Curated by Justin Ducharme in collaboration with the Artist… this year’s Festival offers a pop-up exhibit featuring new and retrospective works from artist Zachery Longboy.
Longboy is from Churchill, Manitoba and is of Sayisi Dene lineage. This new and retrospective collection continues the artists’ exploration within a fractured cultural experience through deeply felt layered videos, paintings and archival film.
This exhibit has been held over until September 14.
The west coast stop of Queer Media Database Canada-Québec Project’s touring exhibition series, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Omnibus bill.
A naughty, nuanced and nerdy retrospective of queer lives circa 1969 and the partial ‘decrim’ of sodomy. As the powers-that-be celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Bill C-150, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, ‘69 positions is here to set the record queer.
Continue reading “69 POSITIONS: THE QUEER CANADIAN AND QUÉBEC ARCHIVE IN FILM AND BEYOND”Technology in the arts can provide us with incredible opportunities to take our creations to the next level. However, knowledge on how to use and install equipment can keep us from exploring and achieving the potential of our artistic visions. Workshops are FREE and available for all Queer and Allied Emerging Artists!
Ever wondered… How does technology facilitate the way we create art? What are the dramaturgical perspectives on video projections?
How does the role of arts and technology implicate with our artistic expression and our spiritual health?
Friday May 4 from 3-5pm come and learn from cutting edge interdisciplinary media artist Sammy Chien, the official selected mentor for the audiovisual performance software Isadora from the creator of the software Mark Coniglio.
This workshop will focus on introducing audiovisual technologies and demonstrating its applications to inspire the participants’ creative possibilities working with sound, video and new media/technologies.
On Wednesday May 9 from 2-6pm, join media artist extraordinaire Bobbi Kozinuk at SUM gallery for an intro to Media Art Installation!
In this workshop you will learn about:
– Sources: DVD, media players, computers, looping and auto start, file types, compression, synchronization.
– Projectors: aspect ratio, image resolution, brightness, care and setup, orientation, zoom and throw.
– Signals and Cables: hdmi, dvi, VGA, video, sdi, wifi. Cable length.
PAID INTERNSHIPS OPPORTUNITY
The Queer Arts Festival is offering emerging artists a rare opportunity to receive an honorarium while working and learning alongside professional artists. Through a mentorship and training program, you will learn the skills necessary to work towards a career in the arts and technology. Please see the job descriptions for details on the available positions.
QAF Emerging Artist program works to equip you with new skills and experience through mentorship, to offer you the resources and techniques to engage new technologies as a means to further your career, develop leadership skills, and build the necessary abilities for further employment in arts and technology. These mentorship positions will provide you with introductory experiences in the arts as well as on-the-job training.
Previous experience or knowledge is not required.
Read the job descriptions below:
EA Job Description_ Assistant Stage Manager
EA Job Description_ Media Art Installation Technician
Application forms available at the workshops.
*ASL interpretation available upon request. Please contact us directly with any accessibility needs at info@prideinart.ca
Curated by Paul Wong and SD Holman
Presentation Partner: On Main Gallery
Queer-sum a “Chinglish” translation and play on the words Queer Love, alludes to queer attraction that people experience, even though they believe themselves to be straight identified – or queer-sum (sum=heart=love).
QueerSUM心 presents three of Karin Lee’s media works: a 2-channel remix of her classic 16mm film My Sweet Peony Remix, a fantastical drama shot in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Gardens; Portrait of a Girl, a documentary shot in Beijing; and Small Pleasures, a period drama set in Barkerville BC.
The works not only investigate sentiments of being “Queer-sum,” but pay tribute to Vancouver’s Chinatown—where Lee spent her childhood—and examine the underlying racism which contributed to the very creation of “Chinatowns” amidst the colonization of Indigenous peoples.
My Sweet Peony Remix, shot in 16mm film in 1994, is a short fantastical drama that spins a tale of sexuality, gender and desire featuring Zamma – a Chinese Canadian garden guide (played by Sook-Yin Lee) who is stalked by a white feminist outreach worker and a Caucasian Maoist student, but is awakened by her attraction to an Asian-Canadian dyke, all the while perplexed by an other-world cross-dressing Taoist monk. My Sweet Peony Remix plays with the notion of cultural identity (or identity politics of the 90s) and race: then and now—what remains the same and what has changed in the 25 years since the film was made.
Portrait of a Girl is a peek into the life of Han Dong Qing, a cage dancer who works in the Beijing club scene. She speaks about her life, her story of adoption and her sexuality. Candid and defiant, she is always searching for love, acceptance and family.
Small Pleasures tells the story of three women from very different worlds trying to convey complex ideas about feminist resistance to each other through a common language: Chinook Jargon—an intercultural trade language used throughout the Pacific Coast until the early 1900s. Set in the late 1800s in Barkerville, this film explores how marginalized women in late nineteenth century rural Canada create individual identities in a world prescribed to fit the needs of men.
“Karin Lee is a Canadian Screen Award-winning, trailblazing filmmaker who has focused on telling stories about women and Chinese-Canadians for more than three decades.” Sabrina Furminger / Westender June 7, 2017
Born and raised in Vancouver, Karin is a unique storyteller whose critical voice and perspective touches on the past and the present, both local and international. An artist who constantly traverses new territory, Lee challenges film and media forms and addresses new audiences.
Themes of trans-Pacific migration, gender, identity and intercultural contact surface in her documentaries such as Made in China, which portrayed Chinese adoptees in Canada searching for their identity; Cedar and Bamboo, which highlighted intermarriage between Chinese immigrants and First Nations people; and Canadian Steel, Chinese Grit, which depicted the outcome of migration for the Chinese who came to Canada to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Her early influences and links to China grew from her exposure to the ideology and the political movement of Chinese socialism in Canada through Lee’s father, who ran a fledgling communist bookstore in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the 1960s – the 2005 film Comrade Dad.
Lee’s art has been heavily influenced by her own family history. For example, her great-grandmother Tsang Ho Shee, who herself had bound feet when she arrived in Barkerville in 1901, is the inspiration for Small Pleasures. Now, three generations after Tsang Ho Shee arrived in Canada, Lee’s realization that she benefited from her great-grandmother’s acts of feminist resistance, has driven her to expand representations of the history of marginalized women in the Chinese diaspora and, most importantly, to contribute to the minimal coverage of women’s stories in the arts and Canadian media.
In 2001, Karin received a Gemini: The Canada Award for her groundbreaking documentary Made in China, about Chinese children adopted in Canada. In 2005 she received a BC Leo Diversity in Cultures Award and 2015 –diversity award from Women in Film for Cedar and Bamboo.
She has just completed the TV pilot for Plan B, a black comedic drama series set in a women’s sexual health clinic. She is currently in pre-production on Girl with Big Feet (Ts’ekoo Cha Ke), a period drama and Incorrigible – a feature documentary about women who were incarcerated in Ontario for being morally “incorrigible”.
She was a Sessional Instructor at SFU’s Asia-Canada program and Adjunct Professor at UBC’s Film Production program. Karin was awarded the Mayor’s Arts Award for Film and New Media Artist in 2014 and was nominated for the 2017 YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Education, Training and Development and received the Spotlight Award from Vancouver Women in Film and Video Society in 2017.
The gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday 12-6pm, closed on Sundays and Mondays, and statutory holidays.
