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| Debra Sloan: Travellers to the Coast |
Telling Stories: a visual art exhibition, a
new exhibition presented by the Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Vancouver in
collaboration with the BestB4 Collective,
opens at the On-Tak Cheung Gallery at the Chinese Cultural Centre Museum on
Saturday, 07 November, 2015 from 2 – 4pm.
Vancouver visual artists
Alison Keenan, Edward Peck, Phyllis Schwartz of BestB4 Collective bring their
new project Telling Stories: a visual art exhibition to the Chinese
Cultural Centre Museum, opening November 7. In collaboration with six other
artists and community members, the gallery is transformed into a meeting place
where photography, painting, ceramics, fibre and installations tell and evoke
stories.
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| Edward Peck: Looking Outward |
A series of community events
are planned that include an Artist Tour and Exhibition Catalogue launch (29
November), Tea and Talk Party (21 November), Printmaking Workshop (22
November), Calligraphy Workshop (05 December) and Artist Salon (06 December).
Storytelling is a timeless medium for teaching,
entertaining, comforting and connecting. These stories require time to relate,
absorb and reflect upon, as do personal tales and critical opinion, and in
contemporary visual culture, stories are compressed into instantaneous imagery.
Hence, Telling Stories invites
dialogue about essential contemporary questions between the artists, the Chinese
community and other cultural groups.
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| Alison Keenan: Avian Fables 3 |
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| Phyllis Schwartz: Evidence |
Alison Keenan’s Avian
Fables, a series of painting, explore stories in the surreal bodies of land
and water, aided by avian guides, the harbingers of seasonal and environmental
change. Phyllis Schwartz uses photography to tell a story about environmental
devastation and community adaptation in her Salton Sea Series, I Cannot Look Away. Edward Peck’s On the Wall series frames the complex
on-going story telling found in Berlin graffiti.
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| Daphne Harwood: My Map of Imagination Market |
Daphne
Harwood’s quilt series nuances the clash of urban erasure using panelled images
as a means of comprehending the transformation caused by an uncontrollable
process. In a similar way, Happy to Meet
You, Colette Lisoway’s textured, iconic screen print pannels illustrate
cross-cultural connections, which lead to inevitable cultural integration. The
forces of cultural adaptation present conflicting values arising as a result.
Sophi Liang’s installation, Where Does
This Ladder Lead Us, manipulates Chinese symbols to make visual cultural
deconstruction and asks challenging questions about the contemporary
significance of the arts for the Chinese scholar: music, chess, calligraphy and
painting.
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| Sophi Liang: Where Does the Ladder Lead? |
Debra
Sloan’s sculptures are filled with tension: edgy characters seen as naughty and
mischievous. June Yun’s paintings compel a second look at a seemingly iconic
landscape only to reveal a nuclear winter in China’s polluted landscape. The
impending storm depicted in Jim Friesen’s photography reads as a metaphor of
oncoming disaster or the release of tension, implying the cyclical nature
storytelling.
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| Jim Friesen: Iona Island Confession |
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| June Yun: Mountains and Water |
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| Colette Lisoway: Happy to Meet You |
Reading
the imagery in Telling Stories: a Visual
Arts Exhibition invites dialogue about essential contemporary questions.
Taken together, the visual stories told by artists in BestB4 Collective invite viewers to become active spectators and
interpreters. In this way, the viewer is a community member in conversation
about universals that transcend text and context, geography and culture. The
emerging story in this ongoing process of collaboration ultimately consolidates
this visual chaos.
Telling Stories is presented by the Chinese
Cultural Centre of Greater Vancouver and partially funded by the City of
Vancouver and the Province of British Columbia.
It is tempting to muse on the metaphor of a parting bough, but likely the reader wants some quick information about Tree Literal and Figurative at the Chinese Cultural Centre Museum (Columbia and Pender) closing on Saturday, 05 April. The last day to see Connie Sabo's installation, Information and Impression, will be Saturday, 29 April; not to be missed.
In our parting bow, we express our gratitude fir our extended and well received exhibition There are many people to thank: Toni Zhang McAfee, the Gallery Manager at the CCCM, Chu Yin Tak who connected the BestB4 Collective with the CCCM, Bryan Melvin for photodocumentation and many people who visited the exhibition. Copies of the exhibition catalogue are still available at the reception desk for $13, and after the exhibition closes, available from Blurb at a much higher cost.
