GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

OF COURSE THIS HURTS

Exhibition by Jackie Dives

Exhibition
March 16 - 26, 2025

Opening Reception
Sunday, March 16, 2025 from 2 - 5pm

Artist Talk
Saturday, March 22, 2025 from 2 - 3pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

“To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.” — David Wojnarowicz

Of Course This Hurts is a photography series that intimately documents the toxic drug supply crisis through the lives of people who are being impacted by this public health emergency. The photographs explore love, grief, bodily autonomy, trauma, and healing as experienced by drug policy activists, frontline workers, people who use drugs, and their family members in British Columbia, where overdose is the leading cause of death for people aged 10-59.

The photographs are of people like Jeremy Kalicum, a scientist with a Masters of Public Health who could be facing life in prison for operating a compassion club; Trey Helten, an overdose prevention site worker who has dedicated his life to caring for people in the community; and Traci Letts, whose son recently died from a drug overdose.

In 2017 my father died from an accidental drug overdose and my art practice shifted dramatically. His death gave my practice a specific urgency—it became essential to create in order to grieve and to survive that grief.

As someone with lived experience it’s important to me that my documentation challenges the cliche and harmful narratives perpetuated by prevalent media tropes that judge and demonize people who use drugs. My photographs complicate historical narratives while exploring the complexities of the human condition.

The story of the overdose crisis goes far beyond people slumped over on the sidewalk; it’s a story of unrelenting commitment, unconditional love, self sacrifice, perpetual grief, and the brutality that occurs when unrealistic ideals are more heavily weighted than human health and dignity.

I’m interested in interrogating the role of photography, especially in communities that have been marginalized by photography. My practice is diaristic and confessional, based in both auto-ethnography (qualitative research connecting my personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings) and social practice. I see this project as a historical record of existence that proves: We were here, this happened, our stories and lives mattered.

The severity of this crisis cannot be overstated and is only worsening each day. We are experiencing the highest number of deaths from drug overdose ever recorded, to the point where overdose death has lowered the average life expectancy of Canadians. Regardless of how someone might feel about drug use or drug policy, it's undeniable that this amount of death is having a significant impact on our communities. Since the government declared a public health emergency in 2016 over 49,000 people have died from opioid-related deaths in this country. For perspective, the first Canadian death attributed to AIDS occurred in 1983. Approximately 21,000 people have died from AIDS since then.

ARTIST BIO

Jackie Dives is a multi-disciplinary artist working within photography, video, performance, and installation. She uses both auto-ethnography and collaborative storytelling to address themes of social justice, trauma, grief, identity and community. Her work has been recognized by the Canada Council for the Arts, the B.C. Arts Council, and the Digital Publishing Awards, and has been exhibited and screened internationally including in venues such as the Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver), Gallery Gachet (Vancouver), and the Maysles Documentary Center (New York). Her clients include The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, among others.

jackiedivesphoto.com

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

BECOMING ANARCHIVAL

Exhibition with works by
Kate Hennessy & Trudi Lynn Smith

Exhibition
November 2 - November 30, 2024

Opening Reception
Saturday, November 2, 2024 from 2 - 5pm

Artist Talk
Saturday, November 30, 2024 from 2 - 3pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Becoming Anarchival is a collaboration between artist-ethnographers Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy that activates instability and impermanence as generative forces in museums and archives. Over the past decade, they have oriented their writing and art practice toward the anarchival, both as transformative disruption and as a methodology for engaging time-based media and the material politics of place. Where the archival is the imagined truth and stability of museums, collections, and geographies, the anarchival is the unpredictable, the impermanent, and the speculative. The anarchival signals new instances of becoming. 

Emerging from their fieldwork around a defunded paleontology research centre in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia’s most recently established municipality (built around the Quintette metallurgical coal mine), the exhibition uses documentary photographs, anthotype contact prints, and video works to foreground the anarchival as a condition that erodes widely held belief in archives, scientific knowledge, and civic structures as stable and enduring. Hennessy and Smith explore relationships between media and mining practices, settler-colonial exploitation, and their entanglements in paleontology and archives. The works highlight the fugitive materiality of collections and the image-making technologies used to document them, amplified in our current climate crisis fuelled by the extraction of petrochemical dinosaurs archived in the earth. Fossils, what Hiroshi Sugimoto has called “the first photographs”, are a way into an understanding of the entangled politics and practices of becoming anarchival.

ARTIST BIOS

Trudi Lynn Smith is Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada). Trudi specializes in interdisciplinary research-creation and collaboration, working with human and more-than-human communities at the intersection of experimental art, ethnography, and political ecology. Her practice is grounded in a concern with the embodiments, relationships, techniques, and ethics of image-making and explorations of impermanence and uncertainty in photography.

www.trudilynnsmith.com

Kate Hennessy is Associate Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (Canada). As an anthropologist of media and the director of the Making Culture Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation and production studio, her work uses collaborative, feminist, and decolonial methodologies to explore the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives. She values working across disciplinary boundaries in her practice, including expression in video, photography, digital fabrication, and virtual exhibition.

hennessy.iat.sfu.ca/mcl

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

The Studio

Exhibition with works by artist Monique Fouquet

Exhibition
October 3 - October 29, 2024

Opening Reception
Thursday, October 3, 2024 from 6 - 9pm

Artist Talk
Monique Fouquet in conversation with Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig
Saturday, October 12, 2024 from 2 - 3pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Many years ago, Monique Fouquet recalls looking through a glass wall at Brancusi’s reconstructed studio located at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Brancusi considered the relationship between sculptures and the space they occupied to be of crucial importance. When he bequeathed his entire studio to the French state, he stipulated that its reconstruction at a new site had to display his sculptures in their exact location at the time of his death. The studio, in effect, became a work of art.

