As the sun’s path shortens, SJ and Indra offer songs to bridge the end of summer to winter and to reflect on our relationship to our landscape and all the life therein.
Featuring works for voice and piano by Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Jocelyn Morlock, Tobias Picker, Leslie Uyeda, and more!
An accomplished interpreter of western art music, Sarah Jo Kirsch (they/she) has performed across Canada, in Europe and West Asia as a soloist and collaborator. They have been hailed as “…one of the finest contemporary dramatic vocalists in Canada today,” (Calgary Herald) “…with the ability to get under the skin of everything she sings,” (Winnipeg Free Press).
Beyond opera and oratorio, Sarah curates and produces sociopolitically relevant art song experiences of works from the last three centuries. An avid and capable interpreter of new music, they have premiered more than 30 new works for voice by Canadian composers.
Praised for her expressivity and “impressive command of the keyboard” (Prince George Citizen), Vancouver-based pianist and vocal coach Indra Egan is thrilled to be a Yulanda M. Faris Young Artist with Vancouver Opera for their 2023/24 season. Indra holds a M. Mus. in Collaborative Piano from the University of Toronto, where she studied with Steven Philcox and won the Gwendolyn Koldofsky Prize in Accompanying. Originally from Northern BC, Indra received her B. Mus. in Piano Performance at the University of Manitoba as a student of David Moroz and Laura Loewen, followed by post-bacc studies in jazz piano with Will Bonness. She has performed in masterclasses with Elly Ameling, Jean Barr, Margo Garrett, Susan Graham, Liz Upchurch, and others. Additional mentors include Tracy Dahl, Rosemary Thomson, Nathalie Paulin, Kathryn Tremills, and Wendy Nielsen.
“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest. Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”
JULIUS EASTMAN
There’s a Julius Eastman renaissance happening and you’re invited.
Writing music in New York City’s burgeoning downtown scene in the 1970s and ‘80s, Julius Eastman was a young, black, gay man who criss-crossed musical worlds and provocatively “swerved from critical acclaim to gate-crashing controversy.” (NPR)
Eastman’s music mixes the evergreen politics of his time with bold grooves and enthralling melodies that sound equally fresh. Think Minimalism (like the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich) combined with joyful improvisation and moments of surprising stillness.
Don’t miss it when the Music on Main All-Star Band and the Vancouver Youth Choir breathe life into “music that commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic.” (The New Yorker)
Presented by Music on Main and SUM gallery / the Queer Arts Festival.
The Vancouver Youth Choir at the Modulus Festival is generously sponsored by David Cousins.
Shake Your Groove Fang: A Halloween Fundraiser Party
Oct 26, 2023 | 7 – 9pm SUM gallery (#425 – 268 Keefer St.) Admission: PWYC with a suggested donation of $20
Come shake your groove fang with the Queer Arts fam! QAF + SUM gallery is hosting a Halloween fundraiser party Thursday, Oct 26, complete with drinks, music, dancing and even a costume contest. Come dressed in your spooky, campy & Queer attire (if you please) and you might just walk away with the title of Best-Dressed!
This fundraising event is Pay-What-You-Choose with a suggested donation of $20. We are a registered non-profit organization that relies on the generous support of donors and funders to continue to program our queer arts events. Join us for a ghoulishly good time, while supporting your favourite queer arts org with an amount you feel is appropriate!
SUM gallery presents: VOCAL QUEERIES WORKSHOP SERIES with sarah jo kirsch!
Sept 10 & Sept 17, 2023
*PLEASE NOTE that this workshop series is now SOLD OUT.
The Vocal Queeries workshop series is open to individuals of all ages, backgrounds, abilities, identities, and orientations who want to explore the expansive spectrum of vocal expression and the unique beauty of their own voices in a safe and inclusive space for exploration and growth.
Whether you’re a vocalist, actor, performance artist, public speaker, or just someone eager to get to know their voice, this series offers a wholistic and intersectional journey into grounded vocalization through collaborative discussion and practice.
IN 4 INTERACTIVE SESSIONS
1. VOCAL QUEERS
Dive into queer sonic philosophy and practice through the work of Pauline Oliveros, Gabriel Dharmoo, Meredith Monk, and more!
