Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio April 14 installation with  Emilie Grace Lavoie, Melina Querel, Hannah Doyle, Jack Kenna, Mae Stark, and Leah Weinstein; images from the seminars, the Hot&Noisy mahjong community intervention in Chinatown, and deinstallation with Emilie Grace Lavoie, Hannah Doyle, Vanessa Grondin and Leah Weinstein.

MOBILE BARNACLE CITY

A temporary site-specific installation at the intersection of Keefer and Columbia Streets in Chinatown, Vancouver, BC, CANADA.
Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio by Laiwan, with SiteFactory / Leah Weinstein, featuring barnacle sculptures by Emilie Grace Lavoie

Opening reception and open salon
SUNDAY APRIL 15, 2018 2:00pm­‐5:00pm
Welcome with Indigenous Youth leader Senaqwila Wyss (Skwxwu7mesh/Sto:lo/Tsimshian/Irish Metis/Hawaiian/Swiss)
Location: Quebec St at Keefer St (South West side)
Installation runs from April 15-May 1, 2018

Over the course of two weeks Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio will be hosting FREE open salons including:
Luq’luq’i : a herbal lounge with T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss (Skwxwu7mesh/Sto:lo/Metis/Hawaiian/Swiss) & Anne Riley (Slavey Dene/Cree/German).
(No registration needed for herbal lounges which are free and open to the public).

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SUNDAY APRIL 29 OPEN SALON 2-4pm followed by open dinner for all participants 4pm-7pm
Luq’luq’i : a herbal lounge with T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss & Anne Riley.

T’uy’t em’emut: sitting in a group with medicines — Share indigenous medicines, talk about remedies for loving souls, talk about healing ourselves and our planet, share stories with these lands and waters. What else can you expect to find? Tinctures, salves, herbal mists all made from local indigenous plants. IKT: Indigenous Knowledge Transfer.  We hope you will enjoy this relaxing atmosphere of traditional knowledge and healing energies that are created when acknowledging our ancestors.

LOCATION: 105 Keefer Street in the big school bus.
Open Sunday April 29 from 2-4pm then open dinner for all participants

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The Mobile Barnacle City School will offer four FREE seminars:
1. Imagining l’avenir — what is to come and a possible Chthulucene
2. Indigeneity and decolonial mobility
3. Strategies to counter artwashing and gentrification
4. Remembering Chinatown (with guest Chipper John Mah, who as a boy was featured in the CBC 1956 film Summer Afternoon)

Images from Luq’luq’i : a herbal lounge with T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss & Anne Riley.

Images from Remembering Chinatown with Chipper John Mah, with the screening of CBC's 1956 film "Summer Afternoon" in the SiteFactory bus. Photos by Hannah Doyle.

Thanks to Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver for additional sponsorship, the Vancouver East End Food Co-op for beverages, produce and generosity, and support from the Goddard College Faculty Development Fund, Plainfield, VT.

Accessibility: unfortunately the SiteFactory bus is not wheelchair accessible at this time. There are two steps up into the bus.

Bio Notes of Artists and Collaborators

 Laiwan is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. She founded OR Gallery in 1983. Since 2000, Laiwan has been investigating embodiment through performativity, audio, music, improvisation, and varieties of media, so as to unravel and engage presence and bodily, emotional affect. Recent public commissions enable her to focus on issues of urban development, touching on poetic and philosophical themes related to current questions of environment and the built cityscape of Vancouver. She currently teaches at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, Port Townsend, WA, and is based in Vancouver. http://www.laiwanette.net/

SiteFactory is an artist-run exhibition and performance space created by Vancouver-based artist Leah Weinstein, dedicated to exhibiting local and international emerging and established artists in various locations around the Greater Vancouver area. Based in the mobile space of a converted school bus, SiteFactory is designed to accommodate a variety of media, from traditional painting and sculpture to site-specific installation, video and performance. Through the shifting context of changing locations, this mobile gallery is in conversation with a broad range of landscapes, cultivating an audience that roams with it. As a nomadic art space, SiteFactory promotes the intersection of contemporary art, experimental sites and social engagement.  http://www.sitefactory.ca/

A native of New Brunswick, Emilie Grace Lavoie obtained her Diploma of Collegial Studies in Fashion Design in 2011 from LaSalle College in Montreal and her Bachelor in the Visual Arts in 2016 from Université de Moncton. In July 2017, Emilie Grace represented New Brunswick-Canada at the VIII Games of La Francophonie in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, where she won the silver medal in the Sculpture and Installation category. Emilie Grace is graduating this month from the MFA program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

Anne Riley is a multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver. Her work explores different ways of being and becoming, touch, and Indigeneity. Riley is Cree and Slavey Dene from Fort Nelson First Nation, and received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. She has exhibited both in the United States and Canada. http://anne-riley.com/

T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss is an indigenous plant educator and interdisciplinary artist of Skwxwu7mesh, Sto:lo, Metis, Hawaiian, and Swiss heritage. She has extensive experience producing various formats of media art for almost 30 years, and works as an ethnobotanist with traditional training by Indigenous elders. Cease combines culturally focused teaching with storytelling as a means to share knowledge. She recently co-authored Journey to Kaho'olawe, covering more than two centuries of the Kanaka family's migration to the Pacific Northwest coast, and was also a recipient of the City of Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for film and new media in 2010. Among her long list of artist residencies and presentations is the Stanley Park Environmental Art Project, where she helped create public artworks after a storm devastated Stanley Park in 2006. Cease is currently the Vancouver Public Library's 2018 Indigenous Storyteller in Residence. Additionally, for 2017-2019 she is working in collaboration with artist Anne Riley on a project titled A Constellation of Remediation, to create four Indigenous gardens in four vacant gas station lots in the city, commissioned by the City of Vancouver's Artist Initiated Projects Public Art Program, in Canada.

Chipper John Mah as a boy was featured in the CBC 1956 film Summer Afternoon from which Laiwan's 2014 project FOUNTAIN sourced the image of the Georgia Viaduct showing the waters of False Creek flowing up to Chinatown. In 2015 Laiwan put out a call in search of Chipper John Mah, a year later she received an email from a family member who knew his whereabouts. Laiwan discovered he lived around the block from her house. This year Laiwan received a Canada Council Interarts Award to interview Chipper, who at 72 years is enthusiastic with lucid and lively memory, toward a project poetically investigating the trajectory of Chinatown, starting from memories of Chipper’s childhood growing up as the fishmonger’s son at Leong Shing Fish Market at 188 Pender St, a site that is now a parking lot.

Ten Different Things is a series of public art commissions in Vancouver that engages ten artists to investigate the role of culture as a critical ingredient in the construct and vitality of the contemporary city. It is a collaboration between CityStudio Vancouver and Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, curated by Kate Armstrong and supported by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. Janet Moore and Duane Elverum are co-founders of CityStudio Vancouver.

Thanks for additional sponsorship from Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, and support from the Goddard College Faculty Development Fund, Plainfield, VT.