TEN: 10th Anniversary Exhibition

TEN
10th Anniversary Exhibition

Opening: Saturday, January 14, 2023, 2-4 PM
Exhibition: January 14 – February 11, 2023
Hours: Tues to Sat, 12-5 PM

WAAP
1129 East Hastings St.
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 1S3
www.waapart.com
@waapart

For preview and for inquiries, please contact Wil Aballe, wil@waapart.com.

Exhibition PDF

KIM KENNEDY AUSTIN
CHARLES CAMPBELL
STEVEN COTTINGHAM
VANESSA DION-FLETCHER
CHANTAL GIBSON
MAEGAN HILL-CARROLL
LYSE LEMIEUX
GLENN LEWIS
SHOORA MAJEDIAN
RYAN QUAST
MARINA ROY
NICOLAS SASSOON
EVANN SIEBENS
NICO WILLIAMS

As the gallery celebrates its 10th year anniversary, it has spent the past few months inspecting its history, re-evaluating its intentions and assessing the output of the artists with whom we have worked with most closely and the artistic propositions they have brought forward in response to the contemporary moment. It has been a dynamic, complex and exhausting decade, in general, all around the world (how to fix all these problems? also: the more things change, the more they stay the same!), and the art WAAP has shown has reflected that in kind.

An overarching idea has run through the program through its years, as artists have tried to interpret into art ideas and objects what is going on in the world at large. For instance, what kind of aesthetics can be posited to reflect our world in a shifting climate scenario, particularly given Canadian art history’s heavy lean on landscape art tradition and Vancouver’s mythos as a place existing in a kind of wild rainforest? Or, how can art made in diverse multicultural Canadian society reflect humanity’s beliefs, resilience and desires in the face of uncertain conflict at large? These ideas are perhaps best exemplified by this text by Dr. Michael J. Prokopow, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Graduate Studies, at OCADU, which was first commissioned in 2015 for a group presentation curated at AHVA Gallery at the University of British Columbia, and revisited in 2017 in a group exhibition at Vacation in the Lower East Side in New York City. Once more, we are traversing it again now for our 10th anniversary exhibition. It may not cover all the ideas and contexts established by our decade of exhibitions, but it skirts much of the ground that has been covered:

“While aggressively claiming and shaping nature in their own image, humans have likewise cultivated ideas about its difference, separateness and meanings. That a poetics of nature exists makes sense (and perhaps increasingly urgently so). As an expansive subject matter, the depictions of, engagements with and actions upon the land by artists represents the ongoing efforts to record, critique and communicate the character of a northern and continental environment that is wildly varied, romanticized and changeable.  To be sure, one of the more revealing themes in the Canadian landscape tradition is the determination to show the human presence on the land and its modifications, vulnerabilities and injuries.”

Please join us as we celebrate a decade of exhibition making.

Image: CHARLES CAMPBELL, Breath Cycle 1 Sketch, 2022, museum board, wire, aluminum composite panel, 36 in x 36 in x 6 in.