Maple Tree Spiral at Artspeak Gallery

“Maple Tree Spiral: the pedagogy of a tree in the city”

LAIWAN

June 14–July 27, 2019
Reception Saturday July 6, 4pm

Laiwan will be in studio on Tuesdays and Saturdays, 2–4pm

With Egan Davis, Anne Riley, T’uy’t’tanat Ceass Wyss, Melissa West Morrison and Marika van Reeuwyk of the Environmental Youth Alliance, Sepideh Saii, Daniel Negatu, and brothers Frank and Dance Williams.

Situated a short distance from Artspeak at the corner junction of Carrall, Water, Alexander and Powell Streets was formerly the site of Maple Tree Square. Laiwan takes the historic site of the Square as a starting point for her research project Maple Tree Spiral: the pedagogy of a tree in the city. The original Maple Tree no longer stands, and instead a statue of ‘Gassy’ Jack Deighton. As a site where one of the first city council meetings of the settlement of Gastown was held, Laiwan considers how Maple Tree Square is a space of convergence.

Continue reading here.

You are invited to map a Maple Tree Spiral trail of your own to explore here: Maple Tree Spiral Geo Location Map

Art at Women Deliver Conference 2019

Thanks Germaine Koh for organizing this exhibit for Women Deliver at the Vancouver Public Library Central Branch, June 3 - 21, 2019.

Women Deliver is well-known for hosting global conferences that bring together people from across a multitude of sectors, issues, and cultures. Held every three years, Women Deliver conferences are fueling stations where organizations and individuals leave re-energized, knowledgeable, connected, and challenged to think outside the box.

More details on the Women Deliver 2019 Conference can be found at WD2019.org

Recollective website for "Archival Intuitions and Annotations" now online

The Recollective website for "Archival Intuitions and Annotations" with Cindy Mochizuki, Elizabeth MacKenzie, and Laiwan in response to Christine D'Onofrio's project "Intuition Commons" and the Belkin Gallery Archives at The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is now online:.

https://archivesweek.ca/events/intuition-commons-workshop

Thanks to Carol J Williams, Kati Campbell, all from the (N)on Commercial, Anna Tidlund, Naomi Sawada, Christine D'Onofrio, Owen Sopotiuk, and the Belkin Gallery.

S19 Residency at Goddard College MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (WA)

A few photos from the Spring 2019 MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, with special thanks to guest artist Ron Johnson (Makah) for his generosity guiding us in uncolonial ways; to guests Celeste Dybeck (Jamestown S'Klallam) and Jo Blair, co-coordinators of the Native Connections Action Group, for showing us the Chetzemoka Trail Walk; and to our vibrant MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (MFAIA-WA) community of wonderful students, alumni, staff and faculty at Fort Worden, Port Townsend, WA! Our semester begins!

Creative City Strategy Symposium

It was my pleasure to be on the panel Land and Bodies: Reconciliation & Cultural Redress in Public Art at the Creative City Strategy symposium organized by Cultural Services of the City of Vancouver, on March 4, 2019, at the Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton Street. We were asked to examine the question:

How are artists claiming space to centre land and bodies that various structural forces have attempted to erase from the public realm and imagination?

Panelists will explore ways artists working in the public realm reinscribe land and bodies whose stories have been displaced by systemic forces of colonialism and racism.

Marcia Crosby, Curator, Writer, Researcher; PhD – Art History and Cultural Theory, UBC

Arash Khakpour, Cofounder; Pressed Paradise, Co-Founder; The Biting School

Laiwan, Artist; Faculty – Goddard College; Founder – Or Gallery

Dylan Robinson, Assistant Professor Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts – Queens University

Vanessa Richards, Artist; Director – Creative Together Community; Community Engagement Director – 312 Main

The Creative City Strategy symposium was a remarkable day that offered many learnings. Thank you to our Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh hosts, staff at Vancouver Civic Theatres, panelists, interpreters, artists, videographers, graphic recorders, facilitators and participants for making the symposium possible. 