2. FUNDAMENTALS OF PHONATION
Explore the miraculous mechanics of vocal production and gain a deeper understanding of how the body functions as an instrument.
3. FULL SPECTRUM RESONANCE
Learn to harness breath momentum, open and balance resonators, and align articulators to ring with ease and flexibility.
4. PRACTICE & PROCESS
Develop a wholistically conscious practice to help build an authentic and reciprocal relationship with your voice and your self.
+ CODA
Each 75-minute session is followed by a 15-minute collaborative reflection and intention-setting.
We recommend you register to attend all four sessions as these workshops are designed as a four-part series, however, you may also register for a single session. All sessions must be registered for individually.
SUGGESTED DONATION:
$200 if you plan to register for the FULL SERIES (use the Pay-What-You-Wish admission option to enter $50 per session)
or
$60 per session
Embracing the Pay-What-You-Wish admission option allows you to pay what you can afford. We encourage those who can contribute more than the suggested rate to do so. It enables aspiring singers more challenged by the cost of living to engage in this transformative experience. Your contribution can make a difference in someone else’s journey and help keep these workshops genuinely inclusive.
Sarah Jo Kirsch is a vocalist steeped in Western European song traditions. They have premiered dozens of new works by Canadian composers, they create their own sound-and text-based electroacoustic works, and they share knowledge about wholistic vocalization and the evolution of organized sound. sarahjokirsch.com
Rojina Farrokhnejad: Gods and Monsters OCT 14 – DEC 1 | 2023 Opening reception: Oct 14, 5 to 7pm
Mythology offers us valuable life lessons by illuminating our own human behaviour. In Vancouver-based artist Rojina Farrokhnejad’s solo exhibition entitled Gods and Monsters, Farrokhnejad uses mythological figures like Gods, centaurs, mediators, angels, and demons to explore transcendent and timeless human conditions, familial relationships and emotions, like love and lust, envy and rage, rejection and loss, violence and death.
Myth demands to be transplanted into the present, reinterpreted according to present-day ideas or anxieties. Myths should be thought of as constantly-moving turnstiles. To retell is to metamorphose. Meaning is never fixed, but ever fluid — as likely to be arrested as the reflection in water that entranced Narcissus.
A painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, Farrokhnejad’s multidisciplinary exhibit uses figurative art to explore themes of queer sensuality, religiosity, and isolation. Gods and Monsters employs elements of animation, acrylic and oil paintings, and clay and ceramic sculpture to blur the line between the representational and abstract; the grotesque and divine; mythological symbolism and religious devotion. In Gods and Monsters, Farrokhnejad takes on the role of mediator to initiate a non-verbal dialogue where audiences are able to interrogate their own stance: Are we all simply Gods and Monsters, one or the other, or neither?
ABOUT Rojina Farrokhnejad
Rojina Farrokhnejad (RJ) lives in Vancouver, BC. Originally from Iran, she came to the city in the early 2000s and quickly connected with the LGBT community and found like-minded people, now proudly calling Vancouver home. RJ is renowned for her evocative images of memories & metamorphosis, expressions of solitude, and moments of importance that connect with the audience’s experiences. She uses myth to explore the darker side of human nature and as allegory to encrypt hidden meanings. A painter, sculptor and filmmaker, she works using multiple mediums and techniques like oil, acrylic and clay in layers through a variety of motion, colours, tones and textures, to help provide a sense of narrative. Her most recent works push the boundaries of representation, integrating abstraction within imaginative figurative compositions. Her works have been exhibited at grunt gallery, Gallery Gachet, and the Cultch.
The coast is queerer than ever! VQFF’s annual showcase of homegrown talent is back with a quartet of shorts exploring trans and nonbinary identities, featuring some familiar faces, including Kendall Gender and SKIM.
Screening followed by a drag performance by Mx. Bukuru and a Q&A with the artists!
Vines Art Festival 2023’s We, The Many highlights 2SLGBTIQIA+ history, existence and art with drag, music and dance. Bringing queer joy to public space acknowledges the ongoing resistance to erasure and destruction of queer spaces, lives and stories. Join us for a vibrant evening of queer brilliance as the sun sets on our glowing bodies.
