Beginning 50 years in the future, this new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Syrus Marcus Ware proposes an archive whose ‘holdings’ act as a meeting ground for artists and activists across time and space
Date/Time: Dec 13 2018, 12:00 am to 5:00 pm
Vancouver, grunt gallery | Event calendar
2068: Touch Change is both an archive and a speculation.
The exhibition has 3 main components: a series of large-scale graphite portraits drawn on paper and directly on the walls, a speculative text and a disseminated printed work that documents materials gathered and accessed in the artists’ research process. The portraits - in many ways the centrepiece of the exhibition - are created through a complex process of visiting and revisiting images and interviews with historic and present-day BIPOC (Black, Indigenous or People of Colour) activist communities. Ware’s investment in the archive is overlaid with a parallel interest in forms of speculative fiction and he invokes the philosophy of Octavia E. Butler’s now-famous Earthseed movement from her (unfinished) Parables trilogy: “All that you touch/ you Change. All that you change/ Changes you” is a resonant theme throughout the artists work, as a reference to empathic human connection as the fuel for sustained and sustaining social justice movements. Ware, like Butler, invites us to consider change as a constant, and hope as an ever-expanding network of relations.
There will be a discussion event taking place as well on the evening of November 2, 2018, 7 PM, grunt gallery 116-350 E. 2nd Ave.
Curated by Vanessa Kwan
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