this region: narratives of trade and exchange, habitation and nourishment, resistance and violent erasure. It might similarly evoke our contemporary lived situation in this place. Considering the potential of this zone as both concept and site, The Foreshore initiative asks the following: how do we generate conditions of emergence? How can we take up space differently? How do we support unruly practices and futures?
Accessibility Info
Front door: width 35 inches. Front door step: height 4 inches. No ramp.
Hallway door: 35 inches. Washroom door: 29 inches width. Toilet: 12 inch clearance on left side, 19 inch clearance from toilet to sink. The washroom has no handrail. Washroom is all genders.
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Other Sights for Artists’ Projects is a non-profit arts organization that develops new and unexpected exhibition platforms outside of the gallery context. Other Sights collaborates and shares resources with organizations and individuals to present artworks that consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public places and public life. For more information visit othersights.ca
Other Sights gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Columbia Arts Council, The Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 15, and private donors without whom this project would not be possible.
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Established as an non-profit artist-run centre in 1991, Access Gallery is platform for emergent and experimental art practices. We enable critical conversations and risk taking through new configurations of audience, artists, and community. For more information visit accessgallery.ca
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 Hamber Foundation, the Burrard Arts Foundation, the Contemporary Art Gallery, NSB Reederei, and our committed donors, members and volunteers.