Thu Jun 22 – Fri Jul 28 Exhibition open hours: Tue-Sat, 12 to 6pm
SUM gallery presents a solo exhibition by Odera Igbokwe, an illustrator and painter who celebrates the magic of the African Diaspora and QTBIPOC. New Yams Festival is a direct reflection, response, and Queer reclamation of the New Yam Festival of the Igbo people. Traditionally, it is a celebration of abundance, ancestral veneration, and protection. In referencing The New Yam Festival, Odera seeks to create a visual lineage between Queer Afrofuturism and ancestral rituals.
About Odera Igbokwe
Odera Igbokwe (they/them & he/him) is an illustrator and painter located on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Odera loves to explore storytelling through Afro-diasporic mythologies, Black resilience and magical girl transformation sequences. Their work explores the magic of the Black imagination, and responds to the fractures that occur via diaspora and displacement. Ultimately their paintings celebrate joy, mundanity, and fantasy coexisting alongside pain and healing. As a freelance illustrator, Odera works with clients and galleries to create work that is deeply personal, soulful and intersectional.
Imagery captures impressions from the cross-country journey the Vancouver artist undertook after spouse Catherine White Holman’s tragic floatplane death
A PINK SILK flower sits on wet asphalt, pressed against the rough, black surface.
Titled Day 16, the image was taken as Vancouver artist SD Holman was just over two weeks into a cross-country walk, focused on putting one foot in front of the other, overcome with grief. The pilgrimage followed the 2010 death of their spouse, pioneering social worker and Three Bridges Clinic founder Catherine White-Holman, in a floatplane crash off Saturna Island.
Armed only with a small Canon G11, Holman documented that journey not with pictures of epic Canadian landscapes, but instead with the kind of imagery you see when you put your head down and go: ragged grass, cracked pavement, dead birds, discarded pop cans, flattened bottle caps, and empty masses of gravelly road.
Over three months and 2,700 kilometres, SD Holman took 8,000 images—and now, for the first time, almost 13 years later, they are on exhibit—in Pas-à-pas; not intent on arriving at the SUM Gallery.
“My wife died,” the founding artistic director emeritus of the Queer Arts Festival and its SUM Gallery tells Stir over the phone. “It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but I feel like I’ve been living a half life. And you know, I’ve learned to build a garden around that black hole. But that black hole is always there. ‘Crazy with grief’ is not a metaphor. It is the actual, literal truth. Who would walk across Canada starting April 1?
“All of my friends and family just really didn’t want me to go,” they continue. “I don’t know whether I was going to die; I didn’t care. I was going to find, you know, life out there. I just needed to walk out my door and keep walking. And I do hate walking. I like walking better now, surprisingly, but I really wrecked my knees doing this. I just wanted to walk, so my state of mind was not good. It was yeah, it was really jumbled. I just needed to take a little walk. And I think it was also that I needed to get away.”
Friends helped Holman bring the work to exhibition—including artist Paul Wong, who encouraged Holman to create the exhibit; SUM gallery curator Mark Takeshi McGregor; writer Persimmon Blackbridge, who has worked with words from Holman’s travel journal; and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, who brought Bach’s Goldberg Variations to Holman—its looping structures now echoing through the space and acting as an organizing principle for Pas-a-pas.
Walking through the installation-exhibit is a meditative experience. Fittingly, the photographs, each titled after a numbered day during the trip, sit low to the ground. They’re arranged along a curtained pathway, like a kind of contemplative labyrinth. Elsewhere, a grand piano sits empty, and slightly obscured, behind gauzy curtains—suggesting an aching absence, as the Goldberg Variations plays through speakers.
“I really wanted to make it a journey that people could take on their own,” Holman stresses, “because we will all grieve, right? And it’s such a universal thing, but we do it alone. And we don’t like to talk about it…..People ask me, ‘Well, what is that?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, what do you think? What do you see?’”
The entry and exit of the pathway consist of diaphanous white curtains, printed with words from Holman’s travel diary—many of them blacked out—and the unmistakable image of floatplane wreckage, the only direct allusion to the tragedy in the show.