In Fouquet’s studio, objects such as notebooks, art materials, books, family heirlooms, and other items, either purposefully collected, or haphazardly accumulated meld into the background. In a home studio, boundaries can be ambiguous. It is in fact, the visibility of works-in-progress that here cover the walls and which transforms domestic space into conquered territory. As transitional space and space of uncertainty, the studio is also a place of unpredictable connections.

On the studio walls, a series of drawings suggesting space, movement and time coalesce in abstractions where imaginary boundaries could potentially extend beyond the edges of the paper. The objects which, moments ago, sat imperceptibly on shelves thus become part of a new register. This shift of context, from background to foreground, calls attention to materiality and to social relations.

As an experiment, Fouquet isolates and photographs objects, a process that gradually leads to building an inventory from which images are selected to construct still life compositions in dynamic relation to each digitized drawing. Historically, still life paintings or drawings occupy commonplace settings like a table top. But here, it is the objects’ placement over the drawing that determines the illusory surface onto which the objects sit. The series renders visible, not only the accumulation of things, but also the incongruous relationships that are suggested in the process of juxtaposition.

In this project, Fouquet aims for a fluid relationship between the photographic representation of the objects and the abstraction of the drawings. Objects make connections. Books, an old camera, porcelain vases, a bottle of black acrylic paint and other effects, though personal to the artist, are assembled and underscore the dialectical interplay between the artist’s intent, the viewer’s perception and the social sphere.

The Studio invites viewers to engage on a personal level and to consider the interconnectedness of disparate components in both, art and life, while contemplating the possibility of multiple meanings and the reinterpretation of historical traditions to allow for more poetic associations.

ARTIST BIO

Monique Fouquet was born in Quebec City and now lives in Vancouver - Unceeded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Territory.

She holds an MFA (Simon Fraser University) and a PhD in Curriculum Studies (The University of British Columbia). She taught at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and served as Vice President Academic and Provost 2002-2011.

She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Asia including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the Yokohama Citizen Gallery among others. She has served on the Vancouver Public Art Committee 2018-2021, 2020-2021 (Chair).

Her work is included in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Vancouver General Hospital and in numerous private collections in Canada and the United States.

moniquefouquet.com

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

The Heart is Not a Well, It Is a Fountain Exhibition

Exhibition with works by artist Monika Wiatrowska. Curated by Alejandro A. Barbosa.

Exhibition
August 8 - August 30, 2024

Opening Reception
Friday, August 9, 2024 from 6 - 9pm

Artist Talk
Monika Wiatrowska in conversation with Alex Waber
Saturday, August 17, 2024, 2 - 3pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The Heart Is Not a Well, It Is a Fountain presents a selection of Monika Wiatrowska's still life works, including pieces produced in collaboration with artist Alex Waber.

The exhibition focuses on the artist's photographic practice and includes staged and unstaged works on fabric and paper. These works express the artist's interest in the representation of the absent body, beauty, banality, the relationship of objects with intimacy and memory, the passage of time, decay, the domestication of organic and synthetic materials, and the codification of natural and artificial light in contemporary photographic imagery.

Wiatrowska's tableaux formalize her desire to translate multisensorial and cognitive experiences into images, and much of her work originates in her writing practice. Her observations of sensory experiences are repurposed toward her visual work by transferring her impressions to the construction of her still lifes.

The central work in the show, F*ck Everlasting, originated in Wiatrowska and Waber's intention of challenging the still life's typical stasis, embracing the artifice of expressing temporality via photographic imagery. In contrast to the full control provided by a studio setting, the work is arranged and photographed outdoors where accidents, decay, shifts in lighting, and the progression of time are all equal participants in a setting where non-human bodies and forms coalesce with what is domesticated and human-made.

ARTIST BIO

Monika Wiatrowska is a Vancouver-based artist, originally from New Hampshire, US. She holds a B.A in Cultural Anthropology from the University of British Columbia; and a M.S in Design Strategy and Management from Parsons School of Design, The New School . Monika started out professionally as a print graphic designer, later moving on to art/creative direction and production. She has art directed for Sad Magazine and Montreal-based Maisonneuve Magazine. Monika began working full-time as a freelance stylist, art director and photographer in 2020.

Monika’s photographic work examines sensing/sensuality, and their necessity as expressed through appreciation of the natural world and the design and histories of objects—from the personal realm, to the social, and anthropological. Her still lifes extend this exploration to personal possessions and human-made objects re-contextualised with natural materials and flora. Music and design are her other energetic outlets, as well as experimental spaces to further translate the world of her visual art. 

CURATOR BIO

Alejandro A. Barbosa (they/he) is an HIV-negative queer latinx visual artist born in Argentina who lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples—the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations—in what is known as Canada. Alejandro’s curatorial practice focuses on lens-based media and revolves around questions on the political potential of the photo-based exhibition as a cultural form, the intersection of photography and family histories, and the ever-shifting relationship of the photographic image with violence. They hold an MFA in visual art from the University of British Columbia, and a BFA in photography from Concordia University. Alejandro’s curatorial projects have been exhibited in Argentina and Canada.