Some Spontaneous Particulars

Some Spontaneous Particulars is a publication positing the radical potential of a feminist archive. It assembles material research, found documents and impatient thoughts-in-progress by Vanessa Brown, Heide Hinrichs, Kathleen Ritter, Erica Stocking and Anna Tidlund. This book accompanies an exhibition of the same name curated by Kimberly Phillips and presented at Access Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, between December 9, and January 20, 2018.

The Some Spontaneous Particulars exhibition presents never-before-exhibited work by three artists whose research-based practices have drawn them to the work of historical women artists Marianne Brandt (for Brown), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (for Hinrichs) and Mina Loy (for Ritter), whose own production and memory has been overlooked or stifled within the art historical canon. Presented in dialogue with Beginning with the Seventies: Activism, Art and Archives, a multi-year project initiated at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and curated by Lorna Brown, the object-based works in Some Spontaneous Particulars demonstrate particular concern for a material handling of the past, as a means to query the act and implications of retrieval, the ethics of translation, and consider the radical potential of a feminist archive.

Vanessa Brown works in sculpture, painting and photography. Her primary medium is steel and she attempts to parse its associations with industry, weaponry, and brutality, with its subtler qualities such as pliability, versatility, and slightness. The imagery in her work draws from various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, recurring symbols from her own dreams, as well as the work and biographies of other female artists. She is based in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish Territories. Brown graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University in 2013 and was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, the USA, and Mexico.

Heide Hinrichs works balance ambiguity and contradiction, telling stories of past emotions, mental state,s and gestures. In this process, she often develops a sculptural language that is structured by the semantic exploration of everyday objects and found materials. Recent exhibitions include red offering (Lovenjoel, Belgium), The Event of a Thread (Dresden, Germany), Kathmandu Triennial (Nepal) and Heidelberger Kunstverein (Germany). Born in Germany, Hinrichs lives and works in Brussels.

Kathleen Ritter is an artist based in Paris. She was an artist in residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2013. Her art practice broadly explores questions of visibility, especially in relation to systems of power, language, and technology. Recent solo exhibitions took place at G Gallery, Toronto, and Battat Contemporary, Montréal, both in 2014. In addition, Ritter has organized exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Her writing on contemporary art has appeared in ESSE, Prefix Photo, and Fillip as well as in numerous catalogues.

Erica Stocking is an artist practicing primarily in sculpture, installation, and performance. Her work develops from a desire to find a sense of place in the world and often looks to explore distinctions between public and domestic space. Stocking frequently works with a strategy of transposing everyday objects from one context to another, creating what she sees as an interruption, "a pause". Erica Stocking was honoured by the City of Vancouver as the Emerging Artist in Public Art in 2009. She received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute in 2004, and since then her work has been exhibited at numerous venues in Vancouver, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery, the Western Front, and Artspeak.

Anna Tidlund is a Swedish-Chinese settler living and working on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Tidlund is a recent graduate of the Master of Archival Studies program at the School of Library, Archival & Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is an archivist at the Vancouver Police Museum, processed the Kate Craig fonds at Western Front and is a research at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery for the Beginning with the Seventies project, which investigates activist, women's labour and social movements in the 1970s. Tidlund is interested in social-justice and intergenerational work associated with archival practice, which considers and examines modes of memory-making, keeping, and representation.