SD Holman’s Day 16 Walking.
The photographic images themselves juxtapose beauty and harshness; in one, a perfectly preserved dead mouse sits amid roadside rubble; another finds a beautiful speckled bird wing on the pavement. Holman mixes up the printing, with some in colour and some fully desaturated; they call the black-and-white shots the “minor variations”, referring back to Bach’s piece. Though the photos here are impressionistic and sometimes abstracted, Holman is actually best known as a portrait artist, whose photographic series “BUTCH: Not like the other girls” captured the diversity of “female masculinity”. Starting as a transit-shelter public-art project in 2013, it went on to tour North America and became a book.
“I don’t really believe in, like, this perfect moment, but in the many imperfections that make up our messy lives and our messy selves,” reflects the artist.The Emily Carr University of Art and Design grad connects the dots across their photographic practice: “We’re not one thing; there is this dissonance. I think, in everyone, there’s a lot of grey….There’s a terrible beauty in that walk, and taking those pictures and making art out of it.”
SD Holman’s Day 4 Self Portrait.
One of the most poignant aspects of Pas-à-pas is that it offers little arc or resolution; as the show’s subtitle suggests, it’s “not intent on arriving”. In fact, Holman’s process with the work from their cross-country journey is unfinished as well. They are gathering pieces for future iterations, including one that will draw from Holman’s extensive videos taken during the cross-country pilgrimage. (Called Walk for Love, it raised money for the Catherine White-Holman Memorial Legacy Fund to help LGBTQ2SIA+ people living in poverty, as well as queer women in art .)
“People really want you to move on,” Holman reflects. “And I think that comes from a loving place; people want you to be okay. And there’s a lot of pressure about that. But I think that leaves people feeling really lonely and isolated and you don’t move on. Again, you find you can eventually build a garden around that. But it’s always there.
“We don’t get healed—you just get better at dealing with it,” they add. “And, you know, you realize there’s other great people in the world and other things to do, but it’s always there. And that’s an honouring: grief is love. Right? It is the relationship that you have with that person. That grief is love. So letting go of that, I think, lets go of that love. That love is always there.”
Plus enjoy the Asian Confectionerywith highlights of Alger Ji-Liang and Sauha Lee – all month long!
SUM gallery is proud to co-produce ahmm events Volume Vulva Verve and Bowl of Jasmine in partnership with Dumb Instrument Dance.
Volume Vulva Verve(May 10-14) features two vibrant solo works by accomplished creators/performers: Taiko artist Kage and dance artist Ziyian Kwan. Through sound composition, live vocals and movement, Kage’s Itadakimasu explores how food intersects with ancestral teachings and community, and how this is being threatened by colonial and capitalist forces. Ziyian’s The Odd Volume similarly emerges in resistance to forces that assimilate, displace, and racialize, articulating through movement and storytelling, her immigrant experience as a first generation Chinese-Filipina. Volume Vulva Verve powerfully voices the importance of preserving cultural knowledge and inspiring healing within ourselves and our communities.
Bowl of Jasmine(May 26-28)is a program of 2 works choreographed by Juolin Lee and Sujit Vaidya. The artists come from distinctly different backgrounds, yet they are unified by a mutual fascination with exploring the tension between imagination and reality. This program inquires into the physicality of their fantasy worlds, exploring how cultural influences in the form of scent and taste permeate through their moving bodies.
Artistic Statement, Ziyian Kwan: “ahmm was born of my desire to connect with kith and kin – at Dumb Instrument Dance’s cultural space Morrow, during Asian Heritage Month. My hope is that this first iteration of a festival, which came about as an impromptu incentive, will develop and evolve into future adventures. But in the here and now, it’s so exciting to dream something into being with an extraordinary group of artists and partners. Expect intimate sharings of poetry, movement, music, film, visual art and interactive offerings of rest and nourishment, made real by co-operative imagining and camaradarie. Through events that are at once resistance and celebration, ahmm is the embrace of Asian Canadian artists who from a space of community, sing their work to shore.”
ASL Interpretation
