How to Remember

March 24th to May 7th, 2017

Opening: Friday, March 24th 6-9pm

How to Remember contains a range of documentation that combines graphic illustration, knitting, book-making, embroidery, journaling and poetry. The artists have formed creative records that serve as a kind of memory. Their work documents time embedded for example, in acts of gentrification on one’s neighbourhood or in transitional states of mental health—these at times imperceptible changes that, without notation, become difficult to track.

All of the artists engage research and experimentation as they document. Their work has developed necessarily through dialogue and social intervention employing a range of practices that address health, pain, ability and access—all of which is approached through experiential means. Lived experiences with disability, addiction, precarious labour, long-term hospitalization, chronic illness and displacement become personal, political and pedagogical. Yet, the visual outcomes are compelling, generative and dialogic as they form connections, determine wellness and foreground the will to thrive.

Works from the following artists will be featured: anonymous artist, Mercedes Eng, Taryn Goodwin, Sima Elizabeth Shefrin, and Sonrisa.

Mercedes Eng works primarily as teacher and writer in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. This is her first art show! She is the author of Mercenary English (CUE Books, 2013; Mercenary Press, 2016), a book of poetry that explores violence and resistance in the Downtown Eastside. Her work has appeared in West Coast Line, Canada and Beyond, The Capilano Review, Geist, Jacket 2, on the sides of Burrard and Granville bridges as contributions to public art projects, and in the collective-produced movement-based chapbooks, r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survalliance and M’aidez (Press Release). Her next book, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Talonbooks) drops in November 2017.

Taryn Goodwin is a multidisciplinary artist and entrepreneur invested in supporting connections that celebrate wellness and mental health. Engaged in delivering playful platforms of learning, Goodwin draws on possibility, transparency and curiosity as artistic mediums to inform her work.

As a social commentary, Goodwin approaches her work through recovering place, building online courses, and within community engagements. Her work includes questionaries, interviews, facilitations, mind+body awareness, video and mixed media installations, creative writing, drawing, sculpture and painting.

Goodwin holds a Foundations Level Narrative Therapy Certificate from the Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy, a Fine Arts Studio Diploma from NIC and a Minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Sima Elizabeth Shefrin played as a toddler in the galleries of Italy, and has been creating art ever since. As well as occasional curating gigs, she has been working professionally as a visual artist for 35 years.  Her international community art project The Middle East Peace Quilt toured North America from 1999 to 2010.  More recently, Elizabeth has turned to book illustration and has five publications to her credit. Embroidered Cancer Comic, published by Singing Dragon, is the first book she has written as well as illustrated.  It has been favourably reviewed in the Lancet, and praised by Judi Dench.

Sonrisa is a Metro Vancouver-based graphic designer and communicator. She has worked and volunteered in the non-profit sector for the last decade, lending both frontline and behind-the-scenes support to organizations. She has a keen interest in nature, social issues, and mental health, and is currently working on small-scale visual projects that encompass each of these passions. Sonrisa is also a self-taught knitter who loves working away at items of warm clothing. She is currently looking for ways to bridge the gap between craft and art with her stitches.