This symposium is a significant component in the development of the Creative City Strategy, a culture plan to guide the City of Vancouver’s efforts to support art, culture and creative work and life.
Download the program: Symposium Brochure (PDF)

Watch the video recordings
Daytime Program

• Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Visibility and Voice on the Land  (Starts at 53:00)

• Advancing Reconciliation, Equity, and Accessibility in Granting (Starts at 3:17:53)

• Securing Local Arts & Culture Spaces (Starts at 5:47:02)

• Reflections on the Day (Starts at 7:58:26)

Evening Program

• Land and Bodies: Reconciliation & Cultural Redress in Public Art (Starts at 25:37)

WANDER: toward a lightness of being

WANDER is a public art project created in collaboration with the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, EOAS, UBC and commissioned by Translink.

Coming in the Spring of 2019 to the 22nd Street Skytrain Station Bus Exchange in New Westminster, BC.

Onsite installation has begun! Keep posted for upcoming news here.

Artists-in-Residence at UBC

Many thanks to Gregory Elgstrand for his article on Artists-in-Residence at UBC, featuring Holly Schmidt and also my recent work with the Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences EOAS, UBC — Special thanks to Tara Ivanochko, Hannah Avenant, Isabel Jankowski, Lvtairan Chen, Eli Braunstein, and Dorothy Yan at EOAS, along with deep appreciations to Barbara Cole, Curator of Outdoor Art at UBC.

Archival Intuitions & Annotations - Artist Responses

On Saturday November 3rd, 2018, from 1pm to 2.30pm, with my colleagues Elizabeth MacKenzie and Cindy Mochizuki, I partook in Archives Week at the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC. My presentation Letters To (N)on Com, included working with typewriters, projecting photographic slides, inspired by the fonds of the (N)on Commercial Gallery that live in the Belkin Art Gallery Archives, and where public participation engaged playful letter writing back to the future.

Thanks to Carol J Williams and Don Gill for correspondences about the (N)on Com, along with Kati Campbell and Warren Murfitt for starting the gallery at 1011 Commercial Drive in 1984.

Additional appreciations to staff at the Belkin for their invaluable help preparing and setting up — Owen Sopotiuk, Naomi Sawada, Christine D'Onofrio, David Steele, Anna Tidlund, Erin Watkins, Shaunna Moore, Karen Zalamea, and Makiko Hamaguchi.

Artists Respond to Intuition Commons: Laiwan, Elizabeth MacKenzie and Cindy Mochizuki

As part of Independent Archives Week, we ask the question, how do we respond to archives both public and private? In this come-and-go event, artists Laiwan, Elizabeth MacKenzie and Cindy Mochizuki contribute three individual responses to the Belkin Gallery Archives and in relation to artist Christine D’Onofrio’s online project, Intuition Commons. The responses are open for viewing, listening and conversations throughout the event. Light refreshments will be served.

Intuition Commons is a growing, interactive database of female influences that destabilizes the bias to individualism in art. Projected in a gallery installation, contributors nominate their influencers with visual connections, overlapping stories, keywords, and links, creating a rhizomatic archive. It is part of the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts (September 4-December 2, 2018) curated by Lorna Brown.

221A, grunt gallery, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Rungh Magazine, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Western Front, & Artspeak present Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week from November 2 – 13, 2018.

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week 2018 is a series of free public events, panels, conversations, and screenings that highlight artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver.

The program significantly expands on the work begun through previous archival projects: Activating the Archive and Vancouver Independent Archives Week. Taking the focus and format of these events as a starting point, Recollective broadens the context, understanding, and awareness of independent archives by exploring what is at stake when artists and arts organizations confront the tasks of arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to material history. In 2018, Recollective features perspectives and approaches to archival practice through grassroots strategies, collective organizing, hybrid models, DIY spaces, open source solutions, and counter-archives that facilitate ownership of community memory by and for community. This series of events will emphasize the reciprocal influence between contemporary culture and social movements by drawing attention to shared experiences and struggles across diverse communities. For more information, visit www.archivesweek.ca

Facebook Event: Archival Intuitions & Annotations

Ten Different Things Symposium

The Ten Different Things CATALOGUE is now available for free PDF download or print order here:

Ten Different Things Symposium
Reliance Theatre, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC

Saturday, September 15, 2018
10am - 4pm Lunch provided Free
Join us for a symposium to share the results of the Ten Different Things series. Artists Colleen Brown, Instant Coffee, Laiwan, Khan Lee, Holly Schmidt, Henry Tsang, Janet Wang, Casey Wei, Jen Weih, and Denise Holland and Pongsakorn Yananissorn will give short presentations about their work and findings to be followed by lunch and an afternoon panel.

10:00 Welcome and Introductions
10:20 Artist talks
12:00 Lunch (provided)
12:30: Artist talks
2:00: Panel Discussion moderated by Adrian Sinclair

Ten Different Things is a series of public art commissions presented throughout Vancouver in Spring 2018. Artists were invited to create new works in the spirit of free inquiry at the intersection of public art, community engagement, and civic process. Curated by Kate Armstrong, the series is a collaboration between CityStudio Vancouver and Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and supported by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. Questions contact karmstrong@ecuad.ca

Ten Different Things is produced on the traditional unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations

At Sun Yat-Sen Garden

Occupying Chinatown
鹹水埠溫哥華/咸水埠温哥华/Haam Sui Fow Wun Goh Wah
July 13 to September 23, 2018

OCCUPYING CHINATOWN is Paul Wong’s year-long artist residency at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden that launched in Spring 2018. Wong will be creating a series of multidisciplinary artworks based on 700 letters in Chinese sent by 90 writers to his mother Suk-Fong Wong.

This residency will evoke memories and loss for the generations of Chinese-Canadians who built a community within a segregated Chinatown. OCCUPYING CHINATOWN throughout the seasons will feature collaborative contemporary works of art with various artists, and will engage visitors and community with diverse programming, workshops, performances, events, and a book.

The first new site-specific work to be created as part of this residency is 鹹水埠溫哥華/咸水埠温哥华/Haam Sui Fow Wun Goh Wah (Saltwater City-Vancouver). These two text pieces acknowledge Chinatown’s Toisanese settlers, and are presented at the Garden: one “wooden” and the other neon.

In addition, there is an exhibition of LAIWAN’s film Movement for Two Grannies: Five Variations in the Scholar’s Study. This piece features two Chinese grannies engaged in a moment of intimate and affectionate friendship. Paul Wong has been creating daring work for over 40 years, pushing the boundaries of conventional cultural stereotypes and art. He has produced large-scale interdisciplinary artworks in unexpected public spaces since the 1970s. His work subverts stereotypes in form and content. Many works are bilingual and trilingual, meshing English, Cantonese and Mandarin codes. Works include: Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade (Cantonese and English) (1988); Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain (1992); Blending Milk and Water: Sex in the New World (1996); Widows 97 (1997), Wah-Q: The Overseas Chinese (1998) and Refugee Class of 2000 (2000). www.paulwongprojects.com

OCCUPYING CHINATOWN is a public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program in partnership with the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. With support from The Audain Foundation.

In Chinatown Today

Mobile Barnacle City was mentioned in Vancouver Chinatown Today news! Thanks Louis Lapprend.

Installation of Mobile Barnacle City

On April 14, 2018 we installed Mobile Barnacle City on location at Quebec Street at Keefer Street. There is something about the brave adventurousness, hearty support and enthusiasm of young artists that really warms my heart! Taking over the street to install sculpture. Many thanks to Emilie Grace Lavoie for creating the beautiful, quietly glittering barnacles, volunteers Melina Querel, Hannah Doyle, Jack Kenna, and Mae Stark for the hard work of installing the sculptures, and Leah Weinstein for continuing vision with the SiteFactory project.

For more information please visit the MOBILE BARNACLE CITY webpage.

Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio

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

Opening reception and open salon on SUNDAY APRIL 15, 2018 2:00pm­‐5:00pm
Location: Quebec St at Keefer St (South West side)
Installation runs from April 15-29, 2018.

Located within the SiteFactory bus at a contentious site of ecological transformation, historical and cultural significance, and development pressure, Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio examines conditions of displacement and disparity where Chinatown meets North-East False Creek. The intersection of Keefer and Columbia Streets points to where water of False Creek used to flow under the Georgia Viaduct reaching up to the Sun Yat Sun Gardens, now covered by Andy Livingstone Park and the surrounding development.

Over the course of two weeks Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio will be hosting FREE open salons with refreshments including: "Luq’luq’i : a herbal lounge" with T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss & Anne Riley.

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

Schedule and registration for seminars here: RSVP
Volunteer to help: email <mobile.barnacle.city@gmail.com> (Subject line: Volunteer)

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

Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio is part of Ten Different Things. Curated by Kate Armstrong, the series is a collaboration between CityStudio Vancouver, and Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and supported by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. It features new commissions launching Spring 2018 in Vancouver where artists were invited to create new works in the spirit of free inquiry at the intersection of public art, community engagement, and civic process. Projects are temporary and take a variety of forms—events, installations, residencies, interventions, workshops—and provoke new visions of art and civic life. How can we create structures, processes or dynamics to produce new ways of living in, interacting with, or occupying the city? Where are the intersections in public life where artists can produce alternate outcomes?

Artists: Colleen Brown, Instant Coffee, Laiwan, Khan Lee, Holly Schmidt, Henry Tsang, Janet Wang, Casey Wei, Jen Weih, and Denise Holland and Pongsakorn Yananissorn.

Find more information about upcoming Ten Different Things events on Facebook.

Update to Interdisciplinary Collaboration with UBC's Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS)

Images: December 2017 presentations by the directed studies students in our work together at EOAS, UBC.

We are into a new semester and I continue to work as artist-in-residence with the research materials generously developed by directed studies students — Hannah Avenant, Elias Braunstein, Lutairan Chen, Isabel Jankowski, Katarina Kusa, Dorothy Yan — led by Dr Tara Ivanochko and assisted by Dr Michael Lipsen at UBC's Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS).

It is exciting to be working in collaboration with Dr Ivanochko as we continue to engage in art - science exchanges toward the public art project slated for Fall 2018. Stay tuned for more to come soon.

At the Belkin Gallery, UBC "Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT”

Runs from January 12 to April 8, 2018

The Readers Respond: Wednesdays, January 24, February 14, March 14 and Friday, April 6, 2 pm
Symposium: Groundhog Day Redux: Friday, February 2, 3-6 pm
Lecture: Maura Reilly: Friday, March 2, 5:30 pm
Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Saturday, March 10, noon-5 pm

Celebrating the excessive abundance of the archive, Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT is concerned with language, depictions of the woman reader as an artistic genre and the potential of reading as performed resistance. 

Many thanks to Lorna Brown and the Belkin Gallery, UBC, for including my works in this fascinating exhibition that worthily revisits the significance of reading and rereading within the archives.  Installed are an early version of she who had scanned the flower of the world...  (1987+) , along with drawing collages The Senseless Series: Treasure Island and The Heartless Series: Little Women (1996), along with the assemblage The Blind Heart: A Book Fan (1996). All live in the Belkin Gallery collection. 

Thanks also to Owen Sopotiuk and the Belkin Gallery preparators for the lovely install.

Photo: Anne Riley

ECU's 88 Artists from 88 Years | An Alumni Retrospective

Sorry I was away for the big ECU new campus reveal and the reception for the Alumni Art show "88 Artists from 88 Years | An Alumni Retrospective".

For those of you wondering what those two small slide mounts on the wall are — either was submitted to accompany a giclee print, one for the surface scan and one for the transparency scan for each slide. For your curiosity here are the images. They are from the ongoing project she who had scanned the flower of the world...  I couldn't imagine how 88 artists would be fitted into the new concourse. Nevertheless, thanks and acknowledgements to the organizers Jonathan Middleton, Cate Rimmer, and Chelsea Yuill, with Susanna Browne and Kathy Slade for putting the show together.

