THE FORESHORE: MELT | John Oliver and Carol Sawyer
Since the summer of 2016 John and Carol have been working on a series of musical investigations into water-related themes, including polar ice melt, acid rain, and most recently, the foreshore of False Creek. Sawyer draws on a wide range of text sources, including wikipedia entries, interviews, and romantic verse to create improvised melodies interspersed with quotes from art songs and popular music, in conjunction with Oliver’s real-time improvised soundscapes and electric guitar. Melt is an informal presentation of their work-in-progress.
The Foreshore: Session 17
Papalia will present on his last few years of practice-based research on the topic of organizing for accessibility and mutual aid. Papalia will discuss projects leading up to and including his recent conceptual work Open Access; a new, relational model for accessibility that sets a precedent for considerations of agency and power in relation to the disabling social, cultural, and political conditions in a given context.
Based on her work with Upper Fraser First Nations in natural resource management, Tung will discuss the tension between their interests and those of environmental assessment processes. Exploring what is made visible and invisible, and for who, Michelle will share her experience on how themes of access, connection, and translation can provide creative spaces to advance the interests of Aboriginal communities.
The Foreshore: Session 16
Based on her experience as a Stevedore and member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Brooke will discuss some of the history of the union as well as how the shift toward exclusion and security in the ports and shipping industry obscures our understanding of the movement of goods, the people who do that work, and their experiences.
Lee Podesva will share some thoughts on ebbing as a means for developing a vocabulary of value that turns away from the principles of gain, growth, and accumulation, among other economic delusions. This discussion will also share very preliminary research on tides, especially low tides, to open up a space of practice that knits corporeal, terrestrial, and celestial contexts with social realities. Let us consider what an alternative vocabulary of value might look like. What forms might it take economically, aesthetically, psycho-spiritually?
The Foreshore: Session 15
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.
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.
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.
When The Hosts Come Home
After the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic athletes gathered their medals and returned to their respective countries, Vancouver’s Olympic Village reverted from dormitory to “home” as condominium owners began to gradually move into the new “Village on False Creek”.
The Future is Floating 4
As a lead up to the launch of the Bomford’s Deadhead (working title) , a floating sculpture commissioned by Other Sights and Presentation House Gallery, Other Sights’ Communication Office presents the first of a series of conversations about building structures, imaginary, physical or social, at the artists’ GNW studio.
In the research phase of this project the Bomfords initiated a discussion with Geoffrey Carr about his insight into the relationship between the built environment and colonial power on the west coast. For this event, Carr will present some of his research and insight into the authority implicit in the design and construction of residential schools. A discussion between Carr and the Bomfords will follow.
The Future is Floating 3
As a lead up to the launch of the Bomford’s Deadhead (working title), a floating sculpture commissioned by Other Sights and Presentation House Gallery, Other Sights’ Communication Office presents the first of a series of conversations about building structures, imaginary, physical or social, at the artists’ GNW studio.
Art for Eat’s Sake:
Last summer, residents of Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek neighborhood were drawn into an unusual artistic experiment. On a vacant lot littered with the rusty remnants of the neighborhood’s industrial past, artist Holly Schmidt led volunteers in designing, building, planting,and harvesting a thriving container garden.