BLUE CABIN SPEAKER SERIES: THE FORESHORE
Thursday, July 12, 7 pm, grunt gallery
OTHER SIGHTS FOR ARTISTS’ PROJECTS PRESENTS: THE FORESHORE
The ‘foreshore’ describes the land along the edge of the water that is both submerged and revealed by the tide. Very simply, it is the wet part of the beach. The foreshore is a place of unclear jurisdiction, and thus of contestation, friction, and constant movement. Those who dwell in this zone must continually adapt to a changing environment. The foreshore also conjures histories specific to this region: narratives of trade and exchange, habitation and nourishment, resistance and violent erasure. It might similarly evoke our contemporary lived situation in this place. Considering the potential of this zone as both concept and site, The Foreshore initiative asks the following: How do we generate conditions of emergence? How can we take up space differently? How do we support unruly practices and futures?
The Foreshore is a multi-year collaboration between Other Sights for Artists’ Projects and curator Kimberly Phillips, and is inspired by the deep influence of the waterways on our cities and societies on the West Coast. Artist Jen Weih and artist and curator Vanessa Kwan will speak about The Foreshore’s past and current projects.
Jen Weih is an artist and educator based in Vancouver, BC. Her projects range from printmaking to video to participatory movement events to projects in public programming and community engagement. She is currently a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University and has been actively involved with Other Sights for Artists’ Projects since 2011. From 2000 to 2003, Jen was programmer at VIVO, where she initiated public and community engaged projects and founded Signal and Noise Media Art Festival. She recently completed an artist residency at the City of Vancouver with City Studio and Living Labs.
Vanessa Kwan is an artist and curator with a focus on collaborative, site-specific and community-engaged practices. At grunt gallery she manages residencies, exhibitions and special projects and is also curator / producer at Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, an artist-run organization that curates and produces artworks for the public realm. She is a founding member of the arts collective Norma who were honoured with a Mayor’s Arts Award for public art in 2012. She regularly writes and publishes on art and culture, and is currently at work on curated projects at venues across the Pacific Rim (Vancouver, Seoul and Sydney) exploring artist-led creative exchange.
Image: Installation from Jeremy Borsos & Sus Borsos’ exhibition The Blue Cabin at grunt gallery
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ABOUT THE BLUE CABIN PROJECT
The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency brings forward a desire and need for alternate modes of living and working and expands our understanding of what constitutes public space.
Representing the last vestiges of a cultural tradition of artists and others living in squatters’ shacks along the foreshores of this region’s waterways, Al Neil and Carole Itter’s Blue Cabin was one of many structures that dotted the shores of the Burrard Inlet. When the adjacent land occupied by MacKenzie Barge and Shipbuilding for 100 years was sold to Polygon Homes for redevelopment, the cabin’s demolition seemed imminent. Working collaboratively and with the support of many, Other Sights, grunt gallery and C3 moved the cabin to a nearby storage site and then on to Maplewood Farms where, in the sheep pasture, it underwent extensive repair by artist team Sus and Jeremy Borsos.
The organizations’ vision for the cabin is to outfit it as an artist studio and to mount it to a floating platform alongside a tiny house, to serve as a vital, off the grid, multi-disciplinary floating artist residency. The idea to set the cabin adrift from ownership or permanent location speaks to its history and occupation of the foreshore as a generative space. The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency is unique to this region while global in its reach.