And BIG thanks to the gardener, Steve Bridger, who submitted this set of original flowers for my ongoing giclee print series. Thanks also to Goddard College Faculty Development Funds for financial assistance toward the printing of the giclee series.

I am also pleased that for the first time, I am in a show with my nephew Tom Chung, also an ECU alum. We should try to show together more often, Tom!

Interdisciplinary Collaboration with UBC's Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS)

Laiwan is developing a public art project, working in collaboration with the Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) directed studies students at the University of British Columbia led by Dr. Tara Ivanochko, Director of Environmental Science. Laiwan will be researching interdisciplinary approaches and opportunities to bridge the arts and sciences with the EOAS starting September 2017 until May 2018. More information to come soon.

As one of the largest and most diverse Earth science departments in the world, UBC’s Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) is an international leader in both research and teaching innovation. EOAS researchers together with undergraduate and graduate students investigate processes happening at Earth’s surface, within its interior, atmosphere, and ocean, as well as processes happening on other terrestrial planets. EOAS instructors utilize cutting-edge, evidence-based pedagogy in the classroom, spearheading the University-wide initiative to improve undergraduate science education. The department’s main outreach hub, the Pacific Museum of Earth, showcases EOAS’s commitment to engage and educate the public on a myriad of Earth science phenomena.

Talk at Foreshore, Other Sights

Thanks Jen Weih, Barbara Cole and Other Sights for inviting me to present alongside with Will Plowright for the Foreshore series. I loved the interdisciplinary expansiveness of the programming and the resulting discussions, and big thanks to the friendly and engaged audience! Till again soon. 

[Photos by Anne Riley]

The Foreshore | Session 15
Laiwan with seagrass, jellyfish and dying stars &
Will Plowright on his research with insurgents
Tuesday May 16, 7pm
The Foreshore
Other Sights at Access Gallery
222 East Georgia, Vancouver BC
 
Please join us for two short presentations followed by discussion.
In an approach to decolonization in tentacular thinking, an approach to staying with the trouble, making oddkin, and in a pitch darkness cast by the Enlightenment, Laiwan will speak nearby with recent research navigating creative practice that is, where and what is, distinct from human exceptionalism and instrumental logic.

Plowright will discuss his work with armed groups (some labelled ‘terrorists’), and the attempts to come to an understanding of them as human beings, rather than as monsters, criminals or deviants.

Cease Wyss & Patrisse Cullors at MFAIA Residency

As a faculty member of the Goddard College MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, I had the pleasure to learn collectively with our community and our Spring 2017 Residency Guest Artists Cease Wyss (Ceremonial Activist, artist and member of Idle No More) and Patrisse Cullors (artist, activist, and Black Live Matter Co-founder) in March at Fort Worden, Port Townsend, WA. Cease and Patrisse worked with us for a week exploring the Residency theme "What is Enough and When Enough is Enough: Contemporary Activism, Well-Being and the Practice of Art". A rich and nourishing week it was! Thanks Cease and Patrisse!

Tentacular Thought and Creative Practice at ECU

It is my pleasure to be teaching a HUMN 311-S004 class at the Emily Carr University this Spring 2017 semester: Tentacular Thought and Creative Practice
This course examines how to expand perception and consciousness for artistic practice informed by contemporary conditions in the world. Shifting away from bracketed thinking that evolved through Cartesian philosophy, this course will instead guide and nurture skills in how to discover an embodied abundance in the world rooted in a practice of deep listening to phenomena. How do we develop sustainable and resilient practices in perception and consciousness aware of abundance and affective dynamics, rather than be propelled by dominating systems rooted in scarcity and panic? Tentacular thinking is a term used by Donna Haraway in her latest book “Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene”. This course develops practices that investigate valuable proposals in creatively approaching the ‘trouble’ we face with agility, responsibility, and new possibility.

Thank you to the fabulous class of students for courageously participating in our experiments preparing for the Chthulucene.

Making waves for the Chthulucene