The Foreshore: Session 9
Gelardin will present a selection of projects from StoreFrontLab’s (San Francisco) current season of installations, happenings, discussions and workshops that address America’s sociopolitical climate using the agency of art and public engagement. The series, entitled NOW!, invites an evaluation of progress and demands an end to regressive values through direct action and counteraction.
Prentice asks do therapeutic practices and theories help or hinder social change? Considering the longstanding frictional relationship between Marxism and Freudian theory to the endpoint of today’s tendency to look for an analysis of political events in psychological terms, it would seem that therapy and politics make uneasy bedfellows.
The Foreshore: Session 4
Taking Habitat Forum 1976 as a model for the confluence of design, politics, art and community, Brown will look at the current situation in Vancouver regarding public space, land use policy and political maneuvering by our civic government and real estate developers. She will contrast approaches to land use and speculation in UN Habitat’s “New Urban Agenda” of 2016 and its more radical predecessor, the Vancouver Declaration of 1976, to provide context for Vancouver’s increasing abdication of meaningful, politically potent public spaces and public art practice.
The Foreshore: Session 3
Chris Williams is an environmental scholar and activist based in New York and focused on the topic of the eco-socialism. His talk assesses the interrelationships between our economic system and the environmental crisis, between the convergence of planetary and social degradation, and offers suggestions and insights into possible alternatives. This talk was originally aired on Alternative Radio and recorded in San Luis Obispo, CA on May 15, 2016.
The Foreshore: Session 2
Justin Langlois and Holly Schmidt will share their research into the creation of The Floating School, a multi-year artist-led research, production, and programming initiative that will explore retreat as both a theoretical and methodological proposition. From its physical infrastructure to its curricular framework, The Floating School will examine retreat as necessary indulgence, retreat as long-term strategy, and retreat as active movement in an opposite direction.
The Foreshore: Session 1
Stephen Collis, Genevieve Robertson and Jay White will talk about their ongoing shared investigation into the actual physical places the existing and proposed gas, oil and fuel transmission sites along the local shoreline (from Woodfibre Liquid Fracked Gas at Squamish to the Westshore Coal export terminal in Tswassen). It is a project that integrates their practices as poet, artists and activists.
Kimberly Phillips will talk about Access Gallery’s current traveling artist residency, Twenty-Three Days at Sea, particularly questions it provokes about definitions of emergence, risk, and the role of the artist as “witness.”
The Foreshore
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.