Jan 4 – Jan 31
SUM gallery activates the New Year with a new artist residency program featuring Vancouver-based West Moberly First Nations artist Dion Smith-Dokkie. Throughout the month of January, Dion will create new multimedia work and engage the community through free, artist-led drawing workshops and an open house. In groups of five, workshop participants will create collaborative charcoal drawings, with a focus on intuitive mark-making and an experimental approach to space and form. Register here to attend a workshop. Space is limited and proof of vaccination is required.
Workshop dates:
Dion Smith-Dokkie (he, they) is a painter and visual artist currently living in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ. He is a recent graduate of the UBC MFA in Visual Arts program. Dion also holds degrees from the University of Victoria and Concordia University. His practice hones in on colour and light, skin, screens, clouds and skies, and interfaces of all sorts through the lens of painting, drawing, and video. He grew up in the Peace River region of British Columbia and Alberta and is a member of West Moberly First Nations.
Open house: Feb 3 & 4, 12 to 7pm
Over the course of January, artist-in-residence Smith-Dokkie created a series of pastel drawings. The works in this series, will soften these away – will these soften away represent a burgeoning inquiry into texture, touch, drawing, light and colour. Softness, delicateness, sensitivity were key processual principles. View these fabulous works and meet the artist behind the work by dropping in to our open houses Feb 3 & 4 from 12 to 7pm.
Artist statement:
This series of drawings took on a very different shape to the one I envisioned when I proposed this residency. Instead of an intermedia dialogue between drawing and video, the drawings asked that I come close, that I breathe in the pigments so that something could also blossom in me. I thought about Masao Okabe’s irradiated trees and Simon Hantaï’s étoilements: I folded, crushed, and creased the paper to introduce a topographical sense, bas and haut relief and to stimulate frottage, planar out-foldings—this allowed me to randomize, to miniaturize the pointillist open brushstroke and pixel. The drawings are studies in chromatic filaments, garden sites, woven colours, textures that morph.
Please note that vaccine passports and masks will be required to enter the gallery. If you plan on visiting the gallery after 6pm on open house dates, please contact the gallery at 604-200-6661 to gain access to the Sun Wah